TRIGGERnometry - Richard Dawkins: God, Truth & Death

Episode Date: July 5, 2023

Richard Dawkins is a British evolutionary biologist and author. His 1976 book The Selfish Gene popularised the gene-centred view of evolution, as well as coining the term meme. Dawkins is a vocal atheist and is often referred to as one of the four horsemen of the New Atheism movement which began to grain traction in the mid-2000s, catalysed in large part by Dawkin's 2006 book, The God Delusion. SPONSORED BY: GiveSendGo - Go to https://www.GiveSendGo.com/ to check out a better alternative to crowdfunding. Support the people who support freedom! SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro 01:04 Sponsor Message: GiveSendGo 03:02 Richard Dawkins’ Background 04:54 The Selfish Gene 05:50 Crucial Recent Discoveries for Human Development 07:15 How Much Does Biology Dominate Our Lives? 08:25 What Innovation & Discoveries are Happening at the Moment? 11:34 Downsides to Medical Advancements 13:15 Is Genetically Modifying Babies Playing God? 15:44 What is Life & Can it be Discarded? 20:49 The People Who Move Our Species Forward 23:59 The Current State of Science 25:44 The Tyranny of the Discontinuous Mind 27:55 Eroding the Concept of Truth 31:52 Is the Claim that you can Change your Sex Supernatural? 33:48 Do Humans Need Religion? 34:50 Did Richard’s Criticism of God go Too Far?  37:08 Could the Universe Have Been Planned? 46:09 Sponsor Message: easyDNS 47:12 The Comfort of Religion 50:42 How Richard Would Face Death 53:06 Richard’s Aim to Defeat Religion 54:47 Euthanasia 56:38 The Development of AI 1:01:40 Are We Alone in the Universe? 1:06:08 What is The One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you not think that there is a fundamental part of us as human beings that needs religion? You could say that there's a deep psychological need for religion. The comfort that you get from believing a falsehood is like a drug, and it's a perfectly valid argument to say that there's everything to be said for the drug. I just want to make a distinction between what is true and what humanity needs, and it may very well be that we do need. false ideas in order to flourish and prosper. But I'm also interested in what's true.

A lot of people are zipping their mouths because of political pressure. And if people, for political reasons, are trying to deny that there really is a binary separation between the two sexes, then that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and is a subversion of language, actually. Hey, Francis, do you think financial platforms should be apolitical, a political and not cancel people just because they don't agree with their politics. I'll never forgive what those absolute fucking b***es that Tide Bank did to us.

Now, Francis, we don't know if our bank account was cancelled because of our politics. Give me five minutes in a room with them and I'll find out. What are you going to do? Test your new jokes on them. Yes, am I saline D on impersonation? Don't want to see that. Moving swiftly on, if you're looking for a crowdfunding platform, then you have to use give send go. Give send go is a crowdfunding platform that is available in over 80 countries and provides a simple and easy ways to raise money online.

They are politically neutral and don't remove campaigns based on political or ideological differences. We all know that a lot of crowdfunding platforms cancel people if they don't agree with their politics. The more we support companies providing alternative models, the more we weaken the power of cancel culture. What's more, give send go is a free platform. powered by donations, which means that you get to keep more of the money you raise. Other crowdfunding sites charge between 5% and 10%. 10% of the total money raised is a huge amount. GiveSand Go can be used to raise funds for medical expenses, business ventures,

personal needs, churches, non-profits, funeral costs and much more. So let's take a stand. Don't give your business to companies that have made it clear they don't want you. Choose hope, choose freedom, choose Give Send Go. Go to www.givesendgo.com and check out a better alternative to crowdfunding. That's www.givsendgo.com and support the people who support freedom. Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kishen.

And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. Our terrific guest today is a world-famous evolutionary biologist, prolific author and one of the four horsemen of the new atheist movement, Richard Dawkins, Professor Richard Dawkins, welcome to Trigger Man. Thank you very much. Oh, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. As I said, you're world famous, but for our audience,

who will already know some of your story. Tell us a little bit about the background. Who are you? What's been your journey through life? How do you end up sitting here a set of huge accomplishments throughout your life talking to us? How far do you want to go? Back to birth or...

As far back as you want to go, yes. I was born in British Columbia. colonial Africa and my father was in the colonial service. And our family came to England when I was eight. And then I went to boarding school and then Oxford. And at Oxford I was inspired by a world famous biologist called Nico Tinbergen, who later got a Nobel Prize. And I did my doctorate under him and have been in academic life ever since.

I went to University of California for two years, a very junior assistant professor, and then I came back to Oxford where I've been for all my life. I was a tutor at Oxford doing the rather unique Oxford tutorial system. And I started writing books, and I wrote a lot of books for a general audience, which many of them sold very well. And then I was given a professorship with the public understanding of science, the Charles Cimonia Professorship,

with the public understanding science and then I had to that was my job then was to communicate science and pretty much that's what I've been doing is communicating science I've written about 16 or 17 books and retired oh about 10 years ago now longer and carried old writing books and that's where I am it is indeed and one of your first or was it the first book the selfish genius yes that's your very first book that was a book that revolutionized as a young student I remember reading it and understanding things that I never understood and some of the challenges then to the idea to the evolutionary theory for example altruism were beautifully addressed in that in a way that even

someone who's not an expert could understand that and you wrote that book almost half a century ago now in 1970s i'm very pleased to hear you say how much that influenced you because um it it's it sums up my attitude to biology is somewhat misunderstood mainly by people who've read it by title only, think it's a book about selfishness or even an advocacy of selfishness, which of course it isn't. Quite the contrary.

