Welcome to the deep dive. Today we are dissecting
a figure who who creates this very specific kind
of gravity in the intellectual world. He certainly
does. Depending on who you ask he's either you
know the high priest of rationality who saves
biology from fuzzy thinking or he is the arrogant
face of a cold godless worldview yeah and there
is almost never a middle ground when it comes
to richard dawkins not at all it's a polarization
that he seems to not only accept but i think
actively cultivate at times it's rare to find
someone who's had two completely distinct peaks
in their career isn't it it really is i mean
you have the richard dawkins of the 1970s the
brilliant oxford biologist who completely revolutionized
how we understand evolution with The selfish
gene. And that alone would have secured his legacy,
right? Case closed. Oh, absolutely. Hall of Fame
scientist. But then you have the second act.
Darwin's Rottweiler. That's the one. The leader
of the new atheist movement, the man who wrote
The God Delusion, and basically decided to take
a sledgehammer to organize religion. And the
timing for this retrospective, it feels crucial.
He was born in 1941. He's in his 80s now. Right.
And he recently announced his final speaking
tour for late 2024. It really feels like the
closing chapter of a very long, very loud argument
he's been having with the world. It creates a
perfect opportunity to step back and look at
the long reach of his own life, to borrow a phrase
from his work. I like that. We want to understand
how the boy collecting insects in colonial Africa
became the man deconstructing the Bible on television.
Maybe most surprisingly, how a rigorous biologist
accidentally invented the concept of the meme.
Providing the vocabulary for the entire internet
age, decades before it even existed, is wild.
That's incredible. We have a massive stack of
source material to get through. His memoirs,
his seminal scientific books like The Selfish
Gene and the Expanded Phenotype, his... polemics
against religion and the whole dossier of controversies
that have dogged him in recent years. It's a
lot to unpack. It is. But I want to start with
the biology because I think people often skip
straight to the atheism. They do. And they miss
the fact that his view on God is actually just
a downstream consequence of his view on genes.
That is exactly the right way to frame it. You
cannot understand the atheist without first understanding
the ethologist. His entire worldview is bottom
up. It all starts with the replicating molecule.
So let's talk about that origin story. We usually
picture Dawkins in, you know, the dusty halls
and ivory towers of Oxford, but he didn't start
there. No, not at all. He started in Nairobi,
Kenya in the waning days of the British Empire.
Clinton Richard Dawkins. Yeah. He dropped the
Clinton later. Yeah, wisely, I think. He was
born in 1941 into what you would call the colonial
administrative class. His father was an agricultural
civil servant in Nyasaland, which is now Malawi.
So it's a very specific kind of background. It
is. It's a background of landed gentry. His family
owned an estate back in Oxfordshire called Over
Norton Park. So it's a world of privilege, certainly,
but also a world of, I think, isolation and intense
observation. And being a child in that environment,
just surrounded by the raw. all nature of East
Africa, that usually leads to one or two things,
right? Either a deep spiritual connection to
the land or a feels almost forensic curiosity
about how it all works. And Dawkins clearly took
the latter path. He did, but it wasn't an immediate
rejection of the spiritual. And I think this
is a common misconception about him. He wasn't
born a skeptic. Right. He had a pretty standard
Anglican upbringing. He did. He was confirmed
in the Church of England. In fact, he said that
throughout his early teenage years, he was quite
devout so what broke the spell i've read that
he talks about the argument from design this
is critical to understanding his whole intellectual
journey The young Dawkins looked at the natural
world, you know, the insane complexity of a dragonfly's
wing, the structure of a human eye, and his intuition
told him what most people's intuition tells them.
This is a machine. Yeah. And machines have designers.
Exactly. Therefore, there must be a god. It's
the classic William Paley's watchmaker argument.
If you're walking on a heath and you find a watch,
you don't assume the wind and rain just assembled
it. You assume a watchmaker. You assume a watchmaker.
It's a very seductive argument because it aligns
perfectly with our human experience of creating
things. But then around the age of 16, he really
truly grasped the mechanism of Darwinian natural
selection. The actual process. The process. He
realized that you could get the watch without
the watchmaker. If you have enough time and enough
variation and a consistent selection pressure,
simple things become complex things all by themselves
automatically. And he described this realization
as what? Pulling the rug out? Pulling the rug
out from under his faith. That's his phrase.
