Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins,

00:00:03.260 | an evolutionary biologist and author of "The Selfish Gene,"

00:00:07.140 | "The Blind Watchmaker," "The God Delusion,"

00:00:09.720 | "The Magic of Reality," and "The Greatest Show of Earth,"

00:00:12.380 | and his latest, "All-Growing God."

00:00:15.740 | He is the originator and popularizer

00:00:18.500 | of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology

00:00:21.780 | and science in general, including, funny enough,

00:00:24.900 | the introduction of the word meme

00:00:27.140 | in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene,"

00:00:29.940 | which, in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution,

00:00:33.100 | is an exceptionally powerful idea.

00:00:35.700 | He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless

00:00:39.220 | in the defense of science and reason,

00:00:41.300 | and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers

00:00:44.540 | of our time.

00:00:45.380 | This conversation was recorded

00:00:48.500 | before the outbreak of the pandemic.

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00:02:25.660 | And now, here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins.

00:02:30.060 | Do you think there's intelligent life

00:02:32.540 | out there in the universe?

00:02:33.860 | - Well, if we accept that there's intelligent life here,

00:02:37.920 | and we accept that the number of planets in the universe

00:02:40.700 | is gigantic, I mean, 10 to the 22 stars has been estimated,

00:02:44.740 | it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life

00:02:47.340 | in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life.

00:02:50.740 | If you deny that, then you're committed to the view

00:02:53.940 | that the things that happened on this planet

00:02:55.540 | are staggeringly improbable.

00:02:57.060 | I mean, ludicrously, off the charts improbable.

00:03:00.620 | And I don't think it's that improbable.

00:03:02.980 | Certainly the origin of life itself,

00:03:04.660 | there are really two steps, the origin of life,

00:03:07.180 | which is probably fairly improbable,

00:03:09.200 | and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life,

00:03:12.220 | which is also fairly improbable.

00:03:13.940 | So the juxtaposition of those two,

00:03:15.620 | you could say is pretty improbable,

00:03:17.340 | but not 10 to the 22 improbable.

00:03:20.500 | It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming onto it,

00:03:22.780 | how we would recognize intelligence from outer space

00:03:25.140 | if we encountered it.

00:03:27.820 | The most likely way we would come across them

00:03:29.540 | would be by radio.

00:03:30.900 | It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us,

00:03:33.580 | but it's not that unlikely

00:03:36.820 | that we would pick up radio signals.

00:03:39.020 | And then we would have to have some means of deciding

00:03:42.060 | that it was intelligent.

00:03:43.320 | People involved in the SETI program

00:03:47.620 | discuss how they would do it,

00:03:48.900 | and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to,

00:03:52.700 | an obvious way for them to broadcast,

00:03:54.860 | to say we are intelligent, we are here.

00:03:57.160 | I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.

00:04:02.140 | - Well, it's interesting, prime numbers,

00:04:03.540 | so the mathematical patterns,

00:04:05.560 | it's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us

00:04:09.140 | as it would be for aliens.

00:04:10.740 | I suppose we could assume that ultimately,

00:04:14.220 | if we're governed by the same laws of physics,

00:04:17.260 | then we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics.

00:04:19.580 | - I think so.

00:04:20.820 | I suspect that they will have Pythagoras' theorem, et cetera.

00:04:23.620 | I mean, I don't think that their mathematics

00:04:25.260 | will be that different.

00:04:26.420 | - Do you think evolution would also be a force

00:04:29.220 | on the alien planets as well?

00:04:30.580 | - I stuck my neck out and said that if we do,

00:04:32.660 | if ever that we do discover life elsewhere,

00:04:35.220 | it will be Darwinian life,

00:04:36.940 | in the sense that it will work by some kind of

00:04:40.580 | natural selection, the non-random survival

00:04:43.180 | of randomly generated codes.

00:04:46.980 | It doesn't mean that the,

00:04:48.860 | it would have to have some kind of genetics,

00:04:50.140 | but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics,

00:04:52.940 | probably wouldn't be, actually.

00:04:54.580 | But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.

00:04:57.020 | - So some kind of selection process.

00:04:59.800 | - Yes, in the general sense, it would be Darwinian.

00:05:02.500 | - So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence

00:05:06.980 | engineering question.

00:05:08.100 | So you've been an outspoken critic of,

00:05:10.860 | I guess what could be called intelligent design,

00:05:13.540 | which is an attempt to describe the creation

00:05:15.380 | of a human mind and body by some religious folks,

00:05:18.700 | religious folks used to describe.

00:05:21.580 | So broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know,

00:05:25.140 | again, you can correct me, is the only scientific theory

00:05:27.500 | we have for the development of intelligent life.

00:05:29.980 | Like there's no alternative theory as far as I understand.

00:05:33.260 | - None has ever been suggested,

00:05:35.180 | and I suspect it never will be.

00:05:36.780 | - Well, of course, whenever somebody says that,

00:05:40.900 | a hundred years later.

00:05:42.580 | - I know.

00:05:43.420 | (laughing)

00:05:44.260 | It's a risk.

00:05:45.100 | - It's a risk.

00:05:45.940 | - But, you want to bet?

00:05:47.820 | I mean, I--

00:05:48.980 | - But it would look, sorry, yes,

00:05:50.500 | it would probably look very similar,

00:05:51.860 | but it's almost like Einstein's general relativity

00:05:54.620 | versus Newtonian physics.

00:05:56.180 | It'll be maybe an alteration of the theory

00:05:59.940 | or something like that,

00:06:00.780 | but it won't be fundamentally different.

00:06:02.500 | But okay, so now for the past 70 years,

00:06:07.500 | even before the AI community has been trying

00:06:10.540 | to engineer intelligence, in a sense,

00:06:12.660 | to do what intelligent design says, you know,

00:06:16.940 | was done here on Earth, what's your intuition?

00:06:19.780 | Do you think it's possible to build intelligence,

00:06:24.460 | to build computers that are intelligent,

00:06:27.320 | or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process?

00:06:30.400 | Like there's no shortcuts here.

00:06:33.380 | - That's an interesting question.

00:06:35.300 | I'm committed to the belief that it's ultimately possible,

00:06:39.100 | because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains.

00:06:42.320 | I think our brains work by the laws of physics.

00:06:45.180 | And so it must, in principle,

00:06:47.460 | be possible to replicate that.

00:06:49.420 | In practice, though, it might be very difficult.

00:06:52.300 | And as you suggest, it may be the only way to do it

00:06:55.100 | is by something like an evolutionary process.

00:06:57.660 | I'd be surprised.

00:06:58.500 | I suspect that it will come.

00:07:00.460 | But it's certainly been slower in coming

00:07:03.140 | than some of the early pioneers thought.

00:07:05.660 | - Thought it would be, yeah.

00:07:07.020 | But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient?

00:07:10.500 | So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful

00:07:12.800 | in one perspective, but at the same time,

00:07:15.200 | maybe that is the only path to--

00:07:17.280 | - It's a paradox, isn't it?

00:07:18.280 | I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful.

00:07:21.920 | It's fundamentally based on waste.

00:07:24.560 | On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results.

00:07:27.400 | The design of a soaring bird, an albatross,

00:07:33.280 | a vulture, an eagle, is superb.

00:07:37.880 | An engineer would be proud to have done it.

00:07:39.520 | On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud

00:07:41.160 | to have done some of the other things

00:07:42.320 | that evolution has served up.

00:07:45.280 | Some of the sort of botched jobs

00:07:47.280 | that you can easily understand

00:07:49.360 | because of their historical origins,

00:07:51.280 | but they don't look well-designed.

00:07:53.400 | - Do you have examples of bad design?

00:07:55.840 | - My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

00:07:58.080 | I've used this many times.

00:07:59.440 | This is a nerve, it's one of the cranial nerves,

00:08:01.840 | which goes from the brain, and the end organ

00:08:04.880 | that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx.

00:08:08.880 | But it doesn't go straight to the larynx.

00:08:10.280 | It goes right down into the chest

00:08:12.320 | and then loops around an artery in the chest

00:08:15.440 | and then comes straight back up again to the larynx.

00:08:19.080 | And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck,

00:08:22.080 | which happened to have died in a zoo.

00:08:24.080 | And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve

00:08:27.520 | going, whizzing straight past the larynx,

00:08:30.640 | within an inch of the larynx,

00:08:32.200 | down into the chest and then back up again,

00:08:34.360 | which is a detour of many feet.

00:08:39.080 | Very, very inefficient.

00:08:41.240 | The reason is historical.

00:08:43.160 | The ancestors, our fish ancestors,

00:08:45.760 | the ancestors of all mammals and fish,

00:08:47.680 | the most direct pathway of that,

00:08:52.800 | of the equivalent of that nerve,

00:08:54.400 | there wasn't a larynx in those days,

00:08:55.760 | but it innervated part of the gills.

00:08:58.800 | The most direct pathway was behind that artery.