And yes, it's colored my whole career, really. And one of the things I wanted to ask you is, as I say, that was 1976 and nearly half a century ago. What things, what discoveries have been made, what theories have been posited that you think in your field, and also more broadly, perhaps in science,

have emerged in that half century or nearly half century that you think are some of the most crucial things for human flourishing human development that we've made in that period? I suppose the main thing is the flourishing of molecular biology, because, I mean, it was written long after Watson and Crick discovered the DNA double helix structure.

That led to the unraveling of the genetic code, and they're realizing that biology is fundamentally digital. And that's what's really going now. Biology is dominated by this digital view of genetics. Everything is digital. And some people have asked me, has that changed the selfish gene? Would I change it if I rewrote it now because of the revolution in genomics?

And I think I wouldn't. It's still that, that. as far as evolution is concerned. Evolution is the differential survival of genes in gene pools, and that could have been said in the 1930s, actually. Well, pretty much was. So, Richard, my question is, how much does biology dominate our lives,

as in our own lives? Does it dominate everything? Do we have free will, or are we just purely a product of our genetics? Well, free will is a question that is a question that doesn't necessarily need a biologist to answer it. It's a deep philosophical question, and it's not a question that I think you can answer by looking at genetics.

If we have free will or we don't have free will, that won't be influenced by looking at genes. You can say, nothing that I do is anything other than predetermined by the things that happen in the world, molecules in my brain, everything is predetermined. And genetics will not just be a part of that. So there's not really a question for a geneticist.

It's a question for a philosopher, I suppose, or any scientist. And it's not a thing that a geneticist has any specific input on. And is it what revolution can you see coming or is happening at the moment that you actually get excited by? because that's the exciting thing about science, the changes, the innovation, the discoveries that we're seeing at the moment. Well, I mentioned molecular genetics, and that's happening all the time.

It's not a single revolution. It's just going on and on. And so the fact that you can actually read, very swiftly nowadays, you can actually read the genetic code of any animal. It's always the same genetic code, and what it says is in detail different. And so you can take any animals you like

and read the genetic code, any people you like, and read the genetic code, and compare it letter by letter, line by line, just as you might compare two manuscripts. And that's an astonishing thing. I mean, that would have amazed Darwin, I think. And that means that you can

reconstruct the whole tree of life, the whole pedigree, the whole family tree of all living things in minute detail. You can say which pairs of animals and parts are the closest cousins. You can estimate how far back they had a shared ancestor.

That's only an approximate estimate, but you can roughly lay out the complete history of the branching tree of life by looking at these molecular genetic sentences. Richard, and for someone like you who is a scientist and who is, I think there's a sort of wondrous appreciation of all these things. and the beauty of the natural world and so on. What are some for our audience and for us, actually, what are some of the practical applications that come out of these discoveries

that we may not yet have seen when we go to the doctor? We may not yet have experienced in our own lives as a thing that's become part of it. What is coming as a product of this steady, slow, but ongoing revolution? Hitherto, doctors have treated us all as pretty much the same. It may be a bit different male and female, old and young, but apart from that, if you've got a certain disease, you get a certain medicine, a certain treatment. What will come is when doctors are able to read the, they can in principle do it now, but when it becomes cheap enough that a doctor will know the genome of each patient,

then the prescription that the doctor will give for any particular disease will vary depending upon the the genotype of the individual patient. In a very sort of crude way, we already have this when certain particular diseases are known to be caused by certain particular genes. But when everybody's patient, when every patient's genome is on file in the doctor's computer, say, oh, okay, well, I look at me as I see your genome,

say, you better have this drug. And then the next patient, are you better have this drug? I think that's the main thing I can think of immediately off the top of my head in answer to your question. Richard, are you worried that? No, from a medical point of view, that sounds incredible. I'm like, of course, that is wonderful. That's what everybody should have access to. But do you worry as well that this type of information could be used in a way to discriminate against people,

for example, to prevent people getting health insurance because you might have the baraka gene, and that means that you have a 90% chance of developing breast cancer? That's a big worry. And it's one of the things that needs to be looked at very carefully because life insurance companies at present have a very crude way of doing their actuarial calculations. They look at your age, they look at whether you smoke, whether you drink to excess, that kind of thing.

But apart from that, we're all treated pretty much equally. And that means that those of us who are healthier, in a sense, subsidizing those of us who get ill, and that's the way insurance works. If it came to it that genetic knowledge enabled actuarial calculators to say, okay, he's got another 25 years to live, he's got only 15 years to live, then life insurance would become impossible. I don't think it'll come to that because it's not that predictable. But nevertheless, there would have to be careful regulation. I'm not sure how that would work.

I suppose to prevent insurance companies getting access to data which would have to be kept confidential, that would be one way to do it. Another way, I'm not quite sure what the legality of it would be, but that is a big worry. And also as well, what it brings into, I mean, the term designer baby, is used. I think it's more of a kind of tabloid description, but we know what we mean, where

babies are then having screened for certain genetics and certain genes are taken out or eliminated or played with. Do you think that's scientist playing God, or do you think that's actually where we need to get to as a species, so thereby eliminating certain illnesses, diseases? I think it's hard to find an objection to eliminating diseases. So I think as long as that's used not for making designer babies, but for screening against hereditary diseases.

