Richard Dawkins - The Selfish Gene & The God Delusion: Understanding Nature, Humanity & Consciousness

Full transcript: Richard Dawkins on London Real

2:48 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, outspoken atheist, documentary filmmaker, and international best-selling author.

3:09 You are an emeritus fellow at Oxford University, a fellow at both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature, and considered one of the most respected scientists on the planet. You’re the author of 17 books, including The Selfish Gene, the bestseller which popularized the idea of the gene as the fundamental unit of natural selection, and The God Delusion, which outlined your belief that science and reason naturally point towards atheism. You’re also the first person to introduce the concept of memes as the cultural equivalent to genes, which has since brought rise to an entire field of study called mimetics.

3:39 Your latest book, Flights of Fancy, Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution, explores how nature and humans have learned to overcome the pull of gravity and take to the skies. Richard, welcome to London Real. Thank you very much. It’s great to have you here, and I can’t wait to jump into this book, Flights of Fancy, because first of all, I have two young boys. They’re five and six years old, and the illustrations are incredible on this book.

4:02 It’s something I know they’re gonna, their eyes are gonna go right to, and they’re gonna start asking me all these questions about some of these animals that glide, and some that fly, and some insects. And so you know, I know you have another book where you had, you know, illustrations, and it was also for a younger audience, but was this something that you wanted to do, or write a book for ages 8 to 80? For some time, yes. The earlier book you referred to is called The Magic of Reality, and I, in that book, each chapter begins with a question, something like, what is an earthquake?

4:36 Why do we have winter and summer? And the chapter then begins with mythological answers to the question, myths from all over the world, and then it gives the scientific answer, and I thought I might do another volume of The Magic of Reality, and the first chapter I thought of was flight. Then flight kind of grew into a whole book, which became Flights of Fancy, and I enjoy learning up all aspects of a subject, including the physics and the biology and the mythology actually, and so yes, that, that’s how it got started, and you kind of open the book and talk about how as humans we are fascinated by flight, and you go back to maybe the old drawings of Michelangelo, and I was telling you earlier I used to fly helicopters, and I just remember being in the air and this device thinking, this is just magic, like I can’t believe I’m up here, and what is this?

5:30 I think a helicopter must give you a wonderful feeling of freedom, because it does. You can land anywhere you like and take off again. Yeah, it’s very unrestrictive. We can hover and fly with the doors off, and so it’s rather like a hoverfly, which can, which can dodge around and stand hovering still and then go backwards, upwards, forwards, downwards, even upside down, actually, which I wouldn’t recommended a helicopter. Um, yes.

5:55 Um, I think everybody is, um, most people are fascinated by flight, and many people share with Leonardo da Vinci the ambition to try to, um, get up in the air, and he designed many flying machines, none of which would have worked, but he obviously has this great ambition. There’s a picture in the book of one of his drawings. I think it looks like a hang glider. Maybe it looks like maybe an early version. Some of his things would look like hang gliders.

6:21 He also had various flapping versions, what was called ornithopters, where the man in the harness was supposed to flap his arms, and obviously trying to mimic a bird. That turned out to be the wrong answer. You can’t do it by mimicking a bird. You have to start from scratch. Um, he also designed a kind of helicopter, which was an Archimedes screw.

6:44 I mean, a screw that’s, but to screw itself into the air, and the motive power for that was four men. There’s a capstan running round and round and round, and it was on the runway, and of course they couldn’t. Muscle power couldn’t possibly generate enough power to lift themselves. But it also, it had no stabilizing what, what, on the modern propeller, is provided by the rear propeller. Otherwise it just spins round and round and round, and that’s all, even if his machine had got off the ground, it would have just spun round and round and round.

7:21 Yeah, do you think if he had the materials and the electric motors in his lifetime he might have been able to create something? Well, yes, if you, if it has enough. When human muscle power is not enough, it depends upon a much greater source of power than that. Right, and in the book you kind of go through the hot air balloon, and then we kind of see the Wright brothers, and it’s kind of fascinating to know that six decades later now we’re on the moon. I mean, that’s an astonishingly short time, actually, from the Wright brothers to Neil Armstrong, ridiculously short space of time.

7:56 Yeah, yeah. I had my sons out, and we were watching the moon, and I was explaining the phases of the moon, and I said, I said, they put a man on the moon, and they both look at me like I’m crazy. It’s still almost inconceivable, if you’re a human on this planet, to look up there and think we put one of our people up there. It’s a long time ago now. I mean, it and it’s amazing that such a long time has elapsed since that time.

8:18 Yeah, 60 plus years. I think they’re going back the latest. Yes, the mission was cancelled a couple of days ago. Okay, all right, but the plan is there. So in the book you start looking into all sorts of variations of flight, gliding, and all sorts of, some of the evolutional implications on that.

8:37 What did you discover in writing this book? I just, I learned about how planes work. For example, I was always a bit vague about what keeps them in the air. I still don’t really understand how they managed to carry enough fuel to keep themselves up in a great big airliner that can fly, actually, from here to Australia. It’s amazing without stopping.

8:59 Um, to carry enough fuel to convey that fuel all the way, let alone all the passengers and goods and things that it can do as well. I find very difficult to understand. Um, I mean, I understand the physics of it, but I didn’t understand the economics of it, and I didn’t really know about Bernoulli’s principle, and the fact that, um, planes work in two different ways, the Newtonian and the Bernoulli way. So I learned that, um, and I learned about aerial plankton.

9:33 Um, lot of different things, and you also learned that some things that we recreate with mechanics aren’t recreated in nature, so there’s no natural organisms that are lighter than air per se. Yes, that’s right. Um, one of the ways in one, one of the chapters of the book is about lighter-than-air flight, balloons using either hot air or helium or hydrogen. Um, and, um, I kind of try to speculate about what will, try to wonder why it is that no animal has done that, because the ingredients are there.

10:07 I mean, there are organisms that produce hydrogen and methane, which would also like the now, and there are organisms that produce silk, and silk is good for making the envelope of a balloon, but no animals actually put them together. Um, so there are plenty of animals that float about, not exactly lighter than air, but they wear the surface area is so large compared to their volume and their weight. One of the, the points of physics is, as you know, that um, the smaller an object is, the larger is its surface area compared to its volume.

10:47 So, something like the fairy fly, Tinker Bell, which is actually a wasp, which is, we’ve got a picture of it in the book Flying Through the Eye of a Needle. It’s so small it would hardly need to bother to fly, just kind of float around, not because it’s lighter than air, but because its surface area is so great that the slightest waft of breeze, the slightest up current, will just lift it without any effort, whereas if you’re as big as a human, or just big as Leonardo, you, your surface area is so tiny compared to your weight that that there’s, that’s not a chance you just plummet to the ground, right? It’s very hard, because it’s kind of it’s like r squared versus r cubed, right?

11:35 Exactly. Yes, so it’s the surface area is a squared ratio, and the other one is a cubed ratio, so it gets to a point where it’s almost physically impossible to have flight at certain sizes. Yes, that’s right. Did you find out what was the largest flying beast? Was it?

11:50 Well, Quetzalcoatlus is was a pterosaur, a sort of giant pterodactyl, which was the size of a of a small aircraft, that’s the size of a Piper Cub or a Cessna. And it must have mostly glided. It probably tried to flap a bit, but it, but it must have glided, I suppose, from high places, a giant, a giant pterosaur, a huge great glider. And I suppose it probably took off from cliff tops and things. There is a suggestion that it might have punted itself into the air with using its elbows, and then they got got into a thermal.

12:28 But it probably made use of thermals like modern vultures that and eagles do. Okay, and you even talk about why, like, why is flying something that was developed my kind of biologist is very keen on the question why, by which we mean what is the Darwinian survival value, what is it about flight that helps the animal to pass on its gene and survive, to pass on its genes, and there are all sorts of different reasons. I mean, looking for food, escaping from predators, pouncing on prey from above, migrating to different places to keep up with climate changes, all sorts of different reasons why flight.