Once the designer hypothesis was rendered superfluous
by a better, more elegant explanation, he just
discarded it. It wasn't an emotional rebellion.
No, not at all. It was an efficiency decision.
The God hypothesis was no longer necessary to
explain the data. That sounds incredibly consistent
with the man he would become. Just a cold, logical
assessment. Precisely. And that rigorous focus
on mechanism followed him to Oxford. He went
to Balliol College and fell under the mentorship
of Nicholas Tinbergen. Now, Tinbergen is a name
people should know. An absolute giant in the
history of biology, a Nobel Prize winner and
one of the founders of modern ethology. Ethology
being the study of animal behavior, but it's
distinct from the Skinner box psychology that
was big at the time. Yes, very different. While
American behaviorists were, you know, putting
rats in mazes to study learning in a very artificial
setting, the ethologists like Tinbergen and Conrad
Lorenz were out in the field. In the mud. In
the mud. Asking why animals have these instincts.
Why does a gull chick peck at a red spot on its
mother's beak to get food? Tinbergen taught Dawkins
to look at behavior not as some mystical spirit
of the animal, but as a biological adaptation.
Something shaped by evolution. Just like a limb
or an organ. It's a piece of survival technology.
And so Dawkins' PhD was on... What was it? Selective
pecking and the domestic chick. It sounds almost
comical, doesn't it? Watching baby chickens peck
at spots all day. A little bit. But it was actually
a study in decision making models. He was looking
for the rules, the algorithms governing the behavior.
If I change the color of the spot. or the shape,
how does the pecking behavior change? He was
trying to reverse engineer the chick's brain.
In a way, yes. He was attempting to view the
animal as a processing system running a program.
This brings us to 1976 and the book that, well,
it changed everything. The Selfish Gene. And
I think this is one of the most famously misunderstood
titles in the history of popular science. Oh,
without a doubt. He has spent 50 years correcting
the record on this. I still hear people say,
oh, Dawkins says we have a gene for selfishness,
so it's okay if I'm a jerk. That is the bane
of his existence. The selfishness refers to the
gene, the replicator, not the organism. In fact,
the entire point of the book is to explain how
incredibly altruistic behavior in animals can
evolve because of selfish genes. So let's break
down the paradigm shift here. Before Dawkins,
and he was synthesizing the work of researchers
like George C. Williams and W .D. Hamilton, the
prevailing view was group selection. Or species
selection, right? The idea that animals do things
for the good of the species. You'd watch a nature
documentary and the narrator would say in a very
grand voice, the lemming bravely commits suicide
to leave more food for the rest of the herd.
It sounds nice. It fits our human morality. It
feels right. But Dawkins, channeling Williams,
pointed out the fatal flaw in that logic. It's
mathematically unstable. Completely. Imagine
a population of lemmings where most are altruistic
and will happily jump off a cliff for the common
good. Now introduce one mutant, a selfish individual
who thinks, you know what, I'm going to sit this
one out. That selfish individual survives every
time. Not only survives, but reproduces and crucially
passes on the selfish gene for not jumping off
the cliff. And very quickly, the altruists are
all dead. And the population is entirely made
up of the descendants of the selfish one. The
good of the species strategy, as loving as it
sounds, gets invaded and destroyed by selfishness
from within. It just doesn't work. So Dawkins
zooms the lens in. He says, forget the species,
forget the group, forget even the individual
organism. Look at the gene. This is the gene's
eye view. It's his central idea. He argues that
the fundamental unit of life, the thing that
natural selection is actually acting on, is the
replicator. The gene. The gene. It wants, and
of course wants is a metaphor, to make copies
of itself. The body, the individual organism,
you, me, a lion, an oak tree. We are just survival
machines. Survival machine. It's such a cold
industrial metaphor. It is. A robot built by
the genes to carry them around, protect them
from the elements, and negotiate the environment
so they can get themselves into the next generation.
We are their vehicles. It reduces a human being
to a temporary vessel. Which is... Existential
horror for some people. But for Dawkins, it was
profoundly clarifying. It explains things that
individual selection can't. Like the paradox
of altruism. Exactly. Why does a honeybee sting
an intruder and die to save the hive? It's suicide.
