Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes
Guests: Richard Dawkins
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
§01Transcript · 00:00–08:19
The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins,
an evolutionary biologist and author of "The Selfish Gene,"
"The Blind Watchmaker," "The God Delusion,"
"The Magic of Reality," and "The Greatest Show of Earth,"
and his latest, "All-Growing God."
He is the originator and popularizer
of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology
and science in general, including, funny enough,
the introduction of the word meme
in his 1976 book, "The Selfish Gene,"
which, in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution,
is an exceptionally powerful idea.
He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless
in the defense of science and reason,
and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers
of our time.
This conversation was recorded
before the outbreak of the pandemic.
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and financial burden of this crisis,
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And now, here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins.
Do you think there's intelligent life
out there in the universe?
- Well, if we accept that there's intelligent life here,
and we accept that the number of planets in the universe
is gigantic, I mean, 10 to the 22 stars has been estimated,
it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life
in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life.
If you deny that, then you're committed to the view
that the things that happened on this planet
are staggeringly improbable.
I mean, ludicrously, off the charts improbable.
And I don't think it's that improbable.
Certainly the origin of life itself,
there are really two steps, the origin of life,
which is probably fairly improbable,
and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life,
which is also fairly improbable.
So the juxtaposition of those two,
you could say is pretty improbable,
but not 10 to the 22 improbable.
It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming onto it,
how we would recognize intelligence from outer space
if we encountered it.
The most likely way we would come across them
would be by radio.
It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us,
but it's not that unlikely
that we would pick up radio signals.
And then we would have to have some means of deciding
that it was intelligent.
People involved in the SETI program
discuss how they would do it,
and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to,
an obvious way for them to broadcast,
to say we are intelligent, we are here.
I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.
- Well, it's interesting, prime numbers,
so the mathematical patterns,
it's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us
as it would be for aliens.
I suppose we could assume that ultimately,
if we're governed by the same laws of physics,
then we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics.
- I think so.
I suspect that they will have Pythagoras' theorem, et cetera.
I mean, I don't think that their mathematics
will be that different.
- Do you think evolution would also be a force
on the alien planets as well?
- I stuck my neck out and said that if we do,
if ever that we do discover life elsewhere,
it will be Darwinian life,
in the sense that it will work by some kind of
natural selection, the non-random survival
of randomly generated codes.
It doesn't mean that the,
it would have to have some kind of genetics,
but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics,
probably wouldn't be, actually.
But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.
- So some kind of selection process.
- Yes, in the general sense, it would be Darwinian.
- So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence
engineering question.
So you've been an outspoken critic of,
I guess what could be called intelligent design,
which is an attempt to describe the creation
of a human mind and body by some religious folks,
religious folks used to describe.
So broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know,
again, you can correct me, is the only scientific theory
we have for the development of intelligent life.
Like there's no alternative theory as far as I understand.
- None has ever been suggested,
and I suspect it never will be.
- Well, of course, whenever somebody says that,
a hundred years later.
- I know.
(laughing)
It's a risk.
- It's a risk.
- But, you want to bet?
I mean, I--
- But it would look, sorry, yes,
it would probably look very similar,
but it's almost like Einstein's general relativity
versus Newtonian physics.
It'll be maybe an alteration of the theory
or something like that,
but it won't be fundamentally different.
But okay, so now for the past 70 years,
even before the AI community has been trying
to engineer intelligence, in a sense,
to do what intelligent design says, you know,
was done here on Earth, what's your intuition?
Do you think it's possible to build intelligence,
to build computers that are intelligent,
or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process?
Like there's no shortcuts here.
- That's an interesting question.
I'm committed to the belief that it's ultimately possible,
because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains.
I think our brains work by the laws of physics.
And so it must, in principle,
be possible to replicate that.
In practice, though, it might be very difficult.
And as you suggest, it may be the only way to do it
is by something like an evolutionary process.
I'd be surprised.
I suspect that it will come.
But it's certainly been slower in coming
than some of the early pioneers thought.
- Thought it would be, yeah.
But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient?
So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful
in one perspective, but at the same time,
maybe that is the only path to--
- It's a paradox, isn't it?
I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful.
It's fundamentally based on waste.
On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results.
The design of a soaring bird, an albatross,
a vulture, an eagle, is superb.
An engineer would be proud to have done it.
On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud
to have done some of the other things
that evolution has served up.
Some of the sort of botched jobs
that you can easily understand
because of their historical origins,
but they don't look well-designed.
- Do you have examples of bad design?
- My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve.
I've used this many times.
This is a nerve, it's one of the cranial nerves,
which goes from the brain, and the end organ
that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx.
But it doesn't go straight to the larynx.
It goes right down into the chest
and then loops around an artery in the chest
and then comes straight back up again to the larynx.
And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck,
§02Transcript · 08:22–17:33
which happened to have died in a zoo.
And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve
going, whizzing straight past the larynx,
within an inch of the larynx,
down into the chest and then back up again,
which is a detour of many feet.
Very, very inefficient.
The reason is historical.
The ancestors, our fish ancestors,
the ancestors of all mammals and fish,
the most direct pathway of that,
of the equivalent of that nerve,
there wasn't a larynx in those days,
but it innervated part of the gills.
The most direct pathway was behind that artery.
