Kind: captions
Language: en
[Music]
richard dawkins welcome back to the show
i am very excited to spend some time
with you again so thank you for joining
me well thank you very much well you are
for anybody that doesn't know you're a
legendary evolutionary biologist as well
as a prolific author you have a new book
out called books do furnish a life and
really taking a pretty beautiful
aesthetic look back at science writing
and many of the
the really sort of famous conversations
that you've had over the years
and the scope of topics that you cover
are really breathtaking the one
theme that really stands out to me is
just
how evolution works how science works
how we've gotten here
and as you build trying to get momentum
behind secularism and bring bringing
science into a place of prominence
almost as an art form and i don't even
know that you would use the word almost
i think you're pretty comfortable with
that idea
um
and what i find fascinating and i think
will be a great jumping off point for us
is that the
the very thing that you're fighting
against this
tendency towards
religiosity for lack of a better word is
is itself a function of evolution and
then the tools that you use to try to
sway the cultural conversation and move
people into something that you think
would be
more beautiful more useful i'm not sure
what word you will slot in there is also
a tool of evolution and so i want to
start with this idea of what what are
what i'll call the physics of human
behavior what is that
base level
of how we are as a species how does our
mind work why do we tend towards the
things that we tend towards and how can
we
move people nudge them in a direction
that might be
more useful
it's a curious matter isn't it that
um
our brains were fashioned by natural
selection
to survive and reproduce in on the
african savannah
and
uh for that you didn't need
well you certainly didn't need quantum
theory and relativity and
um anything other than
fundamental
physics of the way things move when you
touch them and drop them and throw them
and things that of course we had to have
but
uh it's clear that we've moved hugely
beyond
what was
in a utilitarian sense useful for our
evolving
ancestors and i suppose the same goes
for art as well
uh it goes for the aesthetic sense i
suppose we have to as evolutionists make
a case to
understand why it is
that we
are capable of doing science capable of
doing
poetry of doing art
uh of
responding aesthetically being moved by
things
these are
mysteries they're not beyond solution
but i think they are
mysteries that are well worth
talking about and thinking about
yeah i agree with that very much and
when i think about
what are the things that make life as
joyful as beautiful as exhilarating as
it is
for me that leads me to face back inward
and to look at the nature of my mind and
so one thing that i've i've been talking
a lot about socially recently is not to
think about things but to think about
the nature of things and how they are at
at a base level and
if i were to prognosticate about what
and i'll say it a different way what i
hope to be remembered for
is getting people to
really understand that they're having a
biological experience and by that i mean
that your brain works
in a specific way there are just certain
things that it does
and
i want someone to write a book about
what is our sort of true and fundamental
nature and so i'm going to throw out
some things that i think are true and
i'd love to hear either your pushback if
you think i'm crazy uh or if you agree
that they are true then how they came to
be true and what their repercussions are
so
one of the most fundamental things i
think to the human mind and for people
to understand about themselves is that
they're we are
constantly deciding
what to think about the thing that's
happening to us
so there's a region of the brain the
deep limbic system that isn't
necessarily
there to tell you what's happening it's
there to tell you how to feel about
what's happening
and
to me that is when i think about the
the journey that you're on the battle
that you're in the midst of
it's
it's anchored in that moment that
we feel things
that we then
they feel true so if somebody says
something
mean to me or that i perceive as being
mean then i perceive that person as
having
attacked me for instance and it feels
justified for me to have a
strong
aggressive reaction back against them
until i realize wait a second
i can insert myself into that moment i
don't have to believe that emotion
because there is an area of my brain
that told me that that thing was bad
that that statement was aggressive but
in reality it may not have been meant
that way it may merely be somebody
pointing out a
uh
a falsehood in my thinking or something
along those lines but for me i was
trapped in the emotional cycle until i
understood that evolution has delivered
this region of my brain that is designed
to paint with emotion my experience
one do you think that that's a
fundamental thing and if so how did we
get here
so you're talking about a kind of tussle
between the
call it the reptilian brain
uh which feels which responds
emotionally
in the way you say it could be a an
aggressive response for example
and the higher mammalian brain
which comes which steps in and says no
wait a minute
let's think about this
um
yes that seems plausible to me it has
affinities i think with daniel
kahneman's fast and slow
thinking
um
and
there is a certain a certain tussle and
i think perhaps we have to
balance those two
and
i suppose what i've
tried to do in my
writing career is to
emphasize the
the rational
thoughtful
side
um
of the brain
and to
um not deny the existence of the
emotional
but to
try to foster
the control of the emotions by
reason
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the reason i think that this is
come to pass is when i think about the
brain from an evolutionary standpoint it
seems like
because everything is so context
dependent
and because my brain has to be nimble
and this speaks to sort of why we may
have stalled out in the field of
artificial intelligence in terms of
getting something that is true general
artificial intelligence is that
one thing may be good
in one context and then bad in another
context and so for
the human animal to achieve what it has
achieved there would have to be a region
of the brain that is focused on context
dependency
how to feel about something happening
and
when i get down and i look under the
hood of the brain and i start thinking
why do people act in ways that run
contrary to what would be useful to them
i just keep coming back to that
emotional painting
has either become pathological given the
space that we're living in now in a
modern context or was always a difficult
thing i you know maybe that just this is
the nature of the human condition and
we're always going to suffer from this
but
after reading viktor frankl's book man's
search for meaning and him talking about
between stimulus and response there's a
gap and you can insert conscious control
over that gap i really became obsessed
with that to me seems to be the single
most important point in any human life
is to understand that okay evolution
gave you this region of your brain which
is going to read the context
tell you how to feel about what just
happened so in one context might be good
in another context might be bad
and then you have to understand that you
don't have to be
a
slave to that you don't have to dance to
that tune that you can insert that
conscious control does that feel
right to you in terms of when i think
about the trajectory of your career and
what you're trying to accomplish with
your center and trying to swing people
back towards reason and logic
that to me feels like the
piece of evolution that you're fighting
against
yes i think that could be so
um
when you say insert consciousness
strictly speaking it doesn't have to be
conscious it happens it won't mean it is
conscious
um but
um
you could imagine
an evolved life form
which did everything you say but did not
have the
spark of consciousness
that we subjectively know we have i
think that may be a separate issue from
the one you're raising
i think i'm not entirely sure what if i
understand what what you're raising
actually
so i
where i'm trying to
understand are the things that are very
fundamental to the human mind the things
that are going to happen whether you
want them to or not and so because of
what i do i'm constantly coming into
contact with people that are looking for
help and that help maybe i want to build
a better business that help maybe my
marriage is imploding that help maybe
i want to
you know get better at my job make more
money whatever
as i have tried to walk people through
those things i keep asking myself what
has it been that's allowed me to have
the kind of success that i've had and to
me it always comes back to that moment
the ability to
the frame of reference to distrust my
emotions to not just take them as
factual so hey that thing that just
happened made me angry
is that because what just happened to me
is quote unquote wrong that there is
some moral judgment to be passed on that
or is it hey evolution has given me
this thing which reads the context of my
environment tells me how to feel about
it but that thing isn't
tied to my goals it's tied to
evolution's goals so
what i'm trying to get your take on is
one
do you agree that that's one of the most
fundamental things happening in the
human mind and if it is and we can
certainly talk about how it's played out
in your life how you've addressed it
and then i want to layer on other things
that i think like for instance we're an
active species i think it is innate to
the human brain you will go into a space
you will explore it and you will try to
dominate it and then you will try to
exploit it i think that is just that is
the wiring of the human mind and
where i find society goes awry or where
people end up in just tremendous
emotional distress
is when they don't recognize that they
their brain is a product of evolution it
is imperfectly created for a modern
context
and because of that lack of
understanding they end up in these just
emotionally tumultuous places with no
idea of how to get out
and so my hope is over our time together
we can lay out
and you really touch on so many of these
issues in
books do furnish a life and i'm going to
try to thread that needle of what those
fundamental things are about the nature
of a brain that is the product of
evolution
i think i agree with you insofar as i
understand it but perhaps we should get
on to
threading the needle um and looking at
the book itself
to see
where you're taking this because this is
very much your thesis you're talking
about not mine
and i'm not sure i understand well
enough
to i think i understand
what you're saying when enough
let me ask you not to to repeat it to
anybody else so to speak
fair so let me ask a really direct
question what do you think are some
tenants that are fundamental to
the human mind
well
many of them would be fundamental to any
animal's mind any any surviving
creatures mind so things like hunger and
thirst and sex and
um the need to dominate fellow species
members that need to
do whatever it takes to survive to to
