Race, Science, Religion & Evolution - Richard Dawkins

what do you make of this recent rise of cultural Christianity given that you were a big part of popularizing atheism over the last few decades it seems like have we already forgotten that is this sort of coming back around C for Christianity means nothing um we're all cultural Christians if we were brought up in a Christian culture and and I was and you you probably were as well I it doesn't mean anything at all it doesn't mean we believe it that's what's important is whether you believe it or not and I don't believe a word of it but it is a simple matter of fact that I'm brought up in a Christian culture so I'm a cultural cultural Christian it seems that there are uh gradations of belief now I think uh people that you might not have expected to have uh used it so much Jordan Peterson's of the world the Russell br's of the world the Andrew Tate of the world I think is it Latin mass that is one of the quickest growing um denomination ations especially for young people and it's an an entire ceremony that no one unless you're educated in Latin that nobody can understand so beyond just the moniker of cultural Christianity it seems like some kind of religious belief is increasing of course it's a an advantage to be in Latin that nobody can understand because if you can understand it you realize what nonsense it is some people would say that the reason that they like it is that that it's got this sort of uh like a pump and and and ceremony and uh it makes them feel connected to sort of the roots of what's going on yes I get that imagine that but it does seem it's interesting to me that what was rebellious and sort of revolutionary and a a bit kind of uh Cutting Edge was the atheism conversation only not so long ago and there has been uh some rebranding whether it's uh uh men getting their passports and and talking about wanting to convert to Islam which I think would have been a very surprising thing to have heard or Christianity too it seems like that's the uh on Trend dour way to live your life you follow Trends in society I'm not that interested in Trends in society I'm interested in what's true and if there are Trends this way trends that way that'll be different in a few years time anyway mhm I do think that there are leading indicators of what we may see uh in future that is possible or or the reverse also true as well I think uh we spoke about this last night and obviously uh I do need to call it out we had a great conversation on stage for 60 minutes and then another 30 uh so some do rather wonder how we're going to cover something else something new we covered a lot of ground last night um one of the topics I really wanted to touch back on was much of people's uh beliefs and worldviews were pulled apart by typically where they would have got the worldview from being religion if that is uh no longer as prevalent if it's been uh uh disproven if it's been uh criticized to the point where someone can't hold on to their belief anymore that causes a vacuum that causes them to not have something to believe in in the same way what do you what do you say to people that sort of Miss have their life being imbued with meaning in a way where maybe they can't take it from rationality immediately like you do I think it's rather demeaning to humanity to suggest they need anything like that it's rather disrespectful I think of humanity to say you have to have some crutch to boy you up in life and if you haven't got Christianity you turn to something else why assume why why denigrate Humanity in that sort of way I think the problem is and I agree and I I I very much appreciated your answer last night uh the rational perspective on human psychology is to understand its irrationality a lot of the time and that is sort of an odd Circle to try and square I think this is what is true and this is what you should believe but then there's this other branch which is what we tend toward stories and narrative and personification yes I was very impressed uh with both in Dallas and here in Austin with the number of people come up to me and say they thank me for helping them to get rid of their religious crutch and I'm I'm very heartened by that I guess maybe there are the people who do come up to me and the ones a little bit of a selection effect perhaps yeah elction effect but it it is very encouraging and and I I do find that enormous numbers of people do seem to be turning against religion and not turning to some other kind of nonsense how why do you think it is we were talking about convergent evolution last night uh religion seems to be a would you call it a convergent molu you could I mean yes um you you could say that oh by the way talking of convergent evolution I looked up the crabs that you yes brilliant okay little bit of a prim up for everyone that wasn't there last night um I I asked whether crabs are the Pinnacle of evolutionary trajectory because apparently lots of creatures go to it what's true have I been scoped is this okay no I looked it up it's an article in Scientific American uh and uh it simply is that there are a fair number of about half a dozen separate lineages of decapod crustations which are converging on the crab way of doing things which is to as it well lose the abdomen Cur make the abdomen very small and curl it up underneath the um the the big carace um and it's just happened half a dozen times which is convergent evolution and that's very nice I mean that that's a nice example but talk about the Pinnacle of evolution doesn't mean that humans in a few thousand years are going to become okay well that's a that's a shame uh religion as a independently arising system that humans seem to have used culturally it does seem to arise all over the world everywhere in in the world um anthropologists tell us that people converge upon some kind of Supernatural belief that's very understandable psychologically I think U but it does seem to be a a a convergent thing and I can well believe it I can understand it people hunger for explanation and when they didn't have science they would naturally turn to oh the spirit of the river and the spirit of the mountain and the spirit of the waterfall and and all that kind of thing um and then that graduated into Gods like Thor and Wan and Zeus and Apollo and then graduated into the monotheistic religions um but but there's no reason to believe any of them is that uh tendency towards Supernatural explanations when we don't have one that we can grasp on to firmly a byproduct of the fact that most of our lives are lived through story and personification and death and battle and so on and so forth and and also the the the the the desire the hunger for agency um we we we want there to be agents that that are responsible for things so rather than just say the weather is due to the laws of nature