13:07 It’s almost a question that answers itself. It seems so obvious to us that flying would be a wonderful thing to be able to do. I guess we look at how we use it, like you said, you know, the international travel and cost effectiveness. Yes, or do we use drones for, like, just to get better views of this client? Yes, yeah.

13:23 And what, what did you, what was reconfirmed about evolution in doing all this study that you saw? did you, were you reminded of certain things, or were certain things surprise you about some of the evolution of some of these beasts? I wouldn’t say surprise, because I’m sufficiently imbued with Darwinism now that nothing very much surprises me. I suppose there are some quite remarkable adaptations in detail, things like, well, I just mentioned hummingbirds.

13:55 Sorry, I mentioned hoverflies, but hummingbirds do it too, hovering like a helicopter. I was very, I became very fascinated by the symbiotic relationship between plants and insects and birds, pollinators, because the plants need their pollen to be transported from the male flower to a female flower, and some plants do it by wind, but I’d speculate, wouldn’t it be wonderful if plants could have a little winged chariot to carry their pollen, and they probably would have evolved. Excuse me, I should have warned you, I’m liable to, ever since I had a stroke in 2016, now to get croaky throat.

14:49 Okay, yeah, no worries. That was six years ago, right? Plants would have benefited from having a little winged chariot to carry their pollen from male flower to female flower, but why bother? Because there are butterflies and bees and hummingbirds and sunbirds, and so all you need to do is bribe them, or seduce them. In the case of colors or orchids that that that look like a female bee or a female wasp, and the bee tries to copulate with the flower, and gets dusted with bottle, gets covered with pollen, and then goes up and tries to copy it with another flower and delivers the pollen.

15:37 And there’s advanced versions of this, like the hammer orchid, which has a, there are about a dozen different species of hammer orchid in Australia, and each one of each species has one species of wasp which it, which it’s partnered with, so to speak. These wasps, the male flies, the females don’t have wings. The females just climb onto a plant somewhere, and the male comes and seizes the female and carries her off in his arms and mates with her on the wing.

16:13 Well, these orchids have a dummy female on the end of a sort of arm with an elbow in the flower, so the male comes along, grabs the female, tries to lift her up, and the elbow of the plant bends, and the male gets smashed against the place where the pollen is repeatedly bang bang bang like that, and gets covered with these so-called pollinia, which are great big lumps of pollen that orchids have. Finally, he gives up on the effort to make off with this dummy female, flies off, and not having learned his lesson, grabs another one, and again it goes bang bang bang, and this time he delivers the pollen. That’s an astonishingly detailed mechanism.

17:06 There’s another one called the bucket orchid, where, um, there’s a bucket filled with the feet. The flower has a sort of bucket filled with fluid, filled with water, and it’s got a slippery edge, so that the, so that a male bee of a certain species only slips on the edge, falls into the water, and then swims and tries to struggle to grasp and find the only way to escape from this bucket of water, so to speak, is through a tiny hole, and it struggles through this hole, and on its way through gets pollinia stuck to its back, so it flies off, and then again, sadder but not wiser, excuse me, falls into another one, and then struggles through that hole, and then in this case the pollinia gets scraped off its back. Well, think of the intricate detail of the device by which these flowers get themselves pollinated, seducing a particular kind of insect.

18:12 In the case of figs, it’s even better, because there are about 900 different species of fig, and each one has its own private species of wasp. Tiny little wasps. Don’t think of it as being like a real big yellow jacket. It’s a little tiny wasp, and as a very, very complicated cycle of activity, relationship between these wasps and these figs, a fig is actually not a fruit at all, it’s a, it’s a flower. This is, this, a lot of flowers and inverted sort of chamber in which there are lots of flowers on the inside, and the relationship between the fig and the wasp is very, very complicated, extremely complicated, and as I said, about 900 different species of fig and about 900 different species of fig wasp, and each species of fig has one species of fig wasp, so it’s a real magic bullet that takes the pollen to the correct species of fig.

19:15 And that’s all through evolution. Also, yes, it evolves by Darwinian natural selection. The ultimate beautiful detail of these adaptations that come about through Darwinian natural selection inspires me. You mentioned the one with the bee and is trying to mate with this organism that’s moving, bouncing back and forth. Yes, and it’s funny, because when a human would initially see that without training or science, they’d say, well, obviously that was created to make that, but but they don’t see the millions and millions of years.

19:48 They don’t see the mutations that created this thing that now seems designed. The other thing that might occur to them, not with respect to the to the hammer orchid but with respect to say lions and antelopes. You see a lion, which is a beautiful machine for chasing antelopes and killing them, and the antelope is a beautiful machine for escaping from lions. Well, whose side is God on? I mean, you know, why would he create, if, if he wants the lion to eat the antelope, why not?

20:17 Why make it so difficult? And if he wants the antelope to escape from the lion, why make the antelope so fast at getting away from the lion? Why, why make the lion so good at catching antelope? So you cannot really reconcile, I think, a creator view with the fact that nature really is red in tooth and claw. There’s an enormous amount of suffering, and the predators are beautifully designed to kill the prey, and the prey beautifully designed to escape from the predators.

20:48 So you think that obviously, what’s God in it for? Is he? Is he? Does he like the spectator sport? Is he a sadist?

20:55 You know, it doesn’t make any sense. And we only see that because it’s in homeostasis. If for some reason the lion was much better, there would be no prey. Exactly, and if the prey was so much better, there would be no lion. Yeah, and so we see this probably very temporary view.

21:11 I mean, that might not exist a thousand years from now or even a hundred years from now, because the world will change, but when we see it, it’s very easy not to see the evolution behind it, and we see something that was created for us, like we might see a product that was created for us, or, you know, a beautiful coffee maker that does something similar. We are surrounded by machines that are made for our benefit, by things, not just machines, but everything we look at. All these cameras around here, and they’re obviously made by somebody.

21:40 There’s no question about it. And so it’s very, very tempting when you see a beautiful mechanism, like an eye, which looks like a camera, to think of that as being designed, and it takes a great leap of brilliance, actually, which Charles Darwin had to recognize. I think the reason why I’ve actually often been puzzled why it took so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene, because actually his idea is remarkably simple. I mean, it doesn’t require a lot of mathematics and a lot of sophisticated thinking, but 200 years after Newton, and Newton, after, I mean, what Newton did was very, very, very clever.

22:21 What Darwin did, it turns out, must have been clever, because nobody did it before, but it’s terribly simple. And I think the reason that it took so long is that the, it, the eye looks so like a camera. Look, it’s so like a device that must have been designed that people just didn’t even dare to contemplate the possibility that it was anything but something designed. Right, Darwin saw it because he, well, he was a naturalist, he saw so much, but he also knew a lot about domestication.

22:54 He studied pigeons and dogs, so he saw the power of selection to produce, to change a wolf into a bulldog or into a pekingese, and saw how quickly selection by the human eye can produce this dramatic change, and all he had to do was to say, well, maybe you don’t need a human eye to do this selection. Maybe it can be done by nature. So I’ve got to stop again. No worries, no worries. And with Darwin, did the public embrace his ideas immediately, or did it take some time?

23:34 Some did. Many did not. Some churchmen did. Charles Kingsley was, it was, a devout churchman who did. Um, many people found it very difficult.

23:46 Uh, Wallace, who was Alfred Wallace, who was Darwin’s co-discoverer, wrote to Darwin and said to you and me, it’s as clear as daylight that the power of selection can be done by nature, not just by the human and natural selection. Darwin’s phrase was as clear as daylight to Wallace, but so many people misunderstand it. They cannot conceive that you can get selection without a selector, and so Wallace begged Darwin to change his phrase from natural selection to survival of the fittest, which has less of an implication of there being a selector.