It seems to me that's really hard to object to that. Richard, sorry to interrupt. Do you not think there's a moral conundrum there because it kind of depends where you draw that line, doesn't it? For example, if you have a baby that's, I don't know, it has a higher risk of cancer. Now, I have a

young son. I wouldn't want him to have a higher risk of cancer. But if I could then, you know, select them from a number of fetuses and discard the others. Wouldn't that be maybe perhaps too far going in that direction? Well, I don't think necessarily so. I suppose the way it might work would be something like this. In IVF, in vitro fertilization,

a woman is given hormone treatment to super ovulate, so she gets maybe a dozen eggs. And the dozen eggs are all in a petri dish. And what happens at present is that the doctor picks out one of these, eggs at random, they all get fertilized if they can, picks out one of the zygotes at random and re-implants it in the woman. Well, if the, instead of picking the zygote at random,

you examine the genes, and this can be done when it reaches, say, the eight-cell stage. So you let them develop to the eight-cell stage. So they are eight-cell embryos. And then you can take out one cell of the eight, and look at the gene. genes of that and it doesn't damage it. And you say, oh, okay, this one has the gene for hemophilia, and this one doesn't.

Why on earth would you choose at random if you know that half of them have the hemophilia gene and half of them don't? Obviously, it makes moral sense to pick one of the half, one of the 50% that do not have the gene for hemophilia, whatever it might be. I suppose the question that it brings into, and this is part of the other conversation we want to have with you. in terms of atheism and religion, it brings into question life. What is life?

Is an eight-cell-zygote life? Can it be discarded? That's where the moral conundrum comes in. I have no time for that kind of argument about, is this a human life? You don't? Really? No. Why not?

Well, because this eight-cells-zygot has no feeling, it has no nervous system, it has no capacity to suffer, no capacity to feel pain. so there's no moral difficulty at all in choosing. You're going to pick one of them anyway. You want a dozen of them.

And the 11 that you don't choose are going to be flushed away anyway. So you've already taken that moral decision in a way. It's a question of whether you choose one at random or whether you choose the one that does not have the lethal or sub-reason. But what I mean is once you've created that selection process, given that parents would want their children to be

happy, but also clever and charismatic. Now you've moved on to quite a different topic. Now you've moved on to... But that's where I was going with. Okay, okay. So that's, I think, the core of France's question too is, if we've got the opportunity to select the optimum baby for us, are we not going to end up in a position where parents are encouraged to go down that path?

Well, yes. But you've changed the subject. And I was talking about the removal of... Of course. I'm not trying to catch you out. I'm trying to get to the bottom. It's a very interesting question. And then you're going to say,

something like, if it became possible to know that of these dozens zygote that we've got, some of them have a gene for musical genius, and some of them don't. We're nowhere near that at the moment, but if in the future that came about, then would you worry about parents who say, I want my child to be a great musician or a great composer, a great mathematician. And that's very interesting. That's a more difficult moral dilemma. If you object to that, then I might say to you,

why do you object to that when you don't object to parents even forcing their child to practice the piano? You haven't done your music practice today. Get on with it. You're supposed to practice, because the only way you will become a great... pianist is by practicing six hours a day, whatever it is. Why would you think that is okay when you would not think it okay to pick out a zygote from

a petri dish, which contains a genetic predisposition to be a great musician? I'm not answering the question, but I'm saying that in a way these sorts of moral questions can best be answered by comparison with other things. I'm just comparing this case, asking sort of question a moral philosopher. might ask. What's the difference between encouraging a child to practice the piano and giving the child a head start

by giving it the gene of the ones that are available in the Petri dish in an IVF situation to become a musician? I suppose the problem with the answer to that is we come back into the realm of

religion and morality because I think at the core of it is the idea that the creation of life as some kind of random miracle. It's supposed to be sort of, it's not supposed to be as a word that I've introduced, of course, but if we call it a miracle, it's supposed to be random to some extent. It's supposed to be down to chance when we start interfering with that selection process. Instinctively, I can't explain it perhaps. I feel a certain, there's something off about that for me. I know that's not a very rational or scientific argument, but I do think

that's one a lot of people share, actually. Well, it's not rational. No, I acknowledge that. It sounds as they're religious. It does, which I'm not interestingly, but I feel that that is probably how a lot of people do think about it. Yes, I suppose they do. I think more of a worry would be if some mad dictator, some kind of Hitler started using these techniques and mandating, you know, the selection of blonde, blue-eyed, Aryan, you know, the sort of thing Hitler might have selected. I was talking about more giving parents the opportunity to have their, to do their IVF in a non-random way.

I can sort of see that both ways. But on the other hand, if you have a dictator who says, we want to breed in this country a race of people who are of such and such a type. That I think is deeply sinister. I would agree with you. What would you say as well, Richard? Because I think about this a lot. So when I was a teacher, I taught, for instance, children who were on the autistic spectrum,

and they were quite far on the autistic spectrum, so they were nonverbal. But I also saw children who were autistic. And as a result of their autism, some of them were hard. highly gifted in mathematics and would go on to be scientists, physicists, etc., etc. You see artists who have depression, for example, very severe depression, but that almost gives them an insight into the human condition and human suffering. My worry is with this, we go, okay, we're going to get rid of depression, we're going to get rid of autism.

