WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:03.299 Welcome to the deep dive. Today we are dissecting 00:00:03.299 --> 00:00:09.759 a figure who who creates this very specific kind 00:00:09.759 --> 00:00:11.820 of gravity in the intellectual world. He certainly 00:00:11.820 --> 00:00:14.679 does. Depending on who you ask he's either you 00:00:14.679 --> 00:00:16.679 know the high priest of rationality who saves 00:00:16.679 --> 00:00:20.320 biology from fuzzy thinking or he is the arrogant 00:00:20.320 --> 00:00:24.190 face of a cold godless worldview yeah and there 00:00:24.190 --> 00:00:26.530 is almost never a middle ground when it comes 00:00:26.530 --> 00:00:28.829 to richard dawkins not at all it's a polarization 00:00:28.829 --> 00:00:31.609 that he seems to not only accept but i think 00:00:31.609 --> 00:00:34.210 actively cultivate at times it's rare to find 00:00:34.210 --> 00:00:36.710 someone who's had two completely distinct peaks 00:00:36.710 --> 00:00:38.609 in their career isn't it it really is i mean 00:00:38.609 --> 00:00:40.590 you have the richard dawkins of the 1970s the 00:00:40.590 --> 00:00:44.289 brilliant oxford biologist who completely revolutionized 00:00:44.289 --> 00:00:47.020 how we understand evolution with The selfish 00:00:47.020 --> 00:00:48.960 gene. And that alone would have secured his legacy, 00:00:49.079 --> 00:00:51.079 right? Case closed. Oh, absolutely. Hall of Fame 00:00:51.079 --> 00:00:53.280 scientist. But then you have the second act. 00:00:53.460 --> 00:00:56.100 Darwin's Rottweiler. That's the one. The leader 00:00:56.100 --> 00:00:57.939 of the new atheist movement, the man who wrote 00:00:57.939 --> 00:01:01.600 The God Delusion, and basically decided to take 00:01:01.600 --> 00:01:04.359 a sledgehammer to organize religion. And the 00:01:04.359 --> 00:01:06.739 timing for this retrospective, it feels crucial. 00:01:07.019 --> 00:01:09.700 He was born in 1941. He's in his 80s now. Right. 00:01:09.900 --> 00:01:12.180 And he recently announced his final speaking 00:01:12.180 --> 00:01:16.310 tour for late 2024. It really feels like the 00:01:16.310 --> 00:01:19.150 closing chapter of a very long, very loud argument 00:01:19.150 --> 00:01:21.109 he's been having with the world. It creates a 00:01:21.109 --> 00:01:23.849 perfect opportunity to step back and look at 00:01:23.849 --> 00:01:27.430 the long reach of his own life, to borrow a phrase 00:01:27.430 --> 00:01:30.390 from his work. I like that. We want to understand 00:01:30.390 --> 00:01:33.209 how the boy collecting insects in colonial Africa 00:01:33.209 --> 00:01:36.010 became the man deconstructing the Bible on television. 00:01:37.340 --> 00:01:40.040 Maybe most surprisingly, how a rigorous biologist 00:01:40.040 --> 00:01:42.480 accidentally invented the concept of the meme. 00:01:42.680 --> 00:01:44.799 Providing the vocabulary for the entire internet 00:01:44.799 --> 00:01:47.700 age, decades before it even existed, is wild. 00:01:47.859 --> 00:01:49.760 That's incredible. We have a massive stack of 00:01:49.760 --> 00:01:52.019 source material to get through. His memoirs, 00:01:52.019 --> 00:01:54.519 his seminal scientific books like The Selfish 00:01:54.519 --> 00:01:57.810 Gene and the Expanded Phenotype, his... polemics 00:01:57.810 --> 00:02:00.890 against religion and the whole dossier of controversies 00:02:00.890 --> 00:02:02.489 that have dogged him in recent years. It's a 00:02:02.489 --> 00:02:04.510 lot to unpack. It is. But I want to start with 00:02:04.510 --> 00:02:06.390 the biology because I think people often skip 00:02:06.390 --> 00:02:09.210 straight to the atheism. They do. And they miss 00:02:09.210 --> 00:02:11.490 the fact that his view on God is actually just 00:02:11.490 --> 00:02:13.810 a downstream consequence of his view on genes. 00:02:14.069 --> 00:02:16.069 That is exactly the right way to frame it. You 00:02:16.069 --> 00:02:19.090 cannot understand the atheist without first understanding 00:02:19.090 --> 00:02:21.770 the ethologist. His entire worldview is bottom 00:02:21.770 --> 00:02:24.189 up. It all starts with the replicating molecule. 00:02:24.800 --> 00:02:26.659 So let's talk about that origin story. We usually 00:02:26.659 --> 00:02:29.219 picture Dawkins in, you know, the dusty halls 00:02:29.219 --> 00:02:31.620 and ivory towers of Oxford, but he didn't start 00:02:31.620 --> 00:02:34.139 there. No, not at all. He started in Nairobi, 00:02:34.219 --> 00:02:36.599 Kenya in the waning days of the British Empire. 00:02:36.879 --> 00:02:38.960 Clinton Richard Dawkins. Yeah. He dropped the 00:02:38.960 --> 00:02:41.719 Clinton later. Yeah, wisely, I think. He was 00:02:41.719 --> 00:02:44.259 born in 1941 into what you would call the colonial 00:02:44.259 --> 00:02:47.099 administrative class. His father was an agricultural 00:02:47.099 --> 00:02:50.180 civil servant in Nyasaland, which is now Malawi. 00:02:50.319 --> 00:02:52.580 So it's a very specific kind of background. It 00:02:52.580 --> 00:02:55.800 is. It's a background of landed gentry. His family 00:02:55.800 --> 00:02:58.580 owned an estate back in Oxfordshire called Over 00:02:58.580 --> 00:03:01.939 Norton Park. So it's a world of privilege, certainly, 00:03:02.099 --> 00:03:06.460 but also a world of, I think, isolation and intense 00:03:06.460 --> 00:03:09.300 observation. And being a child in that environment, 00:03:09.439 --> 00:03:11.699 just surrounded by the raw. all nature of East 00:03:11.699 --> 00:03:14.300 Africa, that usually leads to one or two things, 00:03:14.419 --> 00:03:16.819 right? Either a deep spiritual connection to 00:03:16.819 --> 00:03:20.419 the land or a feels almost forensic curiosity 00:03:20.419 --> 00:03:24.180 about how it all works. And Dawkins clearly took 00:03:24.180 --> 00:03:26.939 the latter path. He did, but it wasn't an immediate 00:03:26.939 --> 00:03:29.319 rejection of the spiritual. And I think this 00:03:29.319 --> 00:03:31.439 is a common misconception about him. He wasn't 00:03:31.439 --> 00:03:33.620 born a skeptic. Right. He had a pretty standard 00:03:33.620 --> 00:03:36.180 Anglican upbringing. He did. He was confirmed 00:03:36.180 --> 00:03:38.199 in the Church of England. In fact, he said that 00:03:38.199 --> 00:03:40.919 throughout his early teenage years, he was quite 00:03:40.919 --> 00:03:43.800 devout so what broke the spell i've read that 00:03:43.800 --> 00:03:45.900 he talks about the argument from design this 00:03:45.900 --> 00:03:48.060 is critical to understanding his whole intellectual 00:03:48.060 --> 00:03:50.639 journey The young Dawkins looked at the natural 00:03:50.639 --> 00:03:54.300 world, you know, the insane complexity of a dragonfly's 00:03:54.300 --> 00:03:57.280 wing, the structure of a human eye, and his intuition 00:03:57.280 --> 00:03:59.879 told him what most people's intuition tells them. 00:03:59.919 --> 00:04:02.400 This is a machine. Yeah. And machines have designers. 00:04:02.780 --> 00:04:05.479 Exactly. Therefore, there must be a god. It's 00:04:05.479 --> 00:04:07.939 the classic William Paley's watchmaker argument. 00:04:08.180 --> 00:04:10.460 If you're walking on a heath and you find a watch, 00:04:10.620 --> 00:04:13.159 you don't assume the wind and rain just assembled 00:04:13.159 --> 00:04:16.269 it. You assume a watchmaker. You assume a watchmaker. 00:04:16.449 --> 00:04:18.750 It's a very seductive argument because it aligns 00:04:18.750 --> 00:04:20.810 perfectly with our human experience of creating 00:04:20.810 --> 00:04:25.529 things. But then around the age of 16, he really 00:04:25.529 --> 00:04:27.990 truly grasped the mechanism of Darwinian natural 00:04:27.990 --> 00:04:31.129 selection. The actual process. The process. He 00:04:31.129 --> 00:04:33.170 realized that you could get the watch without 00:04:33.170 --> 00:04:35.670 the watchmaker. If you have enough time and enough 00:04:35.670 --> 00:04:38.009 variation and a consistent selection pressure, 00:04:38.329 --> 00:04:41.870 simple things become complex things all by themselves 00:04:41.870 --> 00:04:45.310 automatically. And he described this realization 00:04:45.310 --> 00:04:47.949 as what? Pulling the rug out? Pulling the rug 00:04:47.949 --> 00:04:49.930 out from under his faith. That's his phrase. 