reproduce all those sorts of things
and the discipline of evolutionary
psychology
studies those in
taking account of their evolutionary
origin and also in so far as they are
modified
in
the very foreign environment of
of civilization
um so there are all those things
then there seem to be emergent
properties
which have nothing to do with
evolutionary survival or only in a very
very indirect sense
and it's those that mystify me
uh the the capabilities of the human
mind
in a civilized environment building upon
by cultural evolution
building upon
the achievements of others
as newton said standing on the shoulders
of giants
what the human mind achieves today
in the form of
science in particular
technology
is
utterly bewildering when you think about
it in an evolutionary context it's so
far beyond
what we're ever naturally selected to do
so do you think that that's just sort of
a
almost accidental result of what we have
been selected to do i think it in in one
sense it is accidental um i i would have
been very hard to predict it would have
been very hard
to
look at our
pleistocene ancestors and predict
that one day they would be capable of
producing
einstein
um and it's hard to see why our brain is
capable of reaching so far beyond
what was necessary for
survival it's it's not
we doesn't get mystical about it i mean
we see it in the form of computers where
computers were
originally designed as calculating
machines and then without any
modification to the fundamental
architecture
lo and behold
they become
chess playing machines and simulation
machines and
ai machines and musical composition
machines etc those are all emerging
properties which had nothing to do with
the original function of calculation but
simply emerge
um as a result of
the architecture which was originally
built to calculate
and so how do
you do you have hypotheses around that
so
you recognize that it's happening we
have this sort of emergent phenomenon
that is you know whether it's music
poetry wonder ah
insights into the universe things that
seem wholly unnecessary for just our
basic survival and procreation do you
have a hypothesis as to how we've ended
up here not really i can only think that
that something about what was necessary
to survive in our particular ecological
niche um had they had that emergent
consequence um
there are various
ideas about what
how that was good for survival um
one idea is that um
we are a social species where a
competitive species we exist in we swim
around
in an environment of each other
and part of an important part of that as
it is with many species but in our
ancestors no doubt it was important
to to dominate
to rise to the top of the tree
uh and
um
so
the ability to
to think
and to um to reason and to be
intelligent could have been a device for
out-competing
rivals
another theory which is which is fully
compatible with that is that it's sexual
selection
that
um being brainy is sec is sexually
attractive
uh and um
so
those individuals who were who showed
evidence of
being able to think well
of intelligence perhaps artistic ability
the ability to
to recite epic poetry or to do
complicated dancing or to do all the
sorts of things which
don't appear on the face of it to have
uh
economic value to have a survival value
um
nevertheless they might have been
appealing to the opposite sex and might
have been
um
a vehicle to success
in
competitive
interactions those are two possible
pressures that that pushed us
into having emergent properties which
went beyond
what would seem to be the utilitarian
needs of survival
that's really interesting to me so one
sexual selection in and of itself is
utterly fascinating um it was funny
there was a really funny part in the
book where you talk about how uh had
evolution fully understood what we were
doing by inventing condoms the act of
rolling on a condom should have become
extraordinarily painful and i was like
that is very funny uh and true
and okay so as i think about that um
what i love about that is
as i
look at what it would have been like to
be coming up from an evolutionary
standpoint
creativity for instance so i meditate to
get into a creative state and when i try
to explain to people what the purpose of
meditation is for me one it's lowering
um your stress and anxiety just at a
physiological level but two it does seem
to shift your brain into a different
brainwave pattern that i'll call calm
and creative i forget where i first
heard that i'm not making that up but um
and so i feel like i'm more able to get
these uh far-flung ideas to connect
together a unique way to use something
and so if i think back to
you know whether it's the first use of
tools and things like that
you know using like you even see some
animals doing this where they'll stick
like a a reed into a honeycomb so that
they can pull out the honey without
having to just destroy uh the honeycomb
and
that has to occur to you at some point
and that moment of creativity would have
to be one of two things so it fits i'm
i'm truly just echoing what you're
saying where you've got this okay i want
to be the best at hunting gathering
honey whatever the case may be
so i've got that competitive edge which
makes sense from an evolutionary
standpoint but where this gets really
fascinating is when my sexual partner is
turned on by
the fact that i have made this
interesting breakthrough of now i can
use this tool and now you put these two
things together and you get this ever
escalating arms race of
i want to be more competitive and i'm
super curious to see if you think this
breaks along
the sexes at all if there's going to be
a difference in terms of what they find
interesting
but i'm going to try to be the best
hunter the best honey gatherer whatever
and then
that's getting me a sexual mate and
my desire to out compete and then be
more clever and then also that the other
person is feeling a sense of awe or
wonder when you see somebody do
something new and
exciting or useful
that is
really really fascinating do you think
that explains it or do you are you
haunted by the idea that there's
something more learning
i i think that that could well be part
of it um
there's a
evolutionary psychologist called
geoffrey miller who's written a book
expounding the idea of sexual selection
as a pressure
towards becoming um
well towards the expansion of the brain
actually
um
tool use is is interesting because
if you look at the history of um the use
of flint's
napping flints
it goes for a very long period without
any improvement
and you'd think that
if you think about the way we use tools
we we
we copy each other we
an apprentice copies a master tool user
and
learns from the master and then gets an
idea
to improve
the technique
over what the master is doing so
um you you see a
uh
carpentry or whatever it might be you're
constantly devising new ways new
inventions
and and
um
mentally visualizing imagining a better
way of doing of doing
something um
that is
obviously
very important in our technology
and yet
i forget how long it is but but but if
you look at the at the wreck of the
archaeological record
there were
huge expanses of time
when flint implements
didn't get any better they they stayed
at the level they got to
uh as though there was no ingenuity
going on
and if it was
if sexual selection was driving you'd
expect to see again improvement
so
it's as though something changed at some
point um
and
the
emergent
race took off
arms race perhaps arms race with with
with rivals took off
um
and i'm not quite sure when that would
be i think that there was a moment
about 45 000 years ago when there seems
to have been a big leap forward
in
art and creativity
and who knows what that was due to
if you had to guess what what guess
would you make because that that's
interesting so my initial as you were
saying it my initial thought was the um
innovations were just happening in
another area that maybe didn't survive
as well
um
i would like to think that the that the
boost was given by language but that's
not plausible i mean it's not plausible
that that
language wasn't invented until 45 000
years ago it seems much more plausible
that language is older than that
nobody knows exactly when language
started
and i suppose it's still still
conceivable
that there was no language until the
so-called great leap forward
um
that that strikes me like it's so funny
to push back on you who knows
ten thousand times more about this than
i do but i know just enough to be
dangerous uh
given that whales for instance have the
equivalent of a name essentially they
have a
lyric i don't know what words to use
around this but they have a lyric that's
unique to them
and
that strikes me as the beginnings of
language so if we're seeing it if if
we've all you know come out of the sea
and we're seeing that in creatures that
are still in the sea it strikes me as
either it's co-evolving and so language
just happens to spring up uh you know in
several different places
and that i forget what animals but they
have like different sounds they make if
they see something red versus if they
see something blue so there there are
identifying characteristics across a lot
of species that we could sort of lump
into you know being prototype languages
if you will um
so
that to your point does not seem like it
would be well let's find that language
um
there are
all sorts of attributes of animal
communication which
um you could say are sort of
elements of language like name
um
using different um sounds to mean
different things
um you can find it all over the animal
kingdom even in bees in monkeys in wales
but that's
not language
uh language human language
has this extraordinary
capacity
of um
indefinite complexity
due to
embedded
hierarchically embedded syntax
so the ability to say something like
the man who i saw yesterday who was at
the waterhole and was um drawing water
for his wife said to me so and so
um now that is
a grammatically complex sentence with
multiple
openings of brackets and then closing of
brackets
and that
is unknown anywhere else in the animal
kingdom the this hierarchical embedding
of
phrases and clauses
within sentences
uh which in principle are in
indefinitely expandable
this is the house that jack built this
is the ha this is the zone so that santa
said it sounds in the censor that the
jack built um
this capacity to
embed
sub clauses within the main sentence and
some sub-sub-clauses and sub-sub-clauses
it's that i think that makes human
language
utterly unique
and the the fact that
bees and
vervet monkeys
can
communicate things like in the case of
the bees where and how far away and how
and and and what direction
food is
the fact that whales can have a name
the fact that
monkeys can give a three different alarm
calls one for leopards one for snakes
and one for eagles
um
that's that's really small beer compared
to
the
um
grammatical
hierarchical syntax which human language
has
yeah that that is for sure so all right
if we're ruling out language because we
know that it didn't or it's implausible
that it happened 45 000 years ago and
i'm guessing just because of the
complexity that would take far longer
than that well i don't know i mean
nobody knows it's possible i suppose
that
linguists do
suggest that language evolved once that