And then when the mammal, when the tetrapods,
when the land vertebrae started evolving,
and then the neck started to stretch,
the marginal cost of changing the embryological design
to jump that nerve over the artery was too great,
or rather was, each step of the way was a very small cost,
but the marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over
would have been very large.
As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change
to just increase the length of the detour a tiny bit,
a tiny bit, a tiny bit,
each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference.
And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe,
it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient.
Now that's bad design.
Any engineer would reject that piece of design,
it's ridiculous.
And there are quite a number of examples,
as you'd expect,
it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort.
In a way, what's surprising is there aren't more of them.
In a way, what's surprising
is that the design of living things is so good.
So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results,
partly by tinkering,
partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes
and as it were, making the best of a bad job.
- That's really interesting.
I mean, it is surprising and beautiful.
And it's a mystery from an engineering perspective
that so many things are well-designed.
I suppose the thing we're forgetting
is how many generations have to die for that.
- That's the inefficiency of it, yes.
That's the horrible wastefulness of it.
- So yeah, we marvel at the final product,
but yeah, the process is painful.
Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially the,
what he calls the biological bootloader
for artificial intelligence
or artificial general intelligence is used as the term,
it's kind of like super intelligence.
Do you see superhuman level intelligence
as potentially the next step in the evolutionary process?
- Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence
is to be found, it will be artificial.
I don't have any hope that we ourselves,
our brains will go on getting larger
in ordinary biological evolution.
I think that's probably coming to an end.
It is the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends
in our fossil history for the last two or 3 million years.
- Brain size?
- Brain size, yes.
So it's been swelling rather dramatically
over the last two or 3 million years.
That is unlikely to continue.
The only way that happens is because natural selection
favors those individuals with the biggest brains
and that's not happening anymore.
- Right, so in general in humans,
the selection pressures are not,
I mean, are they active in any form?
- Well, in order for them to be active,
it would be necessary that the most intelligent,
let's call it intelligence.
Not that intelligence is simply correlated
to brain size, but let's talk about intelligence.
In order for that to evolve, it's necessary
that the most intelligent beings have the most,
individuals have the most children.
And so intelligence may buy you money,
it may buy you worldly success,
it may buy you a nice house and a nice car
and things like that if you have a successful career.
It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people,
but it doesn't increase the number of offspring
that you have, it doesn't increase your genetic legacy
to the next generation.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence,
I mean, computers and technology generally
is evolving by a non-genetic means,
by leaps and bounds, of course.
- And so what do you think, I don't know if you're familiar,
there's a company called Neuralink,
but there's a general effort of brain-computer interfaces,
which is to try to build a connection
between the computer and the brain,
to send signals both directions.
And the long-term dream there is to do exactly that,
which is expand, I guess expand the size of the brain,
expand the capabilities of the brain.
Do you see this as interesting?
Do you see this as a promising possible technology,
or is the interface between the computer and the brain,
like the brain is this wet, messy thing
that's just impossible to interface with?
- Well, of course it's interesting.
Whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say.
What I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small
as it is compared to a computer,
and the individual components being as slow as they are
compared to our electronic components,
it is astonishing what it can do.
I mean, imagine building a computer
that fits into the size of a human skull,
and with the equivalent of transistors
or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do.
It's something mysterious about that.
Something must be going on that we don't understand.
- So I've just talked to Roger Penrose.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work.
He also describes this kind of mystery in the mind,
in the brain, that he sees a materialist.
So there's no sort of mystical thing going on,
but there's so much about the material of the brain
that we don't understand,
that might be quantum mechanical in nature and so on.
So there are the ideas about consciousness.
Do you have any, have you ever thought about,
do you ever think about ideas of consciousness
or a little bit more about the mystery
of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up,
just like you're saying, from our brain?
- I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there.
He's one of the world's greatest physicists,
so I can't possibly argue with his-
- But nobody knows anything about consciousness.
And in fact, if we talk about religion and so on,
the mystery of consciousness is so awe-inspiring
and we know so little about it
that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations
is too easy to make.
- I think that it's just an act of cowardice
to leap to religious explanations,
and Roger doesn't do that, of course.
But I accept that there may be something
that we don't understand about it.
- So correct me if I'm wrong,
but in your book, "Selfish Gene,"
the gene-centered view of evolution
allows us to think of the physical organisms
as just the medium through which the software
of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate.
So maybe can we start just with the basics?
What in this context does the word meme mean?
- It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene,
cultural equivalent in the sense of
that which plays the same role as the gene
in the transmission of culture
and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense.
And it's only a useful word
if there's something Darwinian going on.
Obviously, culture is transmitted,
but is there anything Darwinian going on?
And if there is, that means there has to be
something like a gene,
which becomes more numerous or less numerous
in the population.
- So it can replicate?
- It can replicate.
Well, it clearly does replicate.
There's no question about that.
The question is, does it replicate
in a sort of differential way, in a Darwinian fashion?
Could you say that certain ideas propagate
because they're successful in the meme pool?
In a sort of trivial sense, you can.
Would you wish to say, though,
that in the same way as an animal body
is modified, adapted to serve as a machine
for propagating genes,
is it also a machine for propagating memes?
Could you actually say that something
about the way a human is,
is modified, adapted
for the function of meme propagation?
- That's such a fascinating possibility, if that's true.
If that it's not just about the genes,
which seem somehow more comprehensible,
it's like these things of biology.
