The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Richard Dawkins: From Selfish Gene to Flights of Fancy

Episode Date: August 26, 2022

Richard Dawkins needs no introduction. He is one of the world’s most well known scientists and science writers. He is also a good friend and colleague. As many of you may know, Richard and I have toured much of the world together on stage, often in dialogues about our disciplines, our views of the world, and of course the conflict between science and religion. When we decided to create The Origins Podcast, it was natural to consider early on having a dialogue between Richard and me. One fateful day, our crew headed to Oxford. As we began our journey, our car was broken into and much equipment stolen. Then we had a small car accident later. We finally got to Richard’s late in the day, in time to begin a dialogue, but not long enough to complete it. I wanted to hold on to that snippet for the right time, so that Richard and I could continue our conversation by touching something new, something we had not talked about before onstage. The release of two new books over the past year provided just such an opportunity. Richard and I were able to discuss Flights of Fancy, his latest book, about flight in the animal kingdom and beyond. It is a beautiful book to read and look at, with delightful illustrations by Jana Lenzova. I had assumed I knew everything that was in it, as Richard and I had talked about the physics of flying early on when he was writing it. But I was wrong. It is a wonderful compendium of fascinating stories about how nature, and evolution, conspired to harness physics to escape, at least temporarily, they tyranny of gravity. We used the book as a launching point to discuss science more generally. It was an enjoyable tour from The Selfish Gene to his, and my, most recent thinking about nature. I hope you enjoy it. 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

Hi, and welcome to the Origins Podcast. I'm your host Lawrence Krause. This podcast is with none other than Richard Dawkins, who of course needs no introduction. And many of you have been asking for a podcast between me and Richard for some time, and I'm happy to finally be presenting it. Richard and I actually began preparing this podcast about two years ago when we had a discussion at his house about his early life

and his early period in science and writing the selfish dream. and some of that dialogue is included in this podcast and then we brought it up to date today as we were able to have a wonderful discussion about his new books in particular his book Flights of Fancy which is really about flying in all of its different forms in the animal kingdom and beyond and it is a beautiful book and one I actually thought I knew what was in it because he and I talked about it when he was writing it and we discussed some of the physics but it's far more than just physics and the discussions about how flying is implemented in different ways in nature is just remarkable and fascinating to read and there are beautiful illustrations by Jana Lanzova

as well that match the text perfectly so the discussion was delightful about that and science more generally in the current world and will serve as a lovely prelude i think to a public event that Richard and I are doing for the Origins Project Foundation in Phoenix, November 15th, where we'll carry on the discussion we began here. Now, you can watch this podcast without ads by subscribing to our substack site Critical Mass, and those subscriptions will go on supporting the Origins Project Foundation itself. Or you can watch the podcast on our YouTube channel, or you can listen to it anywhere podcasts,

can be listened to. So no matter how you watch or listen to it, I'm sure you'll enjoy the remarkable science popularizer Richard Dawkins, and I hope you enjoyed as much as I did. Thanks. Well, Richard, it's always good to be with you and fun to be here. Likewise. In fact, I was just reminded that it's the fifth year anniversary

of the wide release of the unbelievers, so it's really nice. You cannot be serious. Seriously, yeah, yeah. So it's... Jesus, okay. Time passes. But speaking of time passes. But speaking of time passing, actually, I wanted to start, I can't resist, but notice that that painting there is familiar, and it was from the cover of the Selfish Gene, or vice versa.

That is called The Expectant Valley. It's a painting by Desmond Morris, who's equally famous as a zoologist. Yes. As an artist. Yeah. And when we were, the Selfish Dean was my first book, and needed a good cover for it. And the selfishine has a kind of science fictiony field. it. It's all about kind of reproduction

and biology in a general almost extraterrestrial way. It doesn't have to be the way it is on this planet. It's a general theory that is going to be true wherever there's life. And so something a bit science fiction you like that. It's called the expectant valley, which is right.

It's got a nice green patch at the top right which is a good place to put the title. Perfect. So when the publisher, Michael Rogers and I saw it, we decided that was just the thing. And so we put it on the cover. And then the advance that Oxford University Press gave me, a bit smaller than the sort of advances I get nowadays, happened to be exactly the same as the price of that painting in an exhibition that Desmond was having at the same time.

So I bought it. And he was a bit embarrassed that I bought it. And so he threw in this other painting at the same time. Oh, okay. So you got two for one. similar, yes. Wow, well, it just was so nice to see it there, and what a wonderful remembrance of an amazing book that's had an amazing impact. As long as we're starting with talking about the selfish gene,

you talked about whether you changed the word selfish. Yes, actually the main second edition was much older than that. It was in, I think, 1989. And that's when I put a lot of new stuff in. The 40th anniversary one was actually hardly changed at all. the title was the one thing I didn't change

but you thought about it. Yes. It could equally have been called the altruistic individual. Yeah, that would, I'm glad you didn't change it to them. Or the cooperative gene. The original suggestion, when I went to see a publisher before finally settling on OUP, another publisher, Jonathan Cape, the editor there, the sort of chief editor there, suggested the immortal gene, which I think actually would have been pretty good.

I'm sorry not to have had that. I was thinking about that. I read that, and I thought, well, I still think the selfish gene is. I mean, it's more provocative. You're right, it gives the misimpression perhaps. Don't you think the immortal gene is more sort of romantic and more kind of Sagan-esque? Well, it's clearly more Sagan-esque. Yeah, well, I guess, yeah, it probably is.

I think for your second book, it might have been, but for a breakout book, the selfish gene, what it does, the immortal gene, I mean, the selfish gene gets you asking, what is this all about, the selfish gene? And I think that, and in the end, I think what's really good about that

is it frames evolutionary biology in the context of what it should be, which is that it's not individuals, it's not species, it's genes. Yeah, but you have to read the book. It's not good enough just to read the title. Yeah, and that's right. As you pointed out, I noticed that many critics tend just to read the title.

I've discovered that. It's true for everything, including articles, books, they read the title and then they decide what you've done. But anyway, I think the selfish gene was the perfect title, and I'm just inspired by being there with that. But you did say, in fact, you just mentioned it's a very science fiction book. I noticed that, again, I was just reading the preface. And you said the first words in the book are, this book should be read almost as though we're science fiction. And that's what you meant by it. Yes, that's right. I mean, it's supposed to be general. I'm very fascinated by what life has to be like anywhere in the universe, rather than what life actually happens to be like on this planet. And so that's what I meant by the science fictiony flavor of it.

Well, you know, I know I've been with you. In fact, it's interesting, now that we're in the era of exoplanets, I think, I think, well, you said it, and I think it's true. life, one could imagine, I suppose, but it's hard to imagine in a realistic sense, life anywhere and not being governed by natural selection, right? I mean, that's the, now, whether it's, whether it's the same DNA or ATP or all the basic components of biology is different, but do you, I think we may have asked this once before, but do you think that it's likely that assuming there's life elsewhere in the universe, that it has a different genetic code? Yes. I'm pretty confident it's going to be Darwinian. I'm pretty confident that there'll have to be some sort of genetic code,

and it'll have to be digital and highly accurate, very high fidelity. I think it'll have to be one-dimensional or two-dimensional, but not three. So we can sort of make quite a few guesses, plausible guesses. I'd be very surprised if it was DNA, well, I'd be totally surprised if it was the same genetic code. but I wouldn't be totally surprised if it was also DNA. If it so was based on, yeah. You know, I was talking to George Church recently,

and he said we've been able to artificially create new sequences that aren't just, you know, the four letters of our genetic code. I don't know if we'll both be around, but I'd like to make a bet that it's the same. I think I can't help but think that it could have just been an accident that life picked those, but I think chemistry, certainly chemistry determines, biology at some level. And I suspect that life found the chemically most preferred set.

Well, there are various levels of this. Maybe you'd be right that it's going to be a triplet code. Yeah, yeah. But I bet anything you like, it won't be the same genetic code. Anything I like. Okay. Yeah. I saw your Tesla there. Okay, it'll be interesting. I love it if we, you know, I was going to say if we knew this in our lifetime. But we'll talk today. There's so many things that I thought would never be observed in my lifetime that have been observed, and maybe we'll get to black holes and other things. But so maybe we'll know. Maybe we'll, I don't know how we'll know, but, but it would be wonderful. Well, I would, I mean,

if extraterrestrial life was actually discovered and we could actually look at what to that the magic code, I would love that. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I think we may, I think it's quite likely we may discover evidence of extra gesture of life by looking at spectral signatures from planets. But boy, not being able to see genetic code, that would require probably a sample, and that's going to be a little hard. If it was Mars, then the same genetic code, then I would say that's contamination. Yeah, but what if it's Europa and it was the same genetic code? That's the, it's true that, you know, no planet is an island, and I think it's really important was discovered. well, when I remember when Bill Clinton had that press conference in the White House about that rock,

that meteorite that had been discovered from Mars that had been sectioned, and they discovered what they thought were fossils of real life. The consensus is it's probably not biological. But it made it clear, and what we've learned about extremophiles, is that life can survive inside rock, certainly microbes could in extreme environments. So if life originated as it did in our solaceous, many where, and we know it did on Earth, it would certainly pollute other systems, and that's why... Well, I think if it was the same genetic code, that would be, for me, positive evidence that it is contamination.

And if it was Mars, that's very plausible. If it's Enceladus or Europa, it's harder to believe. But nevertheless, it's even harder to believe that the same genetic code would have arisen twice. I'm so confident the more of, and I don't, I'm not an expert in biochemistry, that the energetics of chemistry does govern life and it could be just random for random

nucleotides but I suspect there must be a reason why those four but we'll see well I think it'll be a bit like human language where there's an awful lot that's in common between different human languages but the same language I mean if English had arisen

totally independently in South America and in the old world. That would be, you just don't believe that would happen. But of course we know that all human language has a certain base in common. Yeah, I was talking to Nome Chomsky. Yeah, no, that's true, I guess. At that level, I mean, something similar to Chomsky in universality,

I would agree with you, but not the same genetic code. Well, the question, let's say, I don't know if the biochemists have done this, but let's say you had four different base pairs. Would DNA be a stable? Would, you know, the question is that I don't know the answer to is the energetics of whether that particular set allows you to form a double helix more efficiently than four other base pairs.

And, you know, I don't know. I don't know either, but I doubt it. Okay, well, it'll be wonderful to discover and one of us will get a nice gift, but it's nice to find something we disagree about it. But, well, speaking about what we might discover, What's the most interesting thing you've been hearing in science lately? Well, obviously, photographing the black hole.