00:04:50.029 --> 00:04:53.769 Once the designer hypothesis was rendered superfluous 00:04:53.769 --> 00:04:56.790 by a better, more elegant explanation, he just 00:04:56.790 --> 00:04:59.079 discarded it. It wasn't an emotional rebellion. 00:04:59.279 --> 00:05:01.180 No, not at all. It was an efficiency decision. 00:05:01.259 --> 00:05:03.779 The God hypothesis was no longer necessary to 00:05:03.779 --> 00:05:06.300 explain the data. That sounds incredibly consistent 00:05:06.300 --> 00:05:09.240 with the man he would become. Just a cold, logical 00:05:09.240 --> 00:05:12.019 assessment. Precisely. And that rigorous focus 00:05:12.019 --> 00:05:14.379 on mechanism followed him to Oxford. He went 00:05:14.379 --> 00:05:16.839 to Balliol College and fell under the mentorship 00:05:16.839 --> 00:05:19.199 of Nicholas Tinbergen. Now, Tinbergen is a name 00:05:19.199 --> 00:05:21.480 people should know. An absolute giant in the 00:05:21.480 --> 00:05:24.459 history of biology, a Nobel Prize winner and 00:05:24.459 --> 00:05:27.040 one of the founders of modern ethology. Ethology 00:05:27.040 --> 00:05:30.220 being the study of animal behavior, but it's 00:05:30.220 --> 00:05:32.660 distinct from the Skinner box psychology that 00:05:32.660 --> 00:05:34.680 was big at the time. Yes, very different. While 00:05:34.680 --> 00:05:36.759 American behaviorists were, you know, putting 00:05:36.759 --> 00:05:39.759 rats in mazes to study learning in a very artificial 00:05:39.759 --> 00:05:43.379 setting, the ethologists like Tinbergen and Conrad 00:05:43.379 --> 00:05:46.220 Lorenz were out in the field. In the mud. In 00:05:46.220 --> 00:05:49.120 the mud. Asking why animals have these instincts. 00:05:49.379 --> 00:05:52.339 Why does a gull chick peck at a red spot on its 00:05:52.339 --> 00:05:55.939 mother's beak to get food? Tinbergen taught Dawkins 00:05:55.939 --> 00:05:58.939 to look at behavior not as some mystical spirit 00:05:58.939 --> 00:06:01.360 of the animal, but as a biological adaptation. 00:06:01.959 --> 00:06:04.279 Something shaped by evolution. Just like a limb 00:06:04.279 --> 00:06:06.199 or an organ. It's a piece of survival technology. 00:06:06.660 --> 00:06:10.569 And so Dawkins' PhD was on... What was it? Selective 00:06:10.569 --> 00:06:12.810 pecking and the domestic chick. It sounds almost 00:06:12.810 --> 00:06:15.110 comical, doesn't it? Watching baby chickens peck 00:06:15.110 --> 00:06:17.089 at spots all day. A little bit. But it was actually 00:06:17.089 --> 00:06:19.870 a study in decision making models. He was looking 00:06:19.870 --> 00:06:22.589 for the rules, the algorithms governing the behavior. 00:06:22.930 --> 00:06:26.220 If I change the color of the spot. or the shape, 00:06:26.420 --> 00:06:29.139 how does the pecking behavior change? He was 00:06:29.139 --> 00:06:30.779 trying to reverse engineer the chick's brain. 00:06:31.079 --> 00:06:33.000 In a way, yes. He was attempting to view the 00:06:33.000 --> 00:06:35.540 animal as a processing system running a program. 00:06:35.899 --> 00:06:39.399 This brings us to 1976 and the book that, well, 00:06:39.439 --> 00:06:42.160 it changed everything. The Selfish Gene. And 00:06:42.160 --> 00:06:44.560 I think this is one of the most famously misunderstood 00:06:44.560 --> 00:06:47.220 titles in the history of popular science. Oh, 00:06:47.220 --> 00:06:50.240 without a doubt. He has spent 50 years correcting 00:06:50.240 --> 00:06:51.860 the record on this. I still hear people say, 00:06:51.959 --> 00:06:53.980 oh, Dawkins says we have a gene for selfishness, 00:06:54.000 --> 00:06:56.560 so it's okay if I'm a jerk. That is the bane 00:06:56.560 --> 00:06:59.339 of his existence. The selfishness refers to the 00:06:59.339 --> 00:07:03.019 gene, the replicator, not the organism. In fact, 00:07:03.079 --> 00:07:04.959 the entire point of the book is to explain how 00:07:04.959 --> 00:07:07.860 incredibly altruistic behavior in animals can 00:07:07.860 --> 00:07:11.079 evolve because of selfish genes. So let's break 00:07:11.079 --> 00:07:13.300 down the paradigm shift here. Before Dawkins, 00:07:13.480 --> 00:07:15.399 and he was synthesizing the work of researchers 00:07:15.399 --> 00:07:18.220 like George C. Williams and W .D. Hamilton, the 00:07:18.220 --> 00:07:21.449 prevailing view was group selection. Or species 00:07:21.449 --> 00:07:24.569 selection, right? The idea that animals do things 00:07:24.569 --> 00:07:27.410 for the good of the species. You'd watch a nature 00:07:27.410 --> 00:07:29.350 documentary and the narrator would say in a very 00:07:29.350 --> 00:07:32.490 grand voice, the lemming bravely commits suicide 00:07:32.490 --> 00:07:34.529 to leave more food for the rest of the herd. 00:07:34.670 --> 00:07:37.490 It sounds nice. It fits our human morality. It 00:07:37.490 --> 00:07:40.029 feels right. But Dawkins, channeling Williams, 00:07:40.329 --> 00:07:43.129 pointed out the fatal flaw in that logic. It's 00:07:43.129 --> 00:07:45.740 mathematically unstable. Completely. Imagine 00:07:45.740 --> 00:07:49.220 a population of lemmings where most are altruistic 00:07:49.220 --> 00:07:51.540 and will happily jump off a cliff for the common 00:07:51.540 --> 00:07:55.199 good. Now introduce one mutant, a selfish individual 00:07:55.199 --> 00:07:56.860 who thinks, you know what, I'm going to sit this 00:07:56.860 --> 00:07:59.720 one out. That selfish individual survives every 00:07:59.720 --> 00:08:03.620 time. Not only survives, but reproduces and crucially 00:08:03.620 --> 00:08:06.420 passes on the selfish gene for not jumping off 00:08:06.420 --> 00:08:08.680 the cliff. And very quickly, the altruists are 00:08:08.680 --> 00:08:11.160 all dead. And the population is entirely made 00:08:11.160 --> 00:08:13.819 up of the descendants of the selfish one. The 00:08:13.819 --> 00:08:16.000 good of the species strategy, as loving as it 00:08:16.000 --> 00:08:18.899 sounds, gets invaded and destroyed by selfishness 00:08:18.899 --> 00:08:21.459 from within. It just doesn't work. So Dawkins 00:08:21.459 --> 00:08:24.339 zooms the lens in. He says, forget the species, 00:08:24.639 --> 00:08:26.779 forget the group, forget even the individual 00:08:26.779 --> 00:08:29.699 organism. Look at the gene. This is the gene's 00:08:29.699 --> 00:08:32.480 eye view. It's his central idea. He argues that 00:08:32.480 --> 00:08:34.740 the fundamental unit of life, the thing that 00:08:34.740 --> 00:08:37.179 natural selection is actually acting on, is the 00:08:37.179 --> 00:08:40.759 replicator. The gene. The gene. It wants, and 00:08:40.759 --> 00:08:43.440 of course wants is a metaphor, to make copies 00:08:43.440 --> 00:08:46.059 of itself. The body, the individual organism, 00:08:46.320 --> 00:08:50.919 you, me, a lion, an oak tree. We are just survival 00:08:50.919 --> 00:08:53.379 machines. Survival machine. It's such a cold 00:08:53.379 --> 00:08:56.379 industrial metaphor. It is. A robot built by 00:08:56.379 --> 00:08:58.200 the genes to carry them around, protect them 00:08:58.200 --> 00:08:59.799 from the elements, and negotiate the environment 00:08:59.799 --> 00:09:01.460 so they can get themselves into the next generation. 00:09:01.820 --> 00:09:04.440 We are their vehicles. It reduces a human being 00:09:04.440 --> 00:09:07.299 to a temporary vessel. Which is... Existential 00:09:07.299 --> 00:09:09.820 horror for some people. But for Dawkins, it was 00:09:09.820 --> 00:09:12.659 profoundly clarifying. It explains things that 00:09:12.659 --> 00:09:14.860 individual selection can't. Like the paradox 00:09:14.860 --> 00:09:18.259 of altruism. Exactly. Why does a honeybee sting 00:09:18.259 --> 00:09:21.059 an intruder and die to save the hive? It's suicide. 00:09:21.419 --> 00:09:23.639 Why does a bird give a warning call that attracts 00:09:23.639 --> 00:09:25.679 the hawk to itself that saves the rest of the 00:09:25.679 --> 00:09:28.019 flock? If the bird is just trying to survive 00:09:28.019 --> 00:09:30.539 and reproduce, that's a catastrophically stupid 00:09:30.539 --> 00:09:33.649 move. From the bird's perspective, yes. But if 00:09:33.649 --> 00:09:35.509 the genes are trying to survive, it's a calculated 00:09:35.509 --> 00:09:37.529 bet. And this is where we have to bring in the 00:09:37.529 --> 00:09:40.169 work of W .D. Hamilton and the concept of inclusive 00:09:40.169 --> 00:09:43.110 fitness. The math of kinship. That's it. It's 00:09:43.110 --> 00:09:45.909 just simple math. You share, on average, 50 % 00:09:45.909 --> 00:09:47.950 of your genes with a full sibling or a child. 