24:25 And Darwin did adopt the phrase survival of the fittest, which had actually been invented by Herbert Spencer, but Wallace tried to persuade Darwin to adopt it. Um, so Darwin continued to use the phrase natural selection alongside survival of the fittest. Are there problems with using the language of survival of the fittest? Like, do people hear fittest and think it’s the strongest, which it isn’t. Well, that’s right.

24:47 When, in Darwin’s and Wallace’s time, that’s what it did mean. It meant the strongest, the keenest, of the sharpest, of which, and so on. And, um, later on, when geneticists started to, in to get involved in evolutionary theory, which was quite a bit after Darwin, even after Darwin’s death, after Mendel’s genetics had been rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century, mathematical geneticists needed an algebraic symbol. They called it w, fitness. So fitness became, it’s almost a tautology, just the fitness of an animal was its capacity to survive and reproduce, measured as, for example, the number of its grandchildren or the number of his great-grandchildren.

25:40 So the survival of the fittest became a tautology, because that’s what, that’s how you define fitness. In Darwin’s time, it was not a tautology, because it really did mean the strongest or the swiftest or the cleverest, but then in the hands of the population geneticist, survival of the fittest became a tautology. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. We might as well say, if you objected to it as a tautology, would say, I don’t know. It’s no good breeding racehorses for speed, because it won’t work, because it’s a tautology.

26:15 I mean, it, of course it’ll work. You, this, the original meaning of fitness as speed, and in this case, is still there. But I don’t like using the word fitness, actually, for that kind of reason. But it is, it is a favorite word of evolutionary geneticists. Some people have called you the rottweiler of Darwin.

26:39 Is that a compliment? I was called that. Yes. Well, it was a take-off from Huxley, who was called Darwin’s bulldog. Okay, but actually rottweilers are a very charming, sweet dog, so I don’t really worry about it.

26:55 Was this something at an early age that just naturally clicked with you, those ideas of Darwin? I know you, I know you were, you were brought up with various exposures to the church. But what early on? Not really. I mean, I think my father explained natural selection to me.

27:12 He’d read botany at Oxford. He was a biologist, but I didn’t really appreciate it. I mean, I understood it, but I didn’t think it was big enough there to do the job. And I think it was only when I was about 15 that I kind of realized that it actually was big enough to do the job. And there’s nothing else.

27:34 I mean, it has to be big enough, but it is. Too, we now, we now know it’s plenty of evidence that it really does work. Did uh, when you grew up in Kenya, did that exposure to nature and the animals actually? Left Kenya when I was two. So no, but I could have done, because my father then, my parents then moved to what was their Nyasaland, which is now Malawi, which is in also in Central Africa.

27:57 Um, but no, I wouldn’t say that I was that exposed to wildlife in a way that I rather now wish I had, and have been since I’ve now been back to Africa frequently, and have been filled with great pleasure to go around national parks and things. I spent some time in Botswana. Honestly, like, me too. Yes, magical. Yes, I agree.

28:21 That’s just it. It’s like a 24-hour-a-day show. It’s just incredible to see what’s happening, and the biology and the evolution and the you know, the interactions between prey and predator, and it’s, it’s all right there in front of you. Yeah, I agree. When, when, when you wrote The Selfish Gene, did you know it was going to be such a big deal?

28:46 No, um, it’s your first book. Yes, I, I remember jokingly referring to it as my best self while I was writing it, and, and obviously I hoped, it investments any of us, I hope, is it could be a bestseller. But was that a joke, or did someone? It was a joke, because you knew you were talking about some groundbreaking ideas. Well, yes, sort of.

29:08 I mean, I, they were ideas. I thought I was really putting into a different kind of language, ideas which were current in among professional biologists, at least I was, and that’s exactly what I was doing, but the way I put it seemed to catch an impact, catch the public imagination in a way that it hadn’t been caught before. It was the idea that the gene is the unit of selection, and the, I mean, that’s just the way population geneticists would express evolution.

29:53 They would tend to put it at the level of the individual and say the individual, the individual’s fitness is measured by its success in reproduction, which means passing on its genes. I twisted that on its head and said, therefore, the gene’s measure of success is how much, how far it survives. So, and that seemed to me to be a much simpler way of putting it, because if you, if you talk at the level of the individual organism, then you have to say the individual organism is not trying to survive except in so far as survival leads to reproduction, and not just reproduction, but passing on genes to the next generation, and so on.

30:36 I thought it was a much simpler thing, to simply go straight to the level of the gene and say that it’s the gene’s level of selection, and the gene is using the individual organism as what I call a survival machine to get itself passed on. So the organism, the individual, is a tool of the gene, of the genes, to get passed on, and those genes that are successful, the ones that are very good at building individual bodies, but the body is a machine for passing on the genes that created it. Right?

31:09 Yeah, that’s a pretty groundbreaking advancement of the theory. Have you ever thought what it would be like to have this conversation with Darwin about your work and his work? I would be wonderful to do so. Of course, um, I, I once actually was invited by a Japanese television company to meet an actor dressed up as Charles Darwin, and um explained to him what had happened since his time. And it was quite fun.

31:43 I mean, he was an English actor, not a Japanese actor, and he was quite a good actor. He was dressed up, covered with grease painting, looking, looking like Darwin. The grease paint kept on dropping off, and the makeup girl had to come along and put it back on again, and I had to explain to him about Mendelian genetics, because this was a puzzle that had faced Darwin in his own lifetime. Nobody knew anything about genetics at the time. It was just sort of vaguely known that, like begets like, that there is a tendency for children to look like their parents, but it was sort of thought to be a kind of mixture.

32:25 You were thought to be a sort of blend of your mother and your father. That’s the way it appears. I mean, people do tend to have the cat attributes of both their mother and their father, sometimes more of one, son as well as the other. Um, and, but it was thought to be blending, a bit like mixing paint. You get red paint and blue paint, and you mix them together, and you get purple, but it was pointed out in Darwin’s time that once you’ve got the purple, no amount of mixing purple with purple will give back your blue and red, and so the variation just disappears, so there’s not enough variation for selection to work on, and there was a man called Fleming Jenkin writing, I think it was a review of The Origin of Species in the Scottish journal in which he said therefore natural selection is impossible, right?

33:18 Which is actually silly, because any fool could see that as a matter of fact, I mean, if he’d been right grandchildren should look more uniform than their grandparents, which is not true. So Fleming Jenkin was simply it’s written in flaming, but he’s pronounced Fleming. Fleming Jenkin was simply saying manifest facts are impossible, which is ridiculous, of course, but nevertheless his criticism did worry Darwin, and the solution to the problem is Mendelian genetics, which, which is digital.

33:51 You you, you are not a mixture of two paints. You’re a mixture. It’s more like beads of different colors being shuffled together in a sack. The red beads and blue beads don’t, don’t make purple beads. They, they still say red and blue and so, in Mendelian genetics, what happens is that genes just go on unmixed with each other to the next generation.

34:14 Your, your your grandparents’ genes are in you intact, only a quarter of your genes for, from each grandparent, but they don’t mix together they just shuffle together. That’s the answer to the Fleming Jenkin’s problem, which Darwin never knew about. Mendel’s work showing that genetics is digital in that sense had been done in Darwin’s lifetime, but Darwin unfortunately never read it. Nobody else did, hardly. It was published in a rather obscure journal and its significance was simply overlooked until the beginning of the 20th century, and then even then it’s, it took a while for anybody to realize this was the answer to the Fleming Jenkin’s riddle.

35:03 So it was my job to explain this to the actor, in for this Japanese crew. I had sort of answered the door, and Mr. Darwin, I’m delighted to meet her. were you very nice to him? Of course. And then I explained to him and about this, this thing, and he was, he said that’s it, that’s it, he said.

35:26 You know, it was repeated very, very nicely. So that was rather, is that what Darwin would have said? You think, well, I suspect he would probably. Yes, I think he was so clear. Yeah, and it’s an explanation.