And then you could argue, well, look, we're going to lower suicide rates. As a result of that, we're going to nonverbal autism will be eradicated completely. But also, aren't we going to get rid of the outliers, the great thinkers, the people who look at the world in a different way that move our species forward? That's an excellent point. And one that I should have come on to anyway. Yeah. When you do any kind of selection for any one characteristic, you're in danger of having side effects which you never thought of. If you select for to remove some kind of psychological problem, then it could well be.

be that you're then having a side effect of never getting any genius mathematicians of something of that sort of what you're saying. I think that's a very good point. And it's one of the problems with any kind of eugenic selection is that you don't know what the byproducts are going to be of the selection that you're engaged upon. And that's what I mean when you have a dictator who says we're going to breed for such and such. You see this with breeding animals. You breed for racehorses who can run very fast. And they break their legs. I mean, they've become more vulnerable to leg breakages

because you're breeding for one thing, namely speed. And in nature, that doesn't happen. In nature, it would be counterbalanced by selection against breaking the legs. Well, you're only using a human example, which is much more serious, where geniuses, out of the way. liars, as you rightly said, are quite likely to be selected against if you naively go for removing

certain psychological problems. So there is something to be said for letting nature take its course. But I think I come back to the negative things of these sort of genetic diseases which are, I think anybody would agree, are undesirable like hemophilia. And it seems to me that taking a moral, letting your moral concerns overspill into forbidding the removal of genetic diseases like hemophilia that are obviously negative in all respects. That's going too far. And Richard, we have a lot of scientists saying that they're worried about where science is going. state of science in general, free speech in university, scientists no longer being able to

allow to explore certain avenues. How do you see the field of sciences at the moment? Are you optimistic or are you a little bit more cautious? What examples you're thinking of where scientists are not allowed to? Well, we, for instance, when it comes to talking about the sexes, and saying, you know, there's differences between the sexes, investigating the differences between the sexes. Certain scientists would say, I don't feel able to investigate that anymore because people will complain.

People will say certain things about me that I'm denying the existence of trans people, for example. Yes, I think you're right that not just scientists, but a lot of people are zipping their mouths because of a political pressure of the sort that you're saying. And it is important. I think for scientists to be honest and to use language precisely. And in the particular case of sex that you mentioned,

it's one of the few cases where there really is a bifurcation, a binary bifurcation, there really are two sexes. And scientists have to work under that fact. And if people, for political reasons, are trying to deny that there really is a binary separation between the different, between the two sexes, then that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and is a subversion of language, actually. Richard, I actually didn't want to make this conversation

in any way about the cultural discussions around that issue, but since we've come to it, do you sit there and sometimes have to pinch yourself that you, one of the most eminent evolutionary biologists in our society, go on the mainstream media, and you are asked to talk to talk about the fact that there's men and women. Do you not feel, do you not experience that as like a gigantic regression? I do. I do because I've, one of the main points I like to make is that very often, I call

the tyranny of the discontinuous mind, we're far too fond of making discriminations. Things like, well, we're talking a bit earlier about embryos, When does an embryo become human? Is there a particular moment when an embryo becomes human? No, there isn't. It's a continuum. It's a sliding scale. There are sliding scales everywhere.

We in universities, when we examine students, we give them a degree, first, second, 2, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3rd. We insist upon making a divide between one class and another. We know perfectly well that the top of one class is closer to the bottom of the one about, than it is to the bottom of its own class. And yet the information about the sliding scale is actually in this bell-shaped distribution in this case is thrown away when we divide.

We insist upon making divide. So the tyranny of the discontinuous mind is one of my catchphrases. And if I look around and say, is any case where there really is a proper divide where there really is no spectrum. And sex is the one thing I can think of. there really isn't a spectrum.

You really are either male or female. And so I do have to pinch myself when for once it goes the other way. I mean, there really is no spectrum there. And yes, I do have to pinch myself. And where do you think this regression, if you agree with my use of it, where does that come from? Well, in certain social sciences, they've been very influenced by what they call post-Mondon. I never really don't know what postmodernism is.

In fact, I think the so-called post-modernist don't know either. But I think it's something to do with words meaning something that is determined by politics. You don't actually have a fixed meaning of words like male and female because there's an intellectual movement in the social sciences that says that everything is a social construct. And male and female, it's a social construct. There's no real validity to the conflict to different in male and female. It's all a social construct. Or cultural relativism,

the idea that different cultures have completely different ways of classifying the world. And so it's just our white, western way of looking at things that says that there's a divide between males and females and something like that. And Richard, with this social constructivism, my sense is that is the erosion of the concept of truth itself. Is that too strongly put?

I think it's absolutely right to say that it is erosion of the concept of truth. I mean, it is valid to say that language evolves and what words mean today is not the same as what they meant 200 years ago necessarily or 1,000 years ago. And so we have to accept the fact that words change their meaning. But we also have to live in a world where we have to be able to communicate and so we have to be able to say

that there are certain words that at present means such and such at present black means black and white means white and blue means blue and if that changes in a hundred years that's okay but for the moment we've got to use words that everybody understands and words like male and female

are pretty clear in everybody's mind what that means and to come along and say oh that's just a social construct is subversion of language, subversion of truth. I think you're right. Do you think that this is a religious belief, Richard?