00:09:03.320 | And then when the mammal, when the tetrapods,

00:09:05.840 | when the land vertebrae started evolving,

00:09:07.760 | and then the neck started to stretch,

00:09:10.200 | the marginal cost of changing the embryological design

00:09:14.200 | to jump that nerve over the artery was too great,

00:09:17.640 | or rather was, each step of the way was a very small cost,

00:09:22.440 | but the marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over

00:09:24.840 | would have been very large.

00:09:26.680 | As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change

00:09:30.320 | to just increase the length of the detour a tiny bit,

00:09:32.760 | a tiny bit, a tiny bit,

00:09:33.600 | each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference.

00:09:35.800 | And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe,

00:09:38.240 | it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient.

00:09:41.160 | Now that's bad design.

00:09:42.840 | Any engineer would reject that piece of design,

00:09:46.720 | it's ridiculous.

00:09:47.800 | And there are quite a number of examples,

00:09:49.560 | as you'd expect,

00:09:50.400 | it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort.

00:09:53.400 | In a way, what's surprising is there aren't more of them.

00:09:55.480 | In a way, what's surprising

00:09:57.200 | is that the design of living things is so good.

00:09:59.600 | So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results,

00:10:04.360 | partly by tinkering,

00:10:06.120 | partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes

00:10:11.120 | and as it were, making the best of a bad job.

00:10:14.320 | - That's really interesting.

00:10:15.160 | I mean, it is surprising and beautiful.

00:10:17.680 | And it's a mystery from an engineering perspective

00:10:20.760 | that so many things are well-designed.

00:10:23.080 | I suppose the thing we're forgetting

00:10:25.680 | is how many generations have to die for that.

00:10:30.680 | - That's the inefficiency of it, yes.

00:10:31.760 | That's the horrible wastefulness of it.

00:10:33.560 | - So yeah, we marvel at the final product,

00:10:36.400 | but yeah, the process is painful.

00:10:38.560 | Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially the,

00:10:43.520 | what he calls the biological bootloader

00:10:45.600 | for artificial intelligence

00:10:47.520 | or artificial general intelligence is used as the term,

00:10:50.440 | it's kind of like super intelligence.

00:10:52.560 | Do you see superhuman level intelligence

00:10:56.080 | as potentially the next step in the evolutionary process?

00:10:59.320 | - Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence

00:11:01.560 | is to be found, it will be artificial.

00:11:03.360 | I don't have any hope that we ourselves,

00:11:06.400 | our brains will go on getting larger

00:11:10.280 | in ordinary biological evolution.

00:11:13.560 | I think that's probably coming to an end.

00:11:16.040 | It is the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends

00:11:19.240 | in our fossil history for the last two or 3 million years.

00:11:23.720 | - Brain size?

00:11:24.560 | - Brain size, yes.

00:11:25.480 | So it's been swelling rather dramatically

00:11:28.440 | over the last two or 3 million years.

00:11:30.680 | That is unlikely to continue.

00:11:32.600 | The only way that happens is because natural selection

00:11:36.040 | favors those individuals with the biggest brains

00:11:40.040 | and that's not happening anymore.

00:11:42.000 | - Right, so in general in humans,

00:11:43.960 | the selection pressures are not,

00:11:47.560 | I mean, are they active in any form?

00:11:49.200 | - Well, in order for them to be active,

00:11:53.080 | it would be necessary that the most intelligent,

00:11:55.560 | let's call it intelligence.

00:11:57.120 | Not that intelligence is simply correlated

00:12:00.480 | to brain size, but let's talk about intelligence.

00:12:03.040 | In order for that to evolve, it's necessary

00:12:06.680 | that the most intelligent beings have the most,

00:12:08.680 | individuals have the most children.

00:12:10.480 | And so intelligence may buy you money,

00:12:16.600 | it may buy you worldly success,

00:12:18.920 | it may buy you a nice house and a nice car

00:12:21.640 | and things like that if you have a successful career.

00:12:24.480 | It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people,

00:12:28.360 | but it doesn't increase the number of offspring

00:12:31.200 | that you have, it doesn't increase your genetic legacy

00:12:34.560 | to the next generation.

00:12:35.920 | On the other hand, artificial intelligence,

00:12:38.160 | I mean, computers and technology generally

00:12:42.120 | is evolving by a non-genetic means,

00:12:45.200 | by leaps and bounds, of course.

00:12:47.920 | - And so what do you think, I don't know if you're familiar,

00:12:50.120 | there's a company called Neuralink,

00:12:51.560 | but there's a general effort of brain-computer interfaces,

00:12:54.320 | which is to try to build a connection

00:12:58.000 | between the computer and the brain,

00:12:59.560 | to send signals both directions.

00:13:01.640 | And the long-term dream there is to do exactly that,

00:13:05.080 | which is expand, I guess expand the size of the brain,

00:13:08.640 | expand the capabilities of the brain.

00:13:10.560 | Do you see this as interesting?

00:13:14.640 | Do you see this as a promising possible technology,

00:13:17.520 | or is the interface between the computer and the brain,

00:13:20.440 | like the brain is this wet, messy thing

00:13:22.320 | that's just impossible to interface with?

00:13:24.000 | - Well, of course it's interesting.

00:13:25.360 | Whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say.

00:13:28.840 | What I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small

00:13:33.400 | as it is compared to a computer,

00:13:36.160 | and the individual components being as slow as they are

00:13:39.040 | compared to our electronic components,

00:13:41.920 | it is astonishing what it can do.

00:13:44.640 | I mean, imagine building a computer

00:13:48.040 | that fits into the size of a human skull,

00:13:51.680 | and with the equivalent of transistors

00:13:55.440 | or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do.

00:14:00.440 | It's something mysterious about that.

00:14:04.280 | Something must be going on that we don't understand.

00:14:07.960 | - So I've just talked to Roger Penrose.

00:14:10.960 | I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work.

00:14:13.880 | He also describes this kind of mystery in the mind,

00:14:19.680 | in the brain, that he sees a materialist.

00:14:23.480 | So there's no sort of mystical thing going on,

00:14:26.840 | but there's so much about the material of the brain

00:14:29.240 | that we don't understand,

00:14:30.680 | that might be quantum mechanical in nature and so on.

00:14:34.320 | So there are the ideas about consciousness.

00:14:36.960 | Do you have any, have you ever thought about,

00:14:39.240 | do you ever think about ideas of consciousness

00:14:41.480 | or a little bit more about the mystery

00:14:43.600 | of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up,

00:14:46.200 | just like you're saying, from our brain?

00:14:48.520 | - I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there.

00:14:51.840 | He's one of the world's greatest physicists,

00:14:56.400 | so I can't possibly argue with his-

00:14:59.960 | - But nobody knows anything about consciousness.

00:15:01.880 | And in fact, if we talk about religion and so on,

00:15:06.880 | the mystery of consciousness is so awe-inspiring

00:15:11.680 | and we know so little about it

00:15:13.960 | that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations

00:15:17.280 | is too easy to make.

00:15:18.800 | - I think that it's just an act of cowardice

00:15:21.320 | to leap to religious explanations,

00:15:22.960 | and Roger doesn't do that, of course.

00:15:24.840 | But I accept that there may be something

00:15:28.960 | that we don't understand about it.

00:15:31.200 | - So correct me if I'm wrong,

00:15:32.760 | but in your book, "Selfish Gene,"

00:15:34.560 | the gene-centered view of evolution

00:15:37.120 | allows us to think of the physical organisms

00:15:40.320 | as just the medium through which the software

00:15:42.680 | of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate.

00:15:47.200 | So maybe can we start just with the basics?

00:15:52.200 | What in this context does the word meme mean?

00:15:56.560 | - It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene,

00:15:59.960 | cultural equivalent in the sense of

00:16:02.280 | that which plays the same role as the gene

00:16:04.440 | in the transmission of culture

00:16:06.320 | and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense.

00:16:09.800 | And it's only a useful word

00:16:11.680 | if there's something Darwinian going on.

00:16:14.320 | Obviously, culture is transmitted,

00:16:16.560 | but is there anything Darwinian going on?

00:16:18.840 | And if there is, that means there has to be

00:16:20.520 | something like a gene,

00:16:22.280 | which becomes more numerous or less numerous

00:16:25.880 | in the population.

00:16:27.800 | - So it can replicate?

00:16:29.640 | - It can replicate.

00:16:30.640 | Well, it clearly does replicate.

00:16:31.960 | There's no question about that.

00:16:33.880 | The question is, does it replicate

00:16:35.320 | in a sort of differential way, in a Darwinian fashion?

00:16:38.480 | Could you say that certain ideas propagate

00:16:40.920 | because they're successful in the meme pool?

00:16:44.480 | In a sort of trivial sense, you can.

00:16:46.480 | Would you wish to say, though,

00:16:49.240 | that in the same way as an animal body

00:16:52.080 | is modified, adapted to serve as a machine

00:16:56.800 | for propagating genes,

00:16:59.160 | is it also a machine for propagating memes?

00:17:01.200 | Could you actually say that something

00:17:02.560 | about the way a human is,

00:17:04.160 | is modified, adapted

00:17:07.520 | for the function of meme propagation?

00:17:12.600 | - That's such a fascinating possibility, if that's true.