And I suppose because I was professor of public understanding of science, I get asked questions, even though I'm not a physicist, I'm not an astronomer. And yesterday I was asked, a day before I was asked by somebody at lunch, how come it's red? So I say, well, I don't think that's a real color. I think it's a virtual, I think it's a, conventional color. Yeah, it's radio telescopes. It's a false color image. It's radio telescope, so it's false color. I think I do understand how you can use eight telescopes from around the

world to act as make one virtual telescope, one huge, great big virtual dish. It's easier in the radio, at least it's been done efficiently in the radio. But yeah, it still amazes me because you have to, you basically, you can't just, they have to operate not independently at all. They have to be totally coupled and because you're looking for what's called phase information, which is the, not just the individual. Okay, and you can't couple them directly. You've got to have a clock running in all eight places. Yes, so exactly. So you know exactly the same time in that atomic clock. The other fascinating thing I read was that the data is so huge that it actually had to be transported physically. Yeah, physically. Gigantic number of hard disks. Yeah, petabytes. I heard that it was

more than, I mean, I'm always amazed about the amount of information the LHC. records, and I've heard that in some comparison to the information in a collider, it was a large fraction. It's a, it's a, as I said, I think, you can recently tweet, it's a, it's a, it's a triumph of human ingenuity. And by the way, the only, I think when you talk about the colors, the false colors, the only color that isn't false, I don't think is the black part in the middle. Yeah. And that, it's, I have to say, I mean, from a point of view of, of, of, of, of, leading us in new directions. Well, there's lots of interesting astrophysics of what might orbit around black holes. And it looks remarkable. In fact, it looks eerily like people thought

such a system should look. It's an immense black hole. It's like seven billion solar masses almost, seven percent of the mass of our entire galaxy. And there's all sorts of stuff falling in and incredible the fireworks on the outside from things emitting light and light traveling around it. It's the kind of thing that makes me proud to be human. I just love it. Liga is the same. Yeah, it's just amazing that we can do that in a galaxy of 55 million light years away. And I have to say as one who, from a physics perspective, I've always been dubious about black holes.

It's just eerily amazing to see the darkness of the black hole. Of course, it could be an object that strongly resembles a black hole in other ways, but it's just, it's amazing. Well, it's amazing that science works so well. I mean, it just, it would be, as you say, to me, if we discovered a life form elsewhere and discovered, you know, that the rules that we applied to the evolution of life and Earth work extremely well there. You wouldn't be surprised. Oh.

But it would be an amazing testament to the triumph of the human. Well, in the case of physics, I'd be surprised if it wasn't the same, but in the case of biology, I don't mean exactly the same. I mean, just mean Darwinian selection, et cetera, et cetera, that there was diversity in the planet. Exactly. I think it's astonishing that an animal that evolved in Africa to hunt and gather is capable of doing this kind of thing. It's just a very, very wonderful thing. It makes me very proud to be human. It is amazing. I mean, as a theoretical physicist, I'm always amazed what experimentalists could do.

But the fact that we can do this is part of the triumph of our culture. And it's lovely that it's international as well. Yeah, oh, in this case, it was, well, it had to be exactly. It's wonderful. Science brings people together internationally. Speak different languages, different cultures, but all those telescopes had to work and time things to the same microsecond to be able to, or even better, to be able to amass that data and combine it. And science is a wonderful example for culture. Bringing people together, whereas religion pushes them apart. Exactly. And people...

And somehow, you know, it surprises me when people talk about scientism and and trying to ride science as an example for our culture, that in fact, it does what we want human culture to do. It brings up, it raises the human spirit. It's democratic in many ways. It's based on free inquiry and mutual respect, and it also works. Yes. Which I think is, so as a triumph of culture, I'm really happy to see. Whenever, and again with LIGO, it's nice to see the public enthusiasm. Because as someone who's communicated science and certainly on television as well, I'm always surprised that people think that, especially TV producers, that people aren't interested in science, but people are fascinated by this stuff when they can see a picture like

that. And it draws all of humanity together. The astronauts, when I was a kid, the astronauts land in the moon, it was something else that drew people together. It wasn't quite science. It was done more for national pride than the project. Which is a pity. I think LIGO is a much better example. I mean, photographing the black hole is a much better example.

Oh, yeah, exactly. And CERN and the Large Hadron Collider. And people will say, why should we spend money on that? And I think that, bottom line is it's not, I mean, in global sense, it's not a lot of money. It's a lot of money for an individual, although individuals could do it now, and we may rely on rich individuals in the future to fund science

like we did in the Renaissance when we have patrons. In fact, we are, to some extent, rich individuals are funding science in certain ways. Well, the space rockets are going private now. To go back to Selfish Gene, I was reading at least one of the introductions again where someone sent you a note saying that they first read it, and it basically destroyed their life. So somehow finding out that we're not,

you know, that we're not special, somehow affects people in a negative way too, I think. I think it's tragic that somebody should have their life ruined by a purely academic. It doesn't actually change anything about your life. You still get up in the morning, you still eat your meals and do whatever it is you'd want to do. You do not have to have your life ruined

by some academic discovery or theory. Well, in fact, it should be the opposite, but it's hard to know whether... I mean, I think it should cause us to reflect on what would ruin our lives. Yeah. If, I think something like for me, it would be something like if I found myself in the world where nobody cared about truth anymore. Uh-oh. I'm a little worried about the world right now.

Yes. I mean, well, of course, in American politics, you're exactly in that precise situation. But nevertheless, that's still a minority. And so science doesn't. But if nobody cared about scientific truth, if all they cared about was what makes you feel good rather than what is actually true, then I think I would not want to go on living. Interesting. Interesting.

Because, well, let me throw it back at you, because we live in a world where, at this point, I think, still a majority of people are religious, which is basically, for many of them, feeling good. Right? Didn't, I mean, the Richard Dawkins Foundation in England did a survey of the people who said they were Christian, and didn't most of the people who basically said why they were Christian, it wasn't doctrinaire, it was basically they wanted to feel like good people, right? Yes, that's right. They thought that you couldn't be moral. Well, they thought, I want to think of myself as a good person, and for them that's what Christian actually means. Yeah, so we do kind of live in a world where most people are happy to feel good. But I suppose the point is those people are also still interested in truth. Yes, it's not like not being interested in truth. Yeah, because people can believe in two opposite things at the same time.

So most people who call themselves religious also accept the reality of much of science that, in fact, demonstrates that much of the precepts of religion. You will meet people in anthropology departments and sociology departments who will say something like, scientific truth is just one particular version of truth, it's patriarchal, white, all that stuff. And if a tribe in the Pacific believes that the moon is just a few feet above the treetops, then that is true on that particular island. And it's okay if all they mean by that is that that's compatible with the culture, of that people and that's fine, but they sometimes go as far as to say, no, it is actually true,

that scientific truth is no more true than that. That, I think, is extremely dangerous. Yes. I mean, it's dangerous for many reasons because, because once again, the best thing about science, that the reason it's worth the whole process, and by science, I mean the process of science, is that it works. And if you deny the fact that if you accept that any one's imagination works as well, or as equally valid, you'll make predictions and you'll take actions that are just silly, right?

Yes. And I've had this debate with a few people, including at one time, I'm Fred Noam Chomsky, who said to me that he doesn't care what people think. It's what they do that matters. But the problem is there's this incredible coupling between what people think and what they do, which is one of the reasons I assume you find religion evil, right? Yes, I mean, not all religion is evil. Some of it is, and some of it's much more evil than other. It does annoy me the way people say, well, it's all evil. Yeah, okay.

It's not. I mean, some is much more evil than others. But I do feel passionately about truth. And I think there is such a thing as truth. And I think that's what science is about. And that these fancy intellectuals in non-scientific departments who really deny truth and say truth is a cultural artifact. Yeah, something like that.

That, I think, is really, really pernicious. Yeah, it's almost more. dangerous because they have the umbrella of scholarship instead of just mere ignorance. And, oh, they are ignorant. I think in a way, if they understood science, they would, at least the scientific process. They wouldn't speak as they do. Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of sort of, it's too much hard work to learn science. And so, and so. Yeah, you know, and that's an interesting thing as well. I was, it is hard work to learn science, but it's really hard work to learn anything. And I don't,

how do you feel about this? It happens to be in my bonnet that people are willing to basically, when it comes to science, they're willing to just give up easily. I'd say I don't, because the illusion is that it's impossible to understand, I'm not even going to try.

But people will try and understand history or economics or, I mean, work very hard. And there's lots of things that are not easy in life or even learn music or whatever. It's a kind of double standard where you can actually almost gain prestige or saying, oh, I can't, I can't do science. I'm hopeless at mathematics.

But you'd never say I'm proud of not knowing who wrote Macbeth or something. Exactly. And yet you can be considered literate for being, quote, non-mathematical. Part of the problem, by the way, in my opinion, is biology. Because, and I don't know if it's done this way in England, but in the United States, what they generally do, in many places, although it's changing, is teach biology before chemistry and chemistry before physics, which means most kids never get to physics. And the argument, there are many arguments that I've heard. One is that biology is more innate in the sense

it deals with things we can see and frogs and things. But modern biology, of course, is far removed from that in many ways. But also the notion that somehow you need preparation that physics is. is harder, and that's why people never get there. But the problem is it gives a complete misrepresentation of science. And the reason I actually, frankly, I remember dropping biology is when I took it. It was very different than now, but it was memorizing the parts of a frog. It was memorizing this and that. But the basis of biology is chemistry, and the basis of chemistry and physics. So we really should teach things in the other order, because if you learn physics first, then you'd learn about energy, and energetics is crucial for understanding chemistry. But indeed, chemistry and the

energetics of chemistry is biology, right? And so it would mean less rote, less accepting things on faith and more understanding about the process by which we understood. Yes, you don't have to, I mean, you can reject learning by rote, and I do, without necessarily getting into

physics and energetics and chemistry and mathematics. I've always worried that textbooks of biology put the evolution chapter last, and it should come first, because otherwise it nothing makes sense. So you don't actually have to do physics.

If you do it, you can do biology the right way around and not just memorize the parts of a frog. I mean, who wants to memorize the parts of a frog if you don't know what it's all for? Yeah, no, it's, to understand the context of why you're learning what you're learning and be motivated to know that, I mean, it's somewhat the same introductory physics.

You learn these awful things like you probably did, like sliding down and inclined plane and never... I don't think that's awful. I think that's rather nice. I like that. Yeah. Okay. Okay, well, there you go. But why did you go into biology then, not physics?

I kind of drifted. My father was a biologist. I had an inspiring biology teacher. That'll do it. And I finally just kind of realized that the... Big questions like, why are we here and why are we so elegantly designed? Why do we look like well-functioning machines? That's an evolution question.

Sure. I've always been totally fascinated by those existential questions. Always. But you said you had a good teacher. Were there one or two teachers who specifically influenced you in a really important way? Yes. Yerun Thomas, who's actually just died two days ago. and which I was sorry about.

Yeah, he was inspiring, but I think my father too kind of introduced me to evolution. Really? Tell me about that story. It's the one I've never heard from you. Well, he read botany at Oxford, and so I, when we were going for walks and things

and cliffs and by the seaside and things, he were talking about biology a lot, and I think it was he who first explained Darwinism to me. Oh, really? Did it strike you as immediately natural? No, no, I didn't believe it. And it took me a while to, I thought it, it, I got the point, but I didn't think it was a big enough theory to account for the complexity of life.

And I only later realized that it is. As an undergraduate or graduate? No, a little bit earlier than when I'm still at school. You still in high school. Yeah. What, was your father, so did your, was your father a proxy biology? or was it? Well, it's kind of. I mean, as I say, he re-read Botany in Oxford. He then did a master at Cambridge and then he went into the colonial services of agricultural scientists.