all human languages are descended from
one single common ancestor
in if they're right
then that one ancestral language had to
come into being at some point and i
suppose it could have been as recent as
recent as as forty five thousand years
ago
um
i yeah i mean it could it could be
nothing changed in the brain i mean the
the brain itself
was as fully developed before that time
as after
so it's so it's it it doesn't go with
any kind of increase in brain size
if that if that were the case
and you don't think that the
um the evolution of language would
follow a very similar trajectory that
okay whales have names uh
there are different calls that monkeys
can make based on whether it's an eagle
a leopard or a snake uh you don't think
that that is the early building blocks
that then lead to what we have now i
think that that those building blocks
had to be there
but
uh but but the the final human um
advance was syntactic
grammar
okay so rockingly syntactic grammar
when was the great leap forward
well archaeologically i i quoted forty
five thousand years and and i'm i i dare
say it's different in different parts of
the world but but
that's when you start getting
cave paintings and and sculptures and
things like that
and do those do they show up in
different places around the world at the
same time i don't know i i think i'm
thinking of europe there and i'm not
sure whether whether we have the same
kind of things in different parts of the
world
that would be utterly fascinating if for
whatever reason it takes a certain
amount of time for the brain to sort of
make that leap um
very very interesting i want to go back
to sexual selection what are some of the
most fascinating things like
one thing that i love about you and that
you cover in the book is
these moments where
the natural world is so profound that
you have
you have a truly elevated um
i mean i will say basically it's got to
be to me the same sort of part of the
brain that triggers when you're having a
religious experience you have that same
sense of transcendent awe
what has sexual selection given us that
leaves you that sort of gobsmacked
well that that transcendent sense i get
uh all the time from
not just from biology but from
astronomy from looking up at the milky
way galaxy and things like that
um
sexual selection
social sexual selection has produced
some of the most extravagant
i suppose the most extravagant
flowerings of
um
evolutionary exuberance
um
birds of paradise um peacocks
with equivalents in fish
amphibians
um
mammals in the in their calls um
sexual
selection
has been controversial in evolutionary
in the theory in the history
evolutionary theory
um
it was a controversial matter between
darwin and wallace what is the
co-discoverer of natural selection
um who described himself as more
darwinian than darwin
wallace hated the idea of
what darwin called sexual selection
because what the the um
female choice aspect of sexual selection
in darwin's view
involved just postulating
that females have some kind of aesthetic
sense
that females just simply liked
that p hens for example
for some reason unknown
just liked the
mesmerizing beauty of peacock
tales
wallace
hated that idea because it seemed to him
mystical it's odd that he hated it
because wallace himself got quite
mystical
in late later in life and became
a devotee of spiritual seances however
in the field of sexual selection wallace
wanted uh
things like peacock's tails to be useful
it's hard to see how they could be
useful but but
um he wanted it to be if not directly
useful he wanted the peacock's tail to
be a badge
of utilitarian
usefulness
in some sense
and um
this disagreement between darwin and
wallace it's all in in a wonderful book
by helena cronin called the ant and the
peacock
this she traces the
history of darwin and wallace's
disagreement from each other
and traces it through the 20th century
after their deaths
uh and so
the modern study of sexual selection
can be
divided between those followers of
darwin and those followers of
of wallace
in a in a modern
sense
um the
accusation of mysticism
isn't right
um
you can
in you can accommodate it
you can accommodate the idea of female
choice of female aesthetic preference
uh in a proper
model of natural selection uh r.a fisher
did this ari official the great um
statistician and
one of the three inventors of population
genetics in the 1920s and 30s
um
where he suggested that you can that you
can put a genetic value on
female
aesthetic preference so you say not only
are there genes that make males have
tails of a certain shape size color etc
there are genes in females
that make them like certain features in
males
and you have a co-evolution
between the female genes and the male
genes as the as the females evolved to
like certain characteristics in males in
parallel to that males evolved
to fit in
with what the females
like
and if you set up your mathematical
model in the right way
that can lead to a runaway process
uh whereby
um
tales or whatever it might be become
more and more extravagant more and more
ridiculous for mercy from a utilitarian
point of view
so that was what fisher achieved fisher
as it were resolve the disagreement
between darwin and wallace
but
what we might call neo-wallet malaysians
neo-wallacians today
um
don't necessarily disagree with fisher
but they
um
carry the idea the wallacian idea
of
sexual selection being a badge of
utilitarian functionalism
um so
an extravagant peacock's tail
can be seen as a badge of health for
example because w d hamilton suggested
this
a
[Music]
a female
is looking for health a healthy mate
so in a way natural selection is
favoring females
that become
good
diagnostic doctors
that become able to
diagnose whether a male is healthy or
not
and using the brightness of a male's
plumage for example
is one way in which females could
diagnose whether the male is
healthy
and at the same time
this is the really difficult part of the
hamilton theory
males are selected
to become easier to diagnose
it's as though
natural selection favors males
that come with
the equivalent of a thermometer sticking
out of them
to enable the female to diagnose them
um
and the theory works even if the male is
unhealthy
he still
natural selection still favors the
the evolution of
thermometers blood pressure meters
um
in in male and not literally of course
but something equivalent to that um
and so for the neo-wallacians
sexual selection
favors
females that become good diagnostic
doctors
and males that become advertisers
of
health
and the more extravagant sorry the the
the more healthy the male is the more we
can afford costly
advertisements like extravagantly
beautiful long tails which only
a
really healthy male could afford
to display
so that's the kind of
neo-wallacian
approach to sexual selection both of
them produce
aesthetically pleasing results to us
results that are aesthetically pleasing
to us
and at the same time
results that are aesthetically pleasing
to
the opposite sex
you use the word healthy in there and i
want to get a clear definition of what
you mean by that so
um
when i think about humans and what
certainly as a guy you're drawn to are
signs of fertility
so
that we could certainly round to health
are females necessarily looking for
health or are they looking for signs of
fitness which may be given the
evolutionary context an even more
complicated word
but is yeah define health for me in that
scenario in in the context i was talking
about health means
what what we as as humans and doctors
think of it as meaning it means
freedom from bacteria from viruses um
if for example um
one of the points hamilton i think was
hamilton made is that um
diarrhoea would be a
a badge of ill health
and um a long tail
might be uh
become dirty if you have diarrhoea
and so
um
having a long tail which is which is
clean
um is an advertisement of health
um that's i didn't put that very well um
there's
um
red bare skin
in
things like turkeys or some monkeys some
baboons for example
um
are
ways in which the female might gauge the
um
color of the blood
um
that i i'm not sure how plausible that
is but it's like that's the kind of
thing that hamilton is talking about the
if the male is advertising health for
the female what he does
is to bring to the surface
those characteristics which
um would enable
a vet
a veterinarian
to diagnose health
um
temperature
blood pressure
perhaps some
breathing
uh
cleanly without without
wheezing
any anything that that makes that makes
healthy in the conventional sense i mean
in the sense that that that a doctor
would understand as being as being
healthy is exactly what hamilton was
talking about
and what about where some of these
things and and
they may not indicate ill health but
they certainly become risky from a
fitness perspective
whether that's um the antlers of a buck
and he's putting so much of his
micronutrients into that to build that
out that if he doesn't shed them he's
going to die because he's not going to
make it through the winter with
all of his vitamins being stored in his
antlers or the peacock that has such
massive plumage would be far easier to
catch and eat by a predator
so
is is that part of that debate is is
that there
or is this something else entirely no uh
it is it is there um
the the um sort of underlying theory can
now attribute to the israeli zoologist
zahavi amats zahavi uh his so-called
handicap principle um which was
unfashionable when he first proposed it
and and i'm afraid i rubbished it in the
selfish gene and then i i had to climb
down in the second edition of the
selfish gene because
my colleague alan graffen produced a
workable
mathematical model that shows that it
works the handicap principle
uh which is a more general case of what
i've just been talking about in the
hamilton
health theory states that
um
a costly
display like huge antlers
or a huge tail in the case of a of a
peacock
um
only a really fit male could afford
to produce this
great big
tale or these great big
antlers so it is an advertisement
um
that says i'm
capable of paying the genuine cost
of this
display
and if i were
an unfit weak
health unhealthy male
i would not be capable of it my answers
would be small
so it goes with
a female tendency to choose
males
who are displaying a costly
uh
well display such as such as antlers
um
the the
graphene model shows that this will work
under some circumstances that it is
evolutionarily stable it can work but at
the same time as
males let's call them males it could
work the other way but usually would be
males the same time as
males
who have a range of possible displays
that they could
put out
and
among those are costly ones
so as a strategy might be produce a very
costly display
um
and females at the same time
[Music]
are or the receivers of the signal more
generally at the same time
are selected
to choose
either cost-free displays something like
padded shoulders which any fool can do
versus genuine muscular shoulders which
only a genuinely
strong male could afford to do so
something like antlers
are an unfakeable signal they're heavy
they they endanger the the stag he's
more likely to get tangled up in the
bushes or taught or caught by a
by a predator
um
so
um
the the strategy
the male the male strategy
make your displays as costly as possible
