mainstays mid century modern bedroom collection

[music playing] richard dawkins:thank you very much. some of my titles may be good. i'm quite pleased with"the blind watchmaker," as ray kurtzweil has said. "the selfish gene"is not a bad title. but it's unfortunatelybeen rather widely read by title only. various critics have omittedto read the rather substantial

footnote, which isthe book itself. this new book, "anappetite for wonder," the subtitle is "themaking of a scientist," it is a memoir of thefirst half of my life, up to the age of 35,and it culminates in the writing of"the selfish gene." so there's going to be avolume two, in two year's time. it was all supposed tohave been one volume. but i kind of lost abit of stamina halfway

through and decided i needed abit of positive reinforcement. so i asked the publisherif i could split it in half and produce it in two volumes. and so it is actually arather natural breakpoint. "the selfish gene" was a fairlynatural breakpoint in my life. so i'm going to go throughwith a set of readings, kind of strung togetherwith a bit of talk. the book begins withancestors, and goes on to my childhood,and school days.

and i got one ortwo little anecdotes from school days, whichmight be vaguely amusing. i was sent to boarding schoolsof a rather british kind and rather young actually. i was first sentto boarding school at the age of seven,which is a bit too young to be sent away to school. i used to have fantasiesthat the matron would turn into my mother.

and i thought that since bothof them had dark, curly hair, it wouldn't take too much ofa miracle to achieve that. so i'm going to read alittle bit about school days. i was an exceptionally untidyand disorganized little boy in my early years. my first school reportsdwelt insistently on the theme of ink. headmaster's report-- hehas produced some good work and well deserves his prize.

a very inky littleboy at present, which is apt to spoil his work. latin-- he has madesteady progress. but unfortunatelywhen using ink, his written workbecomes very untidy. mathematics-- heworks very well. but i am not alwaysable to read his work. he must learn that ink is forwriting, not washing purposes. ms. benson, my elderlyfrench teacher,

somehow managed toomit the ink leitmotif. but even her report hada sting in the tale. french-- plenty of ability,good pronunciation, and a wonderful facilityin escaping work. i then went on to anotherschool, a secondary school, which was rather morespartan in some ways. and i went through areligious phase, which i then abandoned, and thenbecame rather rebellious. and with a couple offriends, we refused

to kneel down in chapel. and so everybody else waskneeling down with bowed heads and we were sitting upright,like islands of rebellion. it being an anglican school,they were very decent and didn't take it out on us. they didn't indoctrinateor punish us in any way, which i thinkis a nice advertisement for the anglican church. i hate to think whatmight have happened

if we'd been to a schoolrun by a rival sect. my housemaster,mr. ling, did make sort of an effort to reform me. i'm going to reada little bit here. i've only recently learned thatmy housemaster, peter ling, actually a nice man, ifrather too conformist, telephoned [? johan ?]thomas, my zoology master, to voice his concern about me. in a recent letterto me, mr. thomas

reported that he warnedmr. ling that quote, "requiring someone like youto attend chapel twice a day on sunday was doingyou positive harm." the phone went downwithout comment. mr. ling alsosummoned my parents for a heart-to-hearttalk over tea-- that's the way we dothings in england-- about my rebelliousbehavior in chapel. i knew nothing of thisat the time and my mother

has only just toldme of the incident. mr. ling asked my parentsto try to persuade me to change my ways. my father said, approximately,by my mother's recollection, it's not our business tocontrol him in that sort of way. that's kind of thingis your problem. and i'm afraid i mustdecline your request. my parents' attitudeto the whole affair with that it wasn't important.

mr. ling, as i said, wasin his way a decent man. a contemporary and friendof mine in the same house recently told me thefollowing nice story. he was illicitly up in adormitory during the day, kissing one of the house maids. the pair panicked when they hada heavy tread on the stairs. and my friend hastilybundled the young woman up onto a window silland drew the curtains to hide her standing form.

mr. ling came intothe room and must have noticed that onlyone of the three windows had the curtains drawn. even worse, my friendnoticed, to his horror, that the girl's feetwere clearly visible, protruding under the curtain. he firmly believedthat mr. ling must have realized what was going on,but pretended not to, perhaps on boys will be boys grounds.