earthquakes due to the laws of nature um you actually want it to be an agent you actually want it to be some kind of conscious being and that sort of does make sense because um when you live a perilous existence as our ancestors did then any kind of um random change in the environment could be danger and the specific specific kind of danger that they would have feared would have been Predators um would have been enemies um so um rather than say oh it's a fact of nature that there's an earthquake or a volcano or or a or a hurricane it had to be a deliberate uh agency of of some kind there's an idea called compensatory control which is interesting in Psychology so um if somebody is given uh uncertain news like uncertain medical diagnosis in lab setting they're more likely to see patterns in meaningless random static and what it appears to be that when we don't feel like when we feel like the world is chaotic and outside of our control we begin to personify and create stories around it I think this very much even before the uh labak hypothesis had maybe been given more of the the research and the grounding that it perhaps now has a lot of people turned to that because I think it's oddly more comforting to believe that a global pandemic is caused by a malign scientist than just chance mutation of a silly little microb yes I think that's another aspect of what I was just saying I that's that's right is there such a thing as a a kind of belief structure uh a story that you tell yourself about the world uh which doesn't involve the uh historical inaccuracies that that you uh criticize but that does sort of add Comfort is there a way to view the world is there a halfway house between rationality and and religion in your view I can't think what it would be if there is can you think of what it might be people talking about energy the sort of more yogic side of things even if it's not energy between people but you know channeling senses of themselves better versions of themselves you know IM them you know you could look at it maybe from the lens of positive psychology if you wanted to actually do this thing that there may maybe projecting a version of themselves into the future that they're using the the expectation effect as David Robson would call it what about that energy rather than makes me reach from My Revolver I'm afraid perilously close to woo yes yeah yeah uh what was that article that you wrote recently in quette you said RAC is a spectrum sex is pretty damn binary okay yes that was republished from somewhere El else but it's just come out in in quet as well um everywhere you look in life in human life in biology you see contina uh tall and short there's a Continuum between them fat and thin there's a Continuum between them black and white Continuum between them the one place where there is no Continuum is sex sex really is a binary just about the only binary we've got in human biology um male versus female really is an either or it's exe it's extremely rare to come across some creature um some human certainly which is neither a male nor female does that exist it depends how you define it I mean there there are uh people of with ambiguous genitalia there are people um who um don't fit quite neatly into uh the diagnostic features which a doctor might use like xxxy chromos for example there are people with xxy um or xn um and they they usually come out um pretty clearly one or the other I mean xxy comes out as male X not comes out as female um and um the point I would make the most important point I think I would make is that uh never mind about X and Y chromosomes never mind because that's just that applies to mammals and a few other things as well birds have the xxxy system but it's back to front um in in Birds it's the female sex that is XY or the equivalent of XY and the male sex which is equivalent of of of XX so that that's not a universal what is universal is gamt size there really is a disjunct between large gamuts which we call eggs and small gamuts sperms and right the way through the animal and plant kingdoms you have this divide between male gtes and female gtes um there are hermaphrodites like earthworms and snails who who do both so they have both male gonads and female gonads uh but the the origin it's it's called anisogamy the the unequal gametes and it's very interesting mathematical models which I which I could talk about because I think it is interesting um there is a system called isogamy which is which is found in certain algae where the gamuts are equal ized so you just have um mediumsized gamuts which fuse together now economically speaking you need two isogametes to make a full a full-sized zygote um and uh mathematical modeling has shown that isogamy is unstable in evolution if an individual produces slightly smaller than average isogametes then they need to pay hair with a with a slightly larger one in order to produce a fully equipped zygote with all the necessary economic we're talking economics now the economic resources to make a to make a zygote so you have a tendency for a runaway selection runaway Evolution towards half the isog gamits getting smaller and smaller and the other half getting larger and larger and this has been shown mathematically it's a plaus mathematical model and the end product of this runaway process is eggs and sperms eggs being the large ones and sperms being the small ones so um although isogamy does exist in Aly and some fungi um it's unstable and in the vast majority of animals and plants you have an isogamy meaning large gtes and and small GTS and that's the fundamental difference between the sex is that's the one you can always rely upon anywhere in the animal kingdom sex really is binary there's no such thing as a human that would produce both large and small gametes that would be impossible uh I think that is true but even if it was wasn't true it would be a very insignificant uh minor fact it would be a a kind of freak fact would that not well I mean binary would assume that there is never any crossover between I suppose it would but but um if you think about it as a frequency distribution think of it as as a frequency histogram um and you and you class and you set up a histogram with unambiguous males unambiguous females um I think I calculated once that the um that if the that you couldn't possibly plot that histogram on paper because the the number of intermediates if there are any would be so rare I I represented it as um the New York the the twin tars um at the World Trade Center if one of them is male the other one is female then the intermediates if there are any which is itself dubious would be the size of a mole hill compared with the Twin Towers compared with with the Twin Towers yeah wow yeah it is interesting um I guess we we get into sort of lexical jiujitsu a little bit where what you actually mean by binary and