Why does a bird give a warning call that attracts
the hawk to itself that saves the rest of the
flock? If the bird is just trying to survive
and reproduce, that's a catastrophically stupid
move. From the bird's perspective, yes. But if
the genes are trying to survive, it's a calculated
bet. And this is where we have to bring in the
work of W .D. Hamilton and the concept of inclusive
fitness. The math of kinship. That's it. It's
just simple math. You share, on average, 50 %
of your genes with a full sibling or a child.
You share 25 % with a niece or nephew, 12 .5
% with a first cousin, and so on. So Hamilton
formulated a rule. It's literally called Hamilton's
rule that predicts when an altruistic act will
be favored by natural selection. It will happen
if the cost to me is less than the benefit to
my relative multiplied by how related we are.
So the famous J .B .S. Haldane joke, I would
lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.
Precisely. From the genes perspective, saving
two brothers who each carry a 50 percent copy
of you is statistically equivalent to saving
yourself. Your death is a good trade if it saves
two of them. The gene doesn't care which body
it's in. It doesn't care at all, as long as a
copy of it survives to the next generation. So
the selfish gene builds an organism, a survival
machine, that acts altruistically toward its
kin, because that's a brilliant strategy for
the gene to replicate itself. But this feels
like it strips the nobility out of something
like a mother's love for her child. It turns
it into a cold genetic calculation. And Dawkins
would argue he isn't stripping the nobility.
He's explaining its origin. The feeling of love,
that powerful, overwhelming emotion, is the mechanism
the gene uses to ensure the protective behavior
happens. It's the psychological software. It's
the software. We feel love because our ancestors,
who didn't feel a powerful bond with their offspring,
didn't protect them as well, and their genes...
died out. We are the descendants of the ones
who are good at loving because love is an efficient
survival strategy for genes. Now critics, and
there were many, people like the great Stephen
Jay Gould or Ernst Mayr, they had a big problem
with this. A huge problem. They argued that you
can't just select a single gene. You can't have
a gene for long legs if you don't also have genes
for strong bones and a powerful heart and better
circulation. The body is an integrated whole,
not a collection of parts. That was the unity
of the genotype argument. They claimed Dawkins
was being far too reductionist, treating the
genome like a beanbag of isolated traits that
you could just pick and choose from. Which seems
like a fair criticism on the surface. It does,
but Dawkins' counter -argument is subtle and,
I think, very powerful. He completely agrees
that genes interact in complex ways. But he argues
that from the perspective of any single gene,
all the other genes in the genome are just part
of the environment it has to deal with. Okay,
unpack that. A gene for, say, sharp teeth is
being selected for its ability to work well in
a body that also has the gene for strong jaw
muscles. If it finds itself in a body with weak
jaw muscles, it's not very useful and it fails.
So genes are selected for their ability to cooperate
with other genes. Exactly. So over eons of evolutionary
time, you get these cooperative clusters of genes
that work well together. They form a team. But
the fundamental unit of selection, the thing
that is actually being passed on or not, remains
the single replicator, the gene. OK, so if the
selfish gene was about looking inward at the
code, his next major work, the extended phenotype
in 1982, was about looking outward. And I know
for a fact that Dawkins considers this. His single
most important scientific contribution. More
than the memes, more than the atheism. He does.
He's very clear on that. The extended phenotype
is the logical and some would say radical conclusion
of the gene's eye view. So standard biology 101
teaches us genotype is the DNA code, the blueprint.
Right. And the phenotype is the physical expression
of that code, the body. Blue eyes, black hair,
height. The phenotype stops at the skin. And
Dawkins just asked a very simple question. Why?
Why should it stop at the skin? What do you mean?
If a gene's purpose is to manipulate the world
to ensure its own replication, and it builds
a body to do that, why can't it also manipulate
the inanimate world outside that body? Give me
an example. The classic example is the beaver
dam. Okay, the beaver dam. It's a structure made
of wood, rocks, and mud. It's part of the environment.
But why does it exist? It exists because specific
genes in the beaver's brain wire it to have an
urge to chew trees and pile them up in a particular
way in running water. The dam then creates a
deep pond, which protects the beaver from predators
and allows it to store food for the winter. The
dam directly increases the survival chances of
the beaver's genes. So you're saying the dam
is... A genetic trait. Dawkins argues that the
dam is a phenotypic effect of the beaver's genes,
just as much as the beaver's teeth or its flat
tail is. The gene's influence reaches out of
the body and reshapes the landscape. The phenotype
is extended. It is extended. And it gets even
stranger and more undeniable when you look at
parasites. This is where the concept really becomes
mind bending. There is a fluke. A type of parasitic
flatworm that infects snails. But to complete
its life cycle, it needs to get inside a bird.