Which is why you were born, born where you were. Okay, okay. Okay, so that was that background. It's interesting. And did you ever think of being a doctor? No. No? Never. No, I didn't. Oh, well, okay. I I mean, I couldn't stand it. That really is learning facts. Yeah, no, I, well, I've already told you this, that yeah, my mother wanted me be a doctor. And it was only, and she made the mistake, I think, at the time of saying doctors were scientists, because neither of my parents finished high school, really. And I got enamored by science.

I don't know if it's a chicken egg kind of thing, but I was certainly enamored by science at quite a young age. And the thought of being a doctor scientist was really, really exciting to me. Well, I think the best doctors are scientists, But you can't become a doctor without memorizing huge numbers of facts. Yeah, that's why I became a physicist because I didn't like to memorize facts. I certainly couldn't. You don't have to memorize anything if you're a physicist. Who was I listening to the other day?

It was a Nobel Prize winning physicist. And he said, the reason I became a physicist was that I could only remember 10 facts. Well, that's what's great about physics. In principle, you don't have to memorize anything. That's not true. Well, you know, Newton's laws, and then if you're really good enough, if you're Feynman, you can just derive everything from that. Yes.

And what do you think about Feynman's father used to walk with him in the woods? And I remember this struck me because I'm not good at the names of things, and partly because I think I'm colorblind. And therefore, when it comes to birds and things, I would have always liked to know what they were, but I sort of gave up. but he asked his father what the name of a bird was, and the father said, well, the name doesn't matter. The name is just, what matters is how it behaves, how it reproduces. Names aren't important.

Of course, we name things in physics as well as in biology, but what really matters is observing behavior. I wonder, sort of... Well, I've never been good at names, I must confess, and my father was, and so he was very good on names of all the wildflowers and birds too. And it's always been a matter of regret to me. You do need to know the names

because when you study the behavior and things, it actually makes a difference. But I kind of get the point Feynman's father was making. It's funny that you say, you're not good now. When we've been together, you always seem to know at least,

well, maybe you're not good, but you're much better than me at naming birds when we're together and things like that. Well, no, you see, when I've been on the Galapagos, for example, I've done that quite a lot of times now. And I give lectures in the evening on the boat, as I did in your trip.

But the actual naming of which bird is which is done by the local, in this case, Ecuadorian guides who are superb. Yeah, oh, absolutely. And so I have a kind of symbiotic relationship with them. But it's no good when I go on those trips people asking me, what's that bird? Well, I'm getting better at it now.

So you've never, have you been tempted to be? a bird watcher? I enjoy it. I take binoculars when I go out. And I like watching birds. But I don't, I'm not a Twitter who has a list of the birds of species that I've seen. I don't drive 100 miles across the country because somebody rings me up and says there's a lesser spotted. Yeah.

Exactly. What about, what about gardening? What about plants and things? Again, you see, for me, it's just, the world used to divide between, I'm embarrassed to say this, but there were sort of trees and grass and plants and animals. And that was kind of my, that was sort of... You know the rule in the British Army. In the Army, we have three kinds of trees.

Fur, poplar, and bushy top. Well, Richard, it is wonderful to be back with you, again, at least virtually. And although I'm here in Cool, Prince Edward Island, and you're there in hot England, but... It's hotter than it's ever been. Hotter than ever been in history. That's right. Well, I suppose you can think of that.

a lucky time to be alive then. It's probably not hotter than it was in the Carboniferous, as we'll get to it. But probably England was in England then, so it's okay. And we normally, as you may know in this origins podcast, I like to talk about personal origins. But happily, you and I have had a discussion about that when we recorded the first part of this podcast is several years ago, actually, in your place and Oxford. So we can we can dispense with that. But I did want to ask you one question because I want to talk. What I'd like to talk about today are your two recent books, Flights of Fancy and Books Do Furnish a Life, which which I really enjoyed actually. As I'll mention in a moment, I was kind of so pleasantly

surprised in both cases. It wouldn't be surprised, Lawrence. Well, well, I thought I knew what it were. No, no, not that they were wonderful. I knew that they'd be wonderful. But I thought I knew what would would be interesting. them and and I was surprised because there was so much more and and that was wonderful. I mean, we, you know, I talked to you earlier about the flights of fancy when we talked about some physics questions that you had early on and I thought, okay, well, I now having talked to Richard about that, I know what's in the book and then then I discovered that that was just

scratching the surface. But the books do furnish a life, which is about reading and writing, didn't, I don't remember if I asked you this question, but I, who, what popular is, what popular science writer did you first read? Did you, did you, I mean, or a scientist, did you read when, because I was thinking about that. Yes, probably Peter Medaward, to whom the book is dedicated. And I, I knew of his name because he'd been a school friend of my father, as a matter of fact. So I knew, I knew his name from childhood. And I met him a few times. And he was the most marvelous writer. I mean, he had a wonderful wit, a rather sort of lofty patrician wit. Yeah. And arrogant, but got away with it, arrogant but arrogant but with justification. And I hope I don't emulate that. But he's lovely to read.

As a scientist writer, absolutely. I remember he wrote something like memoirs of a thinking radish or something like that. That's one of his books. I remember that's one I have. Mostly essays and wonderful essays. In fact, we'll get to Medivar because when we when we, we, we, we, we later on because I yeah I was I was taken by I for me actually one of the reasons I write is I when I read people I thought were great scientists who were wonderful writers that always had an impact on me and did that did that did he serve as in any way as a role model for your writing in any in any way sort of but as I say I hope I don't you know the arrogance I don't have to take justification for it But yes, I mean, I suppose in some way he was a role model.

And again, I can't remember Vassius, but I can't help but thinking, what made you decide to write in the first place? I suppose, well, as an Oxford student, you have to write an essay every week. And so I got into the way of, into the habit of writing and thinking about what I was writing about and um i suppose well i wrote the selfish gene in 1975 and uh i was motivated to write that by the fact that group selection the group selection fallacy was so widespread especially in popular science writing yeah and i thought i had a much better way of expressing what's wrong with that which is the genes i view yeah sure so i i wrote that in quite a sort of fever of excitement

Oh, well, okay. Well, that's interesting. That comes across, the excitement comes across. It certainly, it was a great idea. And, and, you know, I want to talk in some sense, because we'll talk about writing ideas behind writing books. And I do want to turn to this beautiful book, which is beautiful in many ways. It's not just beautiful read, but the illustrations by Jana are marvelous. And it's one of those books that you shouldn't just listen to. too, but look at because of the beautiful illustrations. Yeah, it's nice you should say that. And of course, I appreciate down as illustrations as well. But Anthony Cheatham, the publisher, whom you know, confided in us that he reckons that the future of books, printed books, depends upon their being beautiful. Because you just want to read a book. You can read a kindle or you can read, or audio books.

but to actually own a book, to want to own a book and fill it in your hands, it's got to be beautiful. And so he's dedicated to producing books that people find beautiful to actually possess. Oh, well, that's wonderful. Well, I'm excited because, as you know, my next book is Anthony's publishing. I know, yes. The cover is beautiful. They come up with a beautiful cover, but it is, you know, I was actually, this is kind of an aside, but I was actually surprised. I don't know how they did it. Given the quality of the color illustrations, I had expected this book to be incredibly expensive, and it's not. And I don't know how they did it. I'm surprised, too. I agree with you, and I'm delighted by it. Yeah, no, it's wonderful. Well, it is, as I said,

to you, I thought I was, I thought I knew what the book was about because we talked about some of the physics, but, but it was so much more. And it was so charmed, it's full of charming stories. It It, I think, I don't know if it's the most, um, it, it, if it's the most sort of colloquial kind of book that you've written, but it's, it's, I feel like, like their bedtime stories almost when I, when I, when I okay. And, and, um, and for me also, you see, I, I'm such an ignoramus when it comes to zoology and much of biology that, that every time I learn about what animals do, it's amazing. And I love the way that you, um, merge that.

that you merge the stories of specific animals with questions of flights. So you began by saying that, and it's true, everyone's had dreams of flying. And I'm wondering, did that motivate this book? What motivated this book? I don't think that did motivate it really, although it is the first chapter.

I think I wrote a book for children a few years ago called The Magic of Reality, which each chapter is a separate, question, some of which involve physics, a separate question like what is an earthquake, what is the sun, why do we have winter and summer, why do we have night and day, that kind of thing. And so there are 10 chapters, each of them beginning, each of them having a question like that, and then beginning with mythical answers to those questions, and then finally homing in on the true scientific answer. And I sort of thought about having perhaps a new addition, as I would say as second

volume of that, the 10 more questions. The first question I thought of was flight, and that grew into a book. Enough questions for a whole book. Yeah, no, in fact, I remember that other books, because that was a book we spent a lot of time together talking about because there was a lot of physics in that earlier book. Yes, that's right. That's right. And yeah, no, flying turns out to be a wonderful hook to be able to talk about a lot of different subjects. That's what kind of surprised me. It's not, I mean, it is about flying, but it allows one to talk about so many different things besides physics and biology from, well, and the details of evolution and lovely, as I say, stories about animals. The first chapter is sort of the first part of it, which is, is it, is what is flight good for? We asked as an evolutionary question.

Now, again, and I think I was pleased to see that because one of the things you do so well is dispensed. with people's misconceptions about evolution in much of your speaking in writing. And the word good is something that means something very different. And so maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Well, good in Darwinian terms means good for the genes that program the development of the organ concern, in this case, wings and tails and flight surfaces and sense organs that are involved. And so what is the good of flight?

How does it benefit the genes of the animal? How does it benefit the future prospects of the genes of the animal? Future prospects is perhaps not a good way to put it, but the animal is the product of past natural selection, natural selection in the past. And so it is a machine, a beautifully designed machine for preserving genes because it comes from a long line of ancestors whose genes were preserved. That's why they became ancestors. And so, so, so, so you can regard an animal as a beautifully designed machine for passing on its genes.

And the details of how it does that in the case of flight are things like finding food, escaping from creditors, finding a good place to build a nest, all that kind of thing, migrating long distances on. And reproduction, I mean, and finding mates as well. I mean, I was thinking early on, you say, okay, so good means what, what, how does flight allow genes to, to propagate, in other words, and and it means animals to reproduce and you're feeding, reproduction, escape from predators, etc. There's one thing you didn't mention and I, I don't know if it, but it carcans back to, it came, it occurred to me anyway, it harkens back to what you said about, we all dream of flying and how wonderful it is. Has anyone, has anyone ever done a study? It must be fun.

Has anyone done a study to see if there are hormonal releases like oxytocin or something to encourage animals to fly? I mean, because it must, you look at them there, and I wonder if anyone's ever thought about that. I have no idea about that. I'm not sure it's ever been looked at. It is tempting to think that birds are having fun when they fly. I mean, if you watch seagulls, especially I find,

I love watching seagulls and soaring in the wind and diving and it looks as though they're having fun. You could always put a utilitarian spin on that by saying they're practicing. Yeah, sure. Improving their skill. But I don't object to thinking of they're having fun. It's just that you can't actually test it.