00:09:48.090 --> 00:09:51.529 You share 25 % with a niece or nephew, 12 .5 00:09:51.529 --> 00:09:54.889 % with a first cousin, and so on. So Hamilton 00:09:54.889 --> 00:09:57.759 formulated a rule. It's literally called Hamilton's 00:09:57.759 --> 00:10:00.440 rule that predicts when an altruistic act will 00:10:00.440 --> 00:10:03.340 be favored by natural selection. It will happen 00:10:03.340 --> 00:10:05.419 if the cost to me is less than the benefit to 00:10:05.419 --> 00:10:08.039 my relative multiplied by how related we are. 00:10:08.139 --> 00:10:11.759 So the famous J .B .S. Haldane joke, I would 00:10:11.759 --> 00:10:14.240 lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins. 00:10:14.559 --> 00:10:16.799 Precisely. From the genes perspective, saving 00:10:16.799 --> 00:10:19.259 two brothers who each carry a 50 percent copy 00:10:19.259 --> 00:10:21.639 of you is statistically equivalent to saving 00:10:21.639 --> 00:10:24.600 yourself. Your death is a good trade if it saves 00:10:24.600 --> 00:10:26.500 two of them. The gene doesn't care which body 00:10:26.500 --> 00:10:29.120 it's in. It doesn't care at all, as long as a 00:10:29.120 --> 00:10:32.080 copy of it survives to the next generation. So 00:10:32.080 --> 00:10:35.220 the selfish gene builds an organism, a survival 00:10:35.220 --> 00:10:38.299 machine, that acts altruistically toward its 00:10:38.299 --> 00:10:40.620 kin, because that's a brilliant strategy for 00:10:40.620 --> 00:10:43.159 the gene to replicate itself. But this feels 00:10:43.159 --> 00:10:45.139 like it strips the nobility out of something 00:10:45.139 --> 00:10:48.120 like a mother's love for her child. It turns 00:10:48.120 --> 00:10:51.120 it into a cold genetic calculation. And Dawkins 00:10:51.120 --> 00:10:53.019 would argue he isn't stripping the nobility. 00:10:53.139 --> 00:10:56.519 He's explaining its origin. The feeling of love, 00:10:56.639 --> 00:10:59.379 that powerful, overwhelming emotion, is the mechanism 00:10:59.379 --> 00:11:01.720 the gene uses to ensure the protective behavior 00:11:01.720 --> 00:11:04.379 happens. It's the psychological software. It's 00:11:04.379 --> 00:11:07.259 the software. We feel love because our ancestors, 00:11:07.440 --> 00:11:09.379 who didn't feel a powerful bond with their offspring, 00:11:09.720 --> 00:11:11.779 didn't protect them as well, and their genes... 00:11:11.789 --> 00:11:13.809 died out. We are the descendants of the ones 00:11:13.809 --> 00:11:15.870 who are good at loving because love is an efficient 00:11:15.870 --> 00:11:19.509 survival strategy for genes. Now critics, and 00:11:19.509 --> 00:11:21.269 there were many, people like the great Stephen 00:11:21.269 --> 00:11:24.090 Jay Gould or Ernst Mayr, they had a big problem 00:11:24.090 --> 00:11:26.269 with this. A huge problem. They argued that you 00:11:26.269 --> 00:11:28.289 can't just select a single gene. You can't have 00:11:28.289 --> 00:11:30.970 a gene for long legs if you don't also have genes 00:11:30.970 --> 00:11:34.049 for strong bones and a powerful heart and better 00:11:34.049 --> 00:11:37.049 circulation. The body is an integrated whole, 00:11:37.190 --> 00:11:40.129 not a collection of parts. That was the unity 00:11:40.129 --> 00:11:43.090 of the genotype argument. They claimed Dawkins 00:11:43.090 --> 00:11:45.389 was being far too reductionist, treating the 00:11:45.389 --> 00:11:48.129 genome like a beanbag of isolated traits that 00:11:48.129 --> 00:11:50.230 you could just pick and choose from. Which seems 00:11:50.230 --> 00:11:52.490 like a fair criticism on the surface. It does, 00:11:52.629 --> 00:11:55.429 but Dawkins' counter -argument is subtle and, 00:11:55.509 --> 00:11:58.450 I think, very powerful. He completely agrees 00:11:58.450 --> 00:12:01.809 that genes interact in complex ways. But he argues 00:12:01.809 --> 00:12:04.009 that from the perspective of any single gene, 00:12:04.230 --> 00:12:06.330 all the other genes in the genome are just part 00:12:06.330 --> 00:12:08.190 of the environment it has to deal with. Okay, 00:12:08.210 --> 00:12:11.909 unpack that. A gene for, say, sharp teeth is 00:12:11.909 --> 00:12:13.970 being selected for its ability to work well in 00:12:13.970 --> 00:12:16.490 a body that also has the gene for strong jaw 00:12:16.490 --> 00:12:19.529 muscles. If it finds itself in a body with weak 00:12:19.529 --> 00:12:22.110 jaw muscles, it's not very useful and it fails. 00:12:22.409 --> 00:12:25.230 So genes are selected for their ability to cooperate 00:12:25.230 --> 00:12:28.360 with other genes. Exactly. So over eons of evolutionary 00:12:28.360 --> 00:12:31.019 time, you get these cooperative clusters of genes 00:12:31.019 --> 00:12:33.679 that work well together. They form a team. But 00:12:33.679 --> 00:12:35.919 the fundamental unit of selection, the thing 00:12:35.919 --> 00:12:38.100 that is actually being passed on or not, remains 00:12:38.100 --> 00:12:41.240 the single replicator, the gene. OK, so if the 00:12:41.240 --> 00:12:43.120 selfish gene was about looking inward at the 00:12:43.120 --> 00:12:47.100 code, his next major work, the extended phenotype 00:12:47.100 --> 00:12:50.759 in 1982, was about looking outward. And I know 00:12:50.759 --> 00:12:54.399 for a fact that Dawkins considers this. His single 00:12:54.399 --> 00:12:57.240 most important scientific contribution. More 00:12:57.240 --> 00:12:59.200 than the memes, more than the atheism. He does. 00:12:59.279 --> 00:13:01.379 He's very clear on that. The extended phenotype 00:13:01.379 --> 00:13:04.360 is the logical and some would say radical conclusion 00:13:04.360 --> 00:13:07.139 of the gene's eye view. So standard biology 101 00:13:07.139 --> 00:13:09.700 teaches us genotype is the DNA code, the blueprint. 00:13:10.000 --> 00:13:12.240 Right. And the phenotype is the physical expression 00:13:12.240 --> 00:13:14.720 of that code, the body. Blue eyes, black hair, 00:13:14.840 --> 00:13:17.200 height. The phenotype stops at the skin. And 00:13:17.200 --> 00:13:19.519 Dawkins just asked a very simple question. Why? 00:13:20.269 --> 00:13:22.370 Why should it stop at the skin? What do you mean? 00:13:22.490 --> 00:13:25.429 If a gene's purpose is to manipulate the world 00:13:25.429 --> 00:13:27.690 to ensure its own replication, and it builds 00:13:27.690 --> 00:13:30.250 a body to do that, why can't it also manipulate 00:13:30.250 --> 00:13:33.169 the inanimate world outside that body? Give me 00:13:33.169 --> 00:13:35.490 an example. The classic example is the beaver 00:13:35.490 --> 00:13:37.909 dam. Okay, the beaver dam. It's a structure made 00:13:37.909 --> 00:13:41.330 of wood, rocks, and mud. It's part of the environment. 00:13:41.610 --> 00:13:45.100 But why does it exist? It exists because specific 00:13:45.100 --> 00:13:48.120 genes in the beaver's brain wire it to have an 00:13:48.120 --> 00:13:50.899 urge to chew trees and pile them up in a particular 00:13:50.899 --> 00:13:54.360 way in running water. The dam then creates a 00:13:54.360 --> 00:13:57.440 deep pond, which protects the beaver from predators 00:13:57.440 --> 00:14:00.440 and allows it to store food for the winter. The 00:14:00.440 --> 00:14:03.360 dam directly increases the survival chances of 00:14:03.360 --> 00:14:05.259 the beaver's genes. So you're saying the dam 00:14:05.259 --> 00:14:08.200 is... A genetic trait. Dawkins argues that the 00:14:08.200 --> 00:14:10.600 dam is a phenotypic effect of the beaver's genes, 00:14:10.779 --> 00:14:12.759 just as much as the beaver's teeth or its flat 00:14:12.759 --> 00:14:15.759 tail is. The gene's influence reaches out of 00:14:15.759 --> 00:14:18.379 the body and reshapes the landscape. The phenotype 00:14:18.379 --> 00:14:20.799 is extended. It is extended. And it gets even 00:14:20.799 --> 00:14:22.960 stranger and more undeniable when you look at 00:14:22.960 --> 00:14:25.519 parasites. This is where the concept really becomes 00:14:25.519 --> 00:14:29.139 mind bending. There is a fluke. A type of parasitic 00:14:29.139 --> 00:14:32.179 flatworm that infects snails. But to complete 00:14:32.179 --> 00:14:34.960 its life cycle, it needs to get inside a bird. 00:14:35.159 --> 00:14:37.379 So it needs the bird to eat the snail. A classic 00:14:37.379 --> 00:14:39.740 problem for a parasite. A classic problem. But 00:14:39.740 --> 00:14:42.059 birds don't usually eat these particular snails 00:14:42.059 --> 00:14:44.399 because they hide in the shade. They're camouflaged. 