is stable at the same time as the female
strategy
insist
on only mating with males who make
costly displays
that's what we call evolutionarily
stable
and so that evolves that's that's why
according to the
the harvey theory and the hamilton
theory is just a branch of that of it uh
that's why according to the harvey
hamilton graphene theory
um
we see
costly displays and the thing about
peacock's tales is above all that they
are costly
they they probably cost the male his
life because
he's more likely to be eaten by a
predator if he has a very long heavy
tail makes it difficult for him to take
off things like that
now how does this manifest in humans
what are the there's obviously the
cliches of
uh women flaunt their physical beauty
men flaunt their wealth um
is there truth to that is it just a
stereotype like what are we doing
well i'm always rather hesitant about
what what what we're doing or that
everybody wants to wants to go that in
that direction i'm curious why are you
hesitant
oh
because it's politically sensitive i
mean there are all sorts of political
strands which you which which you get
you get dumped on if you if you start
talking about humans in this kind of way
um
well these harvey i mean zahavi himself
loved talking about humans and so things
like buying a costly engagement ring
uh taking the woman out to an expensive
dinner
um that kind of thing is it fits in with
with his um
his
his way of
speaking um in the case of humans we
have the
an apparent reversal because it looks as
though it's females who wear lipstick
and and and do do
the kind of peacock it kind of displays
so
that kind of
works the other way around
um if it works at all
in females not in all cultures actually
i mean there are there are cultures
where
males
do the displaying males do the peacock
thing and have great big headdresses and
dances where they'd see how jump right
rival with each other who can jump the
highest in a ritual dance that kind of
thing
but in our culture it looks as though
it's females who are doing the doing the
equivalent of peacock display
it's really interesting and i
if this goes uh to a point where you're
no longer comfortable talking about it
just let me know but so needless to say
i find humans absolutely fascinating uh
and we are if not the only one of the
only animals that where the female
obfuscates her
um
when she's able to conceive her um
her fertility cycle and so one idea that
i heard was that the version of wearing
makeup is to show sexual um
signs of like uh sexual receptiveness so
the blushing of the cheeks things that
mimic sort of being aroused and whether
that's true or not i don't know but that
certainly is a an interesting
way to look at it if okay i hide it and
so i need to have ways where i can cue
somebody in
is one particular way do you have a take
on why
female
reproductive cycle is hidden when in all
other animals at least that i know of
there's like a grand display to let you
know it's a it's a pretty hot topic um
female concealed ovulation um there's a
certain amount of evidence which is
probably controversial as to whether it
really is completely
concealed um one of the studies that's
been done
uh
by evolutionary psychologists is the
study of um
um
dancers at clubs
who um
hold
or or hostesses um
uh at
clubs
where they they live on tips they get
they they have drinks bought for them
and they get and they get tips
and um somebody i forget who did a study
in which they measured the amount the
the the amount of the tips that these
women got
um
and
correlated it
with their sexual cycle
and what they've what the study found
was that the tips went up
when they were um at the when they were
ovulating
um which might suggest that um
[Music]
maybe there's some kind of pheromone
that that's subconsciously being
detected by the men who are doing the
tipping or it might suggest that the
women have some kind of subconscious
knowledge of
when they're ovulating and this changes
their behavior in some way um but that's
that's one study that i
know of about
concealed ovulation
um
as for the evolutionary advantage of
concealed ovulation
um
the obvious advantage in not concealing
it is you tend to get mated when you're
ovulating which is what chimpanzees do
um
in in a promiscuous fashion but um
in a species which
where the female needs to
count on male loyalty
um
if the male
doesn't know when she's ovulating
that might provide a pressure for him to
stick around and be loyal to one female
uh rather than
go dashing off
away from a female who is not ovulating
and
simply homing in on whatever females are
ovulating which is what male chimps do
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this is to me where this stuff starts to
get really fascinating
um
you know obviously i know right now it's
very taboo to talk about the differences
between sexes but that to me is crazy
making because it's so disconnected from
what actual life experience is like and
i i mentioned this to you the first time
that we met that five years ago if you
had asked me i probably would have
described humans as being more or less a
blank slate
and then the more that i get in there
and really look at what's going on i
realize that we're not that there are
you know let's call it 50 that's
hardwired 50 that's malleable and then
there are differences between the sexes
and it's like the more i look at the
differences between the sexes the easier
it becomes to relate to my wife to
understand to like get how she
approaches the world and it's
it's absolutely enlightening and i don't
think that one is better than the other
i just find it utterly fascinating from
an evolutionary standpoint how we've got
this race of different needs and i'll be
curious to get your take on this so
it from what i've read and what seems
logical to me
the real big thing comes down to
for a woman it is just obscenely
resource intensive to have a child from
nine months of having to carry that
child to then having to take care of it
after
it's born to this you know years-long uh
period where it has to be cared for just
constantly whereas for the guy it's very
low right so there's low investment it's
basically whatever the biological cost
of the semen is
and that's it and so you would expect
from an evolutionary standpoint that you
would get into this sort of fascinating
co-evolution to be sure but that they
would go in opposite directions that
women are going to be tuned to what i've
heard referred to as a sort of detective
mode like you said of being able to see
is this guy going to be loyal are they
going to be there are they going to help
me raise this child
what are ways that you see that play out
differently and men and women that give
you
hints to our evolutionary past
what you've just laid out is the
standard um evolutionary argument which
applies to any species uh and um
it's due to robert trivers um to bill
hamilton to ra fischer
um in in various forms and so it's the
economic imbalance between the sexes
where
um the
the female sex is the is the
economically valuable sex the scarce
resource
um because as you say
um the female makes a tremendous
investment especially in mammals but in
in i mean just it starts off with the
fact that eggs are bigger than sperms
and and
from that
much else follows
uh including in mammals the fact that
females are invested in
in
prolonged pregnancy and then lactation
and so on which which um
males do not have to pay that cost and
so
it is possible for
males to just to distribute their genes
among lots of females and get away with
it
but um so that there is
potentially a selection pressure on
males to become promiscuous which there
isn't in females so because the female
doesn't benefit but once she's pregnant
she's there's no further benefit in
mating with anybody
and so on i mean it's all pretty obvious
stuff
um
and trivers develops the theory in a
very sophisticated way
uh and you've just applied it to humans
and it seems to me entirely sensible
that there seems to be no reason why you
should not apply to humans if you want
to um you get into political trouble if
you do
um and um
there's a kind of
um
standard sociological response which is
the blank slate um
the the view that
uh humans come into the world knowing
nothing and there's there's everything
everything about them everything about
us comes in
through the environment through
education and imitation and so on
um
and there's no predisposition among the
sexes
um
the blank slate well
have you have you seen steve pink have
you ever interviewed stephen pinker i
haven't interviewed him but i've read
the book the blank slate for sure which
informed much of
i would love to so
yes hopefully one day soon he's a very
very
clever intellectual and knows an
enormous amount about lots of different
things
and the blank slate is one of his
excellent books
um
so
yes i mean the the the issue of the the
uh the balance between
genes and environment in in any animal
but including humans
um what we're really talking about there
is the study of variance the study of
variation how much what proportion of
variation
can be attributed to genes
and this is really just just a
sub department of the analysis of
variants which statisticians use all the
time
um
fisher developed the analysis of
variants
looking at agricultural
data
where he was
looking at the contribution of
fertilizer and rainfall and genetics of
wheat
plants and so on um and calculating the
proportion of the variance that you can
attribute
to fertilizer to rainfall to soil
quality and to genes
and you can do that in in any creature
it doesn't have to be wheat plants you
can do it in in humans you can do it in
anything you like
and um
heritability
is the word he used we one one uses for
that proportion of the variance which
can be attributed to genes
and it's not an absolute figure because
it depends upon the environment that you
provide um
but one of the ways in which it's
studied is is with twin studies
where you you know
there are identical twins have all their
genes in common and you know you can
compare them level with fraternal twins
twitch who are
uh just like ordinary siblings um
and you can calculate therefore the the
proportion of the variance which can be
attributed to genes you can calculate
this
by comparing monozygotic identical twins
with fraternal dizygotic
twins
and
you get a figure
which varies from
what you're measuring to what you're
measuring so in the case of height it's
it's
a very high correlation a very a very
high
um correlation between identical twins
as opposed to fraternal twins so if you
know how tall
one twin is
you can predict with pretty good
accuracy how tall his or her
identical twin will be but with less
accuracy how tall
fraternal twin will be now what you do
is you compare
those figures with those cases where
identical twins are reared apart
it doesn't happen often
um
but
it happens it happens sufficiently often
you can get some some data
twins that are separated at birth for
one reason or another and given
different foster um
or adoptive
parents
and so by comparing
identical twins read together identical
twins read a part fraternal twins read
together a fraternal prince read a part
you come up with a heritability figure
and for height i say it's very high