if you can find edge cases if there are any like that that uh does that outlier disprove the fact that you can roll the dice so many times and it ends up always falling the same way let's make a distinction between bimodal and and binary um bi bimodal would be where where you have a distribution like like that sort of TW two mountains with a sort of Valley in between um and um there are plenty of examples of that but uh binary would be that the the intermediates it is virtually non-existent or or non-existent so not not not not a sort of gentle undulating curve like that but a huge two Twin Towers yes we'll get back to talking to Richard in 1 minute but first I need to tell you about ag1 you are not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it and this is going to help I tried every Green strink I could get my hands on over the space of about three years and I settled on ag1 because it is the best they genuinely care about holistic health which is why I've got my mom to take it my dad to take it and tons of my friends as well and if I found anything better I would switch but haven't which is why I still use it best of all there is a 90-day money back guaranteed so you can buy it and try it for 89 days a full 3 months every single day and if you don't like it for any reason they'll just give you your money back so you can try it completely risk-free right now you can get a year free Supply vitamin D3 and K2 plus five free ag1 travel packs and that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drink a1.com slod wisdom that's drink a1.com SL modern wisdom what was that Fleming article that troubled Darwin ah uh Fleming Jenkin yes um he was a Scottish engineer and he um pointed out wrongly because in those days everybody believed in blending inheritance they believe that um when male M with female you got an intermediate um you got say if black m with white you got um or red with blue you get purple it's a it's a a blending which is how they thought heredity worked and it doesn't work like that um mle showed that Gregor mle showed that but in the time when in Victorian times when people thought heredity was blending Fleming jenin argued that natural selection couldn't work because as the generations go by variation would disappear everything would disappear into a kind of shmear of gray um and therefore there'd be no variation to to work on well that's obviously not true because as the generations go by you don't get a shmear of gray variation is as a matter of fact maintained and um the uh what Fleming jenin got wrong and everybody got wrong was thinking that heredity was blending is not blending genes are either there or not there every every single one of your genes you got from either your father or your mother and every single one of your genes you will either pass on to any particular child or you won't they don't blend they don't mix they don't fuse and um because of that the entire argument Fleming Jenkins entire argument disappears um Hardy and Weinberg showed did that trouble Darwin though it did trouble Darwin yes and if only Darwin had read mle he would have got the answer but what's interesting is that although Darwin hadn't read mendal he came very close to discovering mle's laws himself to discovering that actually G um they didn't call them genes in those days um um the particles of heredity really are particles they really don't blend Darwin actually did experiments on peas which is what mle did as well edible peas yes well actually sweet sweet peas right okay uh no I think Ed will to PE too and um he found that um the progyny were either all they they they were not um they didn't they didn't blend which is which is mle mle's laws um and then he said something very significant he said but I do not consider this any more remarkable than the fact that when you get a when a male mates with a female you get either male or female Offspring see that is pure mentalism and all that anybody had to do all that mle had to do all that Darwin had to do all that Fleming Jenkin had to do was to say what goes for sex goes for everything um because when you get when a male mates with a female you do not get an intermediate hermaphrodite you get either a male or a female Offspring that's just mle's principle r large and and all that mendle did was to show that the same thing applies to everything not just sex what has this got to do with race in the discussion well race is is interesting because race really does appear to be blending if if a black person mates with a white person you tend to get an inter intermediate um and you and that's why so-called African-Americans are a complete Spectrum from from white to black uh and what's that what's going on there is is polygenes that's to say lots and lots of small genes having each one having a little additive effect so although each one of those genes is mandelian is either there or not there it's a particulate either there or not there does it doesn't blend the effect of having lots of genes summating their effects is to make is to look as though it's blending so rather than thinking of mixing black paint and white paint and you get gray what you're doing is mixing black beads black balls with white balls and and you get and you get a what what they are still black and and white in the in the bag that you're mixing them but the effect from a distance looks gray oh that's interesting and that's polygenes so I don't know but I'm going to guess that being transracial are identifying using how you feel to say that you're a different race I some people seem to have done this and then other people said that they couldn't do this I don't know how prevalent that is but I'm going to guess that there would be significantly more push back against that then there would be about identifying as transexual despite the fact that based on yeah your position the evidence actually allows somebody to be I am both Korean and Uruguayan yes it's an extraordinary Paradox that that that if you if you attempted to be transracial as a woman called Rachel do doel did um you get brick bats hurled out you from all directions I mean you're disgraced you're you're you're get you're put in the stocks and have have met orical Tomato's thrown at you um whereas if you if you decide that you're a different sex from the from the one that you actually are then you're lorded to the skies it's exactly the wrong way around because race really is a spectrum when sex isn't what do you make of the primarying of race and the sort of focus on it over the last few years why do you think that's happening well I I think it's a very American phenomenon as American obsession with race and um I mean a lot of it is white guilt because of slavery which is of course understandable I mean the never mind about slavery itself the the um that's bad enough but the the conditions