00:14:44.460 --> 00:14:47.879 So the parasite manipulates the snail. It hijacks 00:14:47.879 --> 00:14:51.600 its brain. It migrates into the snail's eye stalks 00:14:51.600 --> 00:14:53.980 and causes them to swell up, turn these bright 00:14:53.980 --> 00:14:57.519 pulsating colors, red, green, yellow. makes the 00:14:57.519 --> 00:14:59.960 snail climb to the top of a plant leaf in broad 00:14:59.960 --> 00:15:02.700 daylight and wiggle. Oh my god, it turns the 00:15:02.700 --> 00:15:05.240 snail into a flashing neon sign that says, eat 00:15:05.240 --> 00:15:07.779 me. It perfectly mimics a caterpillar, which 00:15:07.779 --> 00:15:10.659 birds love to eat. The bird swooks down, eats 00:15:10.659 --> 00:15:13.059 the pulsating eyestalk, the parasite gets into 00:15:13.059 --> 00:15:15.759 the bird, and the life cycle is complete. That's 00:15:15.759 --> 00:15:18.419 horrifying. It is, but now ask yourself, whose 00:15:18.419 --> 00:15:21.159 phenotype is that pulsating, colorful eyestalk? 00:15:21.340 --> 00:15:23.460 It's happening to the snail's body, but it is 00:15:23.460 --> 00:15:26.340 being caused by the parasite's genes. The parasite's 00:15:26.340 --> 00:15:28.419 genes are driving the snail's body like a stolen 00:15:28.419 --> 00:15:32.230 car. Exactly. Dawkins argues that this is definitive 00:15:32.230 --> 00:15:34.429 proof that the reach of a gene is not limited 00:15:34.429 --> 00:15:37.129 by the cell membrane or the skin. It extends 00:15:37.129 --> 00:15:39.570 as far as its causal power can reach into the 00:15:39.570 --> 00:15:42.610 world. It completely blurs the line between self 00:15:42.610 --> 00:15:47.240 and world in a way that is... It's almost psychedelic 00:15:47.240 --> 00:15:49.059 when you think about it. It destroys the neat 00:15:49.059 --> 00:15:51.720 and tidy idea of the individual organism as a 00:15:51.720 --> 00:15:55.279 sealed sovereign unit. We are all, all the time 00:15:55.279 --> 00:15:57.659 dealing with the extended phenotypic effects 00:15:57.659 --> 00:16:00.460 of other creatures' genes. And speaking of things 00:16:00.460 --> 00:16:02.639 that spread from one being to another and manipulate 00:16:02.639 --> 00:16:06.129 behavior, we have to discuss... The meme. The 00:16:06.129 --> 00:16:09.350 meme. It's so ironic that Dawkins coined this 00:16:09.350 --> 00:16:11.570 term in a chapter of The Selfish Gene back in 00:16:11.570 --> 00:16:14.649 1976, long before the Internet. And now it's 00:16:14.649 --> 00:16:17.149 arguably the primary way that an entire generation 00:16:17.149 --> 00:16:19.350 understands and communicates culture. It was 00:16:19.350 --> 00:16:20.909 almost an afterthought in the book, which is 00:16:20.909 --> 00:16:23.370 the funny part. He just needed a final chapter 00:16:23.370 --> 00:16:25.750 to demonstrate that Darwinism is a universal 00:16:25.750 --> 00:16:27.929 aspect, as Daniel Dennett would later call it. 00:16:27.990 --> 00:16:29.870 Meaning it applies to any system where you have 00:16:29.870 --> 00:16:32.750 replication, variation and selection. Right. 00:16:32.809 --> 00:16:34.350 It doesn't have to be DNA. It could be anything. 00:16:34.509 --> 00:16:37.389 So he needed a cultural equivalent to the gene. 00:16:37.429 --> 00:16:40.649 A unit of imitation. Exactly. He looked for a 00:16:40.649 --> 00:16:43.190 word that sounded a bit like gene and was rooted 00:16:43.190 --> 00:16:45.710 in the Greek word for imitation, which is memam. 00:16:45.929 --> 00:16:48.769 He shortened it to meme. But his definition wasn't, 00:16:48.769 --> 00:16:50.809 you know, a picture of a cat with a funny caption. 00:16:51.049 --> 00:16:54.350 No. For Dawkins, a meme was a unit of cultural 00:16:54.350 --> 00:16:57.929 transmission. A catchy tune, a recipe for a cake, 00:16:58.110 --> 00:17:00.929 a fashion trend, the technology for building 00:17:00.929 --> 00:17:04.269 a stone arch, or a philosophical idea like the 00:17:04.269 --> 00:17:07.549 concept of God. These are all memes. And they 00:17:07.549 --> 00:17:10.849 follow the same Darwinian rules as jeans. Broadly, 00:17:10.849 --> 00:17:13.730 yes. He outlined three key conditions for a successful 00:17:13.730 --> 00:17:16.490 replicator. Fidelity, which is how accurately 00:17:16.490 --> 00:17:19.470 it is copied. Fecundity, how many copies are 00:17:19.470 --> 00:17:22.130 made. And longevity, how long the copies last. 00:17:22.490 --> 00:17:24.990 Let's take a catchy pop song. A catchy pop song 00:17:24.990 --> 00:17:28.029 has incredibly high fecundity. You hear it on 00:17:28.029 --> 00:17:29.769 the radio, you start humming it, your friend 00:17:29.769 --> 00:17:31.650 hears you, they start humming it. It spreads 00:17:31.650 --> 00:17:33.970 like a virus through the population of minds. 00:17:34.190 --> 00:17:37.319 Or is it complex mathematical proof? Very low 00:17:37.319 --> 00:17:39.779 fecundity. Very few people have the background 00:17:39.779 --> 00:17:41.779 knowledge to understand it, let alone remember 00:17:41.779 --> 00:17:44.119 it accurately enough to pass it on. And what 00:17:44.119 --> 00:17:47.240 about fidelity? This is where memes seem really 00:17:47.240 --> 00:17:50.500 different from genes. They are. Genes have incredibly 00:17:50.500 --> 00:17:52.859 high copying fidelity thanks to the chemistry 00:17:52.859 --> 00:17:56.460 of DNA. Mutations are relatively rare. Memes 00:17:56.460 --> 00:17:59.259 mutate constantly. It's like the game Telephone. 00:17:59.420 --> 00:18:02.380 Exactly like that game. You tell a story, I retell 00:18:02.380 --> 00:18:04.359 it, but I exaggerate the funny part, the next 00:18:04.359 --> 00:18:06.480 person forgets the boring middle part and adds 00:18:06.480 --> 00:18:09.339 a new ending. The story evolves, sometimes very 00:18:09.339 --> 00:18:12.339 rapidly, as it spreads. This leads to the darker 00:18:12.339 --> 00:18:15.099 side of the idea, the concept of the mind virus. 00:18:16.220 --> 00:18:18.980 Dawkins suggests that some memes survive not 00:18:18.980 --> 00:18:21.359 because they are true or useful to the host, 00:18:21.539 --> 00:18:23.460 but simply because they are good at surviving 00:18:23.460 --> 00:18:25.740 and spreading. And this is his primary critique 00:18:25.740 --> 00:18:28.500 of religion from a memetic standpoint. It is. 00:18:28.640 --> 00:18:30.960 He argues that many core religious beliefs are 00:18:30.960 --> 00:18:33.359 incredibly effective survival strategies for 00:18:33.359 --> 00:18:36.099 the meme itself. Think of a belief like, if you 00:18:36.099 --> 00:18:37.759 do not believe this, you will suffer eternal 00:18:37.759 --> 00:18:40.559 torment in hell. That's a powerful incentive 00:18:40.559 --> 00:18:43.440 not to abandon the belief. It's a terrifyingly 00:18:43.440 --> 00:18:46.039 effective mechanism, or a commandment like, you 00:18:46.039 --> 00:18:48.480 must go forth and convert others to save their 00:18:48.480 --> 00:18:51.259 souls. That turns the host into an active transmission 00:18:51.259 --> 00:18:53.880 vector for the meme. Precisely. From this perspective, 00:18:54.099 --> 00:18:56.200 it doesn't matter one bit whether the belief 00:18:56.200 --> 00:18:59.039 is factually true or not. All that matters is 00:18:59.039 --> 00:19:01.039 that the belief has a built -in psychological 00:19:01.039 --> 00:19:04.119 mechanism to ensure its own replication and transmission. 00:19:04.480 --> 00:19:07.579 So if we are survival machines for our genes, 00:19:07.880 --> 00:19:11.240 our brains are also survival machines for memes. 