00:17:16.040 | If that it's not just about the genes,

00:17:18.320 | which seem somehow more comprehensible,

00:17:21.640 | it's like these things of biology.

00:17:23.600 | The idea that culture, or maybe ideas,

00:17:28.360 | you can really broadly define it,

00:17:30.640 | operates under these mechanisms.

00:17:33.440 | - Even morphology, even anatomy,

00:17:36.120 | does evolve by memetic means.

00:17:39.400 | I mean, things like hairstyles,

00:17:42.000 | styles of makeup, circumcision,

00:17:45.320 | these things are actual changes in the body form,

00:17:49.480 | which are non-genetic,

00:17:50.800 | and which get passed on from generation to generation,

00:17:53.600 | or sideways, like a virus,

00:17:56.080 | in a quasi-genetic way.

00:17:59.400 | - But the moment you start drifting away from the physical,

00:18:03.520 | it becomes interesting,

00:18:05.440 | 'cause the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems.

00:18:09.680 | - Of course, yes.

00:18:10.560 | - So, what's your sense?

00:18:14.080 | Are memes a metaphor more, or are they really,

00:18:20.240 | is there something fundamental,

00:18:22.160 | almost physical presence of memes?

00:18:24.280 | - Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor,

00:18:26.120 | and I think that,

00:18:27.440 | I mentioned the physical bodily characteristics,

00:18:31.840 | which are a bit trivial in a way,

00:18:33.080 | but with things like the propagation of religious ideas,

00:18:36.640 | both longitudinally down generations,

00:18:40.400 | and transversely, as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas.

00:18:45.400 | When a charismatic preacher converts people,

00:18:50.560 | that resembles viral transmission,

00:18:55.640 | whereas the longitudinal transmission

00:18:59.080 | from grandparent to parent to child, et cetera,

00:19:02.640 | is more like conventional genetic transmission.

00:19:07.120 | - That's such a beautiful,

00:19:08.840 | especially in the modern day, idea.

00:19:11.320 | Do you think about this implication in social networks,

00:19:13.840 | where the propagation of ideas,

00:19:15.440 | the viral propagation of ideas,

00:19:17.400 | and hence the new use of the word meme to describe--

00:19:21.720 | - Well, the internet, of course,

00:19:23.640 | provides extremely rapid method of transmission.

00:19:27.640 | Before, when I first coined the word,

00:19:30.120 | the internet didn't exist,

00:19:31.160 | and so I was thinking then in terms of books, newspapers,

00:19:36.360 | broad radio, television, that kind of thing.

00:19:39.560 | Now, an idea can just leap around the world

00:19:43.600 | in all directions instantly.

00:19:46.400 | And so, the internet provides a step change

00:19:50.960 | in the facility of propagation of memes.

00:19:55.160 | - How does that make you feel?

00:19:56.600 | Isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas,

00:19:59.080 | it's like you have Galapagos Islands or something,

00:20:02.000 | it's the '70s, and the internet allowed all these species

00:20:05.880 | to just globalize.

00:20:08.320 | And in a matter of seconds,

00:20:10.360 | you can spread a message to millions of people,

00:20:13.160 | and these ideas, these memes can breed,

00:20:17.720 | can evolve, can mutate, there's a selection,

00:20:22.120 | and there's different, I guess, groups that have all,

00:20:25.320 | there's a dynamics that's fascinating here.

00:20:27.520 | Do you think-- - Yes.

00:20:28.600 | - Basically, do you think your work in this direction,

00:20:32.520 | while fundamentally it was focused on life on Earth,

00:20:35.660 | do you think it should continue, like, to be taken further?

00:20:39.200 | - I mean, I do think it would probably be a good idea

00:20:41.240 | to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing.

00:20:45.400 | We conventionally think of the transmission of ideas

00:20:49.000 | in evolutionary context as being limited to,

00:20:52.560 | in our ancestors, people living in villages,

00:20:57.120 | living in small bands where everybody knew each other,

00:21:00.400 | and ideas could propagate within the village,

00:21:03.240 | and they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally,

00:21:07.060 | and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually.

00:21:10.180 | And that was a slow process.

00:21:12.180 | Nowadays, villages are international.

00:21:15.820 | I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers,

00:21:20.380 | where people are in a sort of internet village,

00:21:23.940 | where the other members of the village

00:21:26.500 | may be geographically distributed all over the world,

00:21:29.340 | but they just happen to be interested in the same things,

00:21:31.840 | use the same terminology, the same jargon,

00:21:35.580 | have the same enthusiasm.

00:21:36.900 | So people like the Flat Earth Society,

00:21:39.640 | they don't all live in one place, they find each other,

00:21:43.660 | and they talk the same language to each other,

00:21:45.180 | they talk the same nonsense to each other.

00:21:47.180 | But so this is a kind of distributed version

00:21:51.660 | of the primitive idea of people living in villages

00:21:56.140 | and propagating their ideas in a local way.

00:21:58.660 | - Is there Darwinist parallel here?

00:22:02.400 | So is there evolutionary purpose of villages,

00:22:05.920 | or is that just a--

00:22:07.240 | - I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose

00:22:09.040 | in that case, but villages will be something

00:22:12.520 | that just emerged, that's the way people happen to live.

00:22:15.760 | - And in just the same kind of way,

00:22:19.960 | the Flat Earth Society, societies of ideas

00:22:22.920 | emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space?

00:22:26.560 | - Yes, yes.

00:22:28.000 | - Is there something interesting to say about the,

00:22:31.040 | I guess, from a perspective of Darwin,

00:22:34.960 | could we fully interpret the dynamics

00:22:38.560 | of social interaction in these social networks?

00:22:43.320 | Or is there some much more complicated thing

00:22:46.800 | need to be developed?

00:22:48.320 | Like what's your sense?

00:22:49.280 | - Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve

00:22:52.800 | investigating which ideas spread and which don't.

00:22:57.640 | So some ideas don't have the ability to spread.

00:23:01.960 | I mean, flat Earthism, there are a few people

00:23:06.040 | believing it, but it's not gonna spread

00:23:07.360 | because it's obvious nonsense.

00:23:08.880 | But other ideas, even if they are wrong,

00:23:12.280 | can spread because they are attractive in some sense.

00:23:16.480 | - So the spreading and the selection

00:23:19.520 | in the Darwinian context, it just has to be attractive

00:23:24.240 | in some sense, like we don't have to define,

00:23:26.320 | like it doesn't have to be attractive

00:23:27.640 | in the way that animals attract each other.

00:23:30.600 | It could be attractive in some other way.

00:23:32.200 | - Yes, all that matters is,

00:23:35.120 | all that is needed is that it should spread.

00:23:37.720 | And it doesn't have to be true to spread.

00:23:39.640 | In truth, there's one criterion

00:23:41.400 | which might help an idea to spread.

00:23:43.600 | But there are other criteria which might help it to spread.

00:23:45.960 | As you say, attraction in animals

00:23:49.420 | is not necessarily valuable for survival.

00:23:51.880 | The famous peacock's tail doesn't help

00:23:56.280 | the peacock to survive, it helps it to pass on its genes.

00:23:59.240 | Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish,

00:24:03.280 | but which people don't know is rubbish

00:24:04.880 | and think is very attractive, will spread

00:24:07.000 | in the same way as a peacock's genes spread.

00:24:10.280 | - As a small sidestep, I remember reading somewhere,

00:24:13.080 | I think recently, that in some species of birds,

00:24:18.160 | sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose,

00:24:21.920 | and the idea that some birds,

00:24:26.020 | I'm being ineloquent here,

00:24:29.000 | but there's some aspects of their feathers and so on

00:24:32.320 | that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever.

00:24:35.440 | There's somebody making an argument

00:24:37.360 | that there are some things about beauty that animals do

00:24:40.160 | that may be its own purpose.

00:24:42.560 | Does that ring a bell for you?

00:24:45.400 | Does it sound ridiculous?

00:24:46.960 | - I think it's a rather distorted bell.

00:24:50.680 | Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection,

00:24:55.160 | didn't feel the need to suggest

00:25:00.520 | that what was attractive to females,

00:25:03.680 | usually is males attracting females,

00:25:05.760 | that what females found attractive had to be useful.

00:25:08.080 | He said it didn't have to be useful.

00:25:09.920 | It was enough that females found it attractive.

00:25:12.600 | And so it could be completely useless,

00:25:14.240 | probably was completely useless in the conventional sense,

00:25:17.360 | but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on

00:25:20.600 | to Darwin didn't call them genes,

00:25:21.800 | but in the sense of reproducing.

00:25:23.400 | Others, starting with Wallace,

00:25:27.240 | the co-discoverer of natural selection,

00:25:30.320 | didn't like that idea.

00:25:31.480 | And they wanted sexually selected characteristics

00:25:36.240 | like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful.

00:25:39.440 | It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail

00:25:41.200 | as being useful, but in the sense of survival,

00:25:43.920 | but others have run with that idea

00:25:46.400 | and have brought it up to date.

00:25:48.520 | And so there's a kind of,

00:25:50.440 | there are two schools of thought on sexual selection,

00:25:52.480 | which are still active and about equally supported now.