So it needs the bird to eat the snail. A classic
problem for a parasite. A classic problem. But
birds don't usually eat these particular snails
because they hide in the shade. They're camouflaged.
So the parasite manipulates the snail. It hijacks
its brain. It migrates into the snail's eye stalks
and causes them to swell up, turn these bright
pulsating colors, red, green, yellow. makes the
snail climb to the top of a plant leaf in broad
daylight and wiggle. Oh my god, it turns the
snail into a flashing neon sign that says, eat
me. It perfectly mimics a caterpillar, which
birds love to eat. The bird swooks down, eats
the pulsating eyestalk, the parasite gets into
the bird, and the life cycle is complete. That's
horrifying. It is, but now ask yourself, whose
phenotype is that pulsating, colorful eyestalk?
It's happening to the snail's body, but it is
being caused by the parasite's genes. The parasite's
genes are driving the snail's body like a stolen
car. Exactly. Dawkins argues that this is definitive
proof that the reach of a gene is not limited
by the cell membrane or the skin. It extends
as far as its causal power can reach into the
world. It completely blurs the line between self
and world in a way that is... It's almost psychedelic
when you think about it. It destroys the neat
and tidy idea of the individual organism as a
sealed sovereign unit. We are all, all the time
dealing with the extended phenotypic effects
of other creatures' genes. And speaking of things
that spread from one being to another and manipulate
behavior, we have to discuss... The meme. The
meme. It's so ironic that Dawkins coined this
term in a chapter of The Selfish Gene back in
1976, long before the Internet. And now it's
arguably the primary way that an entire generation
understands and communicates culture. It was
almost an afterthought in the book, which is
the funny part. He just needed a final chapter
to demonstrate that Darwinism is a universal
aspect, as Daniel Dennett would later call it.
Meaning it applies to any system where you have
replication, variation and selection. Right.
It doesn't have to be DNA. It could be anything.
So he needed a cultural equivalent to the gene.
A unit of imitation. Exactly. He looked for a
word that sounded a bit like gene and was rooted
in the Greek word for imitation, which is memam.
He shortened it to meme. But his definition wasn't,
you know, a picture of a cat with a funny caption.
No. For Dawkins, a meme was a unit of cultural
transmission. A catchy tune, a recipe for a cake,
a fashion trend, the technology for building
a stone arch, or a philosophical idea like the
concept of God. These are all memes. And they
follow the same Darwinian rules as jeans. Broadly,
yes. He outlined three key conditions for a successful
replicator. Fidelity, which is how accurately
it is copied. Fecundity, how many copies are
made. And longevity, how long the copies last.
Let's take a catchy pop song. A catchy pop song
has incredibly high fecundity. You hear it on
the radio, you start humming it, your friend
hears you, they start humming it. It spreads
like a virus through the population of minds.
Or is it complex mathematical proof? Very low
fecundity. Very few people have the background
knowledge to understand it, let alone remember
it accurately enough to pass it on. And what
about fidelity? This is where memes seem really
different from genes. They are. Genes have incredibly
high copying fidelity thanks to the chemistry
of DNA. Mutations are relatively rare. Memes
mutate constantly. It's like the game Telephone.
Exactly like that game. You tell a story, I retell
it, but I exaggerate the funny part, the next
person forgets the boring middle part and adds
a new ending. The story evolves, sometimes very
rapidly, as it spreads. This leads to the darker
side of the idea, the concept of the mind virus.
Dawkins suggests that some memes survive not
because they are true or useful to the host,
but simply because they are good at surviving
and spreading. And this is his primary critique
of religion from a memetic standpoint. It is.
He argues that many core religious beliefs are
incredibly effective survival strategies for
the meme itself. Think of a belief like, if you
do not believe this, you will suffer eternal
torment in hell. That's a powerful incentive
not to abandon the belief. It's a terrifyingly
effective mechanism, or a commandment like, you
must go forth and convert others to save their
souls. That turns the host into an active transmission
vector for the meme. Precisely. From this perspective,
it doesn't matter one bit whether the belief
is factually true or not. All that matters is
that the belief has a built -in psychological
mechanism to ensure its own replication and transmission.