00:19:11.599 --> 00:19:14.319 And sometimes those two imperatives come into 00:19:14.319 --> 00:19:17.039 direct conflict. A celibate monk, for example, 00:19:17.039 --> 00:19:20.240 is a total dead end for his genes. Zero genetic 00:19:20.240 --> 00:19:22.599 reproduction. A failure is a survival machine. 00:19:22.799 --> 00:19:25.420 A complete failure. But he might be a fantastic 00:19:25.420 --> 00:19:28.480 replicator for the Catholicism meme, dedicating 00:19:28.480 --> 00:19:30.980 his entire life to studying and spreading the 00:19:30.980 --> 00:19:33.200 idea. In that case, you could say the meme has 00:19:33.200 --> 00:19:35.480 hijacked the genetic vehicle for its own purposes. 00:19:35.779 --> 00:19:38.500 This kind of thinking, this relentless application 00:19:38.500 --> 00:19:41.759 of Darwinian logic to everything, it caused a 00:19:41.759 --> 00:19:43.539 lot of friction within the scientific community 00:19:43.539 --> 00:19:45.859 itself. It really did. The so -called Darwin 00:19:45.859 --> 00:19:49.980 Wars. of the 80s and 90s were intense. And it 00:19:49.980 --> 00:19:52.440 was essentially Dawkins versus Stephen Jay Gould. 00:19:52.539 --> 00:19:54.819 It was a clash of titans. It really was. You 00:19:54.819 --> 00:19:57.640 had Gould, the charismatic Harvard paleontologist, 00:19:57.720 --> 00:20:00.380 versus Dawkins, the precise Oxford ethologist. 00:20:00.839 --> 00:20:02.819 And they agreed on the big picture stuff. Evolution 00:20:02.819 --> 00:20:05.519 is true. Creationism is junk science. Oh, yeah. 00:20:05.579 --> 00:20:08.400 On that, they were united. But they disagreed 00:20:08.400 --> 00:20:11.279 profoundly on the mechanism, the tempo, and the 00:20:11.279 --> 00:20:13.880 emphasis of evolution. Gould was the champion 00:20:13.880 --> 00:20:16.930 of punctuated equilibrium. Right. Gold looked 00:20:16.930 --> 00:20:19.710 at the fossil record and he didn't see smooth, 00:20:19.789 --> 00:20:22.710 gradual change. He saw long periods of stasis, 00:20:22.750 --> 00:20:25.589 millions of years, where a clam just looks like 00:20:25.589 --> 00:20:28.029 a clam interrupted by, geologically speaking, 00:20:28.269 --> 00:20:31.130 sudden rapid bursts of speciation. So evolution 00:20:31.130 --> 00:20:33.369 happens in fits and starts. That was his argument, 00:20:33.430 --> 00:20:36.130 that it isn't a smooth, gradual slope. It's more 00:20:36.130 --> 00:20:38.730 like long, flat landings with steep staircases 00:20:38.730 --> 00:20:41.450 in between. And Dawkins. Dawkins is a strict 00:20:41.450 --> 00:20:44.289 gradualist. He's a Darwinian fundamentalist in 00:20:44.289 --> 00:20:47.160 that sense. argues that even those sudden bursts 00:20:47.160 --> 00:20:49.960 that Gould saw in the fossil record, which might 00:20:49.960 --> 00:20:52.980 be 50 ,000 years long, that's plenty of time 00:20:52.980 --> 00:20:56.400 for slow, steady, gene -by -gene selection to 00:20:56.400 --> 00:20:59.599 do its work. He thought Gould was just over -dramatizing 00:20:59.599 --> 00:21:02.019 the gaps in the record. Pretty much. He saw it 00:21:02.019 --> 00:21:04.319 as a storm in a teacup, but there was also the 00:21:04.319 --> 00:21:06.859 deeper fight about adaptationism. Right. Gould 00:21:06.859 --> 00:21:09.160 accused Dawkins and his allies of being ultra 00:21:09.160 --> 00:21:11.599 -Darwinians, who thought that everything in an 00:21:11.599 --> 00:21:14.440 animal is a perfect adaptation. designed for 00:21:14.440 --> 00:21:17.059 a specific purpose. The famous paper was The 00:21:17.059 --> 00:21:20.019 Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm. 00:21:20.140 --> 00:21:23.019 A mouthful. It is. But the idea is simple. A 00:21:23.019 --> 00:21:25.259 spandrel is the triangular space you get between 00:21:25.259 --> 00:21:27.519 two arches in a cathedral. It wasn't designed 00:21:27.519 --> 00:21:29.359 on purpose. It's just a byproduct of putting 00:21:29.359 --> 00:21:31.640 a round dome on top of square arches. But then 00:21:31.640 --> 00:21:33.880 artists came along and painted beautiful mosaics 00:21:33.880 --> 00:21:37.099 in them. Exactly. So Gould argued that many biological 00:21:37.099 --> 00:21:39.319 traits are like spandrels. They're just architectural 00:21:39.319 --> 00:21:42.259 byproducts of other things. Take the human chin. 00:21:42.890 --> 00:21:45.190 Is the chin an adaptation for something or is 00:21:45.190 --> 00:21:47.430 it just the shape that's left over when the human 00:21:47.430 --> 00:21:50.490 jaw shrank during our evolution? So Gould's point 00:21:50.490 --> 00:21:54.369 was, don't tell these neat just -so stories about 00:21:54.369 --> 00:21:56.809 every single feature. Sometimes things are just 00:21:56.809 --> 00:22:00.549 there. Right. And Dawkins pushed back hard. He 00:22:00.549 --> 00:22:03.490 argued that while, sure, byproducts exist, natural 00:22:03.490 --> 00:22:06.309 selection is the only force we know of that is 00:22:06.309 --> 00:22:08.829 powerful enough to explain complex functional 00:22:08.829 --> 00:22:11.509 design. Like the eye. Like the eye or the wing 00:22:11.509 --> 00:22:15.390 or the echolocation of a bat. That kind of exquisite 00:22:15.390 --> 00:22:18.589 engineering, he argues, cannot be a random byproduct. 00:22:18.630 --> 00:22:22.069 It screams adaptation. This scientific rigorousness, 00:22:22.170 --> 00:22:24.890 this fierce defense of natural selection is the 00:22:24.890 --> 00:22:27.880 ultimate explanation for life's complexity. It 00:22:27.880 --> 00:22:29.759 seems this is what eventually led Dawkins out 00:22:29.759 --> 00:22:31.559 of the lab and into the public square. I think 00:22:31.559 --> 00:22:33.380 that's exactly right. And the key moment was 00:22:33.380 --> 00:22:35.539 the simony professorship for the public understanding 00:22:35.539 --> 00:22:38.259 of science. A chair at Oxford he held from 1995 00:22:38.259 --> 00:22:42.000 to 2008. And his official mandate was to communicate 00:22:42.000 --> 00:22:45.059 science to the public. But he increasingly came 00:22:45.059 --> 00:22:47.839 to feel. that the single biggest barrier to the 00:22:47.839 --> 00:22:50.019 public understanding of science, specifically 00:22:50.019 --> 00:22:54.279 evolution, was religious faith. He felt you couldn't 00:22:54.279 --> 00:22:57.180 properly teach biology if people's minds were, 00:22:57.359 --> 00:22:59.779 in his view, inoculated against it by childhood 00:22:59.779 --> 00:23:03.079 indoctrination. Exactly. And he grew incredibly 00:23:03.079 --> 00:23:06.240 tired of the polite, hands -off truth that existed 00:23:06.240 --> 00:23:09.200 between science and religion. The Noma idea from 00:23:09.200 --> 00:23:12.240 his rival, Stephen Jay Gould. Precisely. Noma 00:23:12.240 --> 00:23:15.240 non -overlapping magisteria. The idea that... 00:23:15.339 --> 00:23:17.299 Science covers the empirical universe. You know, 00:23:17.299 --> 00:23:18.960 what are stars made of? How does life evolve? 00:23:19.319 --> 00:23:21.720 And religion covers the domain of ultimate meaning, 00:23:21.819 --> 00:23:24.240 morality, and value. And the two should never 00:23:24.240 --> 00:23:26.660 meet or interfere. And Dawkins absolutely hated 00:23:26.660 --> 00:23:29.200 that idea. He despised it. He called it cowardly 00:23:29.200 --> 00:23:31.500 and dishonest. He argued that religions don't 00:23:31.500 --> 00:23:33.680 just talk about morality. They make specific 00:23:33.680 --> 00:23:36.279 factual claims about the universe. Like if you 00:23:36.279 --> 00:23:38.420 say Jesus rose from the dead, that is a biological 00:23:38.420 --> 00:23:40.880 claim about a human body reanimating. If you 00:23:40.880 --> 00:23:42.819 say God answers prayers, that is a claim about 00:23:42.819 --> 00:23:45.680 causal interference in the laws of physics. So 00:23:45.680 --> 00:23:48.680 he saw them as scientific hypotheses. Yes. And 00:23:48.680 --> 00:23:51.799 as such, they should be tested, analyzed. And 00:23:51.799 --> 00:23:54.579 if they lack. any evidence whatsoever, they should 00:23:54.579 --> 00:23:57.319 be rejected, not cordoned off in some special 00:23:57.319 --> 00:23:59.960 protected category. This all culminated, of course, 00:24:00.039 --> 00:24:02.980 in the God delusion in 2006. And that wasn't 00:24:02.980 --> 00:24:05.299 just another book. It was a cultural event. It 00:24:05.299 --> 00:24:08.099 was a phenomenon. It sold millions and millions 00:24:08.099 --> 00:24:10.720 of copies. It really tapped into a post 9 -11 00:24:10.720 --> 00:24:13.039 anxiety about religious fundamentalism. And it 00:24:13.039 --> 00:24:16.099 marked the real rise of new atheism. Absolutely. 