00:25:56.000 | Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough

00:25:58.760 | to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace

00:26:03.160 | and say that it has to be in some sense useful.

00:26:07.240 | - Do you fall into one category or the other?

00:26:10.560 | - No, I'm open-minded.

00:26:11.840 | I think they both could be correct in different cases.

00:26:14.540 | I mean, they've both been made sophisticated

00:26:17.840 | in a mathematical sense,

00:26:19.280 | more so than when Darwin and Wallace

00:26:20.860 | first started talking about it.

00:26:22.580 | - I'm Russian, I romanticize things,

00:26:24.800 | so I prefer the former,

00:26:27.720 | where the beauty in itself is a powerful,

00:26:31.280 | so attraction is a powerful force in evolution.

00:26:36.040 | On religion, do you think there will ever be a time

00:26:41.360 | in our future where almost nobody believes in God

00:26:44.960 | or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?

00:26:49.420 | - Yes, I do.

00:26:51.560 | I think it may happen after a very long time.

00:26:53.880 | I think it may take a long time for that to happen.

00:26:56.060 | - So do you think ultimately for everybody on earth,

00:26:59.280 | religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas,

00:27:04.280 | could do a better job than what religion does?

00:27:07.740 | - Yes.

00:27:09.220 | I mean, following truth.

00:27:12.720 | - Well, truth is a funny, funny word.

00:27:15.240 | And reason too.

00:27:18.040 | There's, yeah, it's a difficult idea now

00:27:23.960 | with truth and the internet, right?

00:27:26.960 | And fake news and so on.

00:27:28.680 | I suppose when you say reason,

00:27:30.360 | you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions

00:27:34.600 | of science versus which political system is better?

00:27:38.240 | - Yes, yes.

00:27:39.400 | I mean truth about the real world,

00:27:42.680 | which is ascertainable by,

00:27:45.520 | not just by the more rigorous methods of science,

00:27:48.120 | but by just ordinary sensory observation.

00:27:52.840 | - So do you think there will ever be a time

00:27:54.440 | when we move past it?

00:27:57.360 | Like, I guess another way to ask it,

00:27:59.480 | are we hopelessly, fundamentally tied to religion

00:28:04.480 | in the way our society functions?

00:28:09.200 | - Well, clearly all individuals

00:28:11.800 | are not hopelessly tied to it

00:28:13.360 | because many individuals don't believe.

00:28:15.420 | You could mean something like society needs religion

00:28:20.220 | in order to function properly, something like that.

00:28:22.440 | And some people have suggested that.

00:28:23.840 | - What's your intuition on that?

00:28:25.900 | - Well, I've read books on it and they're persuasive.

00:28:30.900 | I don't think they're that persuasive though.

00:28:33.720 | I mean, some people suggested that society

00:28:38.320 | needs a sort of figurehead,

00:28:40.920 | which can be a non-existent figurehead

00:28:42.880 | in order to function properly.

00:28:44.640 | I think there's something rather patronizing

00:28:46.320 | about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough

00:28:50.680 | not to believe in God, but the plebs need it sort of thing.

00:28:54.280 | And I think that's patronizing.

00:28:55.840 | And I'd like to think that

00:28:58.360 | that was not the right way to proceed.

00:29:01.200 | - But at the individual level,

00:29:02.680 | do you think there's some value of spirituality?

00:29:08.680 | Sort of, if I think sort of as a scientist,

00:29:12.400 | the amount of things we actually know about our universe

00:29:15.140 | is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage

00:29:18.060 | of what we could possibly know.

00:29:19.940 | So just from everything,

00:29:21.360 | even the certainty we have about the laws of physics,

00:29:23.720 | it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover.

00:29:27.680 | And therefore we're sitting where 99.999% of things

00:29:31.640 | is just still shrouded in mystery.

00:29:34.320 | Do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view

00:29:37.680 | of that, sort of a humbled spiritual?

00:29:39.720 | - I think it's right to be humble.

00:29:41.360 | I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know,

00:29:44.200 | a lot that we don't understand,

00:29:45.360 | a lot that we still need to work on.

00:29:47.640 | We're working on it.

00:29:49.200 | What I don't think is that it helps

00:29:50.960 | to invoke supernatural explanations.

00:29:54.480 | If our current scientific explanations

00:29:58.920 | aren't adequate to do the job, then we need better ones.

00:30:01.400 | We need to work more.

00:30:02.800 | And of course, the history of science shows just that,

00:30:05.240 | that as science goes on,

00:30:06.720 | problems get solved one after another

00:30:09.680 | and the science advances as science gets better.

00:30:12.080 | But to invoke a non-scientific, non-physical explanation

00:30:18.080 | is simply to lie down in a cowardly way and say,

00:30:21.720 | "We can't solve it, so we're going to invoke magic."

00:30:24.440 | Don't let's do that.

00:30:25.280 | Let's say we need better science.

00:30:26.600 | We need more science.

00:30:27.820 | It may be that the science will never do it.

00:30:30.560 | It may be that we will never actually understand

00:30:32.560 | everything and that's okay, but let's keep working on it.

00:30:37.560 | - A challenging question there is,

00:30:41.000 | do you think science can lead us astray

00:30:43.000 | in terms of the humbleness?

00:30:44.240 | So there's some aspect of science,

00:30:47.240 | maybe it's the aspect of scientists and not science,

00:30:51.360 | but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence

00:30:56.280 | that can lead us astray in terms of discovering

00:31:01.640 | some of the big open questions about the universe.

00:31:05.280 | - I think that's right.

00:31:06.120 | I mean, there are arrogant people in any walk of life

00:31:09.240 | and scientists are no exception to that.

00:31:11.080 | And so there are arrogant scientists

00:31:13.160 | who think we've solved everything.

00:31:14.200 | Of course we haven't.

00:31:15.440 | So humility is a proper stance for a scientist.

00:31:18.640 | I mean, it's a proper working stance

00:31:20.120 | because it encourages further work.

00:31:23.980 | But in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation

00:31:28.440 | is a kind of arrogance because it's saying,

00:31:30.520 | well, we don't understand it scientifically,

00:31:32.120 | therefore the non-scientific religious

00:31:37.120 | supernatural explanation must be the right one.

00:31:39.720 | That's arrogant.

00:31:40.880 | What is humble is to say we don't know

00:31:43.120 | and we need to work further on it.

00:31:46.400 | - So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second,

00:31:50.240 | you have at times been just slightly frustrated

00:31:54.080 | with people who have a supernatural.

00:31:59.640 | Has that changed over the years?

00:32:01.400 | Have you become, like, how do people

00:32:03.840 | that kind of have seek supernatural explanations,

00:32:07.280 | how do you see those people as human beings?

00:32:12.280 | Do you see them as dishonest?

00:32:14.040 | Do you see them as sort of ignorant?

00:32:19.040 | Do you see them as, I don't know,

00:32:21.680 | like how do you think of those people?

00:32:23.400 | - Certainly not dishonest.

00:32:25.400 | And I mean, obviously many of them are perfectly nice people

00:32:28.520 | so I don't sort of despise them in that sense.

00:32:31.000 | I think it's often a misunderstanding

00:32:35.880 | that people will jump from the admission

00:32:40.880 | that we don't understand something.

00:32:43.960 | They will jump straight to what they think of

00:32:46.440 | as an alternative explanation,

00:32:48.000 | which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative.

00:32:50.640 | It's a non-explanation.

00:32:52.000 | Instead of jumping to the conclusion

00:32:55.280 | that science needs more work,

00:32:57.520 | that we need to actually do some better science.

00:33:00.880 | So I don't have, I mean,

00:33:04.080 | personal antipathy towards such people.

00:33:08.280 | I just think they're misguided.

00:33:10.800 | - So what about this really interesting space

00:33:12.800 | that I have trouble with?

00:33:14.560 | So religion I have a better grasp on,

00:33:16.960 | but there's large communities, like you said,

00:33:19.760 | Flat Earth community that I've recently,

00:33:23.680 | because I've made a few jokes about it,

00:33:26.680 | I saw that there's, I've noticed that there's people

00:33:29.440 | that take it quite seriously.

00:33:31.000 | So there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists,

00:33:36.640 | which is a kind of, I mean, there's elements of it

00:33:40.840 | that are religious as well,

00:33:43.680 | but I think they're also scientific.

00:33:46.120 | So the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist

00:33:50.280 | is to question everything,

00:33:53.760 | which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say.

00:33:57.920 | So what do you make of this?

00:33:59.960 | - I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say

00:34:04.080 | that by labeling something conspiracy,

00:34:06.960 | you therefore dismiss it.

00:34:08.080 | I mean, occasionally conspiracies are right.

00:34:10.680 | And so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand.

00:34:14.760 | We should examine them on their own merits.

00:34:17.280 | Flat Earthism is obvious nonsense.

00:34:19.280 | We don't have to examine that much further.

00:34:21.720 | But I mean, there may be other conspiracy theories

00:34:25.640 | which are actually right.

00:34:27.200 | - So I've grew up in the Soviet Union,

00:34:29.560 | so I understand, you know, the space race

00:34:31.880 | was very influential for me on both sides of the coin.