for weight it's not so high because it
depends more on how much you eat
for iq
it's remarkably high
which is politically
unfashionable
um but it's true
because people don't want iq to be tied
to genes
yes
uh so um
but nevertheless the fact the facts are
there and so you can you can study the
heritability of anything you like
uh and uh but by by doing twin studies
and so as you look at the things that
are heritable not heritable how does
that help us better understand as men
and women are co-evolving for sure but
there there are these divergent paths
one i'll give an example of the kind of
thing that i'm asking towards so one
example that i heard was um
when you understand female power
structures then you really begin to
understand sort of this dynamic between
men and women and the person speaking
was saying look to think that women
don't have hierarchical structures
within their own female to female peer
groups would be just a gross
misunderstanding
and she was saying basically you don't
look at men and go oh i'm going to go
compete on a physical basis you find
another way to make sure that you can
you know get safety um get cooperation
you know
get your own needs met all of that
and she said so it becomes this very
social thing which is why you see in
female peer groups there is this like
status ranking and when you talk to
women uh in a n of one study to be sure
that's not you know a truly controlled
study then they'll say yeah there's you
know you get these sort of pecking
orders um but it's all psychological
it's all social and then when you get
men it's very physical whether it's
jumping the highest running the fastest
fighting whatever like it's it's just
very obvious um
and understandably so in terms of
our evolutionary past looking at a
hunter gatherer or society
guys are going to evolve to be better at
things like and tell me if this is
controversial i think this is
well accepted
that men are better at tracking movement
for instance
and you can understand why that would be
advantageous out on a hunt
and that in terms of upper body strength
men on average these are obviously just
averages men on average have better
upper body strength on average they're
taller but when you start looking at
ultra long distance running for instance
the sexes begin to even out and so if as
a tribe we had to move over tremendously
long distances together then you would
understand why that would end up evening
out so
one
i'm sure some of what i just said is uh
controversial but to be honest i don't
know which parts
so i'd love to know like in there are
there people that you know would dispute
any of that
i don't know about um the
rivalries and female groups it does seem
to me to be
um
utterly implausible to suggest that
given that males and females
have different um
physical organs their different sizes
different
um
different physical strength as you say
different roles to play in reproduction
um it would be
really remarkable if they didn't have
psychological differences as well
and that of course is not to say that
that one is better than the other
um but it there if differences in
everything else why wouldn't there be
differences in psychology as well so
um i think
uh as
steve pinker himself says
um it would be
um
very implausible
if if the sex differences in in
bodily
features
were not reflected in uh
brain mind features as well
yeah that makes sense to me so my
my grandest curiosity around evolution
is probably the difference between the
sexes
for you is there like one question
that man if i could ask a magic machine
and it would give me the definitive
answer on this one thing what question
would you ask
i think there'd be two um
one would be the evolution of
consciousness subjective consciousness
which i think is a big mystery
i'm not even sure
what a solution to it would would look
like
uh are we talking about the hard problem
of consciousness a heart problem um
i i'm not even sure whether it would be
a matter of brain physiology or computer
science or philosophy
but it's the hard problem and and i i
would like to see that salt um
much
less difficult
and much less profound the origin of
life
um there is a
bit of a barrier
once once we once you have dna
and
then
um natural select genetics gets going
natural selection gets going evolution
gets going we understand really
everything that happened in principle we
understand everything that happened once
dna was in place
and up and running and then it's a
straight run through to all the
different the panoply of
of different kinds of animals and plants
that we see all the different ways
predators and prey and trees growing and
thing and and
humans too um but the the very first
step before you got dna before you got
the origin of genetics
um is
a barrier
um it's a it's not understood yet it's
not a profound thing like the hard
problem of consciousness but
nevertheless it's something which i
would like to know the answer to
it it lies in the realm of chemistry
which is not my field but so i'm not
going to understand it in detail but
it'd be nice to to have that
that problem solved
whoo and now
i'm not surprised those are your answers
i actually should have been able to
predict that so those are the two things
that i would say really come to the core
of what i think
you will say is the sort of central
purpose of your life which would be
that
so many people default to there was a
creator to explain those two very things
and
that's got to be the place where i'm
sure people come to when debating with
you around those two like that hey isn't
it ironic that the two things that
science don't yet have an answer for
are the exact two things you don't need
an answer for when you have a creator
if you had to guess and i get that it's
chemistry
do you think that one day we will find
oh when uh
certain molecules are in
you know at the center of a volcano and
they are struck by lightning then we get
it's going to be something like that or
like those hot plumes in the the core of
the ocean
okay so we have like a really
your prediction is there'll be a very
straightforward set of circumstances
that that need to occur
in sort of unusual places and that will
be
that first spark of life yes with
reservation i mean what one reservation
is that
um
it is possible
i think it's highly unlikely but it is
possible that we are unique it's
possible that this that this planet is
unique
and there's only ever been one origin of
life there's only one one life form
anywhere in the universe and it's us
if there is only one life form it has to
be here because because obviously we're
here talking about it
um
so
we we cannot rule out that possibility
now if that's true and i don't think it
is but if it were true
then
it would follow that
the origin of life is a
ridiculously improbable event a
freakishly stupendously staggeringly
improbable event which would mean that
although there has to be an explanation
it must have because it did happen here
it might never
um
yield to any kind of research strategy
because if it is only happen once in the
universe
then we are not looking for any kind of
plausible explanation we're looking for
a highly implausible explanation if
there was a plausible explanation then
it would have happened
all over the universe
which it probably has or at least
billions of times
note by the way what a small number a
billion is
um when you were talking about the
universe as a whole
there could be
billions of independently arisen life
forms
dotted around the universe but so widely
scattered since the universe is so huge
so widely scattered that none of them
ever meets ever encounters any of the
others
so as far as they're concerned they
might as well be the only ones
um
i don't think that's the case i think
that life is probably i think the
universe is crawling with life probably
in which case the origin of life on this
planet is not a highly implausible event
it's not a very rare event
and is is an event which
students of chemistry should eventually
solve
at least come up with a plausible
explanation they might be able to prove
that it's the right one
but um
it might be such such an elegant
explanation that
it pretty much has got to be right
um or
um yes i mean i think that's most i
think it's unlikely that we'll ever be
able to say this is definitely the way
it happened because we don't we can't
witness it it was it happened so long
ago
um but but
[Music]
i think that's a different order of
difficulty it's much easier that's a
much easier problem
than the hard problem of consciousness
before we move on to the heart problem
of consciousness so
don't even try to move on to the hard
problem
oh i definitely have some questions i
want to ask you around some of the
prevailing theories
even if you just say they're ridiculous
but uh before we do that so in the book
you talk about i didn't realize you used
to code
like literally code for computers and so
you have deep insights into just how
much like code dna really is
give us a quick explanation because
until i heard you talk about it i knew
that you could like write
a book in dna which i still find utterly
startling
but what is code
and why is dna just like it
well
um
in computers as you know um it's all
binary and in dna it's quaternary
otherwise it's pretty much the same
okay so really fast let's define that so
binary for computers for people that
don't know zeros and ones that's it
everything
comes up from that everything is zeros
and ones and so in in some computers
it it might be
plus four volts and zero volts or it
might be minus four and zero it could be
and it doesn't matter what it is as long
as it's two different different states
and those states
are represented mathematically as zeros
and ones
and then you have
built upon that
you have
machine codes where various um
combinations it might be um
bytes that would be eight eight bits
of z eight eight zeros and ones would
might represent one kind of
of um
coded instruction to the computer like
add or
move
move this
number to
to this place
and
at machine code level what you're doing
is
i'd
forgive me if you know all this
no please speak to the audience if
nothing else um
when you're writing machine code you're
you're you're you're writing
pretty close to the bottom level to the
to the level where where where you've
got um bytes of say eight eight bits of
information or 12 bits of information
something like that and the and the
um
the
binary
digits either represent instructions or
they represent numbers
uh and um so instructions operate upon
upon numbers so you're you're writing
code
at a level which is very close to the
binary you don't actually type not one
one one one one what what your type is
um it might be three letter code
codes which which
translate directly into
a
a binary number
um
and then built on top of that
you then have higher level languages
which are closer to
human language closer to english or
human 77 human language
um and
um they look like
instructions like um
loop a hundred times and as you do so
call this subroutine which calls this
subroutine which which um measures does
something rather um so you're writing in
a language
uh like c or or or algol or fortran or
cobol or what lots of different
languages python um