I think it has a lot in common with religious belief. It's different in that it doesn't invoke anything supernatural, but it's very similar in the ways that heretics are hunted down. We've seen this in Oxford recently where Kathleen Stock has been vigorously, not almost violently. Sometimes they are, violently hunted down. Then there's actually rather detailed parallels

with religious dogma, the doctrine of original sin. Christians, especially Catholics, believe that we're all born in sin. We all inherit the sin of Adam. Although they no longer think Adam ever existed, but somehow they kind of managed to go on about talking about the sin of. of Adam. And so we all, at the moment we're born, we're born in sin. We had to be baptized,

to be cleansed of sin, that kind of thing. I think we see that in the collective guilt that all white people are supposed to inherit because of slavery, even if they, obviously they have no direct connection with slavery, maybe even if they never had an ancestor, most of it probably did, but... And we're all collectively guilty for what people of our type did in some past age. And that is original sin. It's exactly like original sin. Francis, may I jump in just very quickly?

Richard, you said there's nothing supernatural. Do you not think that the claim that you can change your sex by means of incantation is a claim that is supernatural? Yes. you can make that case. It's not quite supernatural in the same sense as believing in gods or believing in fairies. But yes, it's sort of like that. Let's take another religious example, the Catholic belief in transubstantiation where the consecrated wine and bread becomes the blood and body of Christ. the way they put this is to use the Aristotelian idea of substance, essence, something, and accidental.

So Aristotle made the distinction between the real substance and the accidentals. And so they say, well, the accidentals of wine is still wine in this sort of accidental sense, but in real substance it becomes the blood of Christ. And that's the verbal trick that they use to justify this ridiculous idea that the blood becomes, the wine becomes the blood of Christ. So yes, that's very, very similar to, you're quite right, that's very, very similar to saying that it's an incantation that you say, I stand up and say, I am a woman, therefore I am a woman, therefore everything about me is a woman.

You're not allowed to misgender me, you're not allowed to say anything against the idea that I'm a woman. That's very, very similar to the accidental and real substance argument of Catholics. The accidentals may say, I'm a man, I still have a penis, but in my real substance, I'm a woman. That's very, very similar, yes, quite right. Richard, now, you're obviously a very famous atheist, and you've written fantastic works talking about your atheism. Do you not think that there is a fundamental part of us as human beings that need, to religion? Yes, very possibly there is.

It doesn't mean it applies to everybody. It may mean that there's just a, it's quite difficult to eradicate when you have something as fundamental as that. And yes, I suppose a psychologist could delve into that and say something like you, we all need to believe in something higher than ourselves. We have a desperate need to believe that we're not going to disfizzle out when we die. So yes, you could say that there's a deep psychological need for religion. It doesn't mean everybody has it.

It doesn't mean that you can't get out of it. But there's probably something like that to explain it. And because being critical of organized religion as you were, did you ever think that you went too far with your criticisms, of God in particular or would you look back on it and go no I was absolutely justified in what I said at that particular time um I've always tried to seek the truth and I've never wanted to be I never wanted to upset people um but I just think that we should be free to argue points and um so uh I don't think I think I've gone too far.

You could possibly dig out cases where you might challenge me and I might say, yes, perhaps I did go too far there. But I think in general I've always just tried to be loyal to the truth. I think that religious claims are not trivial and I think that very interesting. It's in a way, it's one of the biggest questions that, perhaps the biggest question there is in science, is does some kind of supernatural intelligence lurk behind the universe? Is the universe a planned entity that's a supernatural being conceived? I mean, that's a profound scientific question. If it's true, then the entire universe we're looking at

is a very different kind of universe from one where there's nothing behind it. And so it's a very, very deep scientific question. And I think the answer is clear. There is none. But I don't write it off as something trivial. I don't write it off as a case where you can just say, it's not interesting.

Of course it's interesting. It's interesting. a scientist has got to be interested in this suggestion that the sort of universe we're studying is a planned, designed universe. That's a very, very different kind of universe. So it's a very deep question. It is a very deep question,

because I sense, and I'm not a scientist, that the more you discover about the world, the more you learn about the beauties, the details, the intricacies, the way things are interlocked together, isn't maybe a part of you that thinks this can't have been a matter? accident. There must be something else here. It's very, very tempting to say, yes, everything

works so perfectly together. For me, as a biologist, the complexity of life, the enormous panoply of plants and animals and forests and birds and insects, everything working together. No, it's a huge, beautiful construction. And what, for me, what is absolutely marvelous is that, Nevertheless, there is a perfectly decent explanation that it did all come about without planning. So one of the beauties of it is precisely that we now can explain it, or we're well on our way to explaining it, without invoking any kind of supernatural intelligence. And it is a great temptation because we are so used to the idea

looking at our own machines, looking at things that we've made like computers and cars and planes. And these are clearly the result of design, deliberate design, deliberate construction. And when you look at something like a bird's wing, compare it with an aeroplane's wing, the temptation is huge to say, oh, they must both be designed. And it was the genius of Darwin to break away from that and say, you actually know there is a proper explanation. There is a materialistic explanation for that.