00:34:34.800 | You know, there's a conspiracy theory

00:34:37.880 | that we never went to the moon, right?

00:34:40.200 | And it's like, I can understand it,

00:34:45.200 | and it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show

00:34:47.880 | one way or the other.

00:34:49.560 | It's just, you have to use some of the human intuition

00:34:52.680 | about who would have to lie,

00:34:54.000 | who would have to work together.

00:34:55.400 | And it's clear that very unlikely good...

00:34:59.800 | Behind that is my general intuition

00:35:01.760 | that most people in this world are good.

00:35:04.280 | You know, in order to really put together

00:35:06.040 | some conspiracy theories,

00:35:07.480 | there has to be a large number of people working together

00:35:11.400 | and essentially being dishonest.

00:35:13.280 | - Yes, which is improbable.

00:35:14.840 | The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy

00:35:18.600 | and the sheer detail, the attention to detail

00:35:21.600 | they'd have had to have had and so on.

00:35:23.680 | I'd also worry about the motive,

00:35:26.080 | and why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen?

00:35:29.200 | What's the...

00:35:30.040 | Why is it so hard to believe?

00:35:33.120 | I mean, the physics of it, the mathematics of it,

00:35:36.120 | the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things,

00:35:40.600 | it all works mathematically.

00:35:42.400 | Why wouldn't you believe it?

00:35:44.200 | - It's a psychology question

00:35:45.320 | because there's something really pleasant

00:35:47.280 | about pointing out that the emperor has no clothes

00:35:52.280 | when everybody...

00:35:53.800 | Thinking outside the box

00:35:56.880 | and coming up with a true answer

00:35:58.480 | where everybody else is deluded.

00:36:00.000 | There's something...

00:36:00.840 | I mean, I have that for science, right?

00:36:02.880 | You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong.

00:36:05.240 | That's the whole...

00:36:06.080 | - No, that's right.

00:36:07.120 | And of course, historically,

00:36:09.680 | lone geniuses have come out right sometimes.

00:36:12.480 | But often people who think they're a lone genius

00:36:15.240 | have much more often turned out not to.

00:36:17.600 | So you have to judge each case on its merits.

00:36:20.240 | The mere fact that you're a maverick,

00:36:21.720 | the mere fact that you're going against the current tide

00:36:25.960 | doesn't make you right.

00:36:27.120 | You've got to show you're right by looking at the evidence.

00:36:29.880 | - So because you focus so much on religion

00:36:32.520 | and disassembled a lot of ideas there,

00:36:34.360 | and I was wondering if you have ideas

00:36:37.560 | about conspiracy theory groups,

00:36:41.040 | because it's such a prevalent,

00:36:42.200 | even reaching into presidential politics and so on.

00:36:46.240 | It seems like it's a very large communities

00:36:48.400 | that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories.

00:36:50.840 | Is there some connection there

00:36:52.280 | to your thinking on religion?

00:36:55.080 | - It is curious.

00:36:55.960 | It's a matter...

00:36:56.800 | It's an obviously difficult thing.

00:36:58.520 | I don't understand why people believe things

00:37:02.920 | that are clearly nonsense like, well, flat Earth,

00:37:05.800 | and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon

00:37:08.600 | or that the United States engineered 9/11,

00:37:13.600 | that kind of thing.

00:37:15.640 | - So it's not clearly nonsense,

00:37:18.640 | it's extremely unlikely.

00:37:20.920 | - Okay, it's extremely unlikely.

00:37:22.520 | Religion is a bit different

00:37:25.040 | because it's passed down from generation to generation.

00:37:27.640 | So many of the people who are religious

00:37:29.600 | got it from their parents,

00:37:31.880 | who got it from their parents,

00:37:32.800 | who got it from their parents,

00:37:33.760 | and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force.

00:37:38.760 | But these things like the 9/11 conspiracy theory,

00:37:43.880 | the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory,

00:37:47.800 | the man on the moon conspiracy theory,

00:37:50.560 | these are not childhood indoctrination.

00:37:52.320 | These are presumably dreamed up by somebody

00:37:56.840 | who then tells somebody else,

00:37:58.640 | who then wants to believe it.

00:38:01.000 | And I don't know why people are so eager

00:38:04.600 | to fall in line with just some person

00:38:07.880 | that they happen to read or meet who spins some yarn.

00:38:11.480 | I can kind of understand why they believe

00:38:14.240 | what their parents and teachers told them

00:38:16.360 | when they were very tiny

00:38:18.160 | and not capable of critical thinking for themselves.

00:38:21.440 | So I sort of get why the great religions of the world

00:38:25.160 | like Catholicism and Islam go on persisting.

00:38:28.880 | It's because of childhood indoctrination.

00:38:31.240 | But that's not true of flat-earthers.

00:38:33.800 | And sure enough, flat-earthers is a very minority cult.

00:38:37.560 | - Way larger than I ever realized.

00:38:39.880 | - Well, yes, I know.

00:38:40.720 | - But so that's a really clean idea.

00:38:42.240 | And you've articulated that in your new book

00:38:43.920 | and "The Outgrown God"

00:38:45.600 | and in "God Delusion" is the early indoctrination.

00:38:49.120 | That's really interesting.

00:38:50.280 | You can get away with a lot of out there ideas

00:38:53.400 | in terms of religious texts

00:38:56.040 | if the age at which you convey those ideas at first

00:39:01.040 | is a young age.

00:39:02.780 | So indoctrination is sort of an essential element

00:39:06.240 | of propagation of religion.

00:39:08.140 | So let me ask on the morality side

00:39:12.480 | in the books that I mentioned,

00:39:13.720 | "God Delusion" and "Outgrown God",

00:39:15.320 | you described that human beings

00:39:17.520 | don't need religion to be moral.

00:39:20.060 | So from an engineering perspective,

00:39:21.660 | we wanna engineer morality into AI systems.

00:39:26.440 | So in general, where do you think morals come from

00:39:30.760 | in humans?

00:39:31.840 | - A very complicated and interesting question.

00:39:36.680 | It's clear to me that the moral standards,

00:39:40.680 | the moral values of our civilization

00:39:44.680 | changes as the decades go by,

00:39:49.600 | certainly as the centuries go by,

00:39:51.040 | even as the decades go by.

00:39:53.320 | And we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled

00:39:58.320 | 21st century people in terms of our moral values.

00:40:03.320 | There's a spread.

00:40:05.360 | I mean, some of us are a little bit more ruthless,

00:40:08.080 | some of us more conservative,

00:40:09.160 | some of us more liberal and so on.

00:40:11.360 | But we all subscribe to pretty much the same views

00:40:15.940 | when you compare us with say 18th century,

00:40:19.540 | 17th century people,

00:40:21.160 | even 19th century, 20th century people.

00:40:23.320 | So we're much less racist,

00:40:27.880 | we're much less sexist and so on than we used to be.

00:40:30.520 | Some people are still racist and some are still sexist,

00:40:33.260 | but the spread has shifted.

00:40:35.480 | The Gaussian distribution has moved

00:40:37.780 | and moves steadily as the centuries go by.

00:40:42.320 | And that is the most powerful influence I can see

00:40:48.160 | on our moral values.

00:40:50.520 | And that doesn't have anything to do with religion.

00:40:53.080 | I mean, the religion, sorry,

00:40:55.600 | the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models,

00:41:00.600 | morals, they're deplorable

00:41:02.400 | and they are to be understood

00:41:06.240 | in terms of the people in the desert

00:41:08.400 | who made them up at the time.

00:41:10.360 | And so human sacrifice,

00:41:11.880 | an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,

00:41:15.560 | petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath,

00:41:19.280 | all that kind of thing, inconceivable now.

00:41:23.720 | - So at some point, religious texts may have in part

00:41:26.840 | reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time.

00:41:30.040 | - I'm sure they did, I'm sure they always reflect that, yes.

00:41:32.120 | - And then now, but the sort of almost like the meme

00:41:35.920 | as you describe it of ideas moves much faster

00:41:40.100 | than religious texts do, than you religious people.

00:41:42.960 | - Basing your morals on religious texts,

00:41:45.200 | which were written millennia ago

00:41:47.120 | is not a great way to proceed.

00:41:51.560 | I think that's pretty clear.

00:41:53.400 | So not only should we not get our morals from such texts,

00:41:58.400 | but we don't, we quite clearly don't.

00:42:01.280 | If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women

00:42:04.560 | and we'd be racist, we'd be killing homosexuals and so on.

00:42:09.480 | So we don't and we shouldn't.

00:42:14.520 | Now, of course, it's possible to use

00:42:18.080 | your 21st century standards of morality

00:42:20.520 | and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick

00:42:23.560 | particular verses which conform to our modern morality

00:42:27.640 | and you'll find that Jesus says some pretty nice things,

00:42:30.480 | which is great, but you're using your 21st century morality

00:42:35.480 | to decide which verses to pick and which verses to reject.

00:42:39.040 | And so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible

00:42:42.760 | and go straight to the 21st century morality,

00:42:46.400 | which is where that comes from.

00:42:49.680 | It's a much more complicated question.

00:42:51.200 | Why is it that morality, moral values change

00:42:55.520 | as the centuries go by?