00:24:16.619 --> 00:24:19.119 Alongside Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and 00:24:19.119 --> 00:24:21.359 Daniel Dennett, who were famously dubbed the 00:24:21.359 --> 00:24:23.859 four whores. Horseman Dawkins helped shift the 00:24:23.859 --> 00:24:26.900 conversation. It moved from a passive I don't 00:24:26.900 --> 00:24:29.200 happen to believe in God to an active, aggressive 00:24:29.200 --> 00:24:32.079 stance of religion is not just wrong. It is actively 00:24:32.079 --> 00:24:34.970 harmful. He has a scale, doesn't he? The spectrum 00:24:34.970 --> 00:24:37.549 of theistic probability. He does. He didn't want 00:24:37.549 --> 00:24:39.609 to fall into the same trap of dogmatism he accused 00:24:39.609 --> 00:24:41.630 the religious of, claiming absolute certainty. 00:24:41.789 --> 00:24:43.670 So he created a scale from one to seven. Where 00:24:43.670 --> 00:24:46.529 one is strong theist, 100 % sure God exists. 00:24:46.750 --> 00:24:49.710 And seven is strong atheist, 100 % sure God does 00:24:49.710 --> 00:24:52.029 not exist. And Dawkins places himself where? 00:24:52.170 --> 00:24:56.109 He places himself at a 6 .9, a de facto atheist. 00:24:56.670 --> 00:24:59.569 Why not a full seven? Because as a scientist, 00:24:59.829 --> 00:25:02.710 you can't technically prove a negative. You can't 00:25:02.710 --> 00:25:04.369 prove there aren't fairies. at the bottom of 00:25:04.369 --> 00:25:07.369 the garden. But, as he likes to say, we don't 00:25:07.369 --> 00:25:09.190 live our lives being agnostic about fairies. 00:25:09.289 --> 00:25:11.789 We live our lives as if they don't exist. So 00:25:11.789 --> 00:25:14.390 he treats the God hypothesis with the same level 00:25:14.390 --> 00:25:17.609 of everyday skepticism. Precisely. The odds are 00:25:17.609 --> 00:25:20.289 so vanishingly small that it's not worth considering. 00:25:20.589 --> 00:25:22.730 One of the central arguments in The God Delusion 00:25:22.730 --> 00:25:25.990 is his rebuttal to the design argument, which 00:25:25.990 --> 00:25:29.960 he calls the ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. Right, 00:25:30.019 --> 00:25:31.799 this is him flipping the watchmaker argument 00:25:31.799 --> 00:25:35.279 back on itself. The creationist says the complexity 00:25:35.279 --> 00:25:38.319 of the eye implies a designer. And Doc is asked. 00:25:38.460 --> 00:25:41.220 So who designed the designer? If your designer 00:25:41.220 --> 00:25:43.400 is complex enough to design an entire universe 00:25:43.400 --> 00:25:46.480 and a human eye, that designer must be infinitely 00:25:46.480 --> 00:25:49.259 more complex and statistically improbable than 00:25:49.259 --> 00:25:51.400 the thing it's supposed to explain. You haven't 00:25:51.400 --> 00:25:53.240 solved the problem of complexity. You've just 00:25:53.240 --> 00:25:55.859 pushed it back one step and made it bigger. You've 00:25:55.859 --> 00:25:58.859 made it infinitely bigger. He argues that natural 00:25:58.859 --> 00:26:01.299 selection is the only theory we have that actually 00:26:01.299 --> 00:26:03.559 explains how you get complexity out of simplicity, 00:26:03.920 --> 00:26:06.559 how you can bootstrap design from the ground 00:26:06.559 --> 00:26:09.400 up without needing a pre -existing designer. 00:26:09.779 --> 00:26:13.359 Yet, despite this incredibly hardline, uncompromising 00:26:13.359 --> 00:26:16.339 stance, there's a nuance that always confuses 00:26:16.339 --> 00:26:19.079 people. He calls himself a cultural Christian. 00:26:19.549 --> 00:26:22.069 Hmm. And he's reiterated this very recently. 00:26:22.170 --> 00:26:24.430 It drives some of his followers crazy. It seems 00:26:24.430 --> 00:26:26.710 like a massive contradiction. To him it isn't. 00:26:26.710 --> 00:26:29.230 He loves the King James Bible as a masterpiece 00:26:29.230 --> 00:26:32.109 of English literature. He adores the music of 00:26:32.109 --> 00:26:35.619 Bach. like St. Matthew Passion. He appreciates 00:26:35.619 --> 00:26:37.799 the beauty of a village church and the rhythm 00:26:37.799 --> 00:26:40.279 of the church calendar. So he separates the culture 00:26:40.279 --> 00:26:43.019 from the creed. Exactly. He separates the meme 00:26:43.019 --> 00:26:45.359 of the culture, the art, and the tradition from 00:26:45.359 --> 00:26:48.160 the truth claim of the theology. He wants to 00:26:48.160 --> 00:26:50.819 keep the cathedral but evict the deity. He argues 00:26:50.819 --> 00:26:53.259 you can and should appreciate the rich cultural 00:26:53.259 --> 00:26:55.640 heritage without buying into the supernatural 00:26:55.640 --> 00:26:57.980 beliefs. But this cultural Christian identity 00:26:57.980 --> 00:27:00.279 has also fueled some of his more recent and more 00:27:00.279 --> 00:27:03.359 pointed controversies. It has. He seems to fear 00:27:03.359 --> 00:27:05.759 the decline of Christianity in Europe, not because 00:27:05.759 --> 00:27:07.720 he thinks it's true, but because he's deeply 00:27:07.720 --> 00:27:10.319 worried about what might replace it. And this 00:27:10.319 --> 00:27:13.400 brings us to the messy, often Twitter -fueled 00:27:13.400 --> 00:27:16.539 chapter of his later years. Dawkins has expressed, 00:27:16.779 --> 00:27:19.720 quite bluntly, his concern that if the gentle, 00:27:19.859 --> 00:27:22.579 largely ignored Anglicanism of Britain collapses, 00:27:22.819 --> 00:27:25.279 it won't be replaced by his brand of secular 00:27:25.279 --> 00:27:28.220 humanism. But by a more assertive form of Islam. 00:27:28.480 --> 00:27:31.799 Yes. And he views what he calls fundamentalist 00:27:31.799 --> 00:27:34.259 Islamism as a far greater and more immediate 00:27:34.259 --> 00:27:37.119 threat to the liberal values he holds dear things 00:27:37.119 --> 00:27:39.019 like women's rights, gay rights, and especially 00:27:39.019 --> 00:27:41.099 freedom of speech. And this is where the old 00:27:41.099 --> 00:27:44.039 liberal of the 1970s clashes head on with the 00:27:44.039 --> 00:27:46.880 modern left. of the 2020s it's a huge clash dawkins 00:27:46.880 --> 00:27:49.140 sees himself as a classic enlightenment liberal 00:27:49.140 --> 00:27:51.660 he cares about free inquiry individual rights 00:27:51.660 --> 00:27:54.339 and objective truth but his critiques of islam 00:27:54.339 --> 00:27:57.099 have drawn extremely heavy fire there was the 00:27:57.099 --> 00:27:59.279 infamous tweet the one where he contrasted the 00:27:59.279 --> 00:28:01.619 number of nobel prizes won by trinity college 00:28:01.619 --> 00:28:04.220 cambridge which is a lot versus the number one 00:28:04.220 --> 00:28:06.680 by the entire muslim world which is very few 00:28:06.680 --> 00:28:10.799 which is factually a true statement but but interpretively 00:28:10.799 --> 00:28:14.609 incendiary critics argued it was science at its 00:28:14.609 --> 00:28:16.650 absolute worst, completely ignoring centuries 00:28:16.650 --> 00:28:20.349 of colonialism, geopolitical strife, economic 00:28:20.349 --> 00:28:22.829 and funding disparities that help explain why 00:28:22.829 --> 00:28:25.589 modern science flourished in the West and stagnated 00:28:25.589 --> 00:28:28.119 in many other parts of the world. It came across 00:28:28.119 --> 00:28:31.160 as a cheap shot at a marginalized group rather 00:28:31.160 --> 00:28:33.559 than a sophisticated critique of theology. That's 00:28:33.559 --> 00:28:35.839 certainly how it was received. And he was disinvited 00:28:35.839 --> 00:28:38.240 from a conference for sharing a satirical video 00:28:38.240 --> 00:28:41.299 mocking certain aspects of feminism and Islamism. 