So if we are survival machines for our genes,
our brains are also survival machines for memes.
And sometimes those two imperatives come into
direct conflict. A celibate monk, for example,
is a total dead end for his genes. Zero genetic
reproduction. A failure is a survival machine.
A complete failure. But he might be a fantastic
replicator for the Catholicism meme, dedicating
his entire life to studying and spreading the
idea. In that case, you could say the meme has
hijacked the genetic vehicle for its own purposes.
This kind of thinking, this relentless application
of Darwinian logic to everything, it caused a
lot of friction within the scientific community
itself. It really did. The so -called Darwin
Wars. of the 80s and 90s were intense. And it
was essentially Dawkins versus Stephen Jay Gould.
It was a clash of titans. It really was. You
had Gould, the charismatic Harvard paleontologist,
versus Dawkins, the precise Oxford ethologist.
And they agreed on the big picture stuff. Evolution
is true. Creationism is junk science. Oh, yeah.
On that, they were united. But they disagreed
profoundly on the mechanism, the tempo, and the
emphasis of evolution. Gould was the champion
of punctuated equilibrium. Right. Gold looked
at the fossil record and he didn't see smooth,
gradual change. He saw long periods of stasis,
millions of years, where a clam just looks like
a clam interrupted by, geologically speaking,
sudden rapid bursts of speciation. So evolution
happens in fits and starts. That was his argument,
that it isn't a smooth, gradual slope. It's more
like long, flat landings with steep staircases
in between. And Dawkins. Dawkins is a strict
gradualist. He's a Darwinian fundamentalist in
that sense. argues that even those sudden bursts
that Gould saw in the fossil record, which might
be 50 ,000 years long, that's plenty of time
for slow, steady, gene -by -gene selection to
do its work. He thought Gould was just over -dramatizing
the gaps in the record. Pretty much. He saw it
as a storm in a teacup, but there was also the
deeper fight about adaptationism. Right. Gould
accused Dawkins and his allies of being ultra
-Darwinians, who thought that everything in an
animal is a perfect adaptation. designed for
a specific purpose. The famous paper was The
Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm.
A mouthful. It is. But the idea is simple. A
spandrel is the triangular space you get between
two arches in a cathedral. It wasn't designed
on purpose. It's just a byproduct of putting
a round dome on top of square arches. But then
artists came along and painted beautiful mosaics
in them. Exactly. So Gould argued that many biological
traits are like spandrels. They're just architectural
byproducts of other things. Take the human chin.
Is the chin an adaptation for something or is
it just the shape that's left over when the human
jaw shrank during our evolution? So Gould's point
was, don't tell these neat just -so stories about
every single feature. Sometimes things are just
there. Right. And Dawkins pushed back hard. He
argued that while, sure, byproducts exist, natural
selection is the only force we know of that is
powerful enough to explain complex functional
design. Like the eye. Like the eye or the wing
or the echolocation of a bat. That kind of exquisite
engineering, he argues, cannot be a random byproduct.
It screams adaptation. This scientific rigorousness,
this fierce defense of natural selection is the
ultimate explanation for life's complexity. It
seems this is what eventually led Dawkins out
of the lab and into the public square. I think
that's exactly right. And the key moment was
the simony professorship for the public understanding
of science. A chair at Oxford he held from 1995
to 2008. And his official mandate was to communicate
science to the public. But he increasingly came
to feel. that the single biggest barrier to the
public understanding of science, specifically
evolution, was religious faith. He felt you couldn't
properly teach biology if people's minds were,
in his view, inoculated against it by childhood
indoctrination. Exactly. And he grew incredibly
tired of the polite, hands -off truth that existed
between science and religion. The Noma idea from
his rival, Stephen Jay Gould. Precisely. Noma
non -overlapping magisteria. The idea that...
Science covers the empirical universe. You know,
what are stars made of? How does life evolve?
And religion covers the domain of ultimate meaning,
morality, and value. And the two should never
meet or interfere. And Dawkins absolutely hated
that idea. He despised it. He called it cowardly
and dishonest. He argued that religions don't
just talk about morality. They make specific
factual claims about the universe. Like if you
say Jesus rose from the dead, that is a biological
claim about a human body reanimating. If you
say God answers prayers, that is a claim about
causal interference in the laws of physics. So
he saw them as scientific hypotheses. Yes. And
as such, they should be tested, analyzed. And
if they lack. any evidence whatsoever, they should
be rejected, not cordoned off in some special
protected category. This all culminated, of course,
in the God delusion in 2006. And that wasn't
just another book. It was a cultural event. It
was a phenomenon. It sold millions and millions
of copies. It really tapped into a post 9 -11
anxiety about religious fundamentalism. And it
marked the real rise of new atheism. Absolutely.