35:38 Yes. Wow, and so you published in 1976 The Selfish Gene. The book goes around the world, it affects so many people in so many ways. Why, and why then was it the timing? I have no idea.

35:52 I mean, I, I think, um, it’s a very clear idea, and I think I, I just put it into words, and yeah, but you mentioned when Darwin came out that there were churchmen that bought onto his thesis? Yes, which surprised me when you say that, because I thought maybe even back then there would be no churchmen that could keep his job that might subscribe to that, and obviously this has been a huge part of your work, is going up against churches and doctrines. Well, nowadays, most, most sophisticated, educated churchmen have no problem with it.

36:36 Um, there are plenty of, of unsophisticated relatively uneducated religious people who think there is a problem, um, because they take the Book of Genesis literally and it would devastate their worldview if they had to depart, but they’ve been brought up from childhood onwards to believe that every word of the Bible is true. It’s an odd belief, because if you actually think about who wrote the Bible, there’s no, no reason whatever to think they knew anything at all. I mean, just, just, it was written by herdsmen in Palestine, who, um, or in Babylon.

37:14 Actually, it was, it wasn’t written until the Babylonian captivity, but it wasn’t came from earlier legends, right? Every tribe in the world has its own creation myth, and everyone is different, and they don’t originate from anybody who knew what he was talking about. They just grew up in some sort of mysterious way. But still, there are people, plenty of people, in America brought up to believe that every word of the Bible is literally true, just as people in the Muslim world are brought up to believe that every word in the Quran is literally true.

37:47 Therefore, it, it’s a terrible thing for them to have to, to lose this rock which they’ve been brought up with. The holy word of God. But then actually, if you talk to a bishop or an archbishop, or a most clergyman of the Anglican or a Catholic church, at least, things, they’re quite happy with, with, with Darwinism. So the more educated they are, the more they’re okay with it. Yes.

38:17 But if you’re not that educated and you just tend to take it on faith, and it’s a big part of your identity, and you don’t solve it. Yes, that’s right. Then you just accept it as, yes, and move on. So it’s a bit of a lazy way to look at religion. Well, I suppose so.

38:30 I mean, I’m not sure which of them were lazy, but yes. Does it still surprise you when you walk around, say, London or England, that religion is so woven into this culture? I mean, I was down at Buckingham Palace over the weekend, and there’s a beautiful story of Queen Victoria, a beautiful statue of Queen Victoria, and she’s holding, like, an orb and a staff, and I, I remember thinking of the televised coronation of Queen Elizabeth, and I, and I remember thinking they say she’s a descendant of God, and like that was a or connected to God.

39:01 I mean, there’s nothing they do, really, you know? I mean, it, it, the coronation service is taken from the Bible. I mean, um, you know, the anointing with oil and things that, that comes from Zadok the Priest, right? Um, in, in the Old Testament so there’s a kind of semi-serious buying into the myth of, of anointing with oil making you somehow divine, the divine right of kings, which, which caused so much war and horror in history that nobody believes that anymore.

39:37 The Queen still is the head of the Church of England. Um, ever since Henry VIII, the monarch has been the head of the, of the Church of England, but people in Christian faith is not very widespread in this country. Um, if you look at, I mean, I mean, my foundation the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in Britain. Um, a survey, uh, in 2011, there was a census. There’s a census written every 10 years, and this one in 2011, one in 2021.

40:19 Um, and, um, one of the questions in the census is you get asked, what’s your religion? People tend to tick Christian, because that’s, they were brought up, they’re not Muslim, not Jews, so they’re Christian. You’re ready to take Christian. But if you actually, what we did was, was to take a sample of people who took the Christian box and give them a detailed set of questions to see whether they really were Christian, and they weren’t very few of them were.

40:48 Um, we asked them, do you believe Jesus is your Lord and Savior? I forget what the faith that it was, but it was very low. Um, do you believe you believe in God? Was slightly higher, but not, not much higher. Um, and, um, so don’t think that just because the Queen is constitutionally head of the Church of England, that therefore people in Britain believe in Christianity.

41:16 Um, a few do, but not that many do. And fast forward 100 years from now, will the church? Well, I would think so, but, but, uh, but I don’t know. But when I say not many, I mean it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s something under, under fifty percent, but, but so it is some. But, um, the figure is much higher in America, but it’s coming down in America, and the number of people who uh, who now subscribe to no religion in America, even, is, I think, up about 25 percent.

41:45 Right. The Richard Dawkins, in 1976, when you’re studying genetics and publishing The Selfish Gene, did you ever think that you would be having discussions about religion, and you would write a book called The God Delusion, or was this always going to be a collision? Well, I never thought of it. It’s a collision course, but, um, there is a certain amount of, um, even in the self-regime, there’s a certain amount of, um, anti-religion assumption. Yeah.

42:18 And when you wrote The God Delusion, what was what was the reaction, and how did that change your perception? Um, like, well, the reaction was, I suppose, predictably mixed. Um, it, it’s the best-selling book I’ve written. It sold even more copies than The Selfish Gene, um, although it’s a newer book. Um, they both sold several million copies.

42:51 Um, but regardless, more so, um, I think the reaction was what you might expect. It was, it was very, there was very positive and very negative, depending upon who you talked to. Right? And, um, we’ve had Lawrence Krauss here, and I made a movie with him called The Unbelievers, where, yes, you kind of toured the world. I think you were doing speaking events in various places.

43:12 I think it ended up in Sydney, um, and I watched that when Lawrence was on the show five or six years ago, and it’s just interesting to see you two engage with audiences, and, yeah, speak openly and frankly with sometimes religious zealots and other people. And what’s it like having those conversations, or having those discussions? Does it get to a point where with some people there’s there’s no discussion to be had, or are most people willing to? Very variable.

43:38 I’m they’re usually fairly amicable. I mean, we very seldom, haven’t gone slanging matches. Um, I’ve usually had rather friendly audiences. I suppose it’s just the friendly ones come. I mean, I think the antis don’t, don’t tend to turn up.

44:00 I’ve had a fair number of interviews with devout people, but they’ve, they’ve been friendly, um, uh, but, but, and we tend to talk past each other. I suppose it’s very, it’s quite hard. You never really managed to convince anybody. It’s very, very seldom to convince anybody, to, to diametrically reverse their opinion about such a thing. I’m happy to flashback and tell me if I’m wrong, but I thought I heard one time that maybe, maybe it was The God Delusion was, was one of the most widely translated books in, like, Arabic and countries that were, very, that’s true.

44:36 Yes, it was. It, it has been unofficially translated originally into Arabic as a downloadable PDF. Um, not, not as a published book, but as a downloadable PDF and I’m told it was downloaded 13 million times in Arabic. Um, presumably secretly in, in many countries, because, you know, the penalty for apostasy is death. Does that surprise you or not very much?

45:07 So yes, I, I was delighted, of course. Um, and that actually inspired my foundation in America, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science in America, to set up a thing called the Translation Project, where we, um, did this much more professionally, and paid professional translators and professional editors in the languages of Islam, in Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and Indonesian, to translate not just The God Delusion, but several of my books into these languages, not as books, but as PDFs to be downloaded free. So there’s no charge, and so we don’t get no royalties from these translations.

45:58 Yeah. The idea is to um, to make these books available to people in the Islamic world. And that’s going very well, and, and several of my books have now been translated and are available as downloadable PDFs in those four languages, and we’re now branching out into translating some other books as well as mine. What’s it like having a conversation with, say, a devout Muslim versus maybe a devout Christian, or, uh, someone who’s Orthodox Jewish? Like, do you find that you go down certain paths with each religion?

46:34 They have different, very much the same, because they’re, they’re all, they’re all arguing. When they’re arguing with me, they tend to be arguing against evolution, and, um, so they, they pick up each other’s arguments, and it’s, it’s mostly they’re very unoriginal. I mean, it’s their stereotyped arguments, to keep popping up again and again. In the game, they just don’t understand. They just I think it’s too stupid to understand in many cases, or the brain blocks that out, because it’s such a part of the identity.