The idea that culture, or maybe ideas,
you can really broadly define it,
operates under these mechanisms.
- Even morphology, even anatomy,
§03Transcript · 17:36–27:38
does evolve by memetic means.
I mean, things like hairstyles,
styles of makeup, circumcision,
these things are actual changes in the body form,
which are non-genetic,
and which get passed on from generation to generation,
or sideways, like a virus,
in a quasi-genetic way.
- But the moment you start drifting away from the physical,
it becomes interesting,
'cause the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems.
- Of course, yes.
- So, what's your sense?
Are memes a metaphor more, or are they really,
is there something fundamental,
almost physical presence of memes?
- Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor,
and I think that,
I mentioned the physical bodily characteristics,
which are a bit trivial in a way,
but with things like the propagation of religious ideas,
both longitudinally down generations,
and transversely, as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas.
When a charismatic preacher converts people,
that resembles viral transmission,
whereas the longitudinal transmission
from grandparent to parent to child, et cetera,
is more like conventional genetic transmission.
- That's such a beautiful,
especially in the modern day, idea.
Do you think about this implication in social networks,
where the propagation of ideas,
the viral propagation of ideas,
and hence the new use of the word meme to describe--
- Well, the internet, of course,
provides extremely rapid method of transmission.
Before, when I first coined the word,
the internet didn't exist,
and so I was thinking then in terms of books, newspapers,
broad radio, television, that kind of thing.
Now, an idea can just leap around the world
in all directions instantly.
And so, the internet provides a step change
in the facility of propagation of memes.
- How does that make you feel?
Isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas,
it's like you have Galapagos Islands or something,
it's the '70s, and the internet allowed all these species
to just globalize.
And in a matter of seconds,
you can spread a message to millions of people,
and these ideas, these memes can breed,
can evolve, can mutate, there's a selection,
and there's different, I guess, groups that have all,
there's a dynamics that's fascinating here.
Do you think-- - Yes.
- Basically, do you think your work in this direction,
while fundamentally it was focused on life on Earth,
do you think it should continue, like, to be taken further?
- I mean, I do think it would probably be a good idea
to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing.
We conventionally think of the transmission of ideas
in evolutionary context as being limited to,
in our ancestors, people living in villages,
living in small bands where everybody knew each other,
and ideas could propagate within the village,
and they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally,
and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually.
And that was a slow process.
Nowadays, villages are international.
I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers,
where people are in a sort of internet village,
where the other members of the village
may be geographically distributed all over the world,
but they just happen to be interested in the same things,
use the same terminology, the same jargon,
have the same enthusiasm.
So people like the Flat Earth Society,
they don't all live in one place, they find each other,
and they talk the same language to each other,
they talk the same nonsense to each other.
But so this is a kind of distributed version
of the primitive idea of people living in villages
and propagating their ideas in a local way.
- Is there Darwinist parallel here?
So is there evolutionary purpose of villages,
or is that just a--
- I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose
in that case, but villages will be something
that just emerged, that's the way people happen to live.
- And in just the same kind of way,
the Flat Earth Society, societies of ideas
emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space?
- Yes, yes.
- Is there something interesting to say about the,
I guess, from a perspective of Darwin,
could we fully interpret the dynamics
of social interaction in these social networks?
Or is there some much more complicated thing
need to be developed?
Like what's your sense?
- Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve
investigating which ideas spread and which don't.
So some ideas don't have the ability to spread.
I mean, flat Earthism, there are a few people
believing it, but it's not gonna spread
because it's obvious nonsense.
But other ideas, even if they are wrong,
can spread because they are attractive in some sense.
- So the spreading and the selection
in the Darwinian context, it just has to be attractive
in some sense, like we don't have to define,
like it doesn't have to be attractive
in the way that animals attract each other.
It could be attractive in some other way.
- Yes, all that matters is,
all that is needed is that it should spread.
And it doesn't have to be true to spread.
In truth, there's one criterion
which might help an idea to spread.
But there are other criteria which might help it to spread.
As you say, attraction in animals
is not necessarily valuable for survival.
The famous peacock's tail doesn't help
the peacock to survive, it helps it to pass on its genes.
Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish,
but which people don't know is rubbish
and think is very attractive, will spread
in the same way as a peacock's genes spread.
- As a small sidestep, I remember reading somewhere,
I think recently, that in some species of birds,
sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose,
and the idea that some birds,
I'm being ineloquent here,
but there's some aspects of their feathers and so on
that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever.
There's somebody making an argument
that there are some things about beauty that animals do
that may be its own purpose.
Does that ring a bell for you?
Does it sound ridiculous?
- I think it's a rather distorted bell.
Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection,
didn't feel the need to suggest
that what was attractive to females,
usually is males attracting females,
that what females found attractive had to be useful.
He said it didn't have to be useful.
It was enough that females found it attractive.
And so it could be completely useless,
probably was completely useless in the conventional sense,
but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on
to Darwin didn't call them genes,
but in the sense of reproducing.
Others, starting with Wallace,
the co-discoverer of natural selection,
didn't like that idea.
And they wanted sexually selected characteristics
like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful.
It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail
as being useful, but in the sense of survival,
but others have run with that idea
and have brought it up to date.
And so there's a kind of,
there are two schools of thought on sexual selection,
which are still active and about equally supported now.
Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough
to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace
and say that it has to be in some sense useful.
- Do you fall into one category or the other?
- No, I'm open-minded.
I think they both could be correct in different cases.
I mean, they've both been made sophisticated
in a mathematical sense,
more so than when Darwin and Wallace
first started talking about it.
- I'm Russian, I romanticize things,
so I prefer the former,
where the beauty in itself is a powerful,
so attraction is a powerful force in evolution.
On religion, do you think there will ever be a time
in our future where almost nobody believes in God
or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?
- Yes, I do.
I think it may happen after a very long time.
I think it may take a long time for that to happen.
- So do you think ultimately for everybody on earth,
religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas,
could do a better job than what religion does?
- Yes.
I mean, following truth.
- Well, truth is a funny, funny word.
And reason too.
There's, yeah, it's a difficult idea now
with truth and the internet, right?
And fake news and so on.
I suppose when you say reason,
you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions
of science versus which political system is better?
- Yes, yes.
§04Transcript · 27:39–36:46
I mean truth about the real world,
which is ascertainable by,
not just by the more rigorous methods of science,
but by just ordinary sensory observation.
- So do you think there will ever be a time
when we move past it?
Like, I guess another way to ask it,
are we hopelessly, fundamentally tied to religion
in the way our society functions?
- Well, clearly all individuals
are not hopelessly tied to it
because many individuals don't believe.
You could mean something like society needs religion
in order to function properly, something like that.
And some people have suggested that.
- What's your intuition on that?
- Well, I've read books on it and they're persuasive.
I don't think they're that persuasive though.
I mean, some people suggested that society
needs a sort of figurehead,
which can be a non-existent figurehead
in order to function properly.
I think there's something rather patronizing
about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough
not to believe in God, but the plebs need it sort of thing.
And I think that's patronizing.
And I'd like to think that
that was not the right way to proceed.
- But at the individual level,
do you think there's some value of spirituality?
Sort of, if I think sort of as a scientist,
the amount of things we actually know about our universe
is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage
of what we could possibly know.
So just from everything,
even the certainty we have about the laws of physics,
it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover.
And therefore we're sitting where 99.999% of things
is just still shrouded in mystery.
Do you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view
of that, sort of a humbled spiritual?
- I think it's right to be humble.
I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know,
a lot that we don't understand,
a lot that we still need to work on.
We're working on it.
What I don't think is that it helps
to invoke supernatural explanations.
If our current scientific explanations
aren't adequate to do the job, then we need better ones.
We need to work more.
And of course, the history of science shows just that,
that as science goes on,
problems get solved one after another
and the science advances as science gets better.
But to invoke a non-scientific, non-physical explanation
is simply to lie down in a cowardly way and say,
"We can't solve it, so we're going to invoke magic."
Don't let's do that.
Let's say we need better science.
We need more science.
It may be that the science will never do it.
It may be that we will never actually understand
everything and that's okay, but let's keep working on it.
- A challenging question there is,
do you think science can lead us astray
in terms of the humbleness?
So there's some aspect of science,
maybe it's the aspect of scientists and not science,
but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence
that can lead us astray in terms of discovering
some of the big open questions about the universe.
- I think that's right.
I mean, there are arrogant people in any walk of life
and scientists are no exception to that.
And so there are arrogant scientists
who think we've solved everything.
Of course we haven't.
So humility is a proper stance for a scientist.
I mean, it's a proper working stance
because it encourages further work.
But in a way to resort to a supernatural explanation
is a kind of arrogance because it's saying,
well, we don't understand it scientifically,
therefore the non-scientific religious
supernatural explanation must be the right one.
That's arrogant.
What is humble is to say we don't know
and we need to work further on it.
- So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you for a second,
you have at times been just slightly frustrated
with people who have a supernatural.
Has that changed over the years?
Have you become, like, how do people
that kind of have seek supernatural explanations,
how do you see those people as human beings?
Do you see them as dishonest?
Do you see them as sort of ignorant?
Do you see them as, I don't know,
like how do you think of those people?
- Certainly not dishonest.
And I mean, obviously many of them are perfectly nice people
so I don't sort of despise them in that sense.
I think it's often a misunderstanding
that people will jump from the admission
that we don't understand something.
They will jump straight to what they think of
as an alternative explanation,
which is the supernatural one, which is not an alternative.
It's a non-explanation.
Instead of jumping to the conclusion
that science needs more work,
that we need to actually do some better science.
So I don't have, I mean,
personal antipathy towards such people.
I just think they're misguided.
- So what about this really interesting space
that I have trouble with?
So religion I have a better grasp on,
but there's large communities, like you said,
Flat Earth community that I've recently,
because I've made a few jokes about it,
I saw that there's, I've noticed that there's people
that take it quite seriously.
So there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists,
which is a kind of, I mean, there's elements of it
that are religious as well,
but I think they're also scientific.
So the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist
is to question everything,
which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say.
So what do you make of this?
- I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say
that by labeling something conspiracy,
you therefore dismiss it.
I mean, occasionally conspiracies are right.
And so we shouldn't dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand.
We should examine them on their own merits.
Flat Earthism is obvious nonsense.
We don't have to examine that much further.
But I mean, there may be other conspiracy theories
which are actually right.
- So I've grew up in the Soviet Union,
so I understand, you know, the space race
was very influential for me on both sides of the coin.