00:28:41.319 --> 00:28:43.859 Right. But let's talk about the specific controversy 00:28:43.859 --> 00:28:46.259 that actually cost him an award. The one that 00:28:46.259 --> 00:28:49.900 got his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award revoked 00:28:49.900 --> 00:28:53.140 in 2021. the transgender debate. This is the 00:28:53.140 --> 00:28:55.400 real flashpoint. This is where his deep -seated 00:28:55.400 --> 00:28:58.000 biological realism collided with modern gender 00:28:58.000 --> 00:29:00.880 theory. It started with a tweet. It did. He tweeted 00:29:00.880 --> 00:29:03.380 a comparison involving Rachel Dolezal, the white 00:29:03.380 --> 00:29:05.240 woman who identified as black and was head of 00:29:05.240 --> 00:29:08.319 an NAACP chapter. I remember that story. And 00:29:08.319 --> 00:29:10.440 Dawkins just asked his followers to discuss. 00:29:10.680 --> 00:29:13.519 He essentially asked, if we condemn Delazal for 00:29:13.519 --> 00:29:15.759 claiming a racial identity that conflicts with 00:29:15.759 --> 00:29:18.920 her ancestry, why do we celebrate trans individuals 00:29:18.920 --> 00:29:20.940 for claiming a gender identity that conflicts 00:29:20.940 --> 00:29:23.599 with their biology? And to his critics, that 00:29:23.599 --> 00:29:26.759 question was itself an act of violence. It was 00:29:26.759 --> 00:29:29.140 seen as denying the validity of trans people's 00:29:29.140 --> 00:29:32.240 very existence. To the American Humanist Association, 00:29:32.720 --> 00:29:35.759 it was the final straw. They revoked his award, 00:29:36.000 --> 00:29:38.460 stating that he was using the guise of scientific 00:29:38.460 --> 00:29:41.720 discourse to demean and harm vulnerable groups. 00:29:41.900 --> 00:29:44.559 But he did back down. No, he doubled down. He 00:29:44.559 --> 00:29:46.799 wrote an obed recently laying out his position 00:29:46.799 --> 00:29:49.920 very clearly. He argues that sex is a biological 00:29:49.920 --> 00:29:52.819 binary determined at conception by the size of 00:29:52.819 --> 00:29:55.680 the gamete sperm or egg and that it is observed 00:29:55.680 --> 00:29:59.039 at birth, not assigned. A very biological genes 00:29:59.039 --> 00:30:01.559 I view perspective. Entirely. He argues that 00:30:01.559 --> 00:30:03.940 the phrase trans woman is a woman is a linguistic 00:30:03.940 --> 00:30:07.000 distortion, a polite fiction. He says he is happy 00:30:07.000 --> 00:30:09.180 to use preferred pronouns as a matter of simple 00:30:09.180 --> 00:30:12.099 human courtesy, but he refuses as a scientist 00:30:12.099 --> 00:30:14.359 to accept that a trans woman is biologically 00:30:14.359 --> 00:30:17.079 female. So it's the gene's eye view crashing 00:30:17.079 --> 00:30:19.680 into the identity's eye view. He looks at the 00:30:19.680 --> 00:30:22.019 chromosomes and says, that's the objective reality. 00:30:23.380 --> 00:30:26.599 Society, or a part of it, is saying, no, reality 00:30:26.599 --> 00:30:29.619 is also social and psychological and lived. That 00:30:29.619 --> 00:30:32.339 is the conflict in a nutshell. He believes there 00:30:32.339 --> 00:30:34.740 is an objective material reality that cannot 00:30:34.740 --> 00:30:37.299 be wished away by language or identity politics. 00:30:38.119 --> 00:30:40.579 He sees himself as the little boy in the story, 00:30:40.660 --> 00:30:42.859 pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. 00:30:43.140 --> 00:30:45.539 Well, his critics see an old, out of touch man 00:30:45.539 --> 00:30:48.359 yelling at people to stop being who they are. 00:30:48.640 --> 00:30:50.859 Exactly. There was another controversy we can't 00:30:50.859 --> 00:30:52.440 ignore because it comes up constantly when his 00:30:52.440 --> 00:30:55.019 name is mentioned. The mild pedophilia comments. 00:30:55.339 --> 00:30:58.200 Yes. This is a prime example of Dawkins applying 00:30:58.200 --> 00:31:01.460 a kind of cold scientific taxonomy where people 00:31:01.460 --> 00:31:04.420 desperately want moral outrage. He was discussing 00:31:04.420 --> 00:31:06.259 his own experience at boarding school. Correct. 00:31:06.299 --> 00:31:08.339 Where a master had touched him inappropriately. 00:31:08.359 --> 00:31:10.700 And in an interview, he described it as mild 00:31:10.700 --> 00:31:13.019 pedophilia and made a point of contrasting it 00:31:13.019 --> 00:31:15.319 with a violent penetrative abuse. He was trying 00:31:15.319 --> 00:31:17.500 to create a scale of badness, a hierarchy of 00:31:17.500 --> 00:31:20.880 harm. Yes. Just like his spectrum of theistic 00:31:20.880 --> 00:31:23.750 probability. He was arguing that we shouldn't 00:31:23.750 --> 00:31:26.829 lump unwanted touching over clothes into the 00:31:26.829 --> 00:31:29.990 exact same moral and legal category as violent 00:31:29.990 --> 00:31:33.400 rape. Logically, he is correct. They are different 00:31:33.400 --> 00:31:35.940 actions with different levels of trauma and impact. 00:31:36.220 --> 00:31:38.740 But emotionally and in the court of public opinion? 00:31:38.980 --> 00:31:41.559 It sounded like he was minimizing or making excuses 00:31:41.559 --> 00:31:44.859 for child abuse. The backlash was immediate and 00:31:44.859 --> 00:31:47.339 immense. He eventually apologized for the distress 00:31:47.339 --> 00:31:49.799 he caused. But you could tell he was genuinely 00:31:49.799 --> 00:31:52.099 baffled that people couldn't separate the intellectual 00:31:52.099 --> 00:31:54.940 classification of an act from the moral condemnation 00:31:54.940 --> 00:31:57.759 of the act. Which highlights what might be his 00:31:57.759 --> 00:32:00.180 biggest flaw as a public intellectual. I think 00:32:00.180 --> 00:32:02.019 so. He often lacks the emotional intelligence 00:32:02.019 --> 00:32:05.250 to read the room. He treats human suffering like 00:32:05.250 --> 00:32:07.789 a data point to be categorized, not an experience 00:32:07.789 --> 00:32:10.049 to be emphasized with. Which is the shadow side 00:32:10.049 --> 00:32:12.289 of his very brilliance. The same intellectual 00:32:12.289 --> 00:32:14.390 detachment that allowed him to see humanity as 00:32:14.390 --> 00:32:16.789 just survival machines for genes prevents him 00:32:16.789 --> 00:32:18.569 from understanding why we don't feel like survival 00:32:18.569 --> 00:32:22.130 machines and why telling us we are feels so dehumanizing 00:32:22.130 --> 00:32:24.990 to many. And yet, for all the controversies, 00:32:25.109 --> 00:32:27.569 his politics are surprisingly progressive in 00:32:27.569 --> 00:32:30.210 other areas. Very much so. He was a vocal opponent 00:32:30.210 --> 00:32:33.150 of the Iraq war from the very beginning. He is... 00:32:33.230 --> 00:32:36.329 passionately anti -Brexit, and he's a champion 00:32:36.329 --> 00:32:38.569 of the Great Ape Project. This goes right back 00:32:38.569 --> 00:32:40.990 to his core understanding of evolutionary continuity. 00:32:41.349 --> 00:32:44.730 It does. If we're all just cousins on the same 00:32:44.730 --> 00:32:47.789 family tree, then the line we draw between human 00:32:47.789 --> 00:32:50.410 and chimpanzee is arbitrary. It's just a matter 00:32:50.410 --> 00:32:53.369 of time and branching. So he argues they should 00:32:53.369 --> 00:32:56.529 have rights. Yes, that great apes, chimps, monobos, 00:32:56.630 --> 00:32:59.309 gorillas, orangutans should have basic legal 00:32:59.309 --> 00:33:01.569 rights. The right to life, the right to liberty, 00:33:01.730 --> 00:33:04.109 and the right to protection from torture. He 00:33:04.109 --> 00:33:06.549 calls our current treatment of them speciesism, 00:33:06.630 --> 00:33:10.490 a form of bigotry just like racism or sexism. 00:33:10.529 --> 00:33:12.630 It's a radical expansion of the moral circle, 00:33:12.690 --> 00:33:15.150 and it's driven entirely by his deep understanding 00:33:15.150 --> 00:33:17.769 of biology. It is. Let's pivot for a moment to 00:33:17.769 --> 00:33:20.750 the man behind the public firestorms. His personal 00:33:20.750 --> 00:33:23.190 life has its own interesting textures. He's been 00:33:23.190 --> 00:33:25.170 married four times. And there's a delightful 00:33:25.170 --> 00:33:27.769 pop culture intersection here that I love. His 00:33:27.769 --> 00:33:30.859 third wife was the actress Lala Ward. Romana 00:33:30.859 --> 00:33:33.460 from Doctor Who. That's I'm Lord. The very same. 00:33:33.619 --> 00:33:36.579 A beloved companion to Tom Baker's Doctor. And 00:33:36.579 --> 00:33:38.579 they were introduced by the author Douglas Adams. 