Well, yeah, no, but I was thinking, and I'm getting ahead a little bit, but one talks about the economics evolution. It's a compromise often between trying to do things at work, but most economically, economically meaning sort of least expenditure of energy and things like that. But I was wondering whether, literally, whether, you know, when one thinks about the biological,

the genetic developments that would encourage animals to fly, you know, that whether there might literally be a hormonal argument that literally might be that there may be hormones release that make the animal like to fly, but I don't know. There is easy it could be, but yes, I don't know. Anyway, one of the things you point out, and I remember hearing you talk about this is this aerial arms race that basically, yeah, animals learn how to fly to escape from predators and then and then some predators learn how to capture flying animals. And it's an arms race and eventually evolution produces, as we'll talk about, animals that can fly really, really well. And not because they were designed, but because, well, why don't you go into it? Well, if it wasn't for arms races, then animal adaptations would be nothing like so beautiful as they are.

I mean, to some extent, animal adaptations are just towards the weather. I mean, towards surviving in the inanimate world. But when you've got an enemy, it's also evolving, then you have a positive feedback, and that's what an arms race is. The phrase arms race, of course, is borrowed from human arms races. And it's a pretty close one. It's an analogy that I don't mind using at all. Because each side has to balance the costs of investing in the arms race versus that's the opportunity cost versus the cost of the other things

that it could be putting its energy and its time into. So the more energy you put into the arms race against predators, the less you've got left over to do things like make eggs and court mates and things like that. And so each side in the arms race is fighting the other side, but it's also having to balance the costs of servicing the arms race against the other things that it ought to be doing in the animal's own economy. And both the predator and the prey are doing that. Both the parasite and the host are doing. doing that. Well, it, exactly. And, and, and, you know, the, you present examples. And the first example, I didn't want to jump in because for me, each of the examples, well, many of them were some of them I'd heard of, but many of them were quite surprised to me. And one of the aspects of the evolutionary arms I see to talk about that I want to touch on at

the beginning is moths and bats. Yes. At which you, you talk about, and maybe because there's physics involved, it fascinating me. But one of you, I was kind of amazed to hear about. So, Why don't you talk about that a little bit? Okay. This is most of the work of a man called Kenneth Roda, American, and it's beautiful work. Bats, as you know, use ultrasound to find the way around and to catch insects with its highly sophisticated.

The detailed precision of it is such that you can think of it as almost like seeing. In fact, I think it's plausible to say that the bats are probably putting together images, mental images, models in the brain, just as we do when we see, they do it with their ears. And I've even gone so far as to speculate that they hear in colour, and that's my own private speculation. But anyway, they've become so good at it, partly because they don't want to bump into obstacles, because that would be fatal, the speed they fly, but also because they're running an arms race against prey,

insects and moths not too in moths have ears which appear to be tuned only to hear bats if they hear anything at all it's a bat and they take evasive action they look like spitfires in war two doing diving and spiraling and and and taking evasive action and the bats have to um compensate to this and the the speed with which the um the pulses of the bat come out when they're just cruising along They have a sort of steady pulse rate of cries, getting a steady echoes, which are updating their world picture as they go. When they're pursuing a moth or another insect, it's like a machine gun. It can be as much as 50 times a second. So they're getting information about the world, specifically about the moth, every 50th of a second.

And that you can see would give you a highly precision picture of where the moth is. So the arms race has been going on from, we don't know how long, of course, but moths have sophisticated ears which are built to hear only ultrasound. And bats have the ultrasound itself. There was another aspect that you mentioned that surprised me, which is that they're all, not only have sophisticated ears, but they act like stealth planes in the sense that they're, that they're they they the bat can only find the moth if it's if it if the sound waves that uh bounce off and come back to and come back to the bat but if they're absorbed by the moth and they don't come

back then that moth is invisible like a stealth their aircraft is that's right something something about the texture of the of the hairs on the moths on the moth's body act like a a stealth a stealth a stealth plane yeah it was sort of they were somehow tuned and to absorb that resonantly absorb that radiation. That's what amazed me. I think that's why. I may as I say, it's wonderful physics because it's exactly what's done in in concert halls to make sure that you don't have reverberations and you design the walls to absorb the radiation rather than have it bounce off. Yes. Well, my my color theory is that is that bats interpret different textures of echoes using color because they would have had ancestors that you would see in color.

Then they went almost blind. So the brain still has those labels. After all, a color is simply a label in the brain. Sure, sure. To label a wavelength of light. Those labels that have been going begging, doing nothing. Why not use them as a method of labeling different textures of echo coming back from different kinds of insects, for example? I mean, a leathery insect like a wasp will be different, have a different color in my eye.

hypothesis from a from a bumblebee, which is, which is furry. Well, let me, let me, let me even encourage that more. I don't know whether it's true or not, but let me add fuel to your fire there. Because what a color of something really is is, is, is I, something absorbs light and then reemits, it absorbs not the entire spectrum, but it absorbs preferentially in certain parts of the spectrum and reflects in other parts of the spectrum. and the part that's get reflected. So the wavelengths that get reflected produce color.

One could imagine that if you were sending sound waves of that, which didn't have all the same frequency, that an object, different objects would reflect certain frequencies more effectively than others, and that could certainly be seen as color. Yes. And by the way, some bats use frequency modulated cries. So they, instead of just doing a fixed pitch, they go, ooh, ooh!

And they're using the difference in pitch of the echo to say, okay, that, the, since it's a downgoing one, the first echo to return is the high pitch one. So it enables, it increases the resolution. Exactly, because different frequencies actually travel at different speeds in the air, and that's really important. Yeah. And there are other bats that use the Doppler shift. And they, so when the insect is flying towards them,

the echoes are Doppler shifted one way, and when the insects are flying away, doppler shifted the other way, and the bats are sensitive to that. And the brain can process that in real time and make use of it. It's wonderful. Well, as I've always said, biology is just really physics,

so there you go. Of course, yes. And okay, before I leave this, so I'm glad we talked about that, because I was fascinating, I didn't know about that. But you also point out, and this is really important, that when you talk about flight being good, it's not good for individuals necessarily. As you say, the point is it's good for the propagation of genes. And that may mean that flight makes certain individuals particularly good flyers for the purposes of eating and reproducing, but it may kill them.

because in fact it's extremely dangerous, for example, to dive as Gannets do or Peregrine Falcons do. And you talk about Peregrine Falcons, which I have a particular fondness for partly because of this amazing. I don't know if you ever read the book, The Peregrine, but I know about it. Somebody's recommended it to me, and I haven't yet read it. It is a remarkable book. One of the more, it's inspiring about someone who followed a Peregrin around. and it's a as a piece of nature writing it is it is fantastic i highly recommend it jay baker i think but they go down at 200 miles per hour when they're diving and it can't be good for you to hit the

water at 200 miles per hour oh no i mean they're absolutely fatal or if you hit hit your target at the wrong angle i should think and gallitz too you know i mean they they eventually lose their eyesight because of because of repeated um striking against the against the water And okay, so that's dangerous for injuries. But the other thing is we think about birds and insects learning how to fly and maneuver beautifully. But the thing that something else that amazed me, that we've both been, you've been to the Galapagos several times. So have I. Not together, unfortunately.

Maybe we'll do it together sometime. But I was, I was, again, maybe because of my ignorance, was amazed that some birds will stay out flying out at sea for hundreds of and will fly for days or weeks and will actually can sleep while they're flying. Half their brain goes to sleep and and and and and this flying for, I think you talk about Swift's flying. Basically they've lived their whole life in the air, right? Yeah. Swift's are amazing.

I gather it's not actually true. I said in the book that they never land except to breed, except to lay eggs, but they I said they cannot take off. It's not quite true. They can take off from the ground, but it's very difficult. So they're very unwise to land on the ground. And they very seldom do it.

They even mate in the air. They even copulate in the air. Just sort of like, well, that's kind of like the jet planes we have that get fueled and in the air. Yes, right. Yes. The beginning of Dr. Strangelove, this is rather erotic scene. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. The next thing you talk about is migration, which of course is useful for a variety of things, but is one of the more amazing aspects of the biological work, the fact that birds can migrate or other even other animals can migrate, but in some case more than 10,000 miles and find their way back home. And that's a mystery, I think, that's fascinated scientists of all types, including physicists, but biologists for a long time.

the Arctic turn you point out, I guess goes from one pole to the other, to always have summer. Always has summer, yes, that's right. I mean, the point about migration, I suppose, is because of seasons, because the earth is tilted and goes around the earth around the sun. And so the best place to be isn't the same at different times of the year. And many, many animals, not just birds, but birds especially are privileged to be able to migrate huge distances because of of their because they can fly. And how they find their way is of course fascinating. And it's one thing to find your way

when you're a regular migrant from one particular place to another. It's another thing is if you're a homing pigeon, which can find their way when a human picks them up and transports them in a random direction and release them from a random place. And so they not only have a compass, they have a map in some sense.

And that's a bit of a mystery. What that's for in nature is probably that a migrating bird is quite likely to get blown off course. And so it has to have a map, it has to know where it is as well as just what direction. So in addition to a compass, it has to know where it is. But and I want to get to that because you talk about some fascinating experiments that amaze me, but to learn about how birds or birds or insects migrate. birds or insects migrate. But this question of sort of evolutionary economy does fascinate me about migration.

Because clearly, from an energetic point of view, it's incredibly cost, it's incredibly expensive to migrate. And so the benefits have to outweigh that expense. When you talk about turns, having perpetual summer, like going from the whirl pole, I keep thinking, why wouldn't the turn just stop in the equator and just say, I don't have to move? I agree with you. I agree. Now, the benefits must outweigh the costs, but it is a mystery. There's little tiny hummingbirds, which you think would be, I mean, they're constantly sipping nectar, which is aviation fuel. Yeah. And yet, they migrate right across the Gulf of Mexico. Yeah. And that's astonishing.

It's astonishing. And yeah, obviously, there's a, there are good reasons for that. But, but in order to be able to do it, as you point out, the biology has, has to, you know, these things have to evolve systems that are amazing. And one, and yeah, I've heard this, and you mentioned the fact that maybe they are sensitive of the magnetic field of the earth, which I'd heard and could, can believe. But as you point out, that's just a compass, not a map for the most part. And there's one set of experiments that I want you to talk about because I was amazed and that's these experiments in planetarium, that these birds may have star maps. That just shocked the heck out of me to hear that.

Yes, well, this is the word Stephen Emlin at Cornell. It's certainly true that they have star maps and that they night flying, night migrating birds use the stars to navigate by. They do not have a genetically built-in star map, which would have been a possibility, a rather far-fetched one, but would have been a probability. Steve Emlin's actual hypothesis is that they,

when they're young, when they're learning, they observe the night sky and they notice that there's a part of the night sky that does not rotate as the as the clock does. And in the northern hemisphere, that's pretty well marked by it's an old star. In the southern hemisphere, it's more and more empty, but nevertheless, in the southern hemisphere, you can still see that there's a part of the sky that's not rotating. And so what they learn is to treat the part of the sky that does not rotate as due north or due south as the case may be. And Emlyn showed this brilliantly in a planetarium. By he not only used the planetarium to show by blotting out bits of the sky that they use the stars, he then brought up. How he got permission to do this from the planetarium? I don't know, but he brought up baby birds, young, young, um, indigo buntings in the planetarium. And he manipulated the planetarium so that the night sky of the planetarium rotated about Betelgoyser, about Orion's left shoulder. And these birds, when they grew up, treated Orion's left shoulder as though it was the North Star.