of the slave ships absolutely appalling what like I'm not familiar with oh god um there there are pictures you can see p just Google it there are pictures of of slave ships in which you have rows and rows of people chained up lying like sardines in a tin for for the whole of a voyage across the Atlantic from Africa to America uh how did how were they fed how did they go to the bathroom it it doesn't bear thinking about it just doesn't bear thinking about it's it's it's it's among the most cruel things I can I has ever ever been perpetrated by Humanity um so there is ample reason for Guilt um but there's no particular reason why white people should feel the guilt of their ancestors just because they're white I mean everybody is is is um we're all we're all human and and we should feel utter disgust at what was done by the slave owners and the slave shippers who were also uh a varying races the people who were selling people into slavy well in Africa of course African Chieftain were selling people into slavery all the all the time even if they weren't the captains of the boats exactly um so but but all I'm saying now is that is that the the behavior was absolutely appalling but there's no particular reason why because you happen to be the same color as somebody who perpetrated these awful things that you should feel guilt can you or can we draw a line between an increased focus on identity politics and a decline in religiosity is this people grasping at something trying to find their meaning elsewhere well that's often said and and uh I I think you brought it up earlier that that um uh those of us who opposed Christianity and and attempted to dissuade people from being Christian are to blame for not quite I maybe asked whether people said that some people have said that that we're to blame for opening the door to a new kind of nonsense and what do you think about that well I I it's ridiculous um I mean I'm I'm I'm an allpurpose um enemy of of irrationality wherever you find it do you think that there could be a um compulsion uh disposition predisposition that humans have to uh look for those kinds of answers and with that religion dropping away that they would find it somewhere social justice activism so on and so forth well so they tell me I mean that I I enough people have said that that there may be something in it it doesn't ring plausible to me but but still temperature plays a huge role in how well you sleep but traditional bedding often fall short just add the brand new pod 4 ultra to your mattress like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool down or warm up each side of your bed up to 20° plus it's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time and your sleep phases and your HIV and your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy eight sleep has been clinically proven to increase Total Sleep by up to 1 hour every night increase deep sleep by up to 2.5 hours a month and reduce wake Time by up to 3 hours per month best of all they ship to the US Canada United Kingdom Europe and Australia plus they offer a 30day sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days and if you do not like it they will give you your money back right now you can get $350 off the brand new pod 4 ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom checkout that's EIG T sleep.com slod wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout speaking of Darwin did you ever see read the list of reasons that Darwin wrote down when he was deciding whether or not to become married I I wanted to read this out it's one of my favorite better than a dog anyway phenomenal so uh Darwin he got married a little bit later in life because he'd been away on voyages and stuff and he's in Victorian England so people he the expectations and I think he nearly said if he had a pen pal relationship maybe a couple of times maybe a cousin something like that and then that didn't happen and then finally he needs to make the decision he's going to make the call document has two columns one labeled marry one labeled not marry and above them circled are the words this is the question on the prom marriage side of the equation were children if it please God constant companion and friend in old age who will feel interested in one object to be beloved and played with after reflection of unknown length he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow he continued home and someone to take care of house charms of music and female chitchat these things good for one's Health but terrible loss of time without warning Darwin had from the prom marage column swerved uncontrollably into major anti-marriage factors so major that he underlined it this issue the infringement of marriage on his time especially his work time was addressed at greater length in the appropriate marry colum not marrying he wrote Would preserve freedom to go where one likes choice of society and little of it conversation of clever men at clubs not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle to have the expense and anxiety of children perhaps quarreling loss of time cannot read in the evening fatness and idleness anxiety and responsibility less money for bucks and if many children forced to gain one's bread such so fascinating immense selfishness um yes well times change don't they um yes the shifting moral zist I i' yeah I was actually asked to read that at at somebody's wedding oh fantastic what a morbid way to begin a marriage yes yes yes did you accept or no well I did but I I I think got a few laughs anyway so good what uh you know we we're going through a uh population decline uh fewer people being uh bothered about getting into relationships lowest rates of marriage that we've seen ever on record uh childlessness so on and so forth what do you uh what do you make of that what do you think about the yes you read this last night I was not aware of it and I haven't had time to look it up so so I'm I'm not can't say anything more than I did last night nothing yeah true well the population thing like I say is uh an interesting uh question the marriage thing you know just the companionship because you can see there's this degree of responsibility bringing another life into the world especially if you were uh during your formative years during covid and undersocialized and risk averse and helicopter parenting and screens and social media and all that stuff like I you know I can kind of see it I would like to think that the only one of the only two things we need to do survive and reproduce they like to think that the reproduce thing was sufficiently powerful to kind of overcome that so it's kind of impressive in a way that it's not but when it comes to the uh marriage side and even pulling back from that in survey data there's a lot of uh young people that say they're just not fussed with dating they're