which get translated into a binary form
by a either either a compiler or an
interpreter which is two different ways
in which that translation can can take
place
so you you're writing in something akin
to the way humans think
uh and um that gets translated into the
binary form for the computer to
to operate well dna um
is quaternary not binary so instead
having nots and ones you have a t c and
g
um the the machine code level
um it's it's triplets which get
translated into
um
into um
instructions for making for for
stringing together amino acids which
make which make proteins
um and proteins
in terms of what matters are enzymes
which are catalysts
which
catalyze chemical reactions in the cell
or in the in the body
and
um
the
embryonic development the embryological
processes that give rise to development
are
things like
sheets of cells
coiling up invaginating
um spreading around
moving around in the in the embryo
in ways which are
ultimately determined by dna slightly
more proximally determined by
proteins acting as enzymes which speed
up chemical reactions
particular chemical reactions rather
than others
and so um
the orchestration
of the embryonic development is done by
enzymes proteins
being called into action being called
into existence indeed in the cell at
strategic times during embryonic
development
and that orchestration is achieved
by
dna
so natural selection
which works on
changing the frequencies with which
some genes some strings of dna exist in
the population relative to others
that has the immediate effect of
changing which proteins get synthesized
in
which cells when which has a slightly
more distant effect of changing the
processes of embryonic development which
has an even more distant effect of
changing the way the animal actually is
and behaves and looks and and
so the dna
in this
rather long
cascade of causal influences starting
with proteins and going on through
embryology
influences the shape of the animal and
the behavior of the animal the form of
the animal
which
influences whether the animal survives
whether the animal reproduces
and that influences whether the genes
which made the animal do that
survive in the gene pool or not
so genes survive in the gene pool by
virtue
of their effects on embryology
which has the effect of making animals
which have the effect of
causing the genes to survive or not
survive depending upon whether the
animal dies or lives before it manages
to
reproduce
so
that's
what causes some genes to survive in
other genes not to survive and that is
natural selection
okay so this is so fascinating
is is the only thing that dna does
tell the body
what proteins to produce and when
well
that's the main important thing it does
but it also
changes the
um it influences what other genes do
so there's a there's a
kind of cascade of control
but by do does it always come down to
the the creation of a protein
um
yes i think it does but but um but what
what that protein might do
[Music]
is is cause
some genes to be to be some other genes
to get turned on so you could have a
kind of hierarchy of control of genes
controlled by other genes controlled by
other genes
so i and we will definitely get to that
but this is so fascinating in terms of
going back to my central thesis in life
understanding you're having a biological
experience we talked about this in the
first interview for me once i can
imagine it
i don't know i i can somehow uh insert
my conscious mind into that thing
because it it is no longer mystical it
is something i can picture and when i
can picture it i feel like i have a
certain level of ability to orchestrate
we'll set that aside but that's why i'm
going to press on this because i think
it's so useful
so all right my dna
is
telling some sort of compiler which i
think is rna right the rna reads the dna
and like helps somehow orchestrate this
i don't want to get lost in the weeds
but
for anybody paying close attention
okay so my dna is a set of instructions
like computer code and what it's saying
is hey create this protein at this point
because that protein is going to go do
something it could be acting as an
enzyme to speed up a chemical reaction
as you said
and all of those things it's it
as it layers and stacks like you were
talking about with the subroutines
within a computer as it layers and
stacks it becomes you it becomes me it
becomes all of us so we get sort of the
end state level of complexity from that
we have
uh consciousness that uh the the krebs
cycle works you know that we're moving
along the electron transport chain
appropriately i mean it is just
immeasurably complicated
but it starts with this really really
basic thing which is create this protein
at this time
now now i want to get into
genes so
when we think about dna
is our genes
a snippet of that code that is a
complicated string of create this
protein at this time so basically
subroutines that it calls and it's
literally a dislike can i go in and cut
out that chunk of dna and go this is a
gene
yes you can
um it would be a length of dna
uh which was which would code for one
polypeptide chain with one one one
protein chain um
there's nothing
obvious
if you look along the length of a
chromosome just a huge great long string
of dna
that there isn't a kind of obvious
divide
between where one gene ends the next one
begins
um
there are
punctuation marks which are just other
other three-letter codes so so
not not only are there
codes for the 20 amino acids
um there's also a stop sign there's also
a full stop
um
which is um just looks like any other
codon any other triplet
um there are by the way um i'm going to
sneeze
excuse me
um
there are um
lengths of dna which are
um called introns
which are which is sitting in between
exons which are actually expressed
the introns are not expressed
so they're
rubbish they're they're not they're not
doing anything but they're just there
um
i thought it's a bit like um on a hard
disk of a computer there are bits of
the discs which aren't doing anything
and and
um
the
uh the
what looks like a coherent
um
chapter of a book you're writing for
example
it appears to be all in one place
because you can read it
as a
single
tract of text actually it's fragments
dotted around the hard disk of the
computer with signals to say now go to
this bit now go to this bit and i'll go
to this bit and string it together so
the genome is a bit is a little bit like
that
um where
the where the the introns are the kind
of gaps of meaningless rubbish between
the exons which are um
which are um
expressed
and there are lots of
old genes lying around
um which used to do something useful but
aren't used anymore being kind of shut
off
which by the way is a big problem for
creationists because
it's hard to imagine why the creator
would
litter the genome with
these
genes that once did something and you
can see what they once did but they know
they no longer do
really give me an example
well um
we have a very inferior sense of smell
compared to dogs for example
but we still have many of the genes for
smelling things that we can no longer
smell they've just been
set aside they've been sidelined
like what
well
i i don't know specifically and i
suppose maybe
champion wine tasters may have mentioned
if you turn on i don't know about that
that's so interesting i didn't know that
that was true so
could you go in and turn them back on
wouldn't that be lovely i mean i i'd
like to think you could i don't think
it's ever been done
[Music]
whoa
so when we get into crispr cast 9 for
anybody
that doesn't know what that is it's
basically using a virus if i'm not
mistaken getting it to go in and
actually edit out pieces of
um dna and either then just glue them
back together or replace it with itself
i can't remember
but it's going in and changing our genes
is
is it doing that is it turning on old
things is it
or can we insert whatever code we want
yes i mean i think the the way the
future is that it it will be in
principle possible to uh do all kinds of
insertions of that sort
and uh you probably know that it's being
done in animals and plants um
inserting
um antifreeze
genes
um
from
arctic
fishes um
and in vegetables so they don't perish
because i mean it it's it's a remarkable
fact that that
the molecular genetics revolution has
brought about brought into our
consciousness that
dna is just
dna's dna it's the same the whole
of the living kingdom's over
and so in principle you can pick up a
gene it's just like a
sub routine for
computing square roots or something you
just could just borrow it
like you can you can borrow a square
root subroutine and stick it in any
program you like and it'll do its job
um and
so genes are in principle like that
and can be transplanted
and they will do whatever it is they're
supposed to do
uh
in in another creature
that that is insane uh
i did you say within reason
well yes i i um i mean
they find themselves in a foreign
genetic environment and so they may not
do what what you hope they'll do but but
they often do
i don't know that this is true but i
remember hearing that people were
experimenting with things like cats that
glow in the dark because there are
have they actually done that yes
i forget where the gene comes from maybe
a jellyfish or something like that
that's yeah what i think yeah yes
that's insane so it's legal or people
are doing that
just uh in secret levels they're not
legal in humans
um
as to whether it's legal in cats i guess
that might depend on which country
you're in
wow i mean that this really becomes this
sort of crazy wild west scenario um i
haven't forgot about the hard problem of
consciousness but this does remind me so
i know at one point you were writing a
science fiction book which i hear you
have shelved
but the the core thesis is so
interesting that i do want to put myself
in the cacophony of voices asking you to
finish it
um
but if you don't mind walking people
through sort of what the core idea was
behind the book because it it feels sort
of tied to this
yes
um
i'm not the only person who's thought of
doing this my idea was to have a a
scientist
my heroine
who uh
wanted to
revive
um a prehistoric
species of human
um
originally she wanted to revive
australopithecus lucy
but she just persuaded to switch to homo
erectus um
and um
so her method
was in in my story i've written about
six chapters of it um
her method was to
um what she called triangulate take
uh human genome and which is known and
the chimp genome which which is known
and
reconstruct
the common ancestor by triangulating
back from
these two modern genomes and trying to
work out what the
ancestor could have been which gave rise
to both these two modern
genomes
and then having got the common ancestor
then split the difference between that
common ancestor and modern humans
and reconstruct the genome of an
australopithecine
that the fossil human lived about three
million years ago in africa
and then um put that into a woman in she
was going to be be that woman i mean she
she just became so dedicated so so um
absorbed in the program that she
insisted on being the
woman in into whom the
um
[Music]
cloned oscillopythocyte
um egg
uh what was was um zygote was implanted
and then the rest of the book was going
to be which i never got around to
writing it was going to be um