Alongside Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and
Daniel Dennett, who were famously dubbed the
four whores. Horseman Dawkins helped shift the
conversation. It moved from a passive I don't
happen to believe in God to an active, aggressive
stance of religion is not just wrong. It is actively
harmful. He has a scale, doesn't he? The spectrum
of theistic probability. He does. He didn't want
to fall into the same trap of dogmatism he accused
the religious of, claiming absolute certainty.
So he created a scale from one to seven. Where
one is strong theist, 100 % sure God exists.
And seven is strong atheist, 100 % sure God does
not exist. And Dawkins places himself where?
He places himself at a 6 .9, a de facto atheist.
Why not a full seven? Because as a scientist,
you can't technically prove a negative. You can't
prove there aren't fairies. at the bottom of
the garden. But, as he likes to say, we don't
live our lives being agnostic about fairies.
We live our lives as if they don't exist. So
he treats the God hypothesis with the same level
of everyday skepticism. Precisely. The odds are
so vanishingly small that it's not worth considering.
One of the central arguments in The God Delusion
is his rebuttal to the design argument, which
he calls the ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. Right,
this is him flipping the watchmaker argument
back on itself. The creationist says the complexity
of the eye implies a designer. And Doc is asked.
So who designed the designer? If your designer
is complex enough to design an entire universe
and a human eye, that designer must be infinitely
more complex and statistically improbable than
the thing it's supposed to explain. You haven't
solved the problem of complexity. You've just
pushed it back one step and made it bigger. You've
made it infinitely bigger. He argues that natural
selection is the only theory we have that actually
explains how you get complexity out of simplicity,
how you can bootstrap design from the ground
up without needing a pre -existing designer.
Yet, despite this incredibly hardline, uncompromising
stance, there's a nuance that always confuses
people. He calls himself a cultural Christian.
Hmm. And he's reiterated this very recently.
It drives some of his followers crazy. It seems
like a massive contradiction. To him it isn't.
He loves the King James Bible as a masterpiece
of English literature. He adores the music of
Bach. like St. Matthew Passion. He appreciates
the beauty of a village church and the rhythm
of the church calendar. So he separates the culture
from the creed. Exactly. He separates the meme
of the culture, the art, and the tradition from
the truth claim of the theology. He wants to
keep the cathedral but evict the deity. He argues
you can and should appreciate the rich cultural
heritage without buying into the supernatural
beliefs. But this cultural Christian identity
has also fueled some of his more recent and more
pointed controversies. It has. He seems to fear
the decline of Christianity in Europe, not because
he thinks it's true, but because he's deeply
worried about what might replace it. And this
brings us to the messy, often Twitter -fueled
chapter of his later years. Dawkins has expressed,
quite bluntly, his concern that if the gentle,
largely ignored Anglicanism of Britain collapses,
it won't be replaced by his brand of secular
humanism. But by a more assertive form of Islam.
Yes. And he views what he calls fundamentalist
Islamism as a far greater and more immediate
threat to the liberal values he holds dear things
like women's rights, gay rights, and especially
freedom of speech. And this is where the old
liberal of the 1970s clashes head on with the
modern left. of the 2020s it's a huge clash dawkins
sees himself as a classic enlightenment liberal
he cares about free inquiry individual rights
and objective truth but his critiques of islam
have drawn extremely heavy fire there was the
infamous tweet the one where he contrasted the
number of nobel prizes won by trinity college
cambridge which is a lot versus the number one
by the entire muslim world which is very few
which is factually a true statement but but interpretively
incendiary critics argued it was science at its
absolute worst, completely ignoring centuries
of colonialism, geopolitical strife, economic
and funding disparities that help explain why
modern science flourished in the West and stagnated
in many other parts of the world. It came across
as a cheap shot at a marginalized group rather
than a sophisticated critique of theology. That's
certainly how it was received. And he was disinvited
from a conference for sharing a satirical video
mocking certain aspects of feminism and Islamism.