sort of working on themselves or they're not ready to meet somebody or whatever it might be and um given that there's very little financial responsibility at least in a a relationship that's not married uh it's very surprising I I kind of feel like I don't know I feel like there's something going on that I even though I've spent a lot of time thinking about it I still feel like there's something that I'm not seeing yes I have nothing to say about that really I I I don't um uh I'm not a sociologist and I don't quite understand why it is that there are certain trends that that seem to to go through Society like that there's definitely one uh this wouldn't necessarily explain the Casual relationship thing but it would explain at least part of the marriage thing that if in order to be able to have sex you need to first become married there is quite a high uh well in past centuries that would have been the case yes yeah and now that that's no longer the tradition yes uh perhaps people are having their cake without having to eat it or eating their cake without having to have it whatever it was that's a better way around actually the conventional ways have your cake and eat it but actually that doesn't make any sense of course you got to have it before you can eat it it but but eat your cake and have it obviously is is is the the necessary wording of the Paradox so I don't know how much truth this is but apparently the way that the unibomber Ted kazinski was caught was his brother was reading the uh manifestos that were being posted in the newspaper and noticed certain um like literary artifacts uh linguistic artifacts and one of them was eat your cake and have it too as opposed to the uh the more Al the uni was actually using the more sensible wording correct yeah exactly but unfortunately the one that was a uh a lexical fingerprint yes that allowed him to be to be identified I never knew that yeah yeah it's cool uh I've noticed this recently over the last few years I've talked about evolutionary psychology biology on the channel a lot and maybe in the last five I've seen an increasing number of evolution skeptical comments uh I don't know whether that's the uh part of an underlying Trend that's going on uh that is disturbing um where do you see these comments on YouTube uh also in discussions that happen on something like Twitter uh are they religiously motivated it's hard to tell uh I would guess at least in part but then there'll be at a small perhaps non insignificant portion of people that are sort of largely skeptical about lots of things it's skeptical about whether Australia exists or Antarctica exists or the Earth is flat you know you mentioned yesterday about um uh belief structures clumping together in reliably predictable ways uh but I kind of wanted to you're the guy if anyone's the guy you're the guy if people have a skeptic ISM about the accuracy of evolution what explanation or evidence do you tend to take people through when you're wanting I was going to say before getting on to that um it's hard to see what you could what you could possibly put in its place I mean if I don't see how you could be anything but religious if you object I mean you've got to have some explanation for the extraordinary complexity of life and the apparent design of life which is just phenomenal some people not even aware of it but if you if you actually are aware of the prodigious complexity of living things down to the very cellular level biochemical level then um you you cannot be sane and and not seek for some kind of explanation for that and if it's not Evolution it's got to be presumably it's got to be some story God yeah um so so I I think if anybody calls himself an atheist and a non- evolutionist he's probably not really thought thought it through very hard uh okay but you were asking me about um how to convince people yeah you're you're explaining to somebody the the uh evidence of evolution what's your favorite way to of course there's an enormous amount of of of convincing evidence um I think that the evidence of geographical distribution is one that doesn't first spring to mine but is an important one um why are all the mammals all the native mammals in Australia except bats uh marup um when when Noah's Arc came to rest on Mount Ararat why would all the marsupial March in a column to Australia and not leave any relics or fossils behind on the way um I mean that that would be a very simple um Elementary thing but perhaps a more serious um piece of evidence would be um molecular genetics if you if you actually look at the um at the uh the data of DNA sequencing in different in different animals it forms a perfect hierarchy uh and what could that hierarchy be I mean a branching hierarchy what could that be about a family tree so so you you find that um uh if you take say um shrew and mole and you looked at their molecular sequences they would be very very close see they they're very very close cousins on The evolutionary interpretation and um all the different molecules agree so it's not it's not that that half the molecules make them close cousins and the other half make them distant cousins they they all um agree with very few exceptions which are interesting in themselves um for example if you looked at uh those genes specifically involved in hearing you would find a an apparent cousinship between bats and toothed whales because they both use Echoes so so that's that's a sort of exception that proves the rule but but mostly the tree of cousinship is an obvious signature of a pedigree um those are two I mean you can do the same thing not with molecules but with bones and and Anatomy generally which is what Darwin had available to him of course D because Darwin didn't have access to molecular information uh what what Darwin had access to was comparing things like the the limbs of vertebrates of the the hand of a of a human the um the um flipper of a turtle the the the leg of a horse and so on um and nowadays we can do the same thing with enormously more data use looking at either protein sequences or or DNA sequences um so those I think I mean those are um fascinating piece of evidence uh the fossil record is is very nice evidence as well because you get um sequences there are there are not fossils in the wrong place when JBS halan was asked for what would be convincing falsifying evidence of evolution he promptly said fossil rabbits in the Precambrian they don't happen there there are there are no fossils that that are out of place out of out of the sequence what in other news this episode is brought to you by Shopify look not going into business to learn about how to code or build a website or do backend Inventory management Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do which is designing and selling a cool product businesses that sell more sell on Shopify and that is why