47:01 Yeah, right. Has anyone ever made anything that made you think twice? When they argue? No. And are you surprised, say, in the last 40 or 50?

47:10 I would love to think twice. It’s it’s, it’s what I’m paid for. You know, my whole life has been as, as a scientist, you’re supposed to think twice, right? Have you had to think twice in the last 25 years in science? Yes, but, but not in there, not in, not with respect to religion.

47:25 Okay, right? Or debates or anything or challenges in that sense, not in religion. Are you surprised that the public hasn’t evolved more in 40 years, but it has, it has. Yes, I mean, as I was saying, the, the, even, even in America, um, the, the number of people who profess a religion is going down and down and down, especially among young people, which is very encouraging, but it’s still a big part of politics there, which is always kind of, well, it is.

47:53 And that’s an astonishing anomaly, because, because you think, I mean, the thing about 25% of the people don’t believe in a religion. So that’s a very large lobby. Yeah, and yet it’s, and other, other lobbies which politicians constantly suck up to are far more powerful, because traditionally politicians are supposed to worry about the Polish lobby, the Jewish lobby, and things, and the, the non-religious lobby has never been a traditional part of the problem.

48:27 Is that, is that, um, well, no, I’m not sure what the problem is, but it is going down, it seems. Yeah, I’m very still always surprised when I see American politicians constantly talking religion and God, and I guess it is kind of baked into the Constitution and all these issues, but they think they won’t be elected if, unless they say God bless America at the end of his speech. But, but I wonder whether they’re right. I mean, maybe they’ve finally tumbled to the fact that actually there’s a huge number of people, huge minority, which may even become a majority as it is in Britain.

49:00 Right, I want to definitely get back to the book, but one of the things that came up was this concept of the phenotype, which came about in your research, and it’s something that I know a lot of people probably struggle to understand at first, because it’s something that’s not as obvious as a gene, but it’s something that I guess, because of that, gene is expressed outside of, of that organism, and I was wondering how would you normally explain that, or how can I explain that to my sons? As far as the extended phenotype? Yes, yes, because the word phenotype is a standard word, which is not difficult to explain.

49:29 It’s just the manifestation of a gene, so, so your, your ears and your nose and your hair and your wings, and expressions of that, are all phenotypes. The extended phenotype is, is not something that’s part of the body, something outside the body. And so it might be something like a bird’s nest, which is, which is made of grass or made of whatever spider web, um, and twigs, and, and mud, um, so it’s not part of the body, but from a Darwinian point of view, I think it should be seen as a manifestation of genes, because it’s clearly a Darwinian adaptation.

50:09 I mean, if you look at a weird weaver bird’s nest, it’s, it’s got a very distinct shape, very complicated shape. Some nests are even more complicated, an oven bird’s nest, a termite mound, um, a caddis larva house, a spider web. These are all beautifully shaped objects not part of the body, but clearly Darwinian adaptations. They’re doing something for the survival of the animal’s genes. So just as when we talk about the evolution of an arm or a wing, we talk about genes for a particular shape of arm or wing or tail or whatever it is, and the genes that are good at making that kind of wing are the ones that survive, and the, so that the wing or the arm is a manifestation of the gene’s power to provide for its own survival.

51:05 Well, just the same could be said of a nest. And so, um, the first step in explaining the extended phenotype is to, is to talk about artifacts, which are a powerful argument for moving the power of a gene outside the body into the outside world. But then you say, well, there are other manifestations of the power of a gene outside the body. What about the influence of parasites on their host? You have a, a worm inside a body.

51:41 Many worms have a complicated life cycle where they have to get themselves from a snail, which might be their intermediate host, into a sheep, which is their definitive host. And the way this happens is that the sheep accidentally eats the snail without, and therefore gets the worm into this sheep’s body. Or another parasite, another, another worm, fluke, lives in an ant, and the ant has to get eaten by a herbivore of some sort. And what happens is that the worm manipulates the behavior of the ant in such a way, to make it more likely to be eaten by the sheep.

52:29 So it causes it, it actually burrows into the brain of the ant and makes a lesion in the brain of the ant, just as a scientist might make a lesion in the brain of an ant and changes its behavior. The ant crawls to the top of grass stems, which is not a thing it would normally do, thereby getting itself more likely to be eaten by a sheep. And there are lots of examples of parasites manipulating their intermediate hosts, manipulating their brain, usually, of them, intermediate host, to make them more likely to be eaten.

53:00 Um, well, the, uh, the change in behavior of the ant. Or there’s a, there’s another one, where a snail has, um, cause it’s, its eyes at the end of its tentacles. The parasite gets into the eye at the end of the tentacle and pulsates with a great big red, so like a flashing beacon which calls attention and predators to the, to this, to the snail once it gets, gets eaten. Well, the, the change in the snail or the change in the ant is phenotype of genes in the, in the worm.

53:36 It’s an adaptation of the worm, which shows itself in the form of a change in another organism. This is an ant or a snail. So the extended phenotype is not just an inanimate object like a bird’s nest, it’s an animate object, uh, the host of a parasite. So that’s the next step in the argument, that the, um, a gene can have phenotypic manifestation in another body. Well, now, not all parasites live inside their hosts.

54:10 Cuckoos, cuckoo chicks, um, as you know, manipulate the behavior of their host, which is a foster parent, or the, the mother cuckoo, who lays the egg in the, in the nest of a of another species, having tossed out at least one of the eggs of the, of the foster parent. And then the chick hatches out. Cuckoo chick hatches out, hatches out first, and it tosses the other eggs out. The special adaptation has a little hollow in its back, where it fits the egg, and it shovels its way up the back of the nest and heaves the egg out, and then it remains the only occupant of the only chick in the nest, and the foster parent doesn’t know it’s a cuckoo, and feeds it, and feeds it and feeds it, and feeds it, and the cuckoo chick grows often grotesquely bigger, not only bigger than a chick of the host, but bigger than the adult.

55:11 I mean, there’s a magnificent picture, seems like a tiny little wren feeding a gigantic great big monster of a, of a cuckoo apparently not realizing that it’s, this is not a wren, it’s, it’s something foreign. Well, the something about the cuckoo chick is manipulating the behavior of the host. It’s got power over the host. It’s the change in the host behavior. The, is, is a is a manifestation of genes in the cuckoo.

55:47 The cuckoo, the cuckoo, the cuckoo genes have phenotypic effect in the behavior of Iren, so the long reach of the gene, as I’ve called it, is reaching out not just within the body of as in the case of the worm in the ant, or the worm in the snails, reaching out across distance to the not much distance in this case, as to just a few inches, but then, if it can reach a few inches, what about 100 yards? What about the influence of a male bird singing on a female? We know from experimental evidence that a male canary singing, or a male dove doing a so-called bowku, there’s a sort of bowing motion they might read, actually, has changes the hormonal state of the female.

56:42 And, um, a female that’s been subject, a female dove that’s been subjected to male baukus, the ovary swells enormously compared to a controlled female which has not been subjected to male bowel cooing, which is a little tiny ovary. Save’s been done with canaries, so the male behavior, singing in the case of the canary, balcony in the case of the dove, causes a change in the female body. This is a Darwinian adaptation. Genes in the male have phenotypic effect in the body of the female.

57:20 This is the extended phenotype. It’s, we start off by just saying things like an inanimate object, like a bird’s nest, or a bowerbird’s bower. That’s a wonderful story, by the way. Barbara’s power, the, um, uh, these Australian birds, spa birds, which need to seduce females like a peacock but whereas a peacock has its advertisement in on its own body, thereby endangering itself because the great big peacock’s fan makes it very difficult for it to fly, but nevertheless it’s worth it, because it attracts females.