00:33:38.819 --> 00:33:41.619 Of course they were. The author of The Hitchhiker's 00:33:41.619 --> 00:33:43.460 Guide to the Galaxy. That makes perfect sense. 00:33:43.779 --> 00:33:46.700 It's the ultimate nerdy Venn diagram. Adams was 00:33:46.700 --> 00:33:50.019 a huge science enthusiast and a committed atheist 00:33:50.019 --> 00:33:52.680 himself. I've heard he credited Dawkins with 00:33:52.680 --> 00:33:55.000 giving him the intellectual framework for his 00:33:55.000 --> 00:33:58.059 own atheism. He did. They were part of this golden 00:33:58.059 --> 00:34:01.339 circle of British... rationalist intellectuals. 00:34:01.500 --> 00:34:04.220 There's a very touching eulogy that Dawkins wrote 00:34:04.220 --> 00:34:06.740 for Adams after he died where he talks about 00:34:06.740 --> 00:34:09.380 how the universe is a poorer, less interesting 00:34:09.380 --> 00:34:11.579 place without him to explain it. And Dawkins 00:34:11.579 --> 00:34:13.340 has appeared in pop culture himself, hasn't he? 00:34:13.400 --> 00:34:15.539 He had a cameo in Doctor Who and he was in The 00:34:15.539 --> 00:34:18.599 Simpsons. He was. In The Simpsons, he voiced 00:34:18.599 --> 00:34:21.260 a demon version of himself in Ned Flanders' religious 00:34:21.260 --> 00:34:23.920 nightmare, tempting him with a copy of The God 00:34:23.920 --> 00:34:26.260 Delusion. He clearly has a sense of humor about 00:34:26.260 --> 00:34:28.880 his own public image. He does. And the Nightwish. 00:34:28.969 --> 00:34:31.289 album this is my favorite piece of Dawkins trivia 00:34:31.800 --> 00:34:35.139 It's the best. The Finnish symphonic metal band 00:34:35.139 --> 00:34:38.380 Nightwish wrote an entire concept album called 00:34:38.380 --> 00:34:41.500 Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is a direct 00:34:41.500 --> 00:34:43.639 quote from the last paragraph of Darwin's On 00:34:43.639 --> 00:34:45.940 the Origin of Species. And they asked Dawkins 00:34:45.940 --> 00:34:48.599 to provide narration. Yes. So you have these 00:34:48.599 --> 00:34:51.920 epic, soaring, heavy metal riffs and a powerful 00:34:51.920 --> 00:34:55.099 female vocalist. And then suddenly you hear Richard 00:34:55.099 --> 00:34:59.539 Dawkins's calm, plummy Oxford voice reading passages 00:34:59.539 --> 00:35:01.699 about the grandeur of life. and the beauty of 00:35:01.699 --> 00:35:04.260 evolution. He even performed with them on stage 00:35:04.260 --> 00:35:07.239 at Wembley Arena. It shows that for all the accusations 00:35:07.239 --> 00:35:10.360 of him having a cold and bleak philosophy, he 00:35:10.360 --> 00:35:13.860 finds a deep, almost spiritual romance in reality 00:35:13.860 --> 00:35:16.480 itself. He calls it the magic of reality. That 00:35:16.480 --> 00:35:18.380 was the title of one of his books. He sincerely 00:35:18.380 --> 00:35:20.639 believes that understanding how a rainbow works, 00:35:20.800 --> 00:35:23.619 understanding Newton's optics, doesn't unweave 00:35:23.619 --> 00:35:25.900 the rainbow and strip it of its beauty. It adds 00:35:25.900 --> 00:35:28.340 a new layer of beauty. The beauty of understanding. 00:35:28.440 --> 00:35:30.300 Precisely. He gets genuinely emotional when... 00:35:30.320 --> 00:35:31.860 He talks about the sheer luck of our existence. 00:35:32.019 --> 00:35:34.300 He talks about the unborn ghosts. Explain that. 00:35:34.650 --> 00:35:36.869 He talks about the staggering odds against your 00:35:36.869 --> 00:35:39.570 specific birth, the trillions upon trillions 00:35:39.570 --> 00:35:41.650 of potential people who could have been born 00:35:41.650 --> 00:35:43.829 if a different sperm had fertilized the egg or 00:35:43.829 --> 00:35:46.110 if your parents had never met. But they are the 00:35:46.110 --> 00:35:48.949 unborn ghosts in the wings. We are the lucky 00:35:48.949 --> 00:35:51.750 few who made it onto the stage. We won the genetic 00:35:51.750 --> 00:35:54.349 lottery. We won. We are the ones who get to see 00:35:54.349 --> 00:35:57.829 the stars and ponder our existence. And he thinks 00:35:57.829 --> 00:36:00.050 that is a profound privilege we shouldn't waste 00:36:00.050 --> 00:36:02.670 on what he sees as superstition and falsehoods. 00:36:02.670 --> 00:36:05.019 On that note, he had a health scare in 2016, 00:36:05.420 --> 00:36:08.159 a minor hemorrhagic stroke. He did. He recovered 00:36:08.159 --> 00:36:10.380 quite well, but it was a stark reminder of the 00:36:10.380 --> 00:36:13.039 fragility of the survival machine. It's largely 00:36:13.039 --> 00:36:15.199 why he's doing this final speaking tour now. 00:36:15.340 --> 00:36:18.239 He's aware that the clock is ticking. So as we 00:36:18.239 --> 00:36:21.300 wrap up this deep dive, how do we begin to summarize 00:36:21.300 --> 00:36:24.619 the legacy of a figure as complex and polarizing 00:36:24.619 --> 00:36:27.280 as Richard Dawkins? I think he is both a bridge 00:36:27.280 --> 00:36:30.210 builder and a bridge burner. How so? He built 00:36:30.210 --> 00:36:32.909 a magnificent bridge between the complex mathematical 00:36:32.909 --> 00:36:35.590 world of modern genetics and the general public, 00:36:35.789 --> 00:36:37.989 giving millions of people the language and the 00:36:37.989 --> 00:36:40.650 concepts to understand who we are and where we 00:36:40.650 --> 00:36:44.869 come from. But at the same time, he took a flamethrower 00:36:44.869 --> 00:36:46.789 to the bridge between the scientific establishment 00:36:46.789 --> 00:36:49.750 and the religious world, forcing a conflict that 00:36:49.750 --> 00:36:52.369 many people, including many scientists, wish 00:36:52.369 --> 00:36:54.630 he had a conflict they felt was unnecessary. 00:36:55.880 --> 00:36:58.559 but he felt was essential. He also changed the 00:36:58.559 --> 00:37:00.480 dictionary itself. I mean, the selfish gene. 00:37:01.119 --> 00:37:04.420 the meme, the blind watchmaker. These are now 00:37:04.420 --> 00:37:06.820 part of the language. You cannot have a serious 00:37:06.820 --> 00:37:10.159 conversation about modern biology or modern internet 00:37:10.159 --> 00:37:12.980 culture without using his words. That is a very 00:37:12.980 --> 00:37:15.480 rare and powerful legacy. I want to leave our 00:37:15.480 --> 00:37:17.199 listener with a final thought, something that's 00:37:17.199 --> 00:37:19.079 been nagging at me as we've been talking through 00:37:19.079 --> 00:37:21.980 all this. Go on. So Dawkins taught us that we 00:37:21.980 --> 00:37:25.320 are survival machines built by our genes to help 00:37:25.320 --> 00:37:28.030 them replicate. Then he taught us that memes 00:37:28.030 --> 00:37:30.670 are the new replicators and they use our brains 00:37:30.670 --> 00:37:33.090 as their survival machines to replicate. Correct 00:37:33.090 --> 00:37:35.269 on both counts, according to his view. So if 00:37:35.269 --> 00:37:38.360 we look at Dawkins own career. The relentless 00:37:38.360 --> 00:37:40.699 touring, the endless stream of books, the constant 00:37:40.699 --> 00:37:42.539 tweeting, the picking of fights, the doubling 00:37:42.539 --> 00:37:45.039 down in controversies. Is he the master of his 00:37:45.039 --> 00:37:48.559 ideas? Or has he himself become the ultimate 00:37:48.559 --> 00:37:51.460 survival machine for his own memes? Has the new 00:37:51.460 --> 00:37:54.679 atheism meme, the rationality meme, hijacked 00:37:54.679 --> 00:37:57.119 the vessel called Richard Dawkins to ensure its 00:37:57.119 --> 00:37:59.420 own replication, even at the cost of his personal 00:37:59.420 --> 00:38:02.090 reputation and scientific legacy? That is the 00:38:02.090 --> 00:38:05.170 ultimate and perhaps terrifying question of the 00:38:05.170 --> 00:38:07.750 extended phenotype, isn't it? Do we have ideas 00:38:07.750 --> 00:38:10.750 or do ideas have us? And I suspect that Richard 00:38:10.750 --> 00:38:12.610 Dawkins, the rigorous biologist, would be the 00:38:12.610 --> 00:38:14.869 first to look at the evidence and admit the meme 00:38:14.869 --> 00:38:17.989 is in charge. A chilling thought to end on. Thanks 00:38:17.989 --> 00:38:19.710 for diving deep with us today. We'll be back 00:38:19.710 --> 00:38:21.090 with another stack of sources next time.