they're the global force behind gym shock and skims and aloe and neonic when it comes to converting browsers into buyers they are Best in Class their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading Commerce platforms and with shop pay you can also boost conversions by up to 50% best of all their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way so upgrade your business today and get the exact same checkout that we use at newtonic on Shopify sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the description below or shopify.com sodern wisdom or lowercase that's shopify.com wisdom to upgrade your selling today what's the current status of the Missing Link uh from uh primate to human evolution I remember this is old stuff and it's not something that I've looked into very much but that the uh lineage maybe fossil record I'm going to guess uh there's certain chunks that seem to have large uh blocks uh Missing is there such a thing no no not not missing anymore um it what was the status was that when you began your studies was that this a long no long before that um in in Victorian times um In Darwin's own time um there were there were no fossils to speak of now we have lots of fossils in Africa as Darwin predicted Darwin guessed that fos that that Africa was the place to look and so why why did he choose Africa uh because of resemblances between humans and chimpanzees and guerillas which are the African Apes as opposed to orangutans and Gibbons which are the Asian Apes and uh so anyway that that's what that has proved to be the case both in in East Africa and South Africa uh very rich fossil record now uh of of ancestral humans not of ancestral chimpanzees uh but but there are of ancestral humans have you got a particular uh favorite or uh ancestor of ours that you're fascinated with some other branch of the not really you know I I was reading a a really great book about Australopithecus yes uh I thought that was really cool that seems like a you know if you're going to be one of the being us isn't bad Homo sapiens is pretty cool but Australopithecus seems like a cool uh yes the they were um they were uh upright walking but they had brains not much bigger than a chimpanze so so it was like they were sort of upright walking chimpanzees um and uh yeah they're pretty charismatic I mean Mrs ple and they've got names like Mrs pleas dear boy um Lucy uh I remember reading as well about I think it was only when when was the last other homo uh Branch still alive it was only 12,000 years ago or so is that right it depends how you define it um the the preceding homos species uh is often thought to be Homo erectus but then there are various other ones which are dubiously assigned specific status like hom Redi Enis homo heidleberg Enis these are um I mean as you would expect they're all intermediates I mean why wouldn't there be be woring if there weren't intermediates but but the the widespread one is Homo erectus um which originally was meant by was went by the names like um op peing man and Java man but they existed all over all over Asia and and Africa was there a uh shorter smaller version of us was that over in oh you're thinking of H floresiensis that's it yes Indonesia well yes there's there's one Island Flores um in in in the Indonesian archipelago where these little um creatures lived and and it's a bit controversial some people think that they were they were not a different species at all but just just freak examples of of homo sapiens um but um uh some people think that they were a an island version of homo erectus it's fairly common for Island mammals to be either Giants or dwarfs and um uh for example on the Mediterranean Islands like Cyprus and and creit there were dwarf elephants uh which must have been very sweet am I right in thinking at least the story that I'd heard about Homo florenci Enis was that because of resource limitation the smaller versions of everything are better able to survive because they need less fewer calories that's one that's one account that's one one theory for why you get Island dwarfism yes yeah but I think those miniature elephants may also have been on that island in Indonesia too which would mean if that was true that you would have had these tiny versions of humans chasing these tiny versions of elephants presumably with tiny sticks which yeah it's a shame that we yeah that we didn't have that what's your latest thinking around the hard problem of Consciousness where are you at with that you're asking the wrong person um uh I'm a humble biologist and I I don't um aspire to the philosophical Heights I I rather doubt whether philosophers actually succeed in that either but but um I think it it's called The Hard problem for a good reason MH and um uh I don't have anything to contribute even from a what does biology have to say about consciousness does it have anything to say it ought to I mean one day it will because it is obviously a biological problem why the philosophers taken over I suppose it's just very difficult to see what to see what evidence would you could bring to bear on it I it it clearly has something to do with brain activity it clearly has something to do with the immense complexity of the brain the huge numbers of neurons the the even Huger number of of connections between neurons in the brain um and uh I don't even know what a theory of Consciousness would look like I I I I can sort of see in the case of the other great baffling thing at the moment which is the origin of life I can see the kind of answer that that would have to be well we don't know what the answer is but I I I know the sort of answer I would expect but in the case of Consciousness I'm not even sure what it would look like traveling should be about the journey not uh-huh the chaos of packing that is why I've partnered with nomatic they make the best backpack on the planet this thing is absolutely glued to me and it's phenomenal it is the 14 L travel pack and it's a complete Game Changer they've got compartments for everything your laptop your shoes your sunglasses it is so well organized that even your toothbrush will feel important it's like the Marie condo of luggage everything has got its place no more folding your t-shirts up into a burrito to make them fit into wherever it needs to go best of all their products will literally last you a lifetime with their lifetime guarantee so this is the last backpack you will ever need to buy and you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason so buy it fill it with your contents and possessions and if you don't like it they will give you your money back and they ship internationally right now you can get a 20% discount off your first purchase when you go to the link in the description below or head to nomatic docomo wisdom that's Nom matic.com modern wisdom from an Adaptive explanation what use is