00:42:56.520 | They undoubtedly do.

00:42:58.240 | And it's a very interesting question to ask why.

00:43:00.480 | It's another example of cultural evolution,

00:43:03.280 | just as technology progresses,

00:43:07.400 | so moral values progress for probably very different reasons.

00:43:10.520 | - But it's interesting if the direction

00:43:12.720 | in which that progress is happening

00:43:14.360 | has some evolutionary value or if it's merely a drift

00:43:17.480 | that can go into any direction.

00:43:19.320 | - I'm not sure it's any direction

00:43:20.440 | and I'm not sure it's evolutionarily valuable.

00:43:22.600 | What it is is progressive in the sense that each step

00:43:26.880 | is a step in the same direction as the previous step.

00:43:30.080 | So it becomes more gentle, more decent,

00:43:33.160 | by modern standards, more liberal, less violent.

00:43:37.440 | - See, but more decent, I think you're using terms

00:43:40.440 | and interpreting everything in the context

00:43:42.680 | of the 21st century.

00:43:44.320 | Because Genghis Khan would probably say

00:43:46.760 | that this is not more decent because we're now,

00:43:49.800 | you know, there's a lot of weak members of society

00:43:52.160 | that we're not murdering.

00:43:53.000 | - Yes, and I was careful to say

00:43:54.800 | by the standards of the 21st century,

00:43:56.840 | by our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history,

00:44:00.880 | what we see is a trend in the direction towards us,

00:44:03.920 | towards our present value system.

00:44:06.760 | - For us, we see progress, but it's an open question

00:44:10.680 | whether that won't, you know,

00:44:13.000 | I don't see necessarily why we can never return

00:44:15.600 | to Genghis Khan times.

00:44:16.440 | - Well, we could.

00:44:18.120 | I suspect we won't.

00:44:19.640 | But if you look at the history of moral values

00:44:24.640 | over the centuries, it is in a progressive,

00:44:27.360 | I use the word progressive not in a value judgment sense,

00:44:31.200 | in the sense of a transitive sense.

00:44:33.920 | Each step is the same direction of the previous step.

00:44:37.480 | So things like we don't derive entertainment

00:44:42.480 | from torturing cats.

00:44:45.360 | We don't derive entertainment from,

00:44:48.400 | like the Romans did in the Colosseum from that stage.

00:44:52.640 | - Or rather we suppress the desire to get,

00:44:57.640 | I mean, to have pleasure.

00:44:58.960 | It's probably in us somewhere.

00:45:00.320 | So there's a bunch of parts of our brain,

00:45:02.720 | one that probably, you know, limbic system

00:45:05.400 | that wants certain pleasures.

00:45:06.840 | And that's-

00:45:07.680 | - I mean, I wouldn't have said that,

00:45:10.760 | but you're limited to think that.

00:45:13.840 | - Well, there's a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History

00:45:17.560 | that has a really nice explanation

00:45:18.960 | of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people,

00:45:22.120 | the fighting of people, just the torture,

00:45:23.760 | the suffering of people throughout history

00:45:25.800 | as entertainment until quite recently.

00:45:29.920 | And now everything we do with sports,

00:45:32.480 | we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else.

00:45:35.680 | I mean, there is some dark aspects of human nature

00:45:39.000 | that are underneath everything.

00:45:41.160 | And I do hope this like higher level software we've built

00:45:45.540 | will keep us at bay.

00:45:46.920 | - Yes.

00:45:47.760 | - I'm also Jewish and have history

00:45:49.880 | with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.

00:45:53.480 | And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects

00:45:57.840 | of human nature creeped up there.

00:45:59.240 | - They do.

00:46:00.080 | - And there have been steps backwards admittedly,

00:46:03.520 | and the Holocaust is an obvious one.

00:46:05.000 | But if you take a broad view of history,

00:46:07.160 | it's in the same direction.

00:46:09.560 | - So Pamela McCordick in "Machines Who Think"

00:46:14.920 | has written that AI began with an ancient wish

00:46:17.400 | to forge the gods.

00:46:19.580 | Do you see, it's a poetic description, I suppose,

00:46:23.000 | but do you see a connection between our civilizations,

00:46:27.040 | historic desire to create gods, to create religions,

00:46:30.120 | and our modern desire to create technology,

00:46:33.840 | an intelligent technology?

00:46:35.560 | - I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire

00:46:40.360 | to explain away mystery and science,

00:46:45.360 | but artificial intelligence creating gods,

00:46:50.520 | creating new gods.

00:46:51.860 | I mean, I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious

00:46:56.920 | paper which said that we have a new god,

00:46:59.000 | it's called Google, and we pray to it, and we worship it,

00:47:03.040 | and we ask its advice like an oracle and so on.

00:47:05.660 | That's fun.

00:47:07.680 | - You don't see that, you see that as a fun statement,

00:47:11.040 | a facetious statement, you don't see that

00:47:13.320 | as a kind of truth of us creating things

00:47:15.480 | that are more powerful than ourselves,

00:47:17.480 | a natural sort of-

00:47:18.760 | - It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get.

00:47:22.320 | - But-

00:47:23.160 | - I wouldn't-

00:47:24.000 | - But not a scientific one.

00:47:25.720 | - I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself,

00:47:27.480 | put it that way.

00:47:28.320 | - All right.

00:47:29.140 | So you don't think AI will become a new religion,

00:47:33.640 | a new god, like Google?

00:47:34.680 | - Well, yes, I mean, I can see that

00:47:36.800 | the future of intelligent machines,

00:47:41.160 | or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space,

00:47:44.520 | might yield beings that we would regard as gods

00:47:48.160 | in the sense that they are so superior to us

00:47:51.120 | that we might as well worship them.

00:47:53.360 | That's highly plausible, I think.

00:47:56.600 | But I see a very fundamental distinction

00:48:00.000 | between a god who is simply defined

00:48:03.080 | as something very, very powerful and intelligent

00:48:05.520 | on the one hand, and a god who doesn't need explaining

00:48:09.380 | by a progressive step-by-step process like evolution

00:48:13.800 | or like engineering design.

00:48:17.720 | So the difference, so suppose we did meet an alien

00:48:21.600 | from outer space who was marvelously,

00:48:25.640 | magnificently more intelligent than us,

00:48:27.480 | and we would sort of worship it for that reason.

00:48:30.640 | Nevertheless, it would not be a god

00:48:32.920 | in the very important sense that it did not just happen

00:48:36.880 | by to be there like God is supposed to.

00:48:40.660 | It must have come about by a gradual, step-by-step,

00:48:44.640 | incremental, progressive process,

00:48:47.560 | presumably like Darwinian evolution.

00:48:49.760 | So there's all the difference in the world

00:48:52.600 | between those two.

00:48:53.800 | Intelligence, design, comes into the universe late

00:48:58.800 | as a product of a progressive evolutionary process

00:49:02.720 | or a progressive engineering design process.

00:49:06.440 | - So most of the work is done through this slow-moving--

00:49:09.440 | - Exactly. - Progress.

00:49:10.720 | - Exactly.

00:49:11.560 | - Yeah. (chuckles)

00:49:17.680 | Yeah, but there's still this desire to get answers

00:49:20.480 | to the why question that if the world is a simulation,

00:49:24.560 | if we're living in a simulation,

00:49:25.840 | that there's a programmer-like creature

00:49:29.000 | that we can ask questions of.

00:49:30.240 | - Okay, well, let's pursue the idea

00:49:32.320 | that we're living in a simulation,

00:49:33.720 | which is not totally ridiculous, by the way.

00:49:36.140 | - There we go.

00:49:38.080 | - Then you still need to explain the programmer.

00:49:44.480 | The programmer had to come into existence

00:49:46.560 | by some, even if we're in a simulation,

00:49:49.920 | the programmer must have evolved.

00:49:51.600 | Or if he's in a sort of--

00:49:54.800 | - Or she. - Or she.

00:49:56.160 | If she's in a meta-simulation,

00:49:58.700 | then the meta-meta-programmer must have evolved

00:50:02.040 | by a gradual process.

00:50:03.560 | You can't escape that.

00:50:05.200 | Fundamentally, you've got to come back

00:50:06.940 | to a gradual, incremental process of explanation

00:50:11.200 | to start with.

00:50:12.140 | - There's no shortcuts in this world.

00:50:16.080 | - No, exactly.

00:50:17.440 | - But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation,

00:50:21.040 | do you think it's an interesting,

00:50:23.080 | basically talk to,

00:50:25.200 | bore the heck out of everybody asking this question,

00:50:28.280 | but whether you live in a simulation,

00:50:31.280 | do you think, first, do you think we live in a simulation?

00:50:34.120 | Second, do you think it's an interesting thought experiment?

00:50:37.320 | - It's certainly an interesting thought experiment.

00:50:39.600 | I first met it in a science fiction novel

00:50:42.400 | by Daniel Galloway called "Counterfeit World,"

00:50:47.400 | in which it's all about,

00:50:52.440 | I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer

00:50:55.200 | which simulates the world,

00:50:57.360 | and something goes wrong,

00:51:00.240 | and so one of them has to go down into the simulated world

00:51:02.480 | in order to fix it.