what are you doing up here inthe dormitory at this hour? just came up tochange my socks, sir. oh, well hurry on down. good call on mr. ling's part. that boy went onto become probably the most successfulalumnus of his generation, the mighty chiefexecutive officer of one of the largestinternational corporations in the world and a generousbenefactor of the school,

endowing, among other things,the peter ling fellowship. i don't mention thename in the book. but i can divulge to youthat that boy was sir howard stringer, who became the head ofthe sony corporation, the only non-japanese to do so. i then went on tooxford, which was i think the turningpoint in my life really. it was wonderful to beeducated to become a scholar and to think,rather than educated

to learn about whatwas in textbooks. and so i think a tremendouslot to the oxford experience. and in particular tovarious mentors at oxford and especially one,michael cullen, who was the numbertwo to niko tinbergen, the great ethologist,animal behaviorist, who later won the nobel prize. niko tinbergen was myofficial research supervisor as a graduate student,but mike cullen

was the one who reallylooked after me. and i want to readto you-- i hope i didn't breakdown when i do so. i occasionally chokeup a bit-- the eulogy that i wrote for himhis at his funeral, in one of the oxfordcollege chapels. he did not publishmany papers himself. yet he worked prodigiously hard,both in teaching and research. he was probably themost sought after tutor

in the entirezoology department. the rest of his time--he was always in a hurry and worked a hugely longday-- was devoted to research, but seldom his own research. everybody who knew him hasthe same story to tell. all the obituaries told itin revealingly similar terms. you would have a problemwith your research. you knew exactlywhere to go for help and there he would be for you.

i see the scene as yesterday,the lunchtime conversation in the kitchen, the wiry, boyishfigure in the red sweater, slightly hunched likea spring wound up, with intenseintellectual energy, sometimes rocking back andforth with concentration. the deeply intelligenteyes, understanding what you meant evenbefore the words came out. the back of the envelope to aidexplanation, the occasionally skeptical, quizzicaltilt to the eyebrows,

under the untidy hair. then he would have to rush off. he always rushedeverywhere and disappeared. but next morning, theanswer to your problem would arrive, in mike's small,distinctive handwriting, two pages, often somealgebra, diagrams, a key referenceto the literature, sometimes an apt verseof his own composition, a fragment of latin or classicalgreek, always encouragement.

we were grateful, butnot grateful enough. if we had thoughtabout it, we would have realized he musthave been working on that mathematical modelof my research all evening. and it isn't only for mefor whom he does this, everybody in the researchgroup gets the same treatment, and not just his own students. i was officially niko'sstudent, not mike's. mike took me on,without payment and

without official recognitionwhen my research became more mathematical thanniko could handle. when the time came tome to write my thesis, it was my mike cullen whoread it, criticized it, helped me polish every line. and all this while hewas doing the same thing for his own, official students. when, we all shouldhave wondered, does he get time forordinary family life?

when does he get timefor his own research? no wonder he so seldompublished anything. no wonder he never wrotehis long awaited book on animal communication. in truth, he shouldhave been joint author of just about every one ofthe hundreds of papers that came out of that research groupduring that golden period. in fact, his name appearson virtually none of them, except in theacknowledgement section.

the worldly successof scientists is charged forpromotion or honors by their published papers. mike did not ratehighly on this index. but if he had consented toadd his name to his students' publications as readily asmodern supervisors insist on putting their names on papersto which they contribute much less, mike would have beena conventionally successful scientist, lauded withconventional honors.

as it is, he was a brilliantlysuccessful scientist, in a far deeper and truer sense. and i think we know which kindof scientist we really admire. oxford sadly losthim to australia. years later in melbourne,at a party for me as visiting lecturer, i wasstanding, probably rather stiffly, with adrink in my hand. suddenly, a familiarfigure shot into the room, in a hurry as ever.

the rest of us were in suits,but not this familiar figure. the years vanished away. everything was the same. though he must been wellinto his 60s by then, he seemed stillto be in his 30s, the glow of boyish enthusiasm,even the red sweater. next day, he droveme to the coast to see his beloved penguins,stopping on the way to look at giant australianearthworms, many feet long.