You know, there's a conspiracy theory
that we never went to the moon, right?
And it's like, I can understand it,
and it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show
one way or the other.
It's just, you have to use some of the human intuition
about who would have to lie,
who would have to work together.
And it's clear that very unlikely good...
Behind that is my general intuition
that most people in this world are good.
You know, in order to really put together
some conspiracy theories,
there has to be a large number of people working together
and essentially being dishonest.
- Yes, which is improbable.
The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy
and the sheer detail, the attention to detail
they'd have had to have had and so on.
I'd also worry about the motive,
and why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen?
What's the...
Why is it so hard to believe?
I mean, the physics of it, the mathematics of it,
the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things,
it all works mathematically.
Why wouldn't you believe it?
- It's a psychology question
because there's something really pleasant
about pointing out that the emperor has no clothes
when everybody...
Thinking outside the box
and coming up with a true answer
where everybody else is deluded.
There's something...
I mean, I have that for science, right?
You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong.
That's the whole...
- No, that's right.
And of course, historically,
lone geniuses have come out right sometimes.
But often people who think they're a lone genius
have much more often turned out not to.
So you have to judge each case on its merits.
The mere fact that you're a maverick,
the mere fact that you're going against the current tide
doesn't make you right.
You've got to show you're right by looking at the evidence.
- So because you focus so much on religion
and disassembled a lot of ideas there,
and I was wondering if you have ideas
about conspiracy theory groups,
because it's such a prevalent,
even reaching into presidential politics and so on.
It seems like it's a very large communities
§05Transcript · 36:48–46:14
that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories.
Is there some connection there
to your thinking on religion?
- It is curious.
It's a matter...
It's an obviously difficult thing.
I don't understand why people believe things
that are clearly nonsense like, well, flat Earth,
and also the conspiracy about not landing on the moon
or that the United States engineered 9/11,
that kind of thing.
- So it's not clearly nonsense,
it's extremely unlikely.
- Okay, it's extremely unlikely.
Religion is a bit different
because it's passed down from generation to generation.
So many of the people who are religious
got it from their parents,
who got it from their parents,
who got it from their parents,
and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force.
But these things like the 9/11 conspiracy theory,
the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory,
the man on the moon conspiracy theory,
these are not childhood indoctrination.
These are presumably dreamed up by somebody
who then tells somebody else,
who then wants to believe it.
And I don't know why people are so eager
to fall in line with just some person
that they happen to read or meet who spins some yarn.
I can kind of understand why they believe
what their parents and teachers told them
when they were very tiny
and not capable of critical thinking for themselves.
So I sort of get why the great religions of the world
like Catholicism and Islam go on persisting.
It's because of childhood indoctrination.
But that's not true of flat-earthers.
And sure enough, flat-earthers is a very minority cult.
- Way larger than I ever realized.
- Well, yes, I know.
- But so that's a really clean idea.
And you've articulated that in your new book
and "The Outgrown God"
and in "God Delusion" is the early indoctrination.
That's really interesting.
You can get away with a lot of out there ideas
in terms of religious texts
if the age at which you convey those ideas at first
is a young age.
So indoctrination is sort of an essential element
of propagation of religion.
So let me ask on the morality side
in the books that I mentioned,
"God Delusion" and "Outgrown God",
you described that human beings
don't need religion to be moral.
So from an engineering perspective,
we wanna engineer morality into AI systems.
So in general, where do you think morals come from
in humans?
- A very complicated and interesting question.
It's clear to me that the moral standards,
the moral values of our civilization
changes as the decades go by,
certainly as the centuries go by,
even as the decades go by.
And we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled
21st century people in terms of our moral values.
There's a spread.
I mean, some of us are a little bit more ruthless,
some of us more conservative,
some of us more liberal and so on.
But we all subscribe to pretty much the same views
when you compare us with say 18th century,
17th century people,
even 19th century, 20th century people.
So we're much less racist,
we're much less sexist and so on than we used to be.
Some people are still racist and some are still sexist,
but the spread has shifted.
The Gaussian distribution has moved
and moves steadily as the centuries go by.
And that is the most powerful influence I can see
on our moral values.
And that doesn't have anything to do with religion.
I mean, the religion, sorry,
the morals of the Old Testament are Bronze Age models,
morals, they're deplorable
and they are to be understood
in terms of the people in the desert
who made them up at the time.
And so human sacrifice,
an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,
petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath,
all that kind of thing, inconceivable now.
- So at some point, religious texts may have in part
reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time.
- I'm sure they did, I'm sure they always reflect that, yes.
- And then now, but the sort of almost like the meme
as you describe it of ideas moves much faster
than religious texts do, than you religious people.
- Basing your morals on religious texts,
which were written millennia ago
is not a great way to proceed.
I think that's pretty clear.
So not only should we not get our morals from such texts,
but we don't, we quite clearly don't.
If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women
and we'd be racist, we'd be killing homosexuals and so on.
So we don't and we shouldn't.
Now, of course, it's possible to use
your 21st century standards of morality
and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick
particular verses which conform to our modern morality
and you'll find that Jesus says some pretty nice things,
which is great, but you're using your 21st century morality
to decide which verses to pick and which verses to reject.
And so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible
and go straight to the 21st century morality,
which is where that comes from.
It's a much more complicated question.
Why is it that morality, moral values change
as the centuries go by?