And so the flip side of the temptation is that when you've overcome the temptation and worked out that it is possible to explain it in simple scientific. I really mean simple because the idea, Darwin's idea is deeply simple idea. And yet, given enough time, the Darwinian idea of natural selection, given enough time can build up to prodigies of complexity and beauty and the illusion of design. And that's a measure of the genius of Darwin to see that. And Richard, in your book, The Blind Watchmaker, you make that point, I think, beautifully. And I do actually think that just slightly, no disrespect to France,

is probably one of the weaker arguments against your position. What I think is a stronger argument is the one he made earlier. And this is about the psychological need people have for religion, but also at the level of society. And this is really something I want to get into with you. Noah U.O. Harari, for example, in his book Sapiens, his central argument is that the reason homo sapiens were able to out-compete other species of humanids, or humanoid's humanids? Hominins. See, I got both wrong, hominins, was that they were able to build shared myths. that allowed them to create tribes that went beyond the 150 limit

of sort of being able to know everybody. And when we look at the world today, our generation, when you're not in the room, I sometimes refer to us as the children of Dawkins and the children of Hitchens, in the sense that you took away with your beautiful books, our ability to have that illusion that the world around us is, you know, this God-created mysterious place for which there's no other explanation.

But as I look around at the world with its inability to agree on what words mean, what people call now the crisis of meaning, where a lot of people are kind of lost. They don't know what the purpose and meaning of their life is. Do you worry that maybe the truth is that for Richard Dawkins, your worldview is perfect? Because you are Richard Dawkins, you're able to be inspired by science, by the beauty of the natural world, by the beauty of the universe. But for a lot of other people, what they actually need is not necessarily the belief in God so much as the social function that religion used to fulfill, which is to bind us together with a set of shared values and a set of shared morals and a set of shared ideas about what it means to be human, what it means to relate to other people. And without that, we are lost and therefore we create these new religions that sort of tear our society apart.

I think that's very interesting, and I'm rather persuaded by Harari's argument. But notice what you've just done. You've said maybe humans need religion, maybe they need something to bind society together and function as a union and so on. And maybe they do. And that doesn't make it true. Oh, I agree with you. And of course you do. How modest of you.

No, I mean, it's just that you can make an utterly watertight argument where humanity needs something, which is false. Oh, fine. And I just want to make a distinction between what is true and what humanity needs. And it may very well be that we do need false ideas in order to flourish and prosper. But I'm also interested in what's true. And so, I mean, I don't want to get involved in that sort of snobbish idea that it's okay for us intellectuals. But Hoi Polly need religion. I wouldn't consider myself an intellectual.

So I am the Hoy Pollo in this context. But I'm just saying to you, to me, truth is a supreme value. And I agree with you. But at the same time, to me, the cohesion of our society, the fact that people are able to live a life of me, meaning and purpose. They're able to connect to other human beings and be fulfilled in their lives and know what to do and you don't have people who are disappointed with the way that their life has gone because of the choices that they made because they didn't have someone encouraging them

down a particular path. That to me is also very tragic, as tragic as the erosion of the concept of truth. And I feel there's a balance to be struck there. That's what I'm saying. Yes. I think that's a very good point. I perhaps I should say accepting the possibility of that, I'd also say that actually there's something wonderful about truth itself. Of course.

And so you can lead a very, very fulfilled life in the search for truth. But that's my argument. You can. You can. You are a scientist to spend his whole life pursuing the truth with a microscope and whatever are the tools you use, right? I haven't. I can't. I can't. That's not what I can do and that's not what a lot of people can do. It's not because they're more stupid than you. It's just because they're not scientifically minded. Maybe they're musicians or whatever and they don't have that same mindset as you do. They don't have the same brain as you do. That's the argument. I can't get involved in using myself as in. But I just want to repeat that you don't act, well, okay, you don't actually have to be a working scientist. You can, you can revel in the beauty of

scientific understanding, just as you can revel in music without actually be able to play an instrument. And there is immense fulfillment to be had in appreciation,

understanding of the universe in which you live and why you live here, why you exist. That's a wonderful thing. And I don't want to accept the idea that only certain people capable of doing that. You can actually have a microscope in order to do that.

You don't. You can read books. You can see Cosmos television series. You can see David Attenborough's films. And there's huge satisfaction of the kind of thing that I suppose religion aspired to do in past centuries. And you can get it by almost worshipping, not worshipping in the sense of worshipping anything supernatural,

but the wonder of your own existence and the process that has given rise to you that has led to your existence, which wonder of wonders, we now pretty much understand. I mean, it's a privilege to be alive in the 21st century and to be in a position to just read a few books and see a few television documentaries

and understand why you exist. That's never happened before. I think the thing that the thing that religion gives people is a sense of safety almost. So for instance, when somebody is very ill and maybe they have cancer, they don't know if they're going to live or not.

This knowledge that there is a supreme being looking after them or there's somewhere that they're going to go afterwards, provide someone with a deep sense of comfort in the darkest moments of their life. And whilst I agree with everything that you said about science and discovery and the wonder of looking at the universe,

I don't think that provides that particular emotion. Do you see? No, it's probably true. And again, you can say that the solace that you get, the comfort that you get from a belief, even if it's false, nevertheless, is comforting. You've probably read,

Aldous Huxley's brave new world, where the, towards the end, Mr. Savage, the person who's brought from the reservation and who has actually got access to reading Shakespeare and things. He has an argument with the world controller about whether dulling people's senses with soma, with the drug that they all have to make them feel good, comparing that with the of emotion that you can get by reading Romeo and Juliet or Othello. And the Savage is advocating Shakespeare, and the world controller is advocating the pacification of people with this drug that makes them all feel good.