Right. But let's talk about the specific controversy
that actually cost him an award. The one that
got his 1996 Humanist of the Year Award revoked
in 2021. the transgender debate. This is the
real flashpoint. This is where his deep -seated
biological realism collided with modern gender
theory. It started with a tweet. It did. He tweeted
a comparison involving Rachel Dolezal, the white
woman who identified as black and was head of
an NAACP chapter. I remember that story. And
Dawkins just asked his followers to discuss.
He essentially asked, if we condemn Delazal for
claiming a racial identity that conflicts with
her ancestry, why do we celebrate trans individuals
for claiming a gender identity that conflicts
with their biology? And to his critics, that
question was itself an act of violence. It was
seen as denying the validity of trans people's
very existence. To the American Humanist Association,
it was the final straw. They revoked his award,
stating that he was using the guise of scientific
discourse to demean and harm vulnerable groups.
But he did back down. No, he doubled down. He
wrote an obed recently laying out his position
very clearly. He argues that sex is a biological
binary determined at conception by the size of
the gamete sperm or egg and that it is observed
at birth, not assigned. A very biological genes
I view perspective. Entirely. He argues that
the phrase trans woman is a woman is a linguistic
distortion, a polite fiction. He says he is happy
to use preferred pronouns as a matter of simple
human courtesy, but he refuses as a scientist
to accept that a trans woman is biologically
female. So it's the gene's eye view crashing
into the identity's eye view. He looks at the
chromosomes and says, that's the objective reality.
Society, or a part of it, is saying, no, reality
is also social and psychological and lived. That
is the conflict in a nutshell. He believes there
is an objective material reality that cannot
be wished away by language or identity politics.
He sees himself as the little boy in the story,
pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.
Well, his critics see an old, out of touch man
yelling at people to stop being who they are.
Exactly. There was another controversy we can't
ignore because it comes up constantly when his
name is mentioned. The mild pedophilia comments.
Yes. This is a prime example of Dawkins applying
a kind of cold scientific taxonomy where people
desperately want moral outrage. He was discussing
his own experience at boarding school. Correct.
Where a master had touched him inappropriately.
And in an interview, he described it as mild
pedophilia and made a point of contrasting it
with a violent penetrative abuse. He was trying
to create a scale of badness, a hierarchy of
harm. Yes. Just like his spectrum of theistic
probability. He was arguing that we shouldn't
lump unwanted touching over clothes into the
exact same moral and legal category as violent
rape. Logically, he is correct. They are different
actions with different levels of trauma and impact.
But emotionally and in the court of public opinion?
It sounded like he was minimizing or making excuses
for child abuse. The backlash was immediate and
immense. He eventually apologized for the distress
he caused. But you could tell he was genuinely
baffled that people couldn't separate the intellectual
classification of an act from the moral condemnation
of the act. Which highlights what might be his
biggest flaw as a public intellectual. I think
so. He often lacks the emotional intelligence
to read the room. He treats human suffering like
a data point to be categorized, not an experience
to be emphasized with. Which is the shadow side
of his very brilliance. The same intellectual
detachment that allowed him to see humanity as
just survival machines for genes prevents him
from understanding why we don't feel like survival
machines and why telling us we are feels so dehumanizing
to many. And yet, for all the controversies,
his politics are surprisingly progressive in
other areas. Very much so. He was a vocal opponent
of the Iraq war from the very beginning. He is...
passionately anti -Brexit, and he's a champion
of the Great Ape Project. This goes right back
to his core understanding of evolutionary continuity.
It does. If we're all just cousins on the same
family tree, then the line we draw between human
and chimpanzee is arbitrary. It's just a matter
of time and branching. So he argues they should
have rights. Yes, that great apes, chimps, monobos,
gorillas, orangutans should have basic legal
rights. The right to life, the right to liberty,
and the right to protection from torture. He
calls our current treatment of them speciesism,
a form of bigotry just like racism or sexism.
It's a radical expansion of the moral circle,
and it's driven entirely by his deep understanding
of biology. It is. Let's pivot for a moment to
the man behind the public firestorms. His personal
life has its own interesting textures. He's been
married four times. And there's a delightful
pop culture intersection here that I love. His
third wife was the actress Lala Ward. Romana
from Doctor Who. That's I'm Lord. The very same.
A beloved companion to Tom Baker's Doctor. And
they were introduced by the author Douglas Adams.