consciousness to humans well even that's controversial because uh there have been people who've argued quite reasonably that uh you could have a robot which was unconscious which could behave in all ways necessary to survive and reproduce uh and and yet didn't have self-awareness and um so uh I I think it must have a use I think Consciousness must have a use but uh not everybody thinks so and and and there are people who think that well I mean the the rather prodigious Feats of that that chat GPT and other other um artificial intelligences that we have now um if they were con if they were controlling the behavior of a robot animal um it it it could very well survive do a very competent jobie repr yes and and and um so I uh I I mean people have worried about about what Consciousness is for um for a long time my favorite I mean this is total Bro Science from me as the least educated person out of two people that don't specialize in Consciousness but um my favorite explanation is it seems like uh human brain size is at least uh partly driven maybe largely driven by our requirement to be able to track the size of the social groups that we were in the complexity yeah of that and that to me seems like a fundamental driver of what humans needed to do was uh related to our social environment therefore our ability to have a phenomenological experience a sense of being us allows us to have a sense of what it's like to be somebody else yeah and that theory of Mind predicting I know Richard I know Richard's demeanor but Richard's not friends with Derek but dereck's friends with John and John's friends with Richard so and actually but John's a little bit more friends with Richard than he is with Derek and that to me just seems like okay and then the sense and the ability to do math and consider the universe and all the rest of it is maybe a bit spand and it just sort of a bit just immersion properties yes I I I like that sort of theory I associate it with Nick Humphrey or Robin Dunbar um the um I think Nick Humphrey's version is is in order to second guess um what your social rivals or friends are going to do um you have to look inside yourself and a first guess yes yes um I yes I mean I like that good good well I'm I'm I'm glad that I've got a a a speculative seal of approval with regards to that one other area we touched on this a little bit last night uh behavioral genetics uh were about were I think on the cusp of uh Gene embryo selection uh then probably getting into just outright uh manipul of genes for humans where would you uh get people to start if I I I do think that behavioral genetics and properly understanding that or at least having a baseline understanding that of that in the way that most people do or many people do about evolution is important behavioral genetics seems to be something that I don't think has had uh necessarily A Richard Dawkins yet for oh well you but are you talking now about uh genetic manipulation or or no in terms of the fact that we have heritable heritable traits from a behavioral perspective oh it's a fairly flourishing field Lowman and yes so on yes uh I I don't think I had I don't don't have a problem with it do you have a problem not at all I I just wa for some reason it doesn't there seems to be a lot of push back against it maybe it's just that the work is more recent uh maybe it's that people seem for some reason to think that it gets perilously close to Eugenics I think that's probably the reason yes I think it's politically um scary uh to some people um they don't like the idea of um I mean there there are still people who hanker after a blank slate and and and uh hanker after the idea that human mind is sort of open to you can pour anything into it and and does that make you want to sort of face palm yourself into a ET a bit rather yes a bit and I I I I I don't understand the hostility for example to evolutionary psychology which which um as you know flourishes here in Austin um I um I mean every other species has a perfectly good behavioral genetics there's no reason why humans shouldn't yeah I I guess the many of the same people that would have a problem with herit heritability explanations for Behavior Uh also have a hypoallergenic Cockapoo for a dog yes quite yes yes what do we think this is what's that exactly yes exactly if it's not yes the same over here which is yeah oddly interesting uh what's your sense around the ethics of Gene embryo selection for humans and then if we were to take it one step further to the outright manipulation getting into the I don't see any problem with I don't think anybody else should see any problem with um attempting to uh remove um dis genic effects like hemophilia um where um you can do it with without Draconian measures you can do it with invitro fertilization where um the the current procedure is to uh super have the woman super ovulate and then and then you have a dozen or so um embryos zygotes in in a Petri dish and you choose one at random and implant it back into the woman well why choose at random why not choose non-randomly in those cases where there is a danger of an hereditary disease like hemophilia here um you can uh examine the genes of these uh very early embryos and instead of choosing at random choose one of the say 50% um that that don't have the delarius gene in question and you if if only that could have been done for the zarovich um who who um Alexi who when and similar I mean other other members of the European royal families it would have been a wonderful thing to do Iceland has I think completely eradicated Down syndrome in the country uh obviously not through IVF with screening uh I don't think that that's the way that every woman's getting pregnant no well Down syndrome actually is not hereditary um what is it that oh so this is well no I mean it it it's it's an effect of of um of uh an an embryological defect but it's not there there's no hereditary tendency to to to get down syndrome that's interesting and so it it would not be a eugenic in the strict sense it would not be Eugenics um do you know if uh two uh Down syndrome parents are more likely to have a Down syndrome child I think not but I don't I don't know that's fasc ating um well you don't don't be too if it's true yes okay if it's true I haven't pin your colors to the flag of that that particular claim don't worry um yeah I think this is I've had a number of conversations with uh guys who are philosophers in this space who are uh geneticists in this space a couple of them that are spinning up companies as well to do this uh to bring this service to uh the general public not cheap but um I think this is probably going to be one of the big Frontiers I think uh Gene embryo selection and large language models and whatever they end up growing into will be two huge Forks but who is talking about sort of Gene embryo selection