They undoubtedly do.
And it's a very interesting question to ask why.
It's another example of cultural evolution,
just as technology progresses,
so moral values progress for probably very different reasons.
- But it's interesting if the direction
in which that progress is happening
has some evolutionary value or if it's merely a drift
that can go into any direction.
- I'm not sure it's any direction
and I'm not sure it's evolutionarily valuable.
What it is is progressive in the sense that each step
is a step in the same direction as the previous step.
So it becomes more gentle, more decent,
by modern standards, more liberal, less violent.
- See, but more decent, I think you're using terms
and interpreting everything in the context
of the 21st century.
Because Genghis Khan would probably say
that this is not more decent because we're now,
you know, there's a lot of weak members of society
that we're not murdering.
- Yes, and I was careful to say
by the standards of the 21st century,
by our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history,
what we see is a trend in the direction towards us,
towards our present value system.
- For us, we see progress, but it's an open question
whether that won't, you know,
I don't see necessarily why we can never return
to Genghis Khan times.
- Well, we could.
I suspect we won't.
But if you look at the history of moral values
over the centuries, it is in a progressive,
I use the word progressive not in a value judgment sense,
in the sense of a transitive sense.
Each step is the same direction of the previous step.
So things like we don't derive entertainment
from torturing cats.
We don't derive entertainment from,
like the Romans did in the Colosseum from that stage.
- Or rather we suppress the desire to get,
I mean, to have pleasure.
It's probably in us somewhere.
So there's a bunch of parts of our brain,
one that probably, you know, limbic system
that wants certain pleasures.
And that's-
- I mean, I wouldn't have said that,
but you're limited to think that.
- Well, there's a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History
that has a really nice explanation
of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people,
the fighting of people, just the torture,
the suffering of people throughout history
as entertainment until quite recently.
And now everything we do with sports,
we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else.
I mean, there is some dark aspects of human nature
that are underneath everything.
And I do hope this like higher level software we've built
will keep us at bay.
- Yes.
- I'm also Jewish and have history
with the Soviet Union and the Holocaust.
And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects
of human nature creeped up there.
- They do.
- And there have been steps backwards admittedly,
and the Holocaust is an obvious one.
But if you take a broad view of history,
it's in the same direction.
- So Pamela McCordick in "Machines Who Think"
has written that AI began with an ancient wish
§06Transcript · 46:17–55:17
to forge the gods.
Do you see, it's a poetic description, I suppose,
but do you see a connection between our civilizations,
historic desire to create gods, to create religions,
and our modern desire to create technology,
an intelligent technology?
- I suppose there's a link between an ancient desire
to explain away mystery and science,
but artificial intelligence creating gods,
creating new gods.
I mean, I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious
paper which said that we have a new god,
it's called Google, and we pray to it, and we worship it,
and we ask its advice like an oracle and so on.
That's fun.
- You don't see that, you see that as a fun statement,
a facetious statement, you don't see that
as a kind of truth of us creating things
that are more powerful than ourselves,
a natural sort of-
- It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I get.
- But-
- I wouldn't-
- But not a scientific one.
- I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself,
put it that way.
- All right.
So you don't think AI will become a new religion,
a new god, like Google?
- Well, yes, I mean, I can see that
the future of intelligent machines,
or indeed intelligent aliens from outer space,
might yield beings that we would regard as gods
in the sense that they are so superior to us
that we might as well worship them.
That's highly plausible, I think.
But I see a very fundamental distinction
between a god who is simply defined
as something very, very powerful and intelligent
on the one hand, and a god who doesn't need explaining
by a progressive step-by-step process like evolution
or like engineering design.
So the difference, so suppose we did meet an alien
from outer space who was marvelously,
magnificently more intelligent than us,
and we would sort of worship it for that reason.
Nevertheless, it would not be a god
in the very important sense that it did not just happen
by to be there like God is supposed to.
It must have come about by a gradual, step-by-step,
incremental, progressive process,
presumably like Darwinian evolution.
So there's all the difference in the world
between those two.
Intelligence, design, comes into the universe late
as a product of a progressive evolutionary process
or a progressive engineering design process.
- So most of the work is done through this slow-moving--
- Exactly. - Progress.
- Exactly.
- Yeah. (chuckles)
Yeah, but there's still this desire to get answers
to the why question that if the world is a simulation,
if we're living in a simulation,
that there's a programmer-like creature
that we can ask questions of.
- Okay, well, let's pursue the idea
that we're living in a simulation,
which is not totally ridiculous, by the way.
- There we go.
- Then you still need to explain the programmer.
The programmer had to come into existence
by some, even if we're in a simulation,
the programmer must have evolved.
Or if he's in a sort of--
- Or she. - Or she.
If she's in a meta-simulation,
then the meta-meta-programmer must have evolved
by a gradual process.
You can't escape that.
Fundamentally, you've got to come back
to a gradual, incremental process of explanation
to start with.
- There's no shortcuts in this world.
- No, exactly.
- But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation,
do you think it's an interesting,
basically talk to,
bore the heck out of everybody asking this question,
but whether you live in a simulation,
do you think, first, do you think we live in a simulation?
Second, do you think it's an interesting thought experiment?
- It's certainly an interesting thought experiment.
I first met it in a science fiction novel
by Daniel Galloway called "Counterfeit World,"
in which it's all about,
I mean, our heroes are running a gigantic computer
which simulates the world,
and something goes wrong,
and so one of them has to go down into the simulated world
in order to fix it.