57:59 Well, the bowerbird, as it were, shifts the burden of its own body into this device made of grass, which sort of external peacock’s tail, which it decorates with blue or whatever species, blueberries or blue, even blue beer bottle tops, um, blue flower or red flowers, so they make this beautiful bower to attract females. So it’s just like an external peacock’s tail. This is an extended phenotype, whereas in the case of the peacock it’s part of the body.

58:31 In the case of the bowerbird it’s outside the body. Well, um, we, we go from an artifact which is an extended phenotype to a nightingale song, which I’m guessing, I mean, or a canary song, I’m not, I’m not guessing, um, where the, the phenotypic expression of the male genes shows itself in an actual change in the ovaries of the female. Male song changes the ovaries of the female. This is a wonderful example of extended phenotype. Um, so okay, well, that’s, that’s what I would say about that.

59:10 That’s a fascinating concept, and maybe more fascinating, maybe one of the most fascinating concepts you’ve written about, because it’s so extensive, and probably, well, I think so. I, I like to think that really the whole of animal communication can, all or much of it anyway, it can be seen as extended phenotype, and I see a sort of web of genetic influence reaching out a long, a long distance away from the, um, from the animal itself, starting with the sort of limited range of the, um, of the, the worm in the, in the ant, changing the behavior of the ant from, it’s actually inside its brain, to reaching out a hundred yards away, across, across a wood, and a male bird singing across a wood and influencing a female bird a hundred yards away. Right?

59:59 Now, if you apply that to humans, it’s difficult to reply to humans. I mean, it’s tempting to ask, are, is a building an extended phenotype? And the answer is, I don’t think it is, because, um, what about human behavior? Human behavior, well, possibly, yes. I mean, the, the building is not, because there are no genes that could be said to influence the str, the architecture.

1:00:33 I mean, if, if, if you could say that, um, a gene and an architect actually cause, it causes him to build a certain kind of architrave, whatever it is they do, um, then, then that would be. But it just doesn’t. The way it works, there may be genes that make a, an architect a good architect, because they have a gift for draftsmanship or something, but it doesn’t work. It’s not like a it’s not like a bird’s nest, where the shape of the nest is under genetic control.

1:01:01 So I, I hesitate to use the, I, the concept of the extended phenotype for humans, at least in that sense. Um, you might be able to do it in other, in other ways, perhaps, I suppose, whether that would be a charisma or a certain trait, something like that. You might, you might want to do, do it along those lines, that might cause the behavior in the opposite test, or the same sex, or get certain parts of that species to behave in different ways. I think you could, but you, you could, like, might make a case for that.

1:01:30 And I know you talked about the meme in The Selfish Gene, and obviously that’s been taken to whole other levels. Um, when you think about the meme, and, and you kind of identifying it back then, and where it’s come today, what, what do you make of the journey of the meme? Well, I really only wanted to make the point that, um, universal Darwinism, the, the general theory of Darwinism, is all about the survival of replicating entities. Replicating information, and DNA happens to be a very powerful replicator.

1:02:05 It’s the replicator which accounts for the whole of evolution on this planet. Um, but I want to make the point that it’s that Darwinism is probably more general than that, and uh, if there’s life elsewhere in the universe, I bet there is. Um, if we ever find it, it will be Darwinian life. I, I stick my neck out and predict that, and in which case there must be some equivalent of DNA. There must be a replicator, replicating information, which replicates not quite perfectly, and in which different variants of that replicator a differential success in passing themselves on, and something equivalent to that will be going on wherever there is life.

1:02:52 And then I said, well, maybe I can explain this without getting into too much science fiction, and say maybe there are other replicators other than DNA on this planet in our form of life. Once DNA has built up animals that have brains, then if those brains can pass information from one to another in the form of some kind of replicator, um, anything that’s imitated, it could be regarded as a, as a replicator analogous to DNA, and if there’s Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection among those replicators, uh, if something that is imitated, like a clothes fashion, or a hairstyle fashion, or a, a musical tune, right, or God is a meme, you said, yes, or yes, or, or an idea like God, an idea like life after death, or something like that. Then, um, if some memes have greater survival value than others, if they’re more likely to get imitated than others, if some tunes are more catchy than others, which, of course, they are, then they’re more likely to get passed on.

1:04:20 I mean, people will, you, you, catchy literally means catchy. It means you hear somebody whistling at you, and It, you get it in your head and usually whistle it, replicate it, and somebody else whistles it. Um, and, uh, so, um, clearly there are replicators in the the realm of imitation, and clearly some are better at replicating than others. There’s no, that’s not a, that’s, that is beyond doubt, so that could be the basis for a form of Darwinian selection.

1:04:52 Um, and, um, what else? Speech habits, I mean, um, there’s a, during my much shorter than my lifetime, during the last decade or so, um, people, especially young people, have taken up using the word awesome, um, just as the general form. It just means okay. It doesn’t mean also at all. It doesn’t.

1:05:16 It just means fine, you know, very, very good. I mean, um, if sometimes you say, um, you’re asked for your, um, your name, you give your name, awesome. It’s not all so much more. It’s just, just thanks. It’s just, it’s just, just okay.

1:05:32 That’s your name, good, take that off. Awesome. Um, well, um, that’s, that’s a meme. I mean, that’s something that, that’s spread, uh, the word basically, which means, uh, or, um, um, there are some people who cannot utter a sentence without basically. Um, other people can’t, after a sentence, without, like, I mean, these are all replicators, which get spread, uh, by imitation.

1:06:02 It’s not quite clear why, but, but that doesn’t matter why. The fact that they do, um, is enough to make them into a replicating meme, right? Um, and it’s, so there could be, and that’s always, in a sense, that almost has to be a form of Darwinian selection going on there, because it can be mutated as well, and exactly. Um, and, um, whether it gives rise to interesting evolution is another matter. I mean, the, the replicator, the genus replicator, gives rise to these astonishing edifices, like a rhinoceros or, or an elephant or an oak tree.

1:06:41 Um, and so the next question would be whether memetic selection gives rise to, to something like, which you could call an edifice, and, and that’s where I thought religion might come in, because, because religion is not just one meme. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a complex, a meme-plex, right? Um, and, um, so something like the Roman Catholic religion could be regarded as a kind of body, um, put together by a collection of memes, in the same way as, as a rhinoceros body is put together by a collection of cooperating, cooperating genes, important, by the way, in genes as well as memes, right?

1:07:19 Yeah, of course it would have to, because, you know, we were, you know, single-cell organisms. There wasn’t a religion, and then you had an edifice of a religion, so it must have been brought together by all these, but it didn’t really start until we got, till we got humans, right? And, and, and, um, there are probably other edifices as well, traditions and things you would regard as meme-plexes as well, I suppose. Yeah, I had, um, Dr. Jordan Peterson in this studio about three years ago, and he was talking a lot about the Bible and the stories in the Bible, and I was thinking to myself, you know, I’m not religious, and I don’t know why it keeps talking about the Bible, and he said, he said, well, the Bible is, is stories that are in the human DNA.

1:08:06 It’s just a reflection of the values of the human, and that’s the way he looked at the Bible, and I never looked at that before. I always looked at it as a bunch of tales that didn’t seem to make sense. Do you ever think that sometimes a religion can reflect things about the organism itself? I don’t know. Well, he’s got, he’s got a very odd idea, which is that, which is that, something he’s obsessed with, Jungian archetypes, and he’s got even an idea that DNA itself is a yoga type, and he thinks that when you see a work of art, ins, you see them all over the world, which looks like a snake’s, two snakes twine together, or something that looks like DNA.

1:08:45 He’s got this idea that somehow people have this ability to look inside their own cells and see DNA, and this has got to be just complete and utter nonsense. But you can see the appeal of somebody who loves the idea of archetypes. Right, I see what you mean, and so the fact that yeah, it’s weird, because you’re talking about memes, like you said, a religion is a collection of memes that cooperate over time. Maybe it started as one, as a superstition, or one to explain this.