the social psychological political
problems faced by this woman giving
birth to
a
prehistoric long extinct
homilyn
um and all the political religious
debates and the fury that would erupt
around her and things like that but i
never got
that was going to be a part two of the
book and i never got as far as part two
well hopefully you will get to that at
some point i forget who the um the
science fiction writer was that said the
following quote but i think this is
brilliant our job as science fiction
writers is not to imagine the car it's
to imagine the traffic jam
and i've just always found oh god it's
so good and it's so true it's like
you're you're touching on you know these
ideas of morality and what would it mean
and like putting us in a position where
we have to make decisions it's it to me
in fact your book raises the exact same
kinds of questions they're not the same
questions but the same kinds of
questions that we have to answer as we
create autonomous vehicles because they
will have the ability to make a decision
between killing somebody here or risking
the driver's life and so you actually
have to program
that is it better to kill the pedestrian
or to risk the driver like where does
the obligation lie i mean it's
yes it's so fascinating as you know
moral philosophers have this so-called
trolley problem where they where they
it's a whole family of problems where
you have the the dilemma of whether to
pull the lever that caught that
moves the trolley so that it kills
one person as opposed to killing five
people and
um you know on the face of it it seems
that the moral thing to do is to pull
the lever so it kills the one person but
we you'd actually murder that one person
you only kill that one person and then
another version of it is that um the
trolley is
going down the track is about to kill
people and there's a very fat man
um sitting on a bridge above the track
and if you push him off that's the only
way you can stop this trolley from
killing those people and
almost everybody shies away from
saying yes they will push the fat man
off off the bridge
it's different from somehow it's
different from the earlier dilemma of
um putting the lever and killing the one
rather than than five
um
because by pushing the fat man off
you're actually using him
as the
obstacle
um but now you've pointed out that with
autonomously driving cars
this is no longer an academic
dilemma for moral philosophers is it
actually an engineering dilemma you have
to decide how to program your autonomous
car
when when it's faced with a decision
shall i
swerve
to avoid the old lady
on the on the road crossing if by doing
so i kill the child or or if i if i vice
versa what if one of the people is
beethoven well
not beethoven but some modern equivalent
to beethoven um
and um these are the the stuff the
stocking trade of moral philosophy which
has suddenly come
to practical
fruition
in the design the programming
of of
self-driving cars
yes and then we're also going to see
similar things there was a doctor in
china i believe that
cloned
two girls
wait i might be conflating two things
there was definitely a doctor again i
believe it was in china that edited the
genes of two twins
if i remember the story correctly he was
trying to give them uh
an increased resilience against hiv
but i guess there's also a knock on that
it may also increase their intelligence
and so then it becomes a question like
should you be able to edit that i mean
it would be great for if you step back
and take a thousand year view if we
could make humans exponentially more
intelligent uh that to me seems like a
good thing but there will inevitably be
just massive turmoil in the short term
and so it becomes a question of
do we i mean at that point we certainly
are playing god like but what if it's a
gene like a single gene mutation that
gives them a debilitating and painful
disease okay everybody's going to agree
that you go in and fix that
so oh man it gets
really interesting aren't they yes
i i think i mean as you say
most people would accept that if there's
a if there's a deleterious gene
um you you
say you were using
um ivf in vitro fertilization
where um you you have in your petri dish
you have
um say 10 um fertilized eggs
and you know
that um half of them on average
will have
hemophilia
well at present what you do is is uh
when you're doing ivf what that what the
doctor does is to pick
one of these
zygotes at random
and implants them back in the woman
um
but uh you could do it non-randomly you
could uh
investigate you can you can tell but
when these things have reached the eight
cell stage you can remove one of those
eight cells
and test it
for for exa for its genes and if you
could test it for say hemophilia
then it would seem to be
an obvious thing
to instead of choosing a zygote at
random
choose one of the 50
that does not have
hemophilia
uh and and yet there are some people who
would object to that
and say it was playing god
uh and you should let nature take its
course
etc
um
well
most people probably would would accept
that kind of
um
selective
um choosing to to avoid hemophilia but
if instead you could test whether
um
genes for i don't know being a brilliant
musician
or a brilliant mathematician
whether you could choose non-randomly
from these zygotes
um choose one that that
predisposes the baby to be born
as a musical genius another mozart well
not in mozart but just just say a a good
music musician um
then
why wouldn't you do it but there are
many people who draw the line that they
say is okay it's okay to select against
hemophilia it is not okay
to select
uh these eggs in favor of
a desired characteristic like
intelligence or musical ability
yeah or even good looks so they're i
don't know how accurate it is but i've
seen
uh people reporting that you can now
scan somebody's dna and get
a rough estimation it looks like you're
looking at them through sort of lightly
frosted glass but you get a sense like
you can see sort of the shape of the
face and you know the color of the hair
and stuff it's really quite interesting
and they show here's what the image we
got from their dna and then here's what
they actually look like and
it it's if that's what we're getting
already it's very eerie in terms of how
well we'll talk can you give me a
reference to that
yeah i'll have to send it to you i have
to re-look it up uh this was something i
saw a couple years ago and just thought
whoa
uh this could go
this could get very interesting very
fast
i mean i i'm i'm skeptical but yeah
let's see i i certainly don't know but
it was uh
it seems like it would be plausible the
only catch is how much of your
nutrition um early encountering
parasites things like that would alter
something like that that is i suppose a
big question but theoretically you
should be able to i mean the information
is there right yes it's entirely
plausible and that that
the
facial features would be included in
deeds of course of course they are
what i what i'm skeptical about is
whether yet technology
that's another question you can read it
no doubt
all right so
i want to talk really fast about the
hard problem of consciousness even if
again just to get your
uh take that it's all baloney i had
never heard of pan psychism before
um
and
it is just quickly the theory that
basically consciousness is sort of the
bottom layer it's everywhere it's in
rocks it's
in you know the very fabric of the
universe um
that's people i think saying i just
can't get to the point where you add
another brain cell and suddenly you're
conscious and so if it isn't a sort of
progressive stacking that gets you there
then it would by their estimation need
to be sort of ever present the first
time i heard it
it didn't seem like there was really
anybody talking about it or that it was
very serious
it has continued to
gain steam
and i'm just curious what if you had to
guess at where we're going to end up is
it something like that is it something
entirely different
i think it's bollocks
[Laughter]
i think um
it will be i mean consciousness is will
be a manifestation of
very large numbers of
neurons
computational units of one sort or
another
um
interacting with each other
um the idea that
every particle in the universe has a
minute
moat of consciousness
seems to me to be complete rubbish
um and um i
i would be hugely surprised if there
were any
uh
decent evidence for that kind of thing
yeah it's one of you talk a lot about
how you know look physics is just hard
to understand a lot of people that are
even physicists say that there are you
know parts of physics that they just
can't wrap their head around that's how
i feel about this about the hard problem
of consciousness i just can't i don't
know what that would mean
because
we
what we think of as consciousness like
being aware that you're having an
experience that red is a thing that it
has qualities okay so if that's
consciousness
i know that i can damage that just by
damaging your brain
and so but like there are a lot of smart
people that just are not compelled by
that
and that's where
yeah i don't know something breaks down
where i can no longer understand and and
i am perfectly willing to accept that
i'm just not bright enough but i don't
understand how then the defense
understands it
i mean
that's that's not unusual
um
but i don't think i don't think it helps
to to to say that the whole universe is
conscious or or or every grain of sand
is conscious or every atom is conscious
or anything like that i think it's it's
got to be a manifestation of
great complexity
uh of interacting units
no one of which is is conscious in
itself but when you put them together
uh they consciousness emerges
from the interactions among them
that's certainly what it seems like to
me i will say i uh yeah i don't know i
can't reach beyond it my intellect
unfortunately no no no no nobody can
yeah it's a it'll it'll be very
interesting to see if and when any sort
of new breakthroughs happen on that it's
a fascinating problem but uh yeah i i
don't see any end in sight for that one
i want to ask you of all people
about
what's happening to
culture in the age of hyper connectivity
with the idea of memes
so for those who don't know you were the
one that popularized this idea of memes
which is now like i mean we talk about
culture as being meme culture
one a quick definition of a meme
do you think it's being used accurately
when people say that this is a meme
culture and then what happens when ideas
are able to spread globally so rapidly
through memes as they're defined now
well
um
a meme isn't is is the cultural analog
of a gene
so just as um
uh
evolution by natural selection is a
matter of the differential survival of
genes which are self-replicating
entities
and they're they're very high fidelity
self-replicating entities and they
influence their own survival in the gene
pool in the ways that we talked about
earlier
culture
cultural evolution is a real phenomenon
it really looks like evolution it really
has the same progressive qualities as
evolution does
um
and um
i wanted to
end the selfish gene but my book
self-esteem by saying that although this
the whole of the rest of this book has
been
an advocacy of
the gene as the replicator which
underlies evolution
any replicator would could do the job
anything that is self-replicating
with occasional mistakes occasional
errors and replication could do the job
and i pointed out that
uh on other planets in the universe
um
which have evolved life there has to be
some equivalent of dna but it may not be
d and probably more certainly isn't dna
but it will have the same property of
self replication with occasional error
um well
memes are that thing
in human culture
they are anything that is
copied from one brain to another
it might be a tune it might be a closed
fashion it might be an accent of speech
um
anything that is copied is potentially
well it is a replicator
and potentially it might be a unit of
selection
if there is selective survival in the
mean pool of
some memes rather than
others
and trivially this is true of things
like catchy tunes we call them catchy
that means they are
self-replicating in a they they get not
only they replicate when you you hear a
tune whistle you and you whistle it as
well if it's a good tune it gets copied
and passed around
um
so
it's it's a hypothesis that
cultural replicators might be units of
darwinian selection in the same kind of
way as
genes are in which case
memes are evolutionarily
interesting
the internet
opens up
a whole new opportunity a whole new
ecosystem
in which
memes could
flourish
and
a whole new
environment in which research on memes
could take place you could you could
use the
computer techniques looking at the
internet to study
the
um propagation the survival value
of
alternative
means and presumably
advertisers market researchers people
who are trying to to um work out how
best to
influence us and persuade us to buy
their product rather than the revival
product a rival product or persuade us
to vote for this candidate rather than
that candidate
uh
um
could benefit from doing memetic
research and
studying what it is that makes
certain ideas
go viral as we say
and and i introduced the idea of
the meme as a virus of the mind
um something that goes viral is a
successful
meme
um and
um the the whole aim of it of a
advertising agency is to try to find
ways to make their
advertisements go viral to sell their
product
um so
it it is an and it starts out as an
analog of a gene
it then becomes evolutionarily
interesting in so far as natural
selection of a kind not darwinian not
not genetic selection but
a kind of darwinian selection operates
within
within culture
now so when i look at this i am
the speed of replication seems to be a
big uh component of this in fact i'm
gonna
i will describe meme as i understand it
and i'm curious to get your take if you
think these are the right layman's terms
to use so
memes require a simplification of an
idea
memes require that the
and now i'm talking specifically like
what we call internet memes so
simplification of an idea an idea that
can be replicated with new context over
and over and over
and then
it
it has a lock and key effect
to something in the brain so that i'm
either i have a receptive nature to the
emotion that it evokes
um that's right i think that's the right
way to say it so take for instance
you've got there's um
a meme going around where it's like
these four panels it's taken from one of
the star wars films where a young anakin
is talking to
uh
uh princess amidala
and it shows he's you know got some like
vague emotion on his face and then she's
smiling in response and then the third
panel is he's leaning in like with this
sort of mischievous grin and then in the
fourth panel she's serious and so you
layer on top of that he says um
something like
you know uh i'm gonna build
a drone army and she goes oh
that's amazing for good and then he has
the wicked smile and then she says for
good right with the like concern on her
face and do people insert like anything
into that like four sort of beat
moment and so it could be
a restaurant could use it about we're
launching a chicken sandwich you know
for good right or it's spicy right i
mean just like over and over and over
and over and over and so
what's interesting is that they will
catch on because they lock into
something it's a simple idea there's
this emotional resonance and it can be
recontextualized over and over and over
and so it will go fast and it will burn
through the culture and convey this idea
really really quickly of that in this
the exact case that i'm using of the
flip right so i'm doing something for
the right reasons right and so you get
that whatever that reversal is
over and over and over and then it will
burn out and it'll be gone but it will
have
sent that idea of the reversal
throughout culture for
three to four weeks whatever you know
sort of the timeline is and it [ __ ]
travels so fast and it
when i think about how that lets us
meme
an idea whether it's the banking
institution cryptocurrency whatever
we're able to get these these big ideas
simplified and transmit them very very
quickly
does that make you one does that feel
like the right understanding yes it's in
one way it's more complicated because to
me a meme could be much simpler than
that it could just be i mean what you're
talking about is is where the same
template
is used to convey different messages in
different different contexts and that's
a very sophisticated idea
um which
is not necessary to the idea of the meme
which just simply spreads
so it could just just be a
a particular
picture which spreads because it's funny
a particular um joke that spreads
because because it's funny um a
particular tune that spreads because
it's catchy um this additional point
you've just made where the four panels
are used to convey different messages so
it's a kind of
um
vehicle in which you can graft your your
message
um a bit like there's another one which
is a which is a picture um
um
hitler using is losing his temper
and he's talking german
and so it is assumed that the internet
users don't speak german and says and so
the subtitles
are then
varied
and the
the the
the clip is not really hitler as an
actor playing hitler um that the the
clip of this act of playing hitler
losing his temper in the general's bit
he's talking to getting
scared
um
has been has been it transmits itself
again with a different set of subtitles
there's even one title with with me
being they've been being
um
that's a more sophisticated idea that
that's not necessary to the idea of of
of a meme spreading it's a it's it's a
sophisticated idea in which the
um
there's a there's a there's a template
on which other meanings are grafted
it's a lovely thought i haven't thought
of it like that way
it's really fascinating i think that the
idea of what i'm calling lock and key
which i think is very much the
whole definition for you of a meme it's
something that whether it's the
catchiness of a tune or the funniness of
a joke whatever it is that thing that
gets people to want to replicate it to
put it out there
um
when we had to slowly tell those ideas
and they spread from one town to the
next you know slowly over months or
years
um
culture sort of moved in an ebb and flow
that felt a little more predictable
now i feel like those ideas sweep
through culture like a raging inferno
and can
then create all these little
fractionated groups
for instance
the there's a whole documentary on the
flat earth's flat earth society and
never in a million years could you have
convinced me that that
meme
would gain traction and yet it has in
watching the documentary i'm like oh my
god like it is
startling
yes it is
in medieval times there were
um
epidemics of uh strange ideas
there was dancing mania that
that that spread
um
then you have things like um
witch hunts uh um
salem witch trials and and just
spreading of the idea of searching for
witches so
that there were
um spreadable memes in this case evil
one because which helps e an evil mean
um
the internet just speeds the process up
as you've said dramatically
yeah it's crazy all right well then as
we uh wrap up
what is a meme you'd like to leave
people with what's an idea that you want
to spread
i don't like really to think of it as a
single meme but but
i things like
critical thinking it insisting on
evidence i i would love to find ways in
which
an insistence on only believing what
that for which there is evidence could
be spread virally
and it's not obvious why it's not it's
not like
a catchy tune
um it's it's more difficult than that
but um
i i would like to find ways in which
that could be
is spread in the nicest possible way i
mean spread because it's it's a good
meme and there's no there's no reason
why meme should be should be good
i'm with you on that well your work
takes leaps and bounds towards that they
may be more complex than your average
meme but they certainly are just full of
amazing information where can people
follow you where can they get the latest
book all your other books
uh well um
books to furniture life you've mentioned
and that is published in america i think
any day now um you must have been do you
you have a copy don't you
i got a pdf copy so i didn't get a
physical look book itself i don't know
unfortunately okay
i'm sorry about that you should have um
they should have sent you one
um i believe it's coming i believe it's
published in america on the 1st of
september which is what two days time
yeah so by the time this comes out it'll
be out
yes good
um
my next book is called flights of
fantasy and that's coming out in britain
on the 1st of november
oh that is a book for young people about
flying about ways of defying gravity
uh in animals to say insects bats
pterosaurs and birds and in humans in
human technology
so it's all about the different ways in
which
animals including us get off the ground
in in defiance of gravity
it's pretty extraordinary that you've
written two books that close to each
other that is uh well done in your life
of course is an anthology of past
writings
uh which which makes a bit easier
um
and was put together by the way with
julian summerscales he's a wonderful
editor and and
he's woven it into different sections
very very successfully i like to think
um but it is
um
past writings past book reviews forwards
to books afterwards to books that kind
of thing also in in
interviews between me and there's other
people like stephen pinker like neil
degrasse tyson
christopher hitchens matt ridley
um
lawrence krauss
so that's an anthology flies to
flight to fancy is is written
with the with an illustrator yarn on
lens over who's a very talented artist
um and it's a very heavily illustrated
book for the benefit of
of young people
teenagers the young young adult market
i love it
richard thank you so much for taking the
time to be here and for all of your
incredible works they really are just
awe-inspiring in their breath it is uh
really the mark of of a
extraordinary mind the number of things
you've pursued and put down on paper so
thank you so much for that
guys speaking of things that will expand
your mind if you haven't already be sure
to subscribe and until next time my
friends be legendary take care
realistic assessment of
where the lions are where the waterhole
is all that kind of thing in our
ancestral past today i think it's
perhaps even more important where we're
actually assailed by
uh political leaders who are
who believe in alternative truth