And then the denouement of the thing,
the climax to the novel is that they discover
that they themselves are in another simulation
at a higher level.
So I was intrigued by this,
and I love others of Daniel Galloway's
science fiction novels.
Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom.
- Bostrom, talking to him in an hour.
- Okay.
(laughing)
And he goes further,
not just to treat it as a science fiction speculation,
he actually thinks it's positively likely.
- Yes.
- I mean, he thinks it's very likely, actually.
- Well, he makes a probabilistic argument
which you can use to come up with
very interesting conclusions about
the nature of this universe.
- I mean, he thinks that we're in a simulation
done by, so to speak, our descendants of the future,
that the products, but it's still a product of evolution.
It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution,
even though the super intelligent people of the future
have created our world,
and you and I are just a simulation,
and this table is a simulation, and so on.
I don't actually, in my heart of hearts, believe it,
but I like his argument.
- Well, so the interesting thing is,
that I agree with you, but the interesting thing to me,
if I were to say, if we're living in a simulation,
that in that simulation, to make it work,
you still have to do everything gradually,
just like you said.
That even though it's programmed,
I don't think there could be miracles.
Otherwise, it's--
- Well, no, I mean, the programmer,
the higher, the upper ones, have to have evolved gradually.
However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous.
I mean, they could be switched on,
and we come into the world with fabricated memories.
- True, but what I'm trying to convey,
so you're saying the broader statement,
but I'm saying from an engineering perspective,
both the programmer has to be slowly evolved,
and the simulation, because it's--
- Oh, yeah.
- From an engineering perspective--
- Oh, yeah, it takes a long time to write a program.
No, like, just, I don't think you can create
the universe in a snap.
I think you have to grow it.
- Okay, well, that's a good point.
That's an arguable point.
By the way, I have thought about using the Nick Bostrom idea
to solve the riddle of how, we were talking earlier
about why the human brain can achieve so much.
I thought of this when my then 100-year-old mother
was marveling at what I could do with a smartphone,
and I could call, look up anything in the encyclopedia,
or I could play her music that she liked, and so on.
She said, "But it's all in that tiny little phone."
No, it's out there, it's in the cloud.
And maybe most of what we do is in a cloud.
So maybe if we are a simulation,
then all the power that we think is in our skull,
it actually may be like the power
that we think is in the iPhone,
but is that actually out there in a--
- It's an interface to something else.
- Yes.
- I mean, that's what people,
including Roger Penrose with panpsychism,
that consciousness is somehow a fundamental part of physics,
that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside a brain.
- But Roger thinks it does reside in the skull,
whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't,
that there's a cloud.
- That'd be a fascinating notion.
On a small tangent,
are you familiar with the work of Donald Hoffman, I guess?
Maybe not saying his name correctly,
but just forget the name,
the idea that there's a difference
between reality and perception.
So like we biological organisms perceive the world
in order for the natural selection process
to be able to survive and so on,
but that doesn't mean that our perception
actually reflects the fundamental reality,
the physical reality underneath.
- Well, I do think that,
although it reflects the fundamental reality,
I do believe there is a fundamental reality,
I do think that our perception is constructive
in the sense that we construct in our minds
§07Transcript · 55:22–1:05:24
a model of what we're seeing.
And so, and this is really the view of people
who work on visual illusions like Richard Gregory,
who point out that things like a Necker cube,
which flip from, it's a two-dimensional picture
of a cube on a sheet of paper,
but we see it as a three-dimensional cube,
and it flips from one orientation to another
at regular intervals.
What's going on is that the brain is constructing a cube,
but the sense data are compatible
with two alternative cubes.
And so rather than stick with one of them,
it alternates between them.
I think that's just a model for what we do all the time
when we see a table, when we see a person,
when we see anything,
we're using the sense data to construct
or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model.
I noticed this when I meet somebody
who actually is, say, a friend of mine,
but until I kind of realized that it is him,
he looks different.
And then when I finally clock that it's him,
his features switch like a Necker cube
into the familiar form.
As it were, I've taken his face
out of the filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto,
or used the sense data to invoke it.
Yeah, we do some kind of miraculous compression
on this whole thing to be able to filter out
most of the sense data and make sense of it.
That's just the magical thing that we do.
So you've written several, many amazing books,
but let me ask what books, technical or fiction
or philosophical had a big impact on your own life?
What books would you recommend people consider reading
in their own intellectual journey?
- Darwin, of course.
- The original, I've actually,
a shame to say I've never read Darwin in the original.
- He's astonishingly prescient
because considering he was writing
in the middle of the 19th century,
Michael Gieselin said he's working
a hundred years ahead of his time.
Everything except genetics is amazingly right
and amazingly far ahead of his time.
And of course you need to read the updatings
that have happened since his time as well.
I mean, he would be astonished by,
well, let alone Watson and Crick, of course,
but he'd be astonished by Mendelian genetics as well.
- Yeah, it'd be fascinating to see what he thought about,
he would think about DNA.
- I mean, yes, it would, because in many ways
it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle.
The digital nature of genetics clears up
what was a problem, what was a big problem.
Gosh, there's so much that I could think of.
I can't really-
- Is there something outside sort of more fiction?