In a way, the comfort that you get from believing a falsehood is like a drug, and it's a perfectly, that's a perfectly, valid argument to say that there's everything to be said for the drug. There are of course real drugs you can take. It doesn't have to be a false belief. You can take so more equivalent. Well, that I mean, that is absolutely true. It's, you know, it's that drug is such a powerful thing.

I've got to the stage in my life, Richard, where I can tell a lot of the time if someone is religious because there's a lightness about them. There's almost that they, that kind of exegiate. potential dread which hangs off atheists and maybe I'm projecting somewhat, they don't seem to have. Not my experience. I would say you have the same likeness, by the way. Actually, yes. Okay, I'm not sure that that would stand up to a serious investigation.

A controlled experiment may not show that. Well, okay, I mean, we've got nothing but anecdotes. Anecdotes I've heard. I was close to somebody who looked after an old people's home. And she said that the people who are really afraid of death are the Catholics. And that seems surprising in a way. But remember, there's hell as well as heaven. And there's purgatory before you get to either.

And so I think we need a bit more investigation before we talk about this lightness of being that you get from... Richard, and what about you? Because you're in your 80s now. You're in extremely great shape, both physically and mentally. But you are in your 80s. And so the moment is coming for you at some point, I hope very, very far away. An atheist deathbed conversion is not a thing that's unheard of. How do you have that lightness?

It's a, often it's a myth. I mean, there's a myth that Darwin had a deathbed conversion, which is utterly false. I guess what I'm asking is how do you have the lightness that you have? How do you face death? I think that, well, I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the same. and never suffered the smallest inconvenience. It's going to be just the same as before we were born.

We were not there during the whole of the Cambrian and the Ordovician and the age of the dinosaurs and everything. And we're going to be not there after we're dead. So we have this brief time in the sun to have a full and fulfilled life, which is what I am doing and intend to go on doing until I can't anymore. The process of dying, as opposed to being dead, the process of dying is often very disagreeable.

That is the most British understatement that's... We're not allowed to... We're not allowed the privilege that a dog has of being taken to the vet and put painlessly to sleep. Maybe I should identify as a dog. Maybe that's the title of the episode. If I'm not allowed to go to the vet and ask to be put down, or if the vet refuses to put me down,

I could sue him for Miss Species. So, okay, I mean, if there is something frightening about being dead, it's the idea of eternity. Yes. And eternity is a sort of frightening idea. Whether it's before you're born or after you're born, It's a kind of frightening idea. And so the best way to spend eternity, therefore,

is after a general anaesthetic, which is exactly what's going to happen. Richard, I was going, you were saying it was under a general anaesthetic. Was there part of you when you were at the forefront of the new atheist movement that thought you were going to defeat religion, but using facts and scientific reason and logic,

you were going to defeat, you were going to defeat, all of these different religions. I was never that optimistic. No, I don't think I ever thought that. And there was no movement. I mean, you know, four or five books came out at a rush at the same time by coincidence. But there was never an actual movement.

I think it's a journalistic invention. Were you close with Christopher Hitchens? Well, I didn't know him that well. I met him from time to time. I had a long interview with him for New Statesman. I think it was the last interview he ever had before he died in Texas where he was being treated. So, yes, but I wasn't one of his close circle of friends

like Martin Amos and Salman Rushdie. And what were your thoughts or impressions of him? What kind of person was he? Oh, immensely eloquent, immensely erudite, the most eloquent speaker I ever heard, I think. And a huge loss. I mean, wonderful intellect, wonderful command of English language, command of facts, command of historic and literary reference.

Richard, before I asked you about the atheism question, You sounded as if you were pro-euthanasia. Are you in order to alleviate suffering at the end of someone's life? With safeguards. I think you do need safeguards against, you know, let's get rid of granny sort of thing. You've got to get on the housing luller somehow, Richard. Yeah. I think there have to be safeguards, and there can be.

Legal scholars look into the possibility. But given that, yes, I am. I think that we should have the right to end our lives when we want to. I know of cases. I've personally come across cases where somebody has committed suicide in a not very pleasant way. because they still had the power to do so. And if they had waited any longer,

then they would have been incapable of doing the act themselves. And therefore, their lives were actually made shorter by suicide because they didn't have the comfort of knowing that if at any time later on, when they were no longer physically capable of killing themselves, they could ask a doctor to do it for them. You understand what I'm saying? Yes, absolutely.

Richard, before we wrap up and ask you our final question and go to locals where our audience get to ask you questions, I want to ask you a couple of just like one-off questions, which is one of the things that a lot of people are talking about now is the emergence of AI. It's not your field of expertise. Do you have any thoughts on the development of AI as we currently have it? had a go with chat, GPT, chat, GPD, yeah.

And I was quite interested in that. Its factual knowledge is lamentable. Yes. Yeah. I mean, it's actually quite comic. I happen to be interested in JBS Holden, who was a great biologist. I can't remember why that subject came up. And his wife, his third.

I think was a woman called Helen Spurway, who was a geneticist. And I can't remember why I asked a question about Helen Spurway, but I did. And it said, Helen Spurway was married to Richard Dawkins. And so I was sort of disgusted by this. And later on, about three weeks later, I thought, well, I'd check up again. So I said, who was Helen Spurway married? Who was Helen Spurway married to? And they said, Aldous Huxley, which again was false.