00:51:03.680 | And then the denouement of the thing,

00:51:07.320 | the climax to the novel is that they discover

00:51:09.240 | that they themselves are in another simulation

00:51:11.040 | at a higher level.

00:51:12.400 | So I was intrigued by this,

00:51:13.680 | and I love others of Daniel Galloway's

00:51:17.000 | science fiction novels.

00:51:18.760 | Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom.

00:51:23.400 | - Bostrom, talking to him in an hour.

00:51:25.160 | - Okay.

00:51:26.000 | (laughing)

00:51:27.360 | And he goes further,

00:51:29.480 | not just to treat it as a science fiction speculation,

00:51:32.240 | he actually thinks it's positively likely.

00:51:34.880 | - Yes.

00:51:35.720 | - I mean, he thinks it's very likely, actually.

00:51:37.240 | - Well, he makes a probabilistic argument

00:51:39.400 | which you can use to come up with

00:51:41.160 | very interesting conclusions about

00:51:42.880 | the nature of this universe.

00:51:44.400 | - I mean, he thinks that we're in a simulation

00:51:48.720 | done by, so to speak, our descendants of the future,

00:51:51.320 | that the products, but it's still a product of evolution.

00:51:54.880 | It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution,

00:51:57.000 | even though the super intelligent people of the future

00:52:01.800 | have created our world,

00:52:05.040 | and you and I are just a simulation,

00:52:06.600 | and this table is a simulation, and so on.

00:52:09.680 | I don't actually, in my heart of hearts, believe it,

00:52:13.120 | but I like his argument.

00:52:15.520 | - Well, so the interesting thing is,

00:52:18.080 | that I agree with you, but the interesting thing to me,

00:52:21.120 | if I were to say, if we're living in a simulation,

00:52:23.600 | that in that simulation, to make it work,

00:52:26.560 | you still have to do everything gradually,

00:52:28.920 | just like you said.

00:52:30.200 | That even though it's programmed,

00:52:31.880 | I don't think there could be miracles.

00:52:33.520 | Otherwise, it's--

00:52:34.360 | - Well, no, I mean, the programmer,

00:52:36.240 | the higher, the upper ones, have to have evolved gradually.

00:52:39.840 | However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous.

00:52:43.040 | I mean, they could be switched on,

00:52:44.440 | and we come into the world with fabricated memories.

00:52:48.200 | - True, but what I'm trying to convey,

00:52:50.200 | so you're saying the broader statement,

00:52:52.800 | but I'm saying from an engineering perspective,

00:52:55.400 | both the programmer has to be slowly evolved,

00:52:58.920 | and the simulation, because it's--

00:53:01.160 | - Oh, yeah.

00:53:02.000 | - From an engineering perspective--

00:53:03.200 | - Oh, yeah, it takes a long time to write a program.

00:53:05.600 | No, like, just, I don't think you can create

00:53:07.880 | the universe in a snap.

00:53:09.920 | I think you have to grow it.

00:53:11.600 | - Okay, well, that's a good point.

00:53:15.760 | That's an arguable point.

00:53:17.040 | By the way, I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom idea

00:53:22.040 | to solve the riddle of how, we were talking earlier

00:53:27.400 | about why the human brain can achieve so much.

00:53:32.160 | I thought of this when my then 100-year-old mother

00:53:36.160 | was marveling at what I could do with a smartphone,

00:53:39.400 | and I could call, look up anything in the encyclopedia,

00:53:42.800 | or I could play her music that she liked, and so on.

00:53:44.680 | She said, "But it's all in that tiny little phone."

00:53:46.840 | No, it's out there, it's in the cloud.

00:53:49.600 | And maybe most of what we do is in a cloud.

00:53:52.600 | So maybe if we are a simulation,

00:53:56.200 | then all the power that we think is in our skull,

00:54:00.280 | it actually may be like the power

00:54:01.760 | that we think is in the iPhone,

00:54:04.160 | but is that actually out there in a--

00:54:06.280 | - It's an interface to something else.

00:54:07.800 | - Yes.

00:54:08.640 | - I mean, that's what people,

00:54:10.520 | including Roger Penrose with panpsychism,

00:54:12.760 | that consciousness is somehow a fundamental part of physics,

00:54:15.920 | that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside a brain.

00:54:19.240 | - But Roger thinks it does reside in the skull,

00:54:21.720 | whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't,

00:54:24.040 | that there's a cloud.

00:54:27.840 | - That'd be a fascinating notion.

00:54:31.280 | On a small tangent,

00:54:33.080 | are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman, I guess?

00:54:37.680 | Maybe not saying his name correctly,

00:54:40.320 | but just forget the name,

00:54:43.560 | the idea that there's a difference

00:54:45.200 | between reality and perception.

00:54:47.400 | So like we biological organisms perceive the world

00:54:52.400 | in order for the natural selection process

00:54:54.760 | to be able to survive and so on,

00:54:56.400 | but that doesn't mean that our perception

00:54:59.360 | actually reflects the fundamental reality,

00:55:02.520 | the physical reality underneath.

00:55:04.000 | - Well, I do think that,

00:55:06.160 | although it reflects the fundamental reality,

00:55:09.880 | I do believe there is a fundamental reality,

00:55:12.080 | I do think that our perception is constructive

00:55:17.960 | in the sense that we construct in our minds

00:55:22.040 | a model of what we're seeing.

00:55:24.360 | And so, and this is really the view of people

00:55:27.440 | who work on visual illusions like Richard Gregory,

00:55:30.720 | who point out that things like a Necker cube,

00:55:33.800 | which flip from, it's a two-dimensional picture

00:55:37.720 | of a cube on a sheet of paper,

00:55:41.000 | but we see it as a three-dimensional cube,

00:55:43.040 | and it flips from one orientation to another

00:55:45.360 | at regular intervals.

00:55:48.440 | What's going on is that the brain is constructing a cube,

00:55:52.680 | but the sense data are compatible

00:55:55.040 | with two alternative cubes.

00:55:57.120 | And so rather than stick with one of them,

00:55:58.640 | it alternates between them.

00:56:00.440 | I think that's just a model for what we do all the time

00:56:04.640 | when we see a table, when we see a person,

00:56:06.640 | when we see anything,

00:56:08.120 | we're using the sense data to construct

00:56:12.200 | or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model.

00:56:15.760 | I noticed this when I meet somebody

00:56:20.800 | who actually is, say, a friend of mine,

00:56:24.160 | but until I kind of realized that it is him,

00:56:28.480 | he looks different.

00:56:29.680 | And then when I finally clock that it's him,

00:56:32.960 | his features switch like a Necker cube

00:56:35.760 | into the familiar form.

00:56:37.440 | As it were, I've taken his face

00:56:39.600 | out of the filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto,

00:56:44.080 | or used the sense data to invoke it.

00:56:48.600 | Yeah, we do some kind of miraculous compression

00:56:51.240 | on this whole thing to be able to filter out

00:56:53.280 | most of the sense data and make sense of it.

00:56:56.040 | That's just the magical thing that we do.

00:56:58.720 | So you've written several, many amazing books,

00:57:03.600 | but let me ask what books, technical or fiction

00:57:08.440 | or philosophical had a big impact on your own life?

00:57:11.400 | What books would you recommend people consider reading

00:57:17.040 | in their own intellectual journey?

00:57:18.800 | - Darwin, of course.

00:57:22.000 | - The original, I've actually,

00:57:25.200 | a shame to say I've never read Darwin in the original.

00:57:28.880 | - He's astonishingly prescient

00:57:30.520 | because considering he was writing

00:57:32.040 | in the middle of the 19th century,

00:57:34.680 | Michael Gieselin said he's working

00:57:37.160 | a hundred years ahead of his time.

00:57:39.040 | Everything except genetics is amazingly right

00:57:42.680 | and amazingly far ahead of his time.

00:57:46.480 | And of course you need to read the updatings

00:57:51.000 | that have happened since his time as well.

00:57:54.680 | I mean, he would be astonished by,

00:57:56.480 | well, let alone Watson and Crick, of course,

00:58:01.440 | but he'd be astonished by Mendelian genetics as well.

00:58:04.240 | - Yeah, it'd be fascinating to see what he thought about,

00:58:06.920 | he would think about DNA.

00:58:08.520 | - I mean, yes, it would, because in many ways

00:58:11.520 | it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle.

00:58:16.520 | The digital nature of genetics clears up

00:58:21.240 | what was a problem, what was a big problem.

00:58:24.160 | Gosh, there's so much that I could think of.

00:58:27.240 | I can't really-

00:58:28.560 | - Is there something outside sort of more fiction?

00:58:32.320 | Is there, when you think young,

00:58:34.080 | was there books that just kind of,

00:58:35.480 | outside of kind of the realm of science and religion,

00:58:38.760 | that just kind of sparked your journey?

00:58:40.520 | - Yes, well, actually, I suppose I could say

00:58:43.640 | that I've learned some science from science fiction.

00:58:48.360 | I mentioned Daniel Galloy, and that's one example,

00:58:54.800 | but another of his novels called "Dark Universe,"

00:58:59.240 | which is not terribly well-known,

00:59:00.360 | but it's a very, very nice science fiction story.