we tired the sun with talking. not, i think, about oldtimes and old friends, and certainly notabout ambition, grant getting, andpapers in "nature." but about new scienceand new ideas. it was a perfect day,the last day i saw him. we may know other scientistsas intelligent as mike cullen, though not many. we may know other scientistswho were as generous in support,

though vanishing few. but i declare that we have nonobody who had so much to give, combined with so muchgenerosity in giving it. from oxford, i movedon to berkeley, where i spent twoyears as a very junior assistantprofessor, who loved it. but was then luredback to oxford, where i became auniversity lecturer and eventually wrote"the selfish gene,"

after quite a whilethere at oxford. throughout the book, itried to put, in addition to just stories about mylife and the people i knew, i tried to put littleasides, perhaps little scientific thoughts. and i want now toread a couple of them. they really are asides. they could have comeanywhere, almost. the first is about--actually the first two--

are about the luck that weall have in being here at all. and i introduce it inthe very first part of the book, where i'mtalking about my ancestors, including one clinton georgeaugustus dawkins, 1808 to '71. he was the britishconsul in venice and he was there duringthe war against austria. i have a cannonballin my possession, sitting on a plinth, bearing aninscription on a brass plate. i don't know who's isthe authorial voice

and i don't knowhow reliable it is. but for what it is worth,here is my translation from french, then thelanguage of diplomacy. one night, when he wasin bed, a cannonball penetrated the bed coversand passed between his legs, but happily did him no morethan superficial damage. this narrow escape of myancestor's vital parts took place before hewas to put them to use. and it is tempting toattribute my own existence

to a stroke of ballistic luck. a few inches closer to the forkof shakespeare's radish and-- but actually, myexistence, and yours, and the postman's, hangs froma far narrower thread of luck than that. we owe it to the precise timingand placing of everything that ever happened sincethe universe began. the incident of a cannonballis only a dramatic example of a much moregeneral phenomenon.

as i put it before,if the second dinosaur to the left of the tall cycadtree had not happened to sneeze and thereby failed to catch thetiny shrew-like ancestor of all the mammals, we wouldnone of us be here. we all can regard ourselvesas exquisitely improbable. but here, in a triumphof hindsight, we are. and that theme of being luckyto be here i come back to in the very last chapter, whichis called "looking back along the path," in which itried to talk about all

the different thingsi described in my life and say what wouldhave happened if they had been a bitdifferent, if things had happened differently? what if aloisschicklgruber had happened to sneeze at aparticular moment, rather than some otherparticular moment during any year before mid-1888,when his son, adolf hitler, was conceived?

you may know that hitler'sreal surname was schicklgruber. heil schicklgruber doesn'thave the same ring, does it? obviously, i havenot the faintest idea of the exact sequenceof events involved. and there are surelyno historical records of herr schicklgruber'ssternutations, but i'm confident that achange as trivial as a sneeze, in say 1858, would have beenmore than enough to alter the course of history.

the evil omen spermthat engendered adolf hitler was oneof countless billions produced duringhis father's life. and the same goes for histwo grandfathers, four great grandfathers,and so on back. it is not only plausible,but i think certain, that a sneeze many yearsbefore hitler's conception would have had knock-oneffects sufficient to derail the trivial circumstance thatone particular sperm, that one

particular egg, therebychanging the entire course of the 20th century,including my existence. of course, i'm not denying thatsomething like the second world war might well have happenedeven without hitler. nor am i saying that hitler'sevil madness was inevitably ordained by his genes. with a differentupbringing, hitler might have turned out good,or at least uninfluential. but certainly, hisvery existence,

and the war as itturned out, depended upon the fortunate-- well,unfortunate-- happenstance of a particular sperm's luck. and i end that with apoem from aldous huxley. a million million spermatozoaall of them alive; out of their cataclysm but onepoor noah dare hope to survive. and of that billion minus onemight have been shakespeare, another newton, a newdonne-- but the one was me. shame to have oustedyour betters thus,

taking ark while theothers remained outside! better for all of us,froward homunculus, if you'd quietly died! well, i was toldto stop at 1:30. so i think maybe i'll stop andtake questions at that point. would that be a good idea? ray kurtzweil: so that's avery interesting thought. i've had that thought ofthe incredible improbability of my own existence.

so i wonder what you thought ison the incredible improbability of our universe having astandard model with these 15 or so constants, which isso precisely what they need to be to allow for a universethat encodes information, which is the enablingproperty for evolution to be at all possible? richard dawkins: yes. it's a very interesting point. not all physicistsaccept that argument.