1:09:18 Yeah, it kind of came, this thing that seems to give meaning to the organism, or explain the organism, something about itself. And so it’s interesting that your concept of the meme helps explain religion, which kind of flies in the face of evolution. Well, it, it, it doesn’t, in one sense, and it, it’s evolved, in it’s, in its, in itself, it’s evolved. I think I’d like to say it’s evolved by memetic selection, as opposed to genetic selection, and not everybody might see it that way, and some people might say religion’s evolved by cynical priests manipulating flocks to their own economic, or even sexual, advantage.

1:10:01 But I prefer to see it as a non-deliberate thing, at least partly, the religion itself. Yes, it is a great structure for power and controlling the individual. Well, it is, and it certainly has been used in that way historically. Yes, yeah, and again, I guess the references I was making to the royal family here was, is, you know, hundreds of years ago or a thousand years ago, by making that divine connection, it would be a great way for a family. This is, boy, yes, quite effective.

1:10:31 Yes, maybe less effective these days for people to buy in, but back then very good too. Yes, I mean, and again, that’s a meme that’s recreated. It’s a preposterous, I don’t think about it. I mean, it’s so self-serving, the idea that somehow divine right of things, this king rules by virtue of being anointed by God. I mean, it wasn’t astonishingly powerful.

1:10:53 What’s this, what amazes me is that how anybody could be so foolish to fall for it, but they did. But imagine if you’re the only people that can read and write and create printed texts. I know it is a great way to control masses that aren’t as educated. Yes, perhaps. Yeah, you mentioned life on other planets.

1:11:10 You know, we’re seeing these, this new Webb telescope that’s showing us all these incredible places everywhere. What do you think we’re going to find when I guess when we find life on other planets, do you think we’ll see it in your lifetime? I hope we do. I, I don’t know. I mean, I’m pretty convinced there is life elsewhere.

1:11:30 I think it’d be astonishing if that, if we were the only one. Does there have to be? No, it doesn’t they don’t have to be, because I mean, just suppose that the origin of life is a quite stupendously improbable event, just so improbable that it will only happen in one in 10 to the 22 planets, and the universe isn’t infinite. There are 10 to the 22 I mean, it, okay, let’s say 10, 10 to 10 to the 30. That’s more than there are in the observable universe.

1:12:14 And so if it did happen only once, that once is here, because here we are talking about it, so it’s not impossible that we are the only place in the universe where life has arisen. That would have the corollary that we’re wasting our time trying to work out how the origin of life happened, because it’s so improbable that you don’t get to replicate it. I don’t believe that for a moment, but it, but if if it was that improbable, then the only, then if there is only one planet in the universe where there is life, then of course it has to be here, and so that’s the anthropic principle.

1:13:02 But suppose that it’s not that improbable, but so improbable that there are only a billion life forms in the universe. Well, a billion is a tiny number compared to the number of planets, stars in the universe. So if there are only a billion life forms in the universe, then they could be so spaced out that they never get a chance to know each other. They’re just one there, as one there. I mean, they’re so far away that they, they cut, they don’t ever encounter each other.

1:13:41 They, they might by, by sheer luck encounter each other, but, but so that’s my pessimistic view. I suspect that there are, there is life elsewhere, but it may be so rare that we never encounter it. I, I very much hope we do encounter it, and I think it’s very worthwhile spending money on SETI, this search for extraterrestrial intelligence, in intelligence, because they’re doing it by radio, and radio telescopes, and it’s got to be intelligent life or it won’t have the technology to produce.

1:14:19 If, if we ever discovered physical life, we’ve actually, actually saw it enough by our eyes. If we find it elsewhere in the solar system, on Enceladus, or, right, somewhere or Titan, immediately that would mean that the universe is simply crawling with life. If, if, if it’s, if there isn’t twice in one solar system, then it’s got to be a highly probable event. And that will be very exciting, but it would only be sort of bacterial-type life. SETI, on the other hand, is looking for intelligent life, because only intelligent life could produce beams of, or broadcasting expanding shells of, of radio waves, and I think both enterprises are thoroughly worthwhile, and I thoroughly approve of exploring the universe not just, well, including to try to find life.

1:15:19 And the fact that it hasn’t happened so far could just mean that we haven’t developed the technology so far, and and with new telescopes we shall do it, and with spacecraft going to, uh, um, there’s a good, there’s a lobby of people wanting to go to Enceladus, where, where there’s looks, so there might be just a possibility of life. I think highly unlikely, but just possible, and I think it’s worth spending the money to go there and see. Right, and that’s kind of one of the last chapters of the book is you talk about us wanting to, to fly to other places and create, yes, systems, and you do dedicate the book of the Elon Musk, I think, who’s trying to go to Mars, and yes, you think that’s a good idea?

1:16:02 I do. That’s fascinating. I mean, I’m not sure about, about sending humans in, into space, because that’s, it enormously adds to the expense because of the, the safety factor, you need to bring them back, psychologically. Yes, but exploring space by instrumentation, by telescopes and by unmanned rockets and unmanned spacecraft, I thoroughly approve of, and insofar as humans are needed to do that, I approve of that too, and I, I believe in what I call in the last chapter of Flights of Fancy, I call it the outward urge, a phrase of John Wyndham, science fiction writer.

1:16:46 It’s one of the noblest features of the human spirit, is this urge to explore, and I, I make a, in that chapter, I make an analogy between the scientists urged to explore mentally and the great explorers of the past, like Leif Erikson and Christopher Columbus and Ferdinand Magellan, exploring the world, and now Elon Musk exploring, wanting to go to Mars and exploring space, and so on. I think it’s a, it’s a very, very noble human feature, the outward urge. Now explain this to me, because when I used to hear Elon talk about, you know, looking for Mars as a potential place, maybe for humans to live.

1:17:35 Well, yes, that’s right, because this is not, don’t put all your eggs in one basket, right? The evolution, we are, we are vulnerable on one, on one planet, and at any time life could be extinguished on any one planet, and one way this can happen is if we get hit by a projectile bigger than the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And that’s going to happen. I mean, it, it eventually, it will happen, long enough timeline, it may be that very likely that humans won’t be here anymore anyway by then, but in which case to have a two-planet civilization rather than a one-planet civilization immediately hugely increases your chance of one or other of them, right?

1:18:25 We’ll say why, of course, Mars just likes to be hit by, by an asteroid, but they won’t both be hit by the same one, right? So, and that has actually a resonance with another chapter in the book, about the Darwinian survival value of sending some of your offspring to distant places however hostile those places may be. There’s a mathematical argument which I like given that a parent has already survived long enough to reproduce, it must be in a pretty good place.

1:19:06 So the temptation might be to plant your offspring in the very same place, but in the long run that very same place is going to be hit by a catastrophe of some sort, like a forest fire, or an earthquake, or a flood, or something, and so sending some of your offspring to a distant place, however improbable it is that they’ll find a better place, nevertheless it’s bound to be better in the sense that that’s the sooner or later, the present place, however good it will be, it’s again, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Yeah, diversification, which means survival of the fittest. Yes, if you do all that, yes, and if we have people on Mars, we actually might survive as a species for the next million years, and we might not if we don’t but, well, I have to say survival of the fittest is not about differential species survival, but nevertheless the argument remains.

1:19:57 Yes, right, question for you, Richard. You were talking about extended phenotypes, for some reason in my mind I thought of a mobile phone and a mobile phone getting me to change my behavior as a human, and I just thought, how does extended phenotypes apply to a piece of technology that maybe is replicable and that can also change behavior? Is that slightly different than a meme? And then I do want to ask you a little bit about artificial intelligence as well.