Of course they were. The author of The Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy. That makes perfect sense.
It's the ultimate nerdy Venn diagram. Adams was
a huge science enthusiast and a committed atheist
himself. I've heard he credited Dawkins with
giving him the intellectual framework for his
own atheism. He did. They were part of this golden
circle of British... rationalist intellectuals.
There's a very touching eulogy that Dawkins wrote
for Adams after he died where he talks about
how the universe is a poorer, less interesting
place without him to explain it. And Dawkins
has appeared in pop culture himself, hasn't he?
He had a cameo in Doctor Who and he was in The
Simpsons. He was. In The Simpsons, he voiced
a demon version of himself in Ned Flanders' religious
nightmare, tempting him with a copy of The God
Delusion. He clearly has a sense of humor about
his own public image. He does. And the Nightwish.
album this is my favorite piece of Dawkins trivia
It's the best. The Finnish symphonic metal band
Nightwish wrote an entire concept album called
Endless Forms Most Beautiful, which is a direct
quote from the last paragraph of Darwin's On
the Origin of Species. And they asked Dawkins
to provide narration. Yes. So you have these
epic, soaring, heavy metal riffs and a powerful
female vocalist. And then suddenly you hear Richard
Dawkins's calm, plummy Oxford voice reading passages
about the grandeur of life. and the beauty of
evolution. He even performed with them on stage
at Wembley Arena. It shows that for all the accusations
of him having a cold and bleak philosophy, he
finds a deep, almost spiritual romance in reality
itself. He calls it the magic of reality. That
was the title of one of his books. He sincerely
believes that understanding how a rainbow works,
understanding Newton's optics, doesn't unweave
the rainbow and strip it of its beauty. It adds
a new layer of beauty. The beauty of understanding.
Precisely. He gets genuinely emotional when...
He talks about the sheer luck of our existence.
He talks about the unborn ghosts. Explain that.
He talks about the staggering odds against your
specific birth, the trillions upon trillions
of potential people who could have been born
if a different sperm had fertilized the egg or
if your parents had never met. But they are the
unborn ghosts in the wings. We are the lucky
few who made it onto the stage. We won the genetic
lottery. We won. We are the ones who get to see
the stars and ponder our existence. And he thinks
that is a profound privilege we shouldn't waste
on what he sees as superstition and falsehoods.
On that note, he had a health scare in 2016,
a minor hemorrhagic stroke. He did. He recovered
quite well, but it was a stark reminder of the
fragility of the survival machine. It's largely
why he's doing this final speaking tour now.
He's aware that the clock is ticking. So as we
wrap up this deep dive, how do we begin to summarize
the legacy of a figure as complex and polarizing
as Richard Dawkins? I think he is both a bridge
builder and a bridge burner. How so? He built
a magnificent bridge between the complex mathematical
world of modern genetics and the general public,
giving millions of people the language and the
concepts to understand who we are and where we
come from. But at the same time, he took a flamethrower
to the bridge between the scientific establishment
and the religious world, forcing a conflict that
many people, including many scientists, wish
he had a conflict they felt was unnecessary.
but he felt was essential. He also changed the
dictionary itself. I mean, the selfish gene.
the meme, the blind watchmaker. These are now
part of the language. You cannot have a serious
conversation about modern biology or modern internet
culture without using his words. That is a very
rare and powerful legacy. I want to leave our
listener with a final thought, something that's
been nagging at me as we've been talking through
all this. Go on. So Dawkins taught us that we
are survival machines built by our genes to help
them replicate. Then he taught us that memes
are the new replicators and they use our brains
as their survival machines to replicate. Correct
on both counts, according to his view. So if
we look at Dawkins own career. The relentless
touring, the endless stream of books, the constant
tweeting, the picking of fights, the doubling
down in controversies. Is he the master of his
ideas? Or has he himself become the ultimate
survival machine for his own memes? Has the new
atheism meme, the rationality meme, hijacked
the vessel called Richard Dawkins to ensure its
own replication, even at the cost of his personal
reputation and scientific legacy? That is the
ultimate and perhaps terrifying question of the
extended phenotype, isn't it? Do we have ideas
or do ideas have us? And I suspect that Richard
Dawkins, the rigorous biologist, would be the
first to look at the evidence and admit the meme
is in charge. A chilling thought to end on. Thanks
for diving deep with us today. We'll be back
with another stack of sources next time.