He could tell what direction they were migrating in. They didn't actually migrate. He kept them in a cage and looked at which side of the cage they fluttered at, try to get out. And that gave him the clue as to what direction. But they were, they fluttered trying out of the cage in the direction that would have been the southerly direction they wanted if the Orion's left shoulder was the North Star.

Yeah, no, it's the fact that it's a wonderful experiment to do because that actually, I mean, that's what science is about is speculating, but then you can actually, well, in a planetarium, he was able to test it. And again, just to be clear for people, because some people may not realize why it is that the North, the things don't move around the North star.

And that is because the Earth is rotating. And therefore, that's why the sky moves around. Of course, as we now know, it's not that the Earth, this is center of the universe. And the universe doesn't rotate around the Earth. It's that motion of the Earth around. And on the axis of the Earth, clearly, if you look up along the axis of rotation,

that's where things won't go around. but I just just for people who who may not recognize that fact but by the way this was one case where there were many cases where the illustrations in the book were quite useful you described this funnel that was used to test the motion of birds and and and and you described it on one page and I kept trying to picture it I couldn't picture it and then I turned the page and I thought oh there it is and there was an illustration of it that explained it beautifully for me so it's called the emlyn funnel and it's a cage with a conical funnel at the bottom And there's an ink pad and there's white paper all around the conical funnel and the birds,

the poor birds get their feet all inky and they try to, they're struggling up on the side they want to migrate for and they leave their little inky footmarks all over the one side of the paper, but not the other. It's, again, a simple and lovely experiment. I was very ingenious. I was very impressed. Before we leave, it's also argued, of course, and this is maybe a little, I don't want to go into this too much here because it may take too much time.

But the key point about knowing where you are on Earth is not just which direction north is, but sort of what time of day it is. So you know what, where are you on earth? And that requires both a clock and an ability to look at sort of angles of stars on the horizon to know what your latitude is as well as your longitude. And use a sextant for that. And you argue, which looks at that angle. And you argue that, or at least it's argued that birds can,

do that because again they're looking at where they can actually kind of observe the motion of the sun and predict where it will be at noon and things that's right i mean this this is one theory it's not it's not necessarily accepted but what one standard of theories is that the birds are doing something like using a sextant uh and um using the um height of the sun um if if they know what time it is locally then the height of the sun is meaningful they have to know what time it is locally and So they need a very accurate clock. They need a chronometer. And in order to navigate very accurately,

sailors, as you know, needed a highly accurate chronometer. That was the Harrison chronometer was invented for that purpose. I suppose birds don't need that accuracy. I mean, a ship needs to be accurate because it doesn't want to bump into rocks. But a bird can be relatively inaccurate, I suppose. A homing pigeon only has to get within a a sort of radius of home where it starts to recognize familiar landmarks, I suppose, church spires and things like that, because they do use landmarks.

Many migrating birds use landmarks in a big way like flying along coastlines, along river valley, that sort of thing. There's plenty of geographic features like that they can use. I remember I used to fly a lot with my uncle who had a plane and also one of the worst senses of directions of anyone I've ever met. Yes. Many times we got lost. The only way to get back was to use local landmarks and follow a road or something

like that. Yeah. It's, okay. Well, the next thing you talk about is you say why is it a good thing to lose your wings? I would phrase it as why when is the absence of wings a good thing? The point you point out is that some birds have some, some, some, some animals have had wings and then lost them. And why not have wings?

And argue it's again sort of evolutionary economics. So maybe you want to talk about how that could happen. Yes. Well, as you say, there are quite a lot of birds, especially on islands that have lost their wings. And obviously they come from ancestors that did have wings. And their ancestors must have arrived on the island in flight. Things like, it's like this cormor and so the lapagos,

things like the dodo of Mauritius. Many, many islands all over the world have flightless versions of more familiar flying birds. And the ratites like ostriches and emus, they must very, very long time ago have descended from flying birds that probably arrived on islands. Queen ants actually bite their wings off, having used them for their only one purpose. I didn't know that until I. Yes, yeah. So yes, it's an economic calculation probably mostly. Wings are costly to make and they're costly to run because we need strong flight muscles in order to use them. And in the case of queen ants, it's probably also that in case of ants generally who lack work arounds lack wings, although both their parents have wings, because it's inconvenient to have wings underground, they get in the way. and termites are the same, termites are unrelated,

independently evolved social insects, and they too have winged reproductives, winged queens and males who then lose their wings, and then the workers have no wings. So it is an economic calculation, and there are plenty of reasons to get rid of your wings once you've had them, and plenty of reasons not to develop wings in the first place.

Well, yeah, but I have to say one of the things about that discussion, once again, that caught me. And I want to use it as an example to talk about these things I never heard about, terror birds and elephant birds. I was shocked. Tell me about, talk about terror birds,

because they're terrible. They're terrifying. They're terrifying. These are birds. They're not related to ostriches, et cetera. They're entirely different, different family of birds. And they terrorized, well, South America until quite recently, until about two million years ago.

And they were gigantic and they were carnivores. They were voracious hunters. Unlike ostriches which have little thin necks and little heads, they had huge necks and huge great jaws, gigantic jaws. They probably swallowed their prey hole. And yeah, they would not want to meet one. Yeah, I think you said, yeah, they could swallow a cap-a-bearer or something like that. Well, I don't know, nobody knows whether they could, but they were like, but they were, there were two, at least two meters tall or something like that or three meters?

More than that, more like that. And the same, elephant birds were as big, the elephant bird of Madagascar, and indeed, moas of New Zealand, they were related to ostriches, and they went extinct in both cases when humans arrived. The Māoris drove the moas extinct, a terrible tragedy. And when humans arrived in Madagascar, actually from the east rather than from Africa, finally enough. and they drove the elephant birds extinct. It's possible that the legend of the rock in Sinbad the Sailor comes from elephant birds. That's what I like. The legendary rock could fly up and pick up elephants and elephant birds certainly could not fly.

They were like gigantic ostriches. And didn't they say something about being from Madagascar in the, I seem? Yes, I think there was, I think Marco Polo talked about the rock as being as coming from Madagascar. So these, again, elephant birds, large, large birds, Madagascar. The reason I think is terrible, I think I've been at a zoo once with ostriches who come up to you. And they're kind of terrifying. They come up to right. And the idea of one that actually is also carnivorous.

It kind of reminds me of kangaroos. I spent a lot of time in Australia. And you walk around a bunch of kangaroos and they stand and look at you. And you think to myself, you're surrounded by the. them, my goodness, it's good that they're not carnivorous because it was. Well, I mean, there were carnivorous kangaroos in Australia. Oh, really? They're extinct, but they were.

I mean, as you know, a huge proportion of the Australian megafauna went extinct. Again, probably driven extinct by the arrival of humans. And that included large carnivorous kangaroos, trust in been quite terrifying. Yeah, I'm just, I guess I should, we'll talk about how sad it is that are extinctions, but I guess having been surrounded by kangaroos on numerous occasions, I'm kind of happy that carnivorous ones went extinct. Yes. Maybe not for them, but it was good for me.

You also point out that, you know, given this economic fight between having wings and not having wings, that bats are the only mammals that fly and sort of speculate on why that is, but also pointed out something to me, I didn't realize you said one-fifth, of all mammals or bats? They're very, very numerous, yes, that's right. That's terrifying in a sense,

mostly now because of COVID, because COVID comes from... Yes, yes. Apparently comes from bats. When we say only, the bats are the only mammals that fly, I mean, quite a lot of mammals glide, and they may have been a stepping stone on the... On the way to fly.

On the way to fly. Yeah, we'll talk about gliding in a bit because I think it's a, well, it's fascinating in its own right, it's also from an evolutionary perspective, those people who wonder, you know, the same question, why, how do we have eyes and all those standard, you know, anti-evolutionary arguments and how can they fly? How could the half a wing work? And we'll get to there. But first, we're going to get to something which I hit home for me,

which is sort of small as beautiful, your chapter on how flying is easier if you're smaller. And I know that you weren't, I like to think. And I don't even know if you ever read my book, Fear of Physics, which begins with the joke of the cow is a sphere. Yes, of course. And in that book where I joked about it, I also said seriously, let's take that notion of a cow's a sphere a little more seriously and try and do some biology. And I was able to show you could do some interesting biology. But this chapter and your book actually takes that further. It really shows specifically how very simple scaling arguments really govern, certainly, certainly,

the biology of flying. And so maybe you can walk us through that. Yes, yes. Okay. Any, any object, and we use cubes in the book, but there could be anything you like, if you scale it up, the volume and the weight goes up as the cube of the linear dimension, and the surface area goes up as the square of the linear dimension, which means that the smaller an object is, the larger its surface area compared to its weight. And so a very, very, very, very, small animal like the so-called fairy fly tinkabella well actually i was going to get to tickebella but yeah okay um it's so small that it hardly needs bother to fly me it just kind of floats around it you have a picture one flying through the eye of a needle yeah um and pollen grains are similarly um

they're they're tiny so that their surface area is large and so you just puff them into the air and they just float about in the breeze that's by way perfect example of why of sort of the physical thinking like a physicist what I'm always happy when you do that Richard the uh because you don't have to worry about the detailed shape of a tinkerbella or a bird or whatever yeah and you might as well just think of it as a sphere and you might as well be a sphere and you get that argument working but um and so the point is it is easier for because flying involves surface area it's sort of it which in some sense allows your resistance to to falling and and and ability to pump against the air, air resistance.

It is much easier for small objects to fly as well as various other things, including also to hop and many other things we can talk about and why large animals need much thicker limbs and why an example used, which is a beautiful one, is a little fairies that so confused. Don't know, yeah, because, because you know, and it's a big,

It's one of the mistakes in movies I love to point out is the 80-foot man or whatever would not look like an 80-foot man because they wouldn't be able to walk with that. But I think, but I want to point out what I think is an error in your book, though. Okay. And I think it's because you got your theology wrong. Okay. You have a beautiful picture of Da Vinci's Annunciation with the angel Gabriel and have the wings. And Janet drew the wings as large as they would have to be. because you point out that if human had wings, they'd have to be much, much larger because a human is

much larger in the bird and therefore needs much more surface area to carry that kind of weight. But I think you got it wrong because you're making the assumption that angels are made of the same stuff as humans. Clearly, clearly angels are not. You're going to start talking theology, Lawrence. I think we're lost. No, no, well, I figure if you're going to use a theological example, I thought you at least get, Anyway, okay, but you do talk about the largest flying animals and the smallest flying animals, which is, so the, you know, one of the reasons I'm not a biologist is I can never do these names. And the largest flying animal is a quesdelcoatlas, or how do you pronounce it?