1:20:25 I don’t quite get what you’re saying. What if there is a piece of technology that can also replicate itself oh well, and it’s sitting in my pocket. It can change the behavior of its host, and if it’s doing the right things, it can get me to replicate more of that, and I was just thinking of a piece of text. Well, yes, I wouldn’t say a mobile phone can do that, but, but I mean one I could imagine, von Neumann imagined a with a self-reproducing machine which could then evolve, and that, that, well, we we don’t have that at the moment.

1:21:03 What we do have, though, is artificial intelligence in computers, which it’s not actually a physical machine that’s being replicated, but it’s information that’s being that potentially could be replicated, and yes, I mean, I think it’s interesting, and some people regard it as with fear, other people with it with enthusiasm. And you think a human can be one day recreated in a piece of technology? Technically it should be able to, if it just recreates the biology.

1:21:38 Well, yes, I mean, technically, I mean, it’s not totally impossible, and there have been people like Arthur C. Clarke who’ve said, if a thing can be done, eventually it will be done. And I think if you’re talking about downloading a human brain into a computer, I think we’re a long way from that. But you think it’s possible? I hesitate to say that anything is impossible, unless it’s logically impossible, which it isn’t, but I, I think it’s, I think artificial intelligence has got a long way to go in different directions from downloading a human brain.

1:22:22 I think it’s more likely to be take off in its own right. Okay, I think Elon believes that we could be living in a simulation. Do you ever think about that? Well, that’s an interesting idea, and it’s, it’s being promoted by a philosopher at Oxford actually called Nick Bostrom. It’s very hard to disprove, and Nick Bostrom thinks it’s not only hard to disprove, he thinks it’s highly likely.

1:22:44 His, his version of that idea is that the simulation is not a different life form on another planet or something, but is our, is our own future, that that our own future, which may be artificial intelligence, reaches the point where it makes a simulation of its own past, of the process that gave rise to it, including us, including the whole of evolution, including us, and it is, it is hard to disprove. Now, I’ve even thought of a wrinkle on that, which is you just mentioned mobile phone. When, when I would pull out my phone to my 102-year-old mother just before she died, and would do things like ask Siri something, or or, you know, show her a map of where she was born or something.

1:23:47 She was, but how could all that information be in that tiny little thing? Well, it’s not in, it’s in the cloud. It’s, it’s probably, it’s in a computer in California or somewhere, and the information is brought into this little tiny thing in your pocket. Well, if Nick Bostrom is right that we’re living in a simulation, We, it is a bit of a baffling mystery how the human brain, this very small skull, can manage to do so much. I mean, when you think about what it can do, which computers can’t do.

1:24:33 Maybe it gets its information from a cloud. If, if we’re in a simulation, there’s no reason why the information should all be inside there. It, it could be in the giant computer that’s running the simulation, and so I’d, I rather like that little wrinkle on the on the the theory that we’re living in, in the Nick Bostrom theory. I first met the theory in a lovely science fiction book called Counterfeit World, by Daniel F. Galouye.

1:25:07 Lovely. He is one of my favorite science fiction authors. And it’s, it’s an adventure story, but which is set in the in the eye with the idea that we’re living in a simulation. Does that mean that the concept of evolution, of evolution, might be simulated as well? Well, I think, however, even if you do think that we’re in a simulation created by an intelligence, which may be ourselves in the future, or our computers in the future, or maybe an extraterrestrial one.

1:25:41 Nevertheless, you cannot get away from the need to say that at some point that civilization has evolved. It doesn’t, it can’t just spring into existence. This is the, this is the main my most fundamental creed, I suppose, that you cannot get complexity from nothing. It’s got to come from somewhere, and the only way it can come is by slow, gradual, incremental steps. So even if we are the product of some superior civilization, that superior civilization has got to have evolved, and if that one’s product, the product, an even more superior one, it sooner or later that’s got to be brought to an end in an, in an evolutionary process.

1:26:28 So when people say to me, don’t you think there may be beings in the universe so superior to us that we would call them gods? I say, yes, we might call them gods, but then it’s very different from the kind of god that didn’t need to evolve. Those superior beings in space, if they, if we ever meet them, maybe we would bow down to them as gods, but they would be, they would have to have evolved in the first place. You can’t just magic things into existence.

1:26:58 They’ve got to have come from some incremental process. Right, and that’s why you’re convinced, if you find life on any other planet, it’s going to go by these fundamental laws. Yes, it’s got, it’s got to have evolved by gradual degrees, which may be different in detail from ours, but we’ll still have the same incremental and, I think, Darwinian in some sense, Darwinian steps. Yeah. You, you like science fiction.

1:27:28 Have you always, and why? I haven’t read all that much science fiction. I like, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Daniel Galouye, as I said. Fred Hoyle, but I’m not a great connoisseur.

1:27:42 A bit, I’ve never subscribed to the science fiction magazines. I just read a few books. Okay, what book is next for you? The Genetic Book of the Dead, which the title is a play on the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but it, what it’s, it’s about is, if you look at an animal it is the product of natural selection of its ancestors. And I want to make the case that it is a description.

1:28:14 Its body and its genes are a description of the ancestral worlds in which, it’s in which, then, such as when were selected to put it together. Now, if you look at a highly camouflaged animal, like a desert lizard, which has a beautiful picture of stones, pebbles, and sand on its back, put together by natural selection, that is a description of a desert landscape painted on the back of this lizard by natural selection of its ancestors. You can read desert from that animal.

1:28:59 You can actually read a description of the ancestral world in which those animals’ ancestors lived, desert, and similarly for a moth that’s on a, for a frog that’s on tree bark that looks exactly like the lichen of a tree. That’s description of ancestral worlds. Well, if the description on the surface of the animal is a detailed description of its ancestral worlds, the interior of the animal must be no less a description of the ancestral world, just less obvious.

1:29:40 The surface of the animal is extremely obvious to us because our eyes are used to looking at things, but our eyes are not used to looking at the interior of cells, and animals, so we don’t implant, so we don’t immediately read it in the transparent way that we read the external surface, but zoologists of the future will be able to read the every detail of the every, the whoop and wolf of the animal. Every detail will be legible to them using more sophisticated instruments than eyes to construct the ancestral worlds in which natural selection shaped shape the animal, and especially when you look at genes which we’re just beginning to do now. It’s interesting when I hear you talk about your works, as in that one is a reference to the Book of the Dead, and the book you talked earlier that the children could read.

1:30:47 You start with a myth that’s told in many cultures around the world. Titles like The Selfish Gene. I mean, clearly you’re an excellent scientist, but you’re also very good at marketing. Do you think about when you write a book that I need to find a way to capture an audience with curiosity in order for them to then digest the ideas, consciously or subconsciously? Well, I suppose any writer ought to be putting themselves in the position of the reader and thinking how to how to influence the reader.

1:31:23 I suppose, yes, I mean, I love the English language, and I’ve practiced how to deploy it. Did anyone teach you how to be a good writer in that sense? I think about that I mean, I, because most scientists aren’t good writers per se. There wasn’t an English Department at MIT. I know that.

1:31:47 Every Oxford student has to write an essay every week. There you go, and in my time we had to read it loud, and so we had to I suppose get a feel for the cadences of language. How does that change writing when you have to read it aloud and from the feedback perspective? And then I think if you make it a bit of a performance, I mean, you don’t drone it. You, you try to read it with expression, and I suppose that helps to give color to it.

1:32:24 Nowadays they tend to hand them essays, which is more hard work for the tutor, and in some ways it might be less educational from the point of view of fostering a sense of English style. Perhaps. Do you think that made your books better with the fact that you had to read them out in the beginning and change your writing style? I wouldn’t be surprised. I would be surprised.

1:32:47 One thing I noticed with Flights of Fancy is it’s so readable. It feels like anyone can pick this up and read it. It doesn’t feel like you’re talking down to me. It feels like you’re engaging me in this very interesting, mysterious story without talking like I said above me or making things complicated. Is that an intentional writing style?

1:33:06 Of course. I mean, every author ought to want to be understood. I suspect there are some authors who don’t want to be understood because they sort of