that much in comparison I I was talking about getting rid of dis genic effects like hemophilia it becomes more controversial when you're talking about um taller stronger smarter that yes musical genius and that that sort of thing um what's your feelings around that well I don't understand why people quite so hostile to it because very least people don't show the same hostility what hostility towards parents who are ambitious to have a musical child and force The Wretched child to have do practice scales all day long um so you you you you might say um it it's somewhat less Draconian to to do an IVF um selection in the first place and to force your child to sit on the seat and play piano for however long um so it there's a little certain amount of self-contradiction I think um inconsistency going on there um but nevertheless positive Eugenics of that of that sort does have a bad rap poor branding well I suppose um because of Hitler and and but that that was a government dictatorial Eugenics and similarly in this country actually in in America as well um whereas as what you're talking about and with with rich people in in America that this this is voluntary this is this is not um this is not government dictated the UN Parable objection there is they precisely they are rich and and unfair Advantage these advantages are not available to poor people as with most Technologies though the rich people begin to use them which increases the supply and then drives the car I think the original iPhone uh adjusted for inflation was like $10,000 the very first iPhone that came out yes and it's still now prohibitively expensive to many people uh but significantly less so yes uh so yeah it's that's a very odd Circle to square I think think that the initial advantages that are given to rich people that can afford things before everybody else can are this odd kind of capitalist philanthropy type trickle down effect which then allows everybody later on to be able to do it it's one of those things that maybe doesn't doesn't immediately make sense yeah it'll be um it'll be very interesting to see I think where that world ends up and then we get into I think the the real sort of final frontier which is if and when we can get in and really Tinker with the the code of of uh yes you whether it's from uh ivg uh are you familiar with this no okay so um ivg as far as I'm aware allows you to take any human cell or a a much broader range of human cells turn them into plur potent stem cells and from there you can turn them uh so as opposed to your what's a normal IVF egg Harvest 10 maybe something like that uh 10 12 uh pick your number yes you have such a higher uh volume that you can pick from which allows you to spread the range which then gives you uh more more options and um so that but then on top of that when you can actually get in and we can start to manipulate individual traits through polymorphic expression or whatever it is yeah I think for me that's one that as yet I haven't managed to get myself sort of across the line with if there's just something I don't know whether it's a weird naturalistic fallacy despite the fact that I've never seen genetics at work like I've never seen the mechanism of it happening there's just something about it that I'm not I just don't know I don't know where I I stand on getting in and tinkering with our source code quite yet you're screamish about that yeah a little yes I don't really know why yes yeah I was looking I was actually listening on the on the way in about uh some of the ways in which the uh sperm is selected for naturally so what we're talking about here when we're talking about uh embryo selection that you're going in and you've got some dashboard on the back end of a website and you say oh this based on the the data it looks like this is going to be that particular preferable child to have you're talking about sperm donors now no this is still about your uh fertilized embryos that you can have a look at but I had a look I was listening on the way in uh to a podcast that was talking about how even before you get to sperm fertilizing eggs naturally that uh much of the female reproductive system is actually hostile to weaker sperm I didn't know this that it's slightly slightly acidic yes which means that weak sperm don't make it through and there's sort of all all manner of different ways that uh sperm are selected for as well I was fascinating I've never really looked at nuts and bolts of reproduction like that I think I'm right in saying that the hloy genotype of a sperm doesn't influence its phenotype therefore the selection of weaker the selection against weaker sperm would not manifest itself in the form of of um stronger children yes wow so this was the exact question I had while I was listening to it in the car which is does the strength of the sperm indicate the strength of the strength yeah I think the answer is no because I think that the um the phenotypic characteristics of a sperm are those of the diploid what's that father the the the the the genotype of the father rather than of the par particular individual sperm I mean each sperm has has a unique um haid genotype um which is what determines the um the um hereditary aspects of the of the children but that Hao genotype I think does not affect things like the swimming speed of of the sperm I think that that's under the control of the diploid genotype of the father I believe that's interesting yeah there is this uh I guess we just look at survival and reproduction as well if we make things harder the tougher ones that get through very effective but the can be areas like when it comes to sperm swimming speed where that isn't necessarily indictive I believe once again I'm not totally certain I believe that's to be that's the case that's fun Richard Dawkins ladies and gentlemen Richard I I've had so much fun yesterday was fantastic today's been really great as well we've got a new book as well yes good uh that'll be available uh what once you've got your tour out of the way which I'm aware you've still got quite a few dates and a few continents to get through what are you interested in working on next have you got anything in your mind uh yes I'm working on another book um not like you um Tales From Heckle um Ernest Heckle was um a German biologist and artist uh he was sometimes known as the German Darwin he was he was Darwin's greatest disciple in Germany and he was also a very good artist and so I've got um I'm I'm using his pictures and and basing each chapter around one of his each each chapter based upon a different one of his animal pictures Richard I really appreciate you thank you for having me last night and for being here today thank you very much indeed Chris thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode you'll love my chat with Mr Sam Harris which you can watch just there go on