Well, quetzal coattelus, it may not be the largest, and a new fossil has been found, which may be even larger, but this was horrendously large. Ianna drew it eye to eye with a giraffe. Yeah. Imagine a flying giraffe. So it must have glided, I suppose. I mean, I would imagine that it probably took off from cliffs and glided great distance. Have you seen that? By the way, there's some beautiful images of it in this new series of David Attenborough on prehistoric on dinosaurs.

And there's a whole sequence with these guys walking. on their elbows and and and and haven't seen that actually no i'd like to see that yes really i've often i mean i have to say frankly as a skeptical or how they knew much of what they say there is fascinating but how they actually knew how you can actually know it but i don't think you really but the images are beautiful you yeah you i want to see that yeah um there's a nice sorry there's a there's a there was an inventor in california called paul mccreedy who made a half-size model of quetzel collateralis which which flew, it had an onboard computer,

because it needed that to control its flight surfaces. Anyway, that's- Well, at least it's not, okay, well, and you just say, I don't know why, I was gonna ask you, you say it pushed to the ultimate limits which flying by muscles is possible. Why do you say that? I mean, are you saying you could not be bigger with muscles?

Well, I could be enlightened on that. I mean, I think probably flapping must be more difficult than propelling yourself along by making great wind with a propeller. Yeah, yeah. Because I suppose, I can't imagine quite how you would use muscle power to generate a wind thrusting the aircraft forward. whereas the internal combustion engine or jet engine can do that. It's a interesting question. I asked it because I suspect some physicists at least must have done, must be analyzing exactly that question.

Given the rate of sort of burning oxygen respiration and energy generation and muscle utility, there must be some physical limit on how much thrust you can provide in a wing. And I suppose so. Yes, I think so. Leonardo da Vinci designed a sort of helicopter, which was actually at an Archimedes screw. And he had four men running around and around and around with the capsule. Yeah, I think there's a picture of it in the book. Yeah, there is. Yeah, it didn't work. He was, yeah, he was a man who dreamed of flying a lot.

And some of his machines didn't work, but some of them at least would have glided, if not flown. Yes, he could have, could have glided. But he designed flapping, machines as well on oathopters and they wouldn't have worked. Yeah, they wouldn't have word for the same for the reasons they point out. It's which again, once again to repeat is just physics. But anyway, the but you do mention, let's mention it again, it's worth tinkerbell. That's a that's an animal that's a name I can at least remember. Yes. And in fact, in fact, isn't it the full name also have the Nama? Yeah, Tinkerbell and Nana. Yeah. In Peter Pan, um, the children, they had this fairy called Tinkerbell.

They also had a nanny, a nursemaid, which was a dog, an old English sheep dog called Nana. Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful. And there is, and it literally is small enough to fly through a needle, right? Oh, easily, yes, I mean, tiny compared to the eye of a needle. It's amazing. It is amazing that it would need to bother to fly, as you point out. Think of all the machinery inside that tiny body.

Think of all the muscles and the nerves and the brain. Yeah, it's like a nano-robot. It really is. It is amazing. But then one goes to larger animals where the challenge is indeed surface area once again. And that because the ratio of surface area to mass goes down for larger animals, you need to increase their surface area. And that lee, you know, it's tempting to say that that sort of challenge is kind of what may what led certain animals to at least, if not have wings, at least know how to glide. So you talk about gliding and flying squirrels and something called the Cologo, which glides along as well. Can you talk about that? Yes, yes. That's sometimes called the flying lemur. It's not actually a lemur. It's its own thing out on the limb.

It's got a bigger gliding surface, flight surface than flying squirrels. Flying squirrels stretch a membrane from the hand to the flyer. foot on both sides. Yeah. They glide from a high tree, maybe a couple of hundred yards, perhaps the most, to a lower tree. The Colago also has that, but it also includes the tail in the, in this. So it's like a great living parachute, and that can glide a bit further. Fascinatingly, there's a marsupial in Australia and New Guinea, which also does the same trick. And it, that looks, exactly like a flying spiral. You can hardly tell the difference,

but ones are marsupial and ones that are actually two are rodents because the rodents have evolved the same trick twice independently. And then we have flying frogs and flying snakes and flying lizards and things which also do do the same trick, but in a different ways. I mean, the flying lizard does it by sticking its ribs out and having a membrane stretched between the ribs, whereas these mammals do it by stretching it

between the front limbs and the hind limb. And yeah, I love the pictures where there's sort of a hand and then stretch down to the leg is a stretch. Yes, yes, yes. There's also flying fish, and I must, I have to ask you. I mean, I was so touched when I learned that your father told you this poem. I just thought, wow, weren't you lucky? Oh, no. Do you remember?

Can you? Yeah, I don't know. Okay. Yes. It's not a bit of a poem. It's just a great narrative. Every word beginning with F. Yes.

Full 40 furlongs from Pharaoh's father's crossly foreshore flew 55 flying fish, fleeing carefully for freedom from 55 ferocious feathered fowls, 40 feet further flop, 40 feet further flop. And then you added another sentence to it, which I thought was great. Well, one of the main birds that take flying fish are, actually frigate birds,

which you and I both seen in in in Galapagos and frigate birds are um clepto parasites they're pirates they they're parrots they're steal fish from other birds and i suppose a flying fish would look pretty much like a bird that's got some prey so anyway frigate birds are good of catching flying fish so i added just one line to my father's rhyme which was uh forgot felonious frigates father yeah oh well that was was great. I'm glad I knew you'd remember it. I know you remember a poem. I just thought I missed out some of it. No, no, but it's what it was just it's just, wow, it was just it really made my day to think your father did that for you. Now the next thing though, the next thing you do talk about is is in fact

flight itself, which is non-trivial, as we physicists would like to say. It's it's not so easy. There are simple arguments, but as always, simple arguments have to be refined. And and and and so we should, it would, we have to spend a few minutes on the physics of flying, which you point out has two pieces, a Newtonian piece and a piece that we would call a Bernoulli piece. So I'll turn the floor over you to explain that. Well, it's a bit unfairly because I actually consulted you about this. When a plane flies, it could have wings which are just flat boards. And by flying very fast through the air, propelling itself forward through its the air, if the wings are slightly tilted upwards, then you get the same effect if you stick your

hand out of a car window and you tilt your hand slightly up, but you feel it being pushed upwards. So that's the Newtonian principle, which seems to be the most important one. That's the principle. Let me say one thing that you didn't say there, and maybe it's my fault for not thinking of it at the time when we talked about it, but it's basically the principle that causes boats to sailboats to work, right? I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, putting a sail in the right direction and the wind will go against it and the resistance will take you in the direction you want to go in this case it's up if you tilt the wing up yes i thought sailing boats was a bit more complicated in that they're also it's like the the principle of

squeezing an orange pip isn't it you're being squeezed between the wind and the sea yeah and um so i never really quite understood it but that's how that's why sailing boats don't always go in with the wind i mean yeah you can do it a boat directions. In fact, that's a Bernoulli aspect, but but the bottom line is, you're absolutely right. I mean, the simple one is if you put you, if you put your hand out the window, it just, the air just pushes you up. So that's the easy part. Well, the Benulia part I find more difficult, but it's to do with the curvature of the wing. Yeah. You would have to correct me if if I get this wrong. And when the, when the wind generated by the forward thrust is,

is flying when the wind is passing rapidly over the top side of the wing and the bottom side of the wing, if the curvature of the top side is greater than the curvature of the bottom side, for reasons I don't fully understand that that tends to kind of suck the wing up upwards. Yeah, no, it's a fascinating phenomenon. You do a real, I thought in the book you did a fine job of explaining the fact that, that, you know, the pressure is. So we don't think of Well, we later on talk about hot air balloons. We tend to think of the floating, but the real point is that the air is heavier

and pushes down below them and lifts them up. And so it's pressure that's doing all the work here. And the bottom line is that what Mr. Bernoulli showed is that when a fluid and the fluid can be air is moving fast, the pressure that it exerts on an object is smaller. And that's just simply because, pressure as Mr. Maxwell first showed is just, just comes from air molecules bouncing off an object. And the more of them and the faster they're hitting the object, the greater the pressure.

And as it's moving fast, you find basically once when you're moving very fast through the air, basically fewer of those molecules are hitting per unit area per second because they're mostly speeding past. And that means that that means what that really means is that it's not so much that that's sucking as the fact that underneath more molecules are hitting and it's pushing you up. The pressure is greater below and less above. But it is, as you point out rightly, it is, and it made me think about some of this. The question is why does the air have to move faster above than below? Why does it have to catch up? You know, you got two molecules, one going below and one going above. Why does the one on the above have to have to have to travel

faster to some who I'll catch up with the one below. And I started to think about that based on your book. And I think the answer is really that if it didn't, there'd be kind of a vacuum, right? If the air, if the air was was not catching up above and below, there'd be less air here. And that would basically, that would. And I think that in some sense, that causes that pressure differential to push in that direction. And one of the reasons you get stalling, which you talk about, is that if you can, if it can't keep up there's kind of like a little vacuum in the back part of the wing and that drags air from underneath up in circles and that produces turbulence which which you point out is a stalling if you if you have a wing that's too and the birds if you have a wing that's if you're if you're

trying to fly too high you stall for that very reason that the air can't keep up on top and you don't get that pressure differential some some birds you stalling as a device for when they're actually landing but i think it's a fallacy, which people used to say that when two molecules hit the front of the, come to the front of the wing, they have to end the back, and the one of the top has to go faster in order to catch up. That, I think, is wrong. Absolutely. No, that one made me think. It was a great statement, because I kind of used to say that. And then I thought, well, he's right, you know. And then I was thinking about what would cause it to be faster. And so I think what was really, what I really

particularly liked about that explanation is you didn't take the easy route you didn't just say that you say but it's not quite that and and and there's some there's some and and when it doesn't work you get stalling which is an interesting thing and i didn't realize that you know outside my my house here we have herons great herons and i like to watch them land and and and and you can apparently see from the fluttering of their wings yes you can see that the feathers sort of push up because of putting up with yes that's right yes and and they use that to basically stall and land at the end of their land yes yeah the um but um to you talk about the other bird you talk about is the well you talk about given that physics how one has to um how evolution had to to to uh to um

evolve things. For instance, I wasn't aware of the fact that feathers are designed very similarly to the way jet aircraft have these devices on them to reduce stalling. Oh, yes. I've never quite understood that, but people say that when you look at the end feathers on the wing of something like a vulture or an eagle, they spread out like a sort of separate fingers, they're actually not fingers at all, their feathers. And that is said to be similar to the anti-stalling devices of aircraft which are called slats, which when a plane coming into land, you see the wing kind of opens up into all sorts of different bits of pseudo-little extra wings. Those are the slats which are designed to remove turbulence, to guide the air um which more officially over the top yet yes um and no doubt it's very bad for flying fast but it's just exactly what you want when you're flying slow and in danger of stalling

well and and um to jump ahead so we go the next chapter really goes well i would say from the physics of flying to the biology of flying which is how how birds fly which is obviously much more complicated than aircraft because they have wings and they're doing lots of things with their wings um because they're flapping and that whole process is fascinating, uses the same physics, but in a much more complicated way. Well, the wings are being used both as wings to provide lift, like an aircraft, airplane wings, but also to provide forward thrust,

which is the role of the propeller or the jets in a plane. And so doing the same thing, performing both functions at once, means they have to be performing a kind of complicated figure of ape movement, pushing the bird forward, which it needs to do to get the lift and also pushing downward, which is the kind of helicopter principle for obtaining lift, which a different principle from the plane. A plane gets his lift by going fast forward and using the Newtonian Bernoulli principle, whereas the helicopter, we just to thrust the air downwards. And birds do that as well. So it's a complicated mixture of helicopter plus plane where the wings are doing both the job of the propeller and the and the doing both the job of the propeller and and the plane wings and have to and also have to make

sure when they do their figure eight obviously if they kept the same configuration then whatever pushed them forward will pull them back on the back on the return trip so they they change their configuration that's right um so they're pulled in pushed out again changing the angle it's a very sophisticated thing and some of them hummingbirds can hover like a helicopter and go backwards And so couldn't some insects. Hoverflies, dragonflies can. Yeah, you talk about hummingbirds. This ability to hover, which is with with this incredible speed of, of vibration of the wings.

Yes. Which is required. And the shape of the wings in order to do that. It's just, it's just remarkable. And I mean, I love how we have hummingbirds and I just love to watch them. It did, it did occur to me that in some of that, you know, I guess I could get a feeling for it. I'm always, I'm not a great swimmer. I'm a reasonable swimmer, but I'm not very fast. And this and and it's kind of a very similar kind of technique that the good swimmers learn how to do is how to move their arms to propel them, but move it back so as not to

Yeah, that's right. Yes, they do. But but swimmers don't have to worry about lift. I mean, the buoyancy keeps you up. Yeah, exactly. Although, although I think there is some of that to keep you up. Yes. When you're when you're, so it's It's a, because I want to talk later about the fact that buoyancy is buoyancy, whether it's an air or water, and we'll get to that. But you talk about the albatross, which is sort of the, I think you say that sort of the, the best use of economy of energy in flying. So talk about the albatross a little bit, the poor albatross. Yes, they fly for prodigious distances low over the water, over the sea, all right the way

around the world in the Southern Hemisphere. And they seem to be using some kind of technique whereby they turn into the wind and use the wind pushing up on the wings to climb. And then they turn and fly with the wind, sinking downwind and then turn back into the wind again and climb and then turn round and face with the wind. So that alternatively climbing against the wind

and going forwards with the wind. And they're also, I think, using the updrafts caused by the waves. That's not like thermals, but it's something like using up-up-up-draft. Because of the weak winds. Yeah. No, I was fascinating to learn that. And they basically go around the world and always in this direction of the prevailing winds or against the, is it with the direction of the prevailing winds or against the- I think it is, yes.

I think it is, yes. So they're primarily glottial. gliding and then every now and then they turn against the prevailing wind or go up. Yes. And then use the wind to bring them along. It seems reasonable to use the wind, to be in the direction of the wind. It gives you an extra power, just like we'll talk about later shooting satellites up. You want to be in part of the earth going in the fastest.

You want to go be using the rotation of the earth to help you. You also point out because of that, because they spend, they're so adapted that, they're using the wind to lift up and then glide that they, that they're, that they, um, In order to get up, they actually have to, it's not so easy for them to get up off the ground and they have to have runways. Yes. And you know what? I don't remember them. They're in the Galapagos. You saw them.

Oh, yes. I forget which island it is. Did you see them at all on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they could actually see the runways that are worn out with, worn down with them. I've seen them in New Zealand as well. See, I don't remember that. Now, next time we go, I have to look at that.

You also talk about that's other birds that have that are also similarly adept at using either thermals or gliding But that that they it's not so easy for them to take off and I thought it was particularly interesting that that that in a book that you talked about walking on water Did I? Oh yes. I remember there's a It's an American grieve that that does a lovely courtship dance running running running running across the surface of the water keeping. Yes very very nice. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I know, so it's, isn't it a bird called the Jesus bird or something like that? You mentioned it. The Jesus Christ lizard is the one. No, no, but I thought there's something where you, is there some bird where the word, or maybe,

where I thought Jesus was in there for a bird that tends to walk on water, but I'll have to look at the book. I think I know that of the Jesus Christ lizard, which I've seen skittering across the process. Oh, maybe it's Christ's lizard. Okay, that's it. Yeah. Okay, skipping across the water. I, I'm going to skip. over some things because I want to I want to continue there's things I want to get to but the most beautiful um the most beautiful flying that you've ever seen is called what's it called a mummumeration of of murmuration murmuration yeah murmuration there's an hour in there yeah it's these amazing things

to see where it looks like all these individual birds are forming starlings yes they're starlings um i've seen them in in near oxford and i've seen you just just googled a Staling murmuration, they are spectacular. They're unbelievable. I've seen them. Ten thousand birds all wheeling and turning together in synchrony. And what's remarkable is that the edge of this gigantic flock is a cut and dried edge. It doesn't tail off.

It looks as though they know they're on the edge. And the pattern just changes as if it's by miracle. It looks, if you wanted to, and this is one of the examples that I love, I love because it's a beautiful example of flying, but also it's a beautiful example of our desire to imagine sort of design when there doesn't have to be. It looks like something had to design these large patterns and somehow the birds had to know that they're going to be in a pattern. And you talk about this in the book, but as a physicist, I was fascinated because people wondered how is it possible that all these birds can be doing these detailed things and not hitting each other

and know the pattern? And it turns out that in physics we call a nearest neighbor interaction, almost the miracle of solids and the behavior of most materials which can be a seeming miraculous is just that particles interact with other parts their nearest neighbors in different ways and it was speculated that if each bird just basically looks at their neighbor and has a rule which which you could explore numerically you could produce such a pattern and you talk about the fact that applying that in fact that's been done so one of you mentioned yes it it has um it's tempting to think there must be a conductor, a choreographer, sort of lead birds. It's not like that. As you say, it's done by bottom-up rules.

And so each bird has its own little local rules. And this has been shown by computer simulation, wonderful example of computer simulation, started by a programmer called Craig Reynolds and other people have done the same thing. What you do is you program the behavior of one bird. You never program the behavior of a flop. You program the behavior of one bird with rules for what to do with its neighbors. And then you release clones of that one bird into the computer. You make a thousand copies of this one bird that you've simulated.

And then what you observe, what you observe is an emergent property, an emergent flock, an emergent murmuration. The birds on the computer screen behave just like Starlings in a murmuration. It's a beautiful example of bottom-up design. Which by the way, it has to be, right? I mean, that's the point. This is one of these wonderful experiments. You could say, if it didn't work this way, then, hey, there's evidence for design. Because if you're a bird, the only thing you can do, you can't be aware of the whole,

there's no physical way to be aware of the whole of the whole pattern. And so the only possibility is that you know what your nearest your neighbors are doing. And so that hypothesis allows you to be tested and it indeed works. And it's a wonderful model for embryology as well because we know that embryology is directed by DNA. But what actually happens in embryology is that each individual cell interacts with other neighboring cells, just like the Starlings interacting with each other. You program the DNA program as the behavior of a cell, different kinds. of cells and then the cells interact with each other and it's a bottom-up thing there's no

direction from above there's no there's no conductor of the orchestra it's all done by individual cells behaving in a particular way that programmed relative to their neighbors in in the body that's how embryology works sure which again which it has to be if you make the assumption that that that that things work by simple laws of chemistry biology and physics and and and and And, you know, because that's the only way it could work. That's not how human building. No, I know. I was going to say that's the only way.

That's the only way it could work if there isn't external design. And so it's another example to me. When you try and think of people, the illusion of design, which you talk about in the book, and we talk about in many cases, many books, and we've had these discussions. And as a physicist, there's many illusions of design. But it's an example of the fact that if, If there isn't design, then this had to be the case, and you can test it. And similarly, that there's another bit of physics, which I think is what you mentioned in terms of flight, which is the V pattern, which is you see in geese and so many other things.

It's just, again, the same reason bicyclists do. They're exploiting energetics. Yes, quite. They're using the slipstream of the bird in front of them in order to use less energy to fly. Yeah. I want to get to Boise because I want to talk about balloons for a minute or two. You talk about balloons and you give a great example of someone who I think should have won the Darwin Award. Right? Don't you think it was a perfect example of someone who's, where is it, De Rozier?

What's his name? De Rozier? Yeah, he had, yeah, gone. Well, you tell what he did because I was amazed that he would be that crazy. You're thinking of the one who had a hot, a hot, a hot brazier underneath a hydrogen balloon. Yeah, a hot air balloon underneath a hydrogen balloon. Asking for trouble. It was a Darwin Award, early example of it.

But I want to take, I want to sort of pick a nitpick here a little bit, because you make the point, and I thought I had a gotcha, but at the end of the chapter, you revert to it. You say no animals really use, you know, our hot air balloons, you know, we've designed them. But immediately it occurred to me, fish, our example, because throughout the book, you point out that, you know, air is a fluid, water's fluid. And you talk about the similarities of streamlining. And it's just a matter of buoyancy.

Hot air balloons is just a matter of buoyancy. You find your, you find your density to be the right place compared to the density of air. And really, and really that's fish bladders are exactly hot air balloons. Well, quite. I mean, and the tealios fish are particularly not. because as you say, they actually have a swim bladder inside, which contains gas. And unlike a shark or unlike a whale or unlike anything else that swims,

teleos fish actually regulate their buoyancy point, their point of neutral buoyancy by regulating the amount of gas in this bladder. They don't do it by muscular compression of the bladder, which I think they should. But in fact, they do it by chemical means changing the quantity of gas in the in the bladder. But either way, they are a biological example of a Cartesian diver, which is a similar device you put in a bottle and regulate the. Exactly. By the, but well, it's yeah, regulating the density of a gas or changes your buoyancy in liquid. And I think, but I think that, I think in that sense, fish fly in using a hot air balloon in the in the same sense.

But more importantly, the reason, but but then the fact that you don't see any of them doing that in error, I think is really important because it really, because the point is it's all a question of buoyancy. And it's just much easier to be buoyant in water. It's, it's virtually impossible to be buoyant in air because air, you know, if you have, if you're a material. object, it's very, very difficult to be buoyant in air because your average density tends to be greater than air. So the fact that you haven't seen animals develop that, I think is a good example of the fact that evolution can't trump physics. Basically, if it were possibly buoyant, easily possibly buoyant and air, evolution would have, I think, you know, natural selection would have found that as a natural mechanism. Well, I do consider the different parts of it. I mean, they

some creatures make hydrogen, some make methane. Yeah. And there also some make silk, which could potentially be, but it just is never been brought together. A sufficiently small animal, I could imagine being light compared to its surface area. Yeah, but would be able to make a silk balloon. But yes, it is difficult and humans do it by, I mean, a a balloon is a gigantic thing compared to the humans that it carries. The basket is a little thing strung underneath this gigantic great ball of hot air or hydrogen or helium. Well, you do point out in this, sometimes they almost like spiders that ride in the air, you know, they're throwing out this self, the sick, but they almost, they almost, they almost. Well, that's called ballooning, but it's not ballooning.

Yeah, it's very, it's right. It's parachuting. Paragliding or something. Well, look, I do so much to talk about here. You, we talked about when you were writing the book, but I mean, I'm so happy you talk about weightlessness because to me it's my favorite misconception that people have about. If you ask 100 people on the street why the astronauts float,

you'll find out, at least 80 of them will say that there's no gravity up there. And it's just the fact that the astronauts are continually falling. And you point out something really neat about fleas, which is basically they're doing the same thing, right? Yes, yes. I mean, a flea for reasons, I don't know, has a spring-like structure and can jump, and therefore basically is weightless for a long time. Yes, that's right.

That's right. But one thing I'd never heard of, which first kind of terrified me a little bit, was I'd never heard of aerial plankton. And the fact that there's all this stuff in the air that's alive is kind of amazing. Yes, it's very high. And I suppose the analogy with sea plankton is moderate, it's fairly loose. It was studied by Alistair Hardy, who was the great authority on plankton in the sea. And he had this lovely, lovely experiment with an old bull nose, Morris Carr, using this as a winch. Yeah, which you have a bit of the image of, yeah.

Yeah, fly a kite with them to catch the area of plankton. It's how, plants and animals spread over great distances, which is an evolutionarily important thing to do. And yes, it's up there. And pollen grains and little tiny spiders and insects and things spread over huge distances up in the high atmosphere. Yeah, and there's two things I want to say. One is, by the way, that's it intrigues me because, you know, there's talk about potential life on Venus, which is an incredibly inhospitable place. Yes.

But, and there was a claim, and it's now been shown to be wrong. but it still could be something like it could be true. If you look at Venus, it's incredibly inhospitable on the ground, but up in the higher levels in the clouds, there's the average density of the clouds is about the average density of water on Earth. And so there was a claim that maybe life could exist in the clouds of Venus.

And some group had claimed to see evidence of a chemical that might suggest that. Now that's been discredited. What about the gas giants like Jupiter? Is that also? No, I think the problem there was that up that in Venus, it's not only the average same average density, but it's the same average temperature. It's less than 100 degrees. So you get basically similar conditions to earth and you wouldn't get that in the gas giants. But in any case, the

thing that's more important and I want to get to it because it, maybe it's a misconception of my own. You point out that the whole point of dispersals is important. I would, call it although you don't use those terms but i would call a hedging your bets i think that throughout the book the idea of hedging your bets is is very similar right you put down a lot of different bets because a lot of them are going to lose but one of them one of them will win and you say well that's the advantage of dispersal and and you are and you point this out the beautiful mathematical theory of hamilton who i know you love and and may as as basically demonstrating that hedging your bets always good. It's all from a evolutionary perspective of of propagation gene hedging

of it. Many of them will not end up anywhere but some of them will survive. Yes. Especially if your place and something bad happens to where you are, the ones that have dispersed will survive. Yes. What and so that's great but then you surprise me, you talk about pollen and you say pollen has to disperse because a plant shouldn't, shouldn't you know, mate with itself. And, and, and, and, and, and, and you point out that this whole question of sex and biology, rather than cloning is, is complicated and, and not understood. And I don't understand why it's not just hedging your bets. Why isn't exactly the same? Why sex isn't hedging your bets, namely mixing up the idea, if you clone, you may be fine and you can survive,

But if you have, if things reproduce by sex, they'll mix up their genes and some of them will be potentially better able to survive. And if something happens in the changes. So I don't quite understand why this hedging your bets isn't a perfect explanation of why sex isn't preferable to claim. Okay. There are lots of books about this. It's a very controversial active field. And many of the models that have been proposed could be thought of as hedging your bets. The problem they all face is that the pressure to reproduce sexually has got to be very strong in order to counter what's called the two-fold cost of sex, which is that if your aim as an individual is to maximize your genetic survival, then cloning yourself looks twice as good as sending half your genes at a time.

And so that's the twofold cost of sex, which is parted out by Maynard Smith. And all these models, which are kind of hedging your bet models, are different sorts. They all start out by saying, whatever our model is, it's got to be pretty damn powerful in order to overcome the twofold cost of sex. I agree with you.

And I think it is hedging your bets. But you've got to get the sums right. And it's quite difficult. Yeah, so the economics is more complicated. OK, well, look, where I, I know you have something. I'm hoping we can go. Can we go maybe 10 more minutes? Can you leave it? I guess so. Yes. I think so. Yes. Eight more minutes. Because one of the things you took, this while pollen, the issue of why plants don't pollinate themselves is maybe complicated.

The point is they don't. And I couldn't resist. It would be, we have to talk about some of the amazingly ingenious ways that plants have learned to seduce, to seduce insects and birds and anything else that will take their problem. Because they're so fascinating. Let me go into a few of them, I mean, that amaze me. One, basically, radar reflectors, that bats, that bats are, help pollinate, help take pollen from one plant to another. And there are plants that are designed to be radar reflectors. I think they're called Mark, I don't know, I never can pronounce the name. Well, there are sonar reflectors.

Yeah, sonar, sorry. Yeah, so they're kind of parabolic reflectors, which would look. to a bat like a great glowing beacon because because the echoes would be coming back and they're a sunflower they look like a horn they look exactly like a sonar reflector amazing yes right yes that's very nice yes and then there's hummingbirds there's there's certain plants this passive floria mixta that that why do you talk about that for a second yes okay um one of the problems with pollination is it's a very hit of misaffair. Some plants do it by just showering the air with pollen. And the chance of any one pollen grain hitting the target, which is that flower of the right species, is very low.

But because you've shared millions of pollen grains, some of them do. Much better from some points of view to have a kind of magic bullet approach, where you target the pollen to the right target. And using bird wings or insect wings is a much better way to approach the magic bullet end of the spectrum because these insects and birds tend to go for flowers of the same color so if an insect is then from yellow yellow yellow then the chances are it's much better than scattering to the wind anyway now this hummingbird and passiflora mixture um interaction the sword-built hummingbird has a beak that's so long that it's the only creature that can reach the nectar of this flower passiflora mixture. And so this flower can more or less guarantee that only this hummingbird is going to go to pollinate it.

And this hummingbird concentrates its attention on the flowers of the correct species. This is a real magic bullet. And there's a lovely example of an insect that does the same thing. And this was pointed out by Darwin. Darwin was writing a book about orchids. And he was sent a specimen of an orchid which had a nectar tube, a nectar, so long that Darwin said, heavens, what insect can reach this nectar? He predicted that in Madagascar, because that's where the orchid came from, In Madagascar, there must be a moth that has a tongue, I think was 11 inches long. And Darwin died before the prediction was fulfilled, but after his death, an entomologist in

Madagascar discovered its moth and gave it the sub-specific name, predictor, in honor of Darwin's prediction. Yeah, it's a wonderful story. And the last example, I guess the other example I wasn't aware of is that they literally seduce, plants literally seduce insects, or words by admitting pheromones and in some sense acting like sex partners so that the hammer orchid why don't you just talk about that for a second because I was okay this is a group of orchids in Australia which has a it has a kind of dummy female wasp on a hinged arm with a kind of elbow pollen grains, the pollinia they're called in the case of orchids, they're great, there's lumps of pollen,

up above. And a male wasp, oh, the biology of this species of wasp is that these species of wasp, is that they, the females don't fly, but they just sit on stems and the males come and sees them and pick them up and fly with them and mate with them on the wing. So what this orchid does is it has a dummy, female on this hinged elbow hinged, hinged arm, and the male wasp lands on this dummy female, tries to pick it up, and the arm hinges and slams the wasp, the male wasp, up against the polinear about half a dozen times, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, slam, finally, the wretched male wasp gives up and flies off. And without having learned a lesson, it's a big, because it comes to the same thing with another one,

carrying the polinia on its back. And then the next time it slams against them, it deposits the polinia on the, so this is a beautiful magic bullet, yeah. Yeah, and it's amazing. Well, look, I want to end in the next few minutes by talking about hedging our bets, because you talk, in my mind, again,

when he can use the idea of hedging the bets to get to the end, your book where you talk about basically going to space. And I think you devote that particular book to Elon Musk because of his desire to populate Mars. I'm less, I think that's more fantasy than reality. But the notion that once again, it's like dispersing pollen, the idea of even if Mars is an awful place, what if something awful happens to the Earth? I think it's an idea that people have pointed out, and the big example is what if a big asteroid hits the Earth as will happen and has happened

and it's more or less guaranteed to happen again, although we are in a position happily to be able to potentially deflect asteroids or at least find them early enough and deflect them. I'm actually more optimistic that the world could do that than that the world may address climate change. because that involves just one group of people going to do it. But I think that the example of human history or an animal history of always sort of going out,

moving to a new continent, traveling to new places, getting on a boat and traveling to an island and the earlier explorers is a good example except for the fact that the, when the explorers of the animals landed on the new island, they could survive. And the difference is that's the difference of what it seems to me between traveling to Mars is that first of all, the voyage will generally kill you. And it's not an environment which you could survive in any easy way. And that will, that means that while it's an interesting desire, it's not going to be easy. And I think in the long term, you're absolutely right that if humanity wants to hedge its bets on the long term, Earth is not the only place it should inhabit. But to do it in Elon Musk's time frame is like trying to inhabit, you know, move to Australia without boats and it's going to be a lot longer.

And the difference is Australia, when you get there, it's a perfectly good place to live. Exactly. It's a perfectly good place to live. In fact, I would say that moving to the bottom of the ocean, which might protect you more against asteroids, it would be easier in some sense to live in than Mars. But the end of the book, really, I think Flights of Fancy is a beautiful name for the book, primarily not just because it's wonderful to read and the examples are great, but as a scientist and someone who loves science and whose love science is so importantly pervade in your writing. Really, you end the book talking about science as a flight, what I would call a flight of fancy. and use the example because you were at Star Must of Elon Musk getting this Hawking Award. And it really resonated with me because Stephen Hawking wrote the forward for my book, Physics of Star Trek. And the point about he pointed out there is that science inspires the imagination. And as I pointed out, we will never travel with the USS Enterprise to distant planets, but we can always do it in the mind.

And so the mind is somehow our wing. And we can think about Mars and we can learn about Mars with ever going there. And so I thought ending this flight of fancy and reality with the fact that we is, that science has become our wings, the wings that have taken us to see the world from the beginning of time to the end of time. Yes. I was trying to express that. I wish I used those words. Oh, well, it was, it, it, it motivated me and inspired me. So there. And, and, you know, had we had more time, I want to. to talk about this other book, which is really four pieces in this other book, which really have the same idea in my mind, which is that science, the central message, which was the title of one of your earlier books, The Magic of Reality. And so I, even though we didn't get there,

I think there's that common thread in your writing, and I think in my own writing, is that we share that fact that while we can't fly, we can do it in our minds. Exactly. And I think, I mean, we are due to meet in Arizona and to have a on stage discussion. So I would think maybe we could do that. Exactly. Exactly. Anyway, as always, this was wonderful to talk to you. And I think it'll be fascinating. It was just a joy for me to read this last book. And it's always a joy for me to talk to you. Thank you very much, Lawrence. Bye-bye. 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

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