So I don't understand quite why it's factual knowledge of silly details like that is so poor, because anybody can Google something now. I mean, why didn't they just Google Helen Spurway and come up with the correct answer, which is that she was married to, she was married to James. B.S. Haldane. It would take about two seconds for a human to do it, let alone for AI to do it. So that's just a, I suppose, a vaguely amusing anecdote about factual knowledge. It is said that people are using it to write essays and things like that. It is pretty impressive. If you ask it to write an essay

about something in the style of somebody or other. It produces something pretty impressive. We could probably ask it to write an essay on evolution in the style of William Shakespeare and it would produce a pretty good pastiche of Shakespeare's style. I'm not quite sure I haven't really been into, as you rightly said, I haven't really been into the things that worry people about it,

But I'm alive to the possibility that there are grave dangers in something getting out of hand, getting out of control. And do you have some sense of how that might play out? Not really. I need to do more reading on the subject, I think. I mean, I need to read some of the people who aren't seriously worried about it, whom I respect. Well, one of the concerns, there was an article, now, I don't know how accurate it was, but it is an example whereby they were training some kind of military system of AI to, choose targets and then a human operator had the final decision over whether that target should be struck or not with a missile.

And allegedly, according to this article, because the human operator sometimes denied a strike on valid targets for other reasons, the AI decided that the human operator was the obstacle in the way of destroying the targets that needed destroying. in this simulation, attack the human operator. So the argument about AI at least seems to be that it's a baby now and it's getting the wives of the people wrong because it's still learning how to walk and talk. But eventually it could grow up to be like a Hitler or whatever. You know what I mean?

Yes, I think that's a very valid point. And I could imagine some kind of AI asked to determine what would be the best thing for the sum of happiness would be to exterminate everybody because we're all miserable. Yes, as I said, I need to read more about it. I think it's interesting and I'm in favor of looking cautiously into the future and saying about all sorts of things, what kind of dilemmas are like to arise in the future, what kind of problems is scientific progress, and this is one, AI is one example, scientific progress like to raise in future, we need to be prepared in advance for what's going to happen.

And I certainly have read enough to know that AI is capable of doing things which are really beyond our dreams at the moment. And who knows where that will lead. Another question I wanted to ask you in this part of the interview is this. On the balance of probability, are we alone in the universe? And second part of that question, if we're not. is it wise to seek contact with those other sentient life forms? I think the balance of probability is that we are not alone.

If we are alone in the universe, then that has interesting implications. It means that the origin of life on our planet was a supremely improbable event, so improbable that we're probably wasting our time trying to work out how it happened. But I don't believe that, and I do actually believe that we are one of many life forms in the universe.

And I would love to know what the others are like. I mean, I'd love to know how unique we are. I'd love to know, I could make a few predictions. I mean, I think I could predict that it's going to be Darwinian. It's going to have some kind of digital genetics. There's got to be a very accurate genetic system. We could make predictions of that sort. Is it wise to, well, first of all, there's a big distinction between life and sentient life.

Intelligent life. The intelligent life is a big step further, and so if there's probably a lot more life around than there is intelligent life around, it's a big barrier to get through there. And intelligent life, if we ever encounter it, we'll almost certainly encounter it, not physically. we would actually meet them because the distances would be too great, but we would at most likely to meet them through radio waves. SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, where they have actual dishes pointing out, looking for signs of intelligent life.

I don't think it's likely to be unwise to respond to any such messages that we find, we hear because the distances again are so great and we won't be able to have a conversation even the nearest star is

so far away that you could you could only send a message and then you all be dead before you get with current technological levels of development wouldn't we be a little bit like the Navajo sending a message in a bottle to Spain in the 1450s? But if you believe

Einstein, then there is a limit to how fast information can travel. Is it limited to the speed of light? Yes. And so the two science fiction books that I've read which come to grips with that problem is Fred Hoyle's Ava Andromeda and Carl Sagan's contact where both authors face up to the fact that distances are too great for direct control of humans, for direct manipulation of humans. We don't have to fear that they actually come in flying sources and run our lives.

And you can't run people's lives by radio unless both books face this, come to the same conclusion. The instructions are build a computer which will then control humanity. Both authors, I don't know whether they independently thought of it, or one of them, I forget which of those books came first. So the extraterrestrial intelligence sends information telling people to build a computer which will do certain things. And the original senders of the information may be long dead because it takes so long for the information to get here. But once the information is here, then the computer can work in. short-term time and can manipulate us.

And in both cases, that's a very interesting science fiction idea. And that's, I think, the only way we need to be afraid. We're not going to be visited by people in flying sources. That, I think, is too improbable. Richard, what an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show. The final question we always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be?

Well, I suppose we've sort of touched on it really, looking into the future, we don't know what's going to happen, and we know looking into the past that we are horrified by certain things that we did in the past, like slavery. And maybe what we should be doing is looking into the future and imagining what will our descendants look back at our time and shudder with horror at what we did. in the same ways we look back

two or three centuries and shadow with horror. Richard, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure and please make sure to join us on our locals where we'll be carrying on with this conversation. Elon Musk is keen to escape Earth

and build on Mars. As an evolutionary biologist, how do you feel about that and what do you think establishing a successful second planet means for the human race in our evolution?