Is there, when you think young,
was there books that just kind of,
outside of kind of the realm of science and religion,
that just kind of sparked your journey?
- Yes, well, actually, I suppose I could say
that I've learned some science from science fiction.
I mentioned Daniel Galloy, and that's one example,
but another of his novels called "Dark Universe,"
which is not terribly well-known,
but it's a very, very nice science fiction story.
It's about a world of perpetual darkness.
And we're not told at the beginning of the book
why these people are in darkness.
They stumble around in some kind of underground world
of caverns and passages,
using echolocation like bats and whales to get around.
And they've adapted, presumably by Darwinian means,
to survive in perpetual, total darkness.
But what's interesting is that their mythology,
their religion, has echoes of Christianity,
but it's based on light.
And so there's been a fall from a paradise world
that once existed where light reigned supreme.
And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them.
So then they no longer are in light's presence,
but light survives in the form of mythology
and in the form of sayings like,
"The great light almighty,"
"Oh, for light's sake, don't do that,"
and "I hear what you mean"
rather than "I see what you mean."
- So some of the same religious elements are present
in this other totally kind of absurd different form.
- Yes.
And so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it satire
because it's too good-natured for that.
I mean, a wonderful parable about Christianity
and the doctrine, the theological doctrine of the fall.
So I find that kind of science fiction immensely stimulating.
Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud."
Oh, by the way, anything by Arthur C. Clarke
I find very, very wonderful too.
Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud,"
his first science fiction novel where he,
well, I learned a lot of science from that.
It suffers from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately,
but apart from that, you learn a lot of science from it.
Another of his novels, "A for Andromeda,"
which by the way, the theme of that is taken up
by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel,
another wonderful writer, "Carl Sagan Contact,"
where the idea is, again, we will not be visited
from outer space by physical bodies.
We will be visited, possibly, we might be visited by radio,
but the radio signals could manipulate us
and actually have a concrete influence on the world
if they make us or persuade us to build a computer
which runs their software
so that they can then transmit their software by radio.
And then the computer takes over the world.
And this is the same theme in both Hoyle's book
and Sagan's book.
I presume, I don't know whether Sagan knew
about Hoyle's book, probably did.
And, but it's a clever idea
that we will never be invaded by physical bodies.
The war of the worlds of HG Wells will never happen,
but we could be invaded by radio signals, code,
coded information, which is sort of like DNA.
And we are, I call them, we are survival machines of our DNA.
So it has great resonance for me because I think of us,
I think of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies
as being manipulated by coded information, DNA,
which has come down through generations.
- And in the space of memes,
it doesn't have to be physical.
It can be transmitted through the space of information.
- Yes.
- That's a fascinating possibility that from outer space,
we can be infiltrated by other memes, by other ideas
and thereby controlled in that way.
Let me ask the last, the silliest,
or maybe the most important question.
What is the meaning of life?
What gives your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, meaning?
- From a scientific point of view,
the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA,
but that's not what I feel.
That's not the meaning of my life.
So the meaning of my life is something
which is probably different from yours
and different from other people's,
but we each make our own meaning.
So we set up goals we want to achieve.
We want to write a book.
We want to do whatever it is we do, write a quartet.
We want to win a football match.
And these are short-term goals.
Well, maybe even quite long-term goals,
which are set up by our brains,
which have goal-seeking machinery built into them.
But what we feel, we don't feel motivated
by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly.
We have other goals, which can be very moving,
very important.
They could even be called spiritual in some cases.
We want to understand the riddle of the universe.
We want to understand consciousness.
We want to understand how the brain works.
These are all noble goals.
Some of them can be noble goals anyway,
and they are a far cry
from the fundamental biological goal,
which is the propagation of DNA.
But the machinery that enables us
to set up these higher level goals
is originally programmed into us
by natural selection of DNA.
- The propagation of DNA.
But what do you make of this unfortunate fact
that we are mortal?
Do you ponder your mortality?
Does it make you sad?
Does it-
- I ponder it.
It makes me sad that I shall have to leave
and not see what's going to happen next.
If there's something frightening about mortality,
apart from sort of missing, as I've said,
something more deeply, darkly frightening,
it's the idea of eternity.
But eternity is only frightening if you're there.
Eternity before we were born,
billions of years before we were born,
and we were effectively dead before we were born.
As I think it was Mark Twain said,
"I was dead for billions of years before I was born
"and never suffered the smallest inconvenience."
§08Transcript · 1:05:26–1:07:14
And that's how it's going to be after we leave.
So I think of it as really,
eternity is a frightening prospect.
And so the best way to spend it
is under a general anesthetic,
which is what it'll be.
- Beautifully put.
Richard, it was a huge honor to meet you, to talk to you.
Thank you so much for your time.
- Thank you very much.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Richard Dawkins.
And thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App.
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And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom
from Richard Dawkins.
"We are going to die.
"And that makes us the lucky ones.
"Most people are never going to die
"because they're never going to be born.
"The potential people who could have been here in my place,
"but who will in fact never see the light of day
"outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.
"Certainly those unborn ghosts
"include greater poets than Keats,
"scientists greater than Newton.
"We know this because the set of possible people
"allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds
"the set of actual people.
"In the teeth of these stupefying odds,
"it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
"We privileged few who won the lottery
"of birth against all odds.
"How dare we whine at our inevitable return
"to that prior state from which the vast majority
"have never stirred."
Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.
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