victor stenger,for example, says that actually the allegedimprobability of the universe is less than many people think. but assuming that it's rightand that we have these 15 knobs, that each one representsa fundamental constant and if any one of those knobshad been tuned ever so slightly different, theuniverse as we know it would not have been possible. galaxies would not have formed.

perhaps, stars wouldnot have formed. therefore, the elementswould not have formed. therefore, chemistrywasn't impossible. therefore, life wouldn't havebeen possible, and so on. so there's a temptation to seethe universe as a put-up job and to see a divine creatoras a divine knob twiddler, who twiddled these knobs to exactlythe right value in order to foreshadow, foreordain,life, perhaps even human life. i find that a deeplyunsatisfying idea because

of course it leaves totallyunexplained the divine knob twiddler himself. you need exactlythe same problem. if you can magichim into existence, you might as well just magicallythe fine-tuning into existence. other physicists have resortedto a multiverse theory, where they propose that thisuniverse, our visible universe, is only one of a bubblingfoam of universes. we are in one bubble.

and the otherbubbles in the foam have differentphysical constants. so there are billions ofuniverses in the multiverse, all with different values ofthe physical constants, all with differentsettings of the knobs. and with hindsight,since we're here, we obviously had to be inone of the bubbles, however small a minority, which hadthe right physical constants to give rise to galaxies, andstars, and chemistry, and life.

that's the anthropic principle. it's obviously alot more satisfying than the divineknob twiddler idea. other physicists saythat the 15 knobs, or how many ever there are,are not free to vary anyway. there's only oneway for them to be. but the standardmodel of physics doesn't yet tell uswhat that way is. and we need a better physics,which will one day tell us

that the values of thefundamental constants could only be that way. as einstein put it,rather unfortunately, in unfortunatelanguage, einstein said what really interestsme is whether god had any choice insetting up the universe? what he meant, of course, was isthere only one kind of universe that is possible tohave or are there lots of alternative ways inwhich a universe might exist,

in which case themultiverse theory works? ok. i probably saidenough about that. the next question? audience: ok. something veryinteresting i've noticed, i mean this is aboutbelief in a deity. what i've usually seen isthat some of the people who are exposed tonatural sciences,

especially through highschool and college, they kind of start to understandthat-- i mean at least go away from faith in a deity. interestingly, i'veseen several scientists, usually in abstract mathematicsand sometimes computer science, who actually, asthe kind of grew up, they start believing inmaybe the abstract idea that is kind of similar to whatthey've been experiencing. i was wondering what'syour thoughts on that

and what do you haveto say to those people? some research has been doneon fellows of the national academy of sciencesin the united states, the elite scientistsof the united states and the equivalentelite scientists of the british commonwealth,the royal society. and these twoindependent studies have both come upwith the same result. that about 90% of these elitescientists are nonbelievers.

about 10% have some kindof religious belief. and within that 10%, there isa slightly greater tendency for physical scientistsand mathematical scientists to be believers than forbiological scientists, which agrees withthe observation that you've just made. quite often when you meeta religious scientist, it's worth asking whathe really does believe. it often turns out to be akind of einsteinian religion.

i mean einstein did notbelieve in a personal god. einstein used thelanguage of religion, used the languageof god, to refer to that which wedon't yet understand. and he had a deepand fitting reverence for that which wedon't understand. and i think manyof us would agree that we feel-- somemight call it spiritual when we think about the enormousamount that we don't yet know,

the deep mysteries ofexistence, the deep mysteries of the universe. but that's hugelydifferent from believing in a personal god, the godof abraham, the god of moses, the god of jesus,the god of muhammad. and i think it doesa disservice to use the same languagefor those two things. as to why biologistsshould be slightly more likely to be nonreligiousthan physicists,

i think that mightcome from the fact that darwin's theory ofevolution by natural selection is deeply anti-design in thesense of deliberate design by a creative intelligence. if you think about it, thegreat achievement of darwin was to show that we don'tneed a creative intelligence. what darwin showed isthat entities complicated enough to be creative designers,things like a human brain-- the human brain isperhaps the only one

we know-- entitiescomplex enough to do that don't suddenlyget magicked into existence. they come about through avery slow, gradual process, exactly like the carvingout of the grand canyon, as ray kurtzweil said. so biologists are predisposedto be hostile to any attempt to smuggle in anintelligence by magic because we know howintelligence comes about. we know how it comesabout that brains

exist which arecapable of designing planes, and cameras,and computers. so that may be why there'sa slightly greater bias. but all scientists of these twoelite groups, the royal society and the national academy,only about 10% are religious. and even they, onewonders whether they're religious in theeinsteinian sense, rather than the personal god sense. audience: thank you.