00:59:02.520 | It's about a world of perpetual darkness.

00:59:06.320 | And we're not told at the beginning of the book

00:59:08.160 | why these people are in darkness.

00:59:09.600 | They stumble around in some kind of underground world

00:59:13.320 | of caverns and passages,

00:59:15.560 | using echolocation like bats and whales to get around.

00:59:20.360 | And they've adapted, presumably by Darwinian means,

00:59:24.600 | to survive in perpetual, total darkness.

00:59:28.240 | But what's interesting is that their mythology,

00:59:30.920 | their religion, has echoes of Christianity,

00:59:35.920 | but it's based on light.

00:59:38.160 | And so there's been a fall from a paradise world

00:59:43.160 | that once existed where light reigned supreme.

00:59:46.960 | And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them.

00:59:51.960 | So then they no longer are in light's presence,

00:59:54.440 | but light survives in the form of mythology

00:59:58.280 | and in the form of sayings like,

01:00:00.320 | "The great light almighty,"

01:00:01.440 | "Oh, for light's sake, don't do that,"

01:00:03.360 | and "I hear what you mean"

01:00:06.080 | rather than "I see what you mean."

01:00:07.880 | - So some of the same religious elements are present

01:00:10.280 | in this other totally kind of absurd different form.

01:00:13.320 | - Yes.

01:00:14.160 | And so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it satire

01:00:16.800 | because it's too good-natured for that.

01:00:17.640 | I mean, a wonderful parable about Christianity

01:00:22.640 | and the doctrine, the theological doctrine of the fall.

01:00:26.040 | So I find that kind of science fiction immensely stimulating.

01:00:31.480 | Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud."

01:00:33.280 | Oh, by the way, anything by Arthur C. Clarke

01:00:35.000 | I find very, very wonderful too.

01:00:37.360 | Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud,"

01:00:39.600 | his first science fiction novel where he,

01:00:44.600 | well, I learned a lot of science from that.

01:00:48.880 | It suffers from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately,

01:00:51.640 | but apart from that, you learn a lot of science from it.

01:00:54.920 | Another of his novels, "A for Andromeda,"

01:00:59.520 | which by the way, the theme of that is taken up

01:01:02.560 | by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel,

01:01:05.720 | another wonderful writer, "Carl Sagan Contact,"

01:01:10.160 | where the idea is, again, we will not be visited

01:01:15.160 | from outer space by physical bodies.

01:01:18.520 | We will be visited, possibly, we might be visited by radio,

01:01:21.760 | but the radio signals could manipulate us

01:01:25.200 | and actually have a concrete influence on the world

01:01:30.560 | if they make us or persuade us to build a computer

01:01:35.320 | which runs their software

01:01:37.400 | so that they can then transmit their software by radio.

01:01:41.480 | And then the computer takes over the world.

01:01:44.680 | And this is the same theme in both Hoyle's book

01:01:48.080 | and Sagan's book.

01:01:49.360 | I presume, I don't know whether Sagan knew

01:01:51.240 | about Hoyle's book, probably did.

01:01:53.320 | And, but it's a clever idea

01:01:56.640 | that we will never be invaded by physical bodies.

01:02:03.080 | The war of the worlds of HG Wells will never happen,

01:02:06.120 | but we could be invaded by radio signals, code,

01:02:10.160 | coded information, which is sort of like DNA.

01:02:13.400 | And we are, I call them, we are survival machines of our DNA.

01:02:18.400 | So it has great resonance for me because I think of us,

01:02:25.080 | I think of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies

01:02:29.040 | as being manipulated by coded information, DNA,

01:02:34.040 | which has come down through generations.

01:02:36.520 | - And in the space of memes,

01:02:38.320 | it doesn't have to be physical.

01:02:39.560 | It can be transmitted through the space of information.

01:02:42.680 | - Yes.

01:02:43.880 | - That's a fascinating possibility that from outer space,

01:02:47.240 | we can be infiltrated by other memes, by other ideas

01:02:51.320 | and thereby controlled in that way.

01:02:54.040 | Let me ask the last, the silliest,

01:02:56.760 | or maybe the most important question.

01:02:58.840 | What is the meaning of life?

01:03:00.920 | What gives your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, meaning?

01:03:06.040 | - From a scientific point of view,

01:03:07.160 | the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA,

01:03:10.160 | but that's not what I feel.

01:03:11.720 | That's not the meaning of my life.

01:03:14.280 | So the meaning of my life is something

01:03:16.400 | which is probably different from yours

01:03:17.640 | and different from other people's,

01:03:18.640 | but we each make our own meaning.

01:03:21.520 | So we set up goals we want to achieve.

01:03:26.240 | We want to write a book.

01:03:27.060 | We want to do whatever it is we do, write a quartet.

01:03:32.060 | We want to win a football match.

01:03:34.900 | And these are short-term goals.

01:03:38.880 | Well, maybe even quite long-term goals,

01:03:41.240 | which are set up by our brains,

01:03:42.760 | which have goal-seeking machinery built into them.

01:03:45.900 | But what we feel, we don't feel motivated

01:03:49.280 | by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly.

01:03:53.400 | We have other goals, which can be very moving,

01:03:57.180 | very important.

01:03:59.200 | They could even be called spiritual in some cases.

01:04:02.700 | We want to understand the riddle of the universe.

01:04:06.060 | We want to understand consciousness.

01:04:07.660 | We want to understand how the brain works.

01:04:09.780 | These are all noble goals.

01:04:13.300 | Some of them can be noble goals anyway,

01:04:15.900 | and they are a far cry

01:04:18.060 | from the fundamental biological goal,

01:04:20.060 | which is the propagation of DNA.

01:04:22.380 | But the machinery that enables us

01:04:24.240 | to set up these higher level goals

01:04:28.180 | is originally programmed into us

01:04:30.960 | by natural selection of DNA.

01:04:34.240 | - The propagation of DNA.

01:04:35.660 | But what do you make of this unfortunate fact

01:04:39.920 | that we are mortal?

01:04:41.700 | Do you ponder your mortality?

01:04:43.960 | Does it make you sad?

01:04:45.740 | Does it-

01:04:47.120 | - I ponder it.

01:04:49.040 | It makes me sad that I shall have to leave

01:04:51.640 | and not see what's going to happen next.

01:04:55.120 | If there's something frightening about mortality,

01:05:00.640 | apart from sort of missing, as I've said,

01:05:03.380 | something more deeply, darkly frightening,

01:05:07.320 | it's the idea of eternity.

01:05:09.640 | But eternity is only frightening if you're there.

01:05:11.800 | Eternity before we were born,

01:05:14.320 | billions of years before we were born,

01:05:15.980 | and we were effectively dead before we were born.

01:05:19.960 | As I think it was Mark Twain said,

01:05:21.240 | "I was dead for billions of years before I was born

01:05:24.100 | "and never suffered the smallest inconvenience."

01:05:26.360 | And that's how it's going to be after we leave.

01:05:29.480 | So I think of it as really,

01:05:31.480 | eternity is a frightening prospect.

01:05:33.760 | And so the best way to spend it

01:05:35.780 | is under a general anesthetic,

01:05:38.120 | which is what it'll be.

01:05:39.420 | - Beautifully put.

01:05:41.640 | Richard, it was a huge honor to meet you, to talk to you.

01:05:43.960 | Thank you so much for your time.

01:05:45.120 | - Thank you very much.

01:05:46.240 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:05:48.680 | with Richard Dawkins.

01:05:49.860 | And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.

01:05:53.000 | Please consider supporting the podcast

01:05:54.660 | by downloading Cash App and using code LEXPODCAST.

01:05:58.560 | If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,

01:06:01.040 | review with Five Stars on Apple Podcast,

01:06:03.200 | support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter

01:06:06.560 | at Lex Friedman.

01:06:08.560 | And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom

01:06:10.920 | from Richard Dawkins.

01:06:12.880 | "We are going to die.

01:06:15.000 | "And that makes us the lucky ones.

01:06:17.560 | "Most people are never going to die

01:06:19.240 | "because they're never going to be born.

01:06:21.940 | "The potential people who could have been here in my place,

01:06:25.240 | "but who will in fact never see the light of day

01:06:27.840 | "outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

01:06:31.260 | "Certainly those unborn ghosts

01:06:33.480 | "include greater poets than Keats,

01:06:35.700 | "scientists greater than Newton.

01:06:37.700 | "We know this because the set of possible people

01:06:41.260 | "allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds

01:06:44.880 | "the set of actual people.

01:06:47.000 | "In the teeth of these stupefying odds,

01:06:49.420 | "it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

01:06:54.420 | "We privileged few who won the lottery

01:06:57.540 | "of birth against all odds.

01:06:59.960 | "How dare we whine at our inevitable return

01:07:03.240 | "to that prior state from which the vast majority

01:07:06.260 | "have never stirred."

01:07:08.360 | Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

01:07:11.460 | (upbeat music)

01:07:14.040 | (upbeat music)

01:07:16.620 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes | Lex Fridman Podcast #87

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