audience: hi. you've done allkinds of great works. i'm sorry to followup a religion question with another religionquestion, but-- richard dawkins: theyusually are, i have to say. ray kurtzweil: this might bea gross oversimplification or perhaps even amisinterpretation of your work. but something that struckme as one of the arguments in "the god delusion"is sort of we

can as biologicalentities, conscious ones, realize maybe thepull towards religion and how that affects us andchoose to not follow that. and i'm wondering howyou would compare that with other things that mightbe a part of our nature, sort of chemicallyand physically as biological beings, whatthat means to how we react to other things, inaddition to religion, such as sexual desire, orlove, and other aspects that

might be considered "better?" richard dawkins: right. so i think i may havegot the question. things like sexualdesire are built into us by natural selection for reasonswe can clearly understand. i mean obviouslynatural selection is all about the survivingof genes and genes get passed on by reproduction. and we need sexfor reproduction.

and so we have rulesof thumb in our brain which make us lustafter the opposite sex. other things, like religion,might come from something a bit analogous to that. i mean i don't think religionhas a direct genetic survival value in the way thatsexual lust does. but perhaps anotherway to put it would be that there arepsychological predispositions which under the rightcultural circumstances

manifest themselves as religion. and i suppose youcould say in a way that sexual lust, under theright cultural conditions, manifests itself as greatpoetry like "romeo and juliet." so it's not all that different. the kind of psychologicalpredisposition i'm thinking of is well, because we'revery social animals, we have a natural tendencyto calculate debts to others, things that we oweto others because reciprocation

is so important forgood darwinian reasons. and so we are awareof who owes us what. we are aware of whomwe owe things to. and when somethingreally good happens, we swim so much in asea of other people that we naturally thinkwe need to thank somebody because so much ofwhat happens to us is because ofsocial interactions. and so we feel a need to thank.

and often there reallyis somebody to thank. often, it reallyis another person who is responsible for the goodthing that's happened to us and so we thank them. but when there's no otherperson to be responsible for-- to be grateful to, ifsay the weather turns out nice for our barbecue-take a trivial example-- we still feel theimpulse to thank. but there's nobody to thank.

i mean nobody actually calledthe weather to be nice. so you thank god. so maybe that'sa small component of the psychologicalpredisposition that led to religion. another one mightbe the tendency for children to obey andbelieve their parents. in the wild state,a child is extremely vulnerable to being killed byaccident and by foolishness.

so a child brain mightbe naturally selected, comes into theworld preprogrammed with the rule,whatever else you do, believe what yourparents tell you. if they tell you not togo too close to the cliff, don't ask questions, just obey. if they tell you not to pick upa snake, don't ask questions. don't obey the sort ofscientific curiosity impulse. just obey your parents.

don't touch that snake. well, if the childbrain is preprogrammed with that rule of thumb, obeyand believe your parents, it has no meansof distinguishing between good advice like"don't touch the snake" and bad or at leasttime-wasting advice like "perform a sacrifice atthe time of the full moon" or "pray five times aday, facing the east." how could the child knowwhich is good advice

and which is bad? if it knew, it wouldn'tneed the advice. it would just know. so the child brainis preprogrammed, just as a computer is built, toobey whatever instructions it's given, in its ownmachine language. and that's why computers arevulnerable to computer viruses. a computer doesn'thave any filter that says the instructionsi'm now being given

are evil instructions, designedto wipe somebody's hard disk and destroy theirdoctoral thesis. why do people dothat, by the way? can you imagine? the computer is simply built toobey whatever instructions it's given in the appropriatemachine language. and that's why it's vulnerableto computer viruses. and so another way to putwhat i've just suggested is that religions are computerviruses, the mind viruses.

audience: i guess just to beblunt about it, to go forward, to follow thatanalogy sort of, why is following thosepredispositions towards religion sort of bad? i get that impression from--as opposed to following say love, which might be anotherbiological process that we follow [inaudible]. no, i didn't meanto say it's bad. it could be good.

and i mean i'm not surehow widely it's done, but it has been suggestedthat computer viruses too could be good. that you could-- if itcomes from anywhere, it probably come fromgoogle actually-- the idea that you could use theprinciple of a program that spreads itself, because itspreads, because it spreads, because it spreads,because it contains the instruction, spreadme around the internet.

it could be benign. i mean you could spread a goodmind virus, a good computer virus. so there's nothing that saysthat the analogy to computer viruses has to have to be bad. but it could be. and in some cases, ithink it probably is. at best, some of themmight be time wasting. i mean it is an awfulwaste of time spending

hours on your knees prayingto some nonexistent spook. audience: i, of course,have another question on atheism and religion. [laughter] so my question,organized religion of course has a long history of sexism. and you might expect atheismto do better in this regard. and i think it'strue that it does. but organized atheismalso had several incidents with male-dominated events,both in terms of audience

and in terms of people speaking,and also major incidents, both at conferences andin online discussions. and you yourself have beencriticized in this regard. and i'm wondering is theresome reason that atheism falls victim tothe same traps as-- richard dawkins: well, i thinkit's a very unfortunate thing that many institutionsfall victim to. and it would be quite surprisingif atheist conferences and atheist organizationswere completely immune to it.

audience: is there someway we could better? richard dawkins: sorry? audience: is there someway we could do better? something that [inaudible]? i mean i think we allneed to do better. i think it's pretty clear thatthere's nothing particularly bad about this inthe atheist world. but there is a need todo better certainly. yes, i agree.

like something we coulddo differently maybe? richard dawkins: well, i meantreat all human beings as of equal worth and don't lookeddown upon 50% of the population because they happen tohave different genitals. [applause] audience: so i don't havea question about religion. [applause] in yourbook, you were reflecting on a bunch ofdifferent memories, one of them of somebodywho has passed.

i was wondering if you'dbe willing to share a memory about somebodyelse who has passed, christopher hitchens? is there any favoritememory that you might find usefulto share with us? richard dawkins:i think he was-- i mean i was a friend of his,but only in his later life. i wasn't one of the earlycoterie of friends like martin amis, and salmanrushdie, and ian mcewan.

so i only met him i think after2006, when we both published books at around the sametime, on a similar theme. he was, i think, themost spellbinding orator i ever heard. he was a magnificent speaker,a beautiful, resonant voice, superbly resourceful, withwhat must have been something close to a photographic memory,able to pull out examples with great speed and tobest anybody in debate. i once wrote apuff for him which

said something like if you area religious apologist invited to have a debate withchristopher hitchens, decline. he was a warm, friendly man. he didn't suffer fools gladly,but he was patient as well. i had enormousadmiration for him. i disagreed with himon certain things. i disagreed with him overthe iraq war, for example. he was impossibleto typecast on sort of standard left,right continuum.

he was his own man inthat, as in so much else. his approach to atheism camefrom a slightly different direction than mine. mine is more scientific. so for me, whatreally matters is the truth about the universe. and the god hypothesis,it seems to me to be an alternativehypothesis about the nature of the universe and its origins,which is i think clearly false.

and so for me, it'sa scientific battle. for christopher, i think itwas more a political one. i think he saw religionsas political organizations. and he saw god as asort of divine dictator. and he saw the kingdom of godas a kind of divine north korea. perhaps, enough of that. audience: i was looking atsome of your personal details earlier. and was surprised to see thatyou're married to the best

"doctor who" companion ever. richard dawkins: here, here. audience: and i'dlike to know are you a big fan of "doctor who?" richard dawkins: well, i becamea big fan of "doctor who" only after i met her actually,i'm ashamed to admit. i'd heard of "doctor who." but i'd never actuallywatched any of the episodes. and then after we married,i did watch, not dvds,

it was-- what do you call them? tapes, yeah. [laughter] and i did become afan of those tapes. i loved them. not least actually,because in her time, which was the tom bakerera, who many people regard as the definitivedoctor as well, the script was writtenby douglas adams.

and was consequently witty,satirical, and appreciated on different-- i mean itwas a children's program. and it's appreciatedmuch by children. but also, therewas a witty irony, which was appreciatedby adults as well. and that's got douglasadams written all over it. and you can appreciate douglas'sepisodes of "doctor who," which included the tombaker and lalla ward times as beautiful satire,of the same kind of satire

as he was to use also inthe "hitchhiker's guide" and in his dirk gently series. so making scienceinto comedy-- laughing at, in a sort of genial,benevolent, satirical way, scientific ideas-- andsatirizing contemporary life was something that hedid supremely well. and that got into "doctorwho" at that time. i personallybelieve that we live in a universe which isgoverned by physical laws.

that's it's notnecessary to have spirits or anything like that. i understand that otherpeople, their behavior may be explainableusing physical processes and that i should applythat to myself also. but i'm struggling atthe moment with where does this kind ofsensation come from, my consciousness, myawareness of myself? and i don't really have ananswer for that at the moment.

so i wonder if you could help? richard dawkins: i meanditto, ditto, ditto. i am as mystified as you. i feel exactly the same way. i am aware that my brain is theproduct of natural selection, evolution by natural selection. and it is a machine. it's an on-board computer. it's helped myancestors to survive

on the african plains, inthe pleistocene and before. and somehow an emergentproperty of that large brain is the feeling of subjectiveconsciousness, which makes me know thati'm me and not you. makes me believe thatyou have a personality and you have a consciousness,which is similar to mine, that i can never actuallyget inside your mind, nor can you get inside mine. that doesn't makeyou a solipsist.

it's the exactopposite, of course. a solipsist issomeone who thinks that he's the onlyperson that there is and everybody else is, asit were, part of his dream. there was a nice storyby bertrand russell. that he had a letter from a ladywho said, dear lord russell, i'm delighted to hearthat you are a solipsist. there are so few ofus around these days. i suppose that peoplelike you and me

have to think that somethingabout making a brain which is good at navigating throughthe world in a versatile way, coping with all sorts ofdifferent things that happen, not moving througha stereotype world like some computer programs,which can only navigate through a world ofcolored bricks or a table or something of that sort. we have to navigate througha very versatile world. above all, we have to navigatethrough a world in which

the dominant things that we see,we encounter are other people. like ourselves. we have to interact with sexualpartners, with business rivals, with business companions,with co-workers, with possible enemies,with children. all the time, we'resurrounded by people and we have tointeract with them. i suppose you couldsay that something about needing to interactwith other people

might facilitate the settingup of a model in the head. we all have models in the headof the world in which we move. i mean when we seesomething, what we're doing is constructing a model inthe head of that something. and you can show thiswith visual illusions. when you construct a similarmodel of the other people you're having to deal withand you have to put yourself in their place, maybe somethingabout the model of other people that you have to makenecessitates the generation

of subjective consciousness. but that doesn'treally do it, does it? that's sort of based on anidea of nicholas humphrey. daniel dennett hasmore advanced ideas in his book,"consciousness explained." and i think i better notgo on too much with that. but you could look at"consciousness explained" and see if that does it for you. there's other people whoare attempting to do it.

i sort of feel it'sone of those things that maybe one day it'llseem awfully obvious and how could we be sostupid as not to realize it. but at present, it doesseem to be a deep mystery. sorry about that. audience: so i readthe big footnotes to "the selfish gene." and one of mytakeaways from it is that it's really notabout being selfish.

i was absolutely uplifted by howmuch cooperation helps people. and somehow like thereasoning in this book kind of flipped me over. so my plea would be, couldyou write more articles with maybe better,catchier titles? and my suggestion would be-- idon't know who to attribute it, but i love this one,snuggle for survival. richard dawkins: ok. thank you.

yes. i mean you're absolutely right. that the central messageof "the selfish gene" is not that we are selfish. still less is it thatwe should be selfish. it's actually mostlya book about altruism, snuggling if you wishto put it that way. and it is true that title-- ithink most of my other titles have been ok, actually,"the blind watchmaker,"

"unweaving the rainbow,""climbing mount improbable," and so on. i did show an earlypair of chapters to a well-known londonpublisher before i gave it the title, "the selfish gene." he said you can't callit "the selfish gene." it's a down word."selfish" is a down word. call it the immortal gene. and that would havebeen good, i think,

because it does also conveyanother aspect of it. the reason whynatural selection can be said to work atthe level of the gene is that genes are immortal,or potentially immortal. and therefore, in thelong-term, survival of genes is what really matters. and if they were notpotentially immortal, it wouldn't matter which onesurvived and which ones didn't. so "the immortal gene," it'sa phrase i use in the book.

and that possiblywould have been better. i also suggestedin the book that it could have been calledthe slightly selfish big bit of chromosome, with theeven more selfish little bit of chromosome. ray kurtzweil: let me askyou to actually follow up on this last question. you described religionas a set of mind viruses. another word formind virus is meme,

which is your ithink very apt word. and some of those memescould be bad or good. and i think one of thegood memes from religion is the golden rule, whichis a synonym for altruism, which you just alluded to. and you had a very interestingthesis in "the selfish gene" about how altruism originatesor evolves in nature. so maybe you couldsum up by sharing your view of howaltruism evolves?

the golden rule, of course,is terribly important. i think it would be unfairto attribute it to religion. it's true that many of thegreat religions have adopted it. but i think it actually doeshave older roots than that. and that's really whatyou're asking about, which is the evolutionaryroots of the golden rule. do as you would be doneby, so unto others as you would have them do unto you. altruism has two mainevolutionary roots.

one is that. one is reciprocation. one is the survival value ofdoing good turns because others may do good turns to you. and the mathematical theoryof that, the best way to approach it, is themathematical theory of games. and the theory hasbeen well worked out. and it does indeed work inan evolutionary context. and a lot of "theselfish gene" is actually

about the game theory of--well, game theory generally, including aggressionand reciprocation. the other main sourceof altruism is kinship. it's easy to see nowadays--it wasn't originally-- but nowadays, we cansee that any gene that makes an individual animalbehave altruistically towards genetic relativeshas, other things being equal, a good chance ofpropagating itself because those geneticrelatives statistically

are likely to containcopies of the same gene. and so anyone can see thatthat's true for offspring. what w.d. hamiltonshowed is that it's also true of collateralkin, like nephews and nieces, andcousins, and siblings. well, humans probablyspent a large part of their ancestrallife in small bands, perhaps rather like baboons,in which they were surrounded by a group, a clan,who would have been

mostly cousins,mostly relatives. and therefore, there would havebeen a genetic kinship pressure to be altruistic towardseverybody in your band, which pretty much meanteverybody you ever meet. and at the same time, sinceyou meet the same people over and overagain in your band, you're going to meet them againand again throughout your life, that is perfect rawmaterial for reciprocation. it's perfect conditionsfor the evolution

of reciprocation, reciprocalaltruism, the golden rule in one way, putting it. so the fact that humans wentaround in limited bands, clans, fostered altruismin these two different ways and provided whatcould be called a lust to be nice, which wasanalogous to the lust for sex. the lust for sex workedbecause before the days of contraception, sex tendedto be followed by babies. nowadays, sex very oftenis not followed by babies

because we're allwise to contraception. and so we still enjoy sex, eventhough we know perfectly well cognitively thatwe've separated it, we've dissociated it fromits darwinian function. but we still have the lust. and why on earth, shouldn't we? because the lust wasbuilt into our brains at a time when contraceptionhad not been invented. natural selection doesn'thave cognitive wisdom.

natural selection simply buildsin clockwork rules of thumb. the lust for sex is justsuch a clockwork rule. and the lust to be nice is also. because it evolvedat a time when we did live in small groups. nowadays, we don'tlive in small groups. we live in largecities, where we are not surrounded by cousins. and we're notsurrounded by people

we're going to meet againand again in our lives. we're surrounded byperfect strangers. but the lust to be nice is stillthere, just as the lust for sex is still there. the lust to be nice still works. we still feel empathytowards somebody in distress. we still feel we want todo a good turn to people who is neither relatedto us, nor in a position to give the good turn back.

but it's there. and we feel it. it's an extremelypowerful emotion. there are a fewpeople, and we call them psychopaths,who don't have it. but most of us do have it. most of us do have empathy. most of us do have pityfor people in misfortune. most of us give tocharity and so on.

so i think thatwould be my attempt at a darwinian explanationfor the origin of altruism. and it becomes, of course,much more sophisticated due to cultural evolution,which you can if you wish, interpret in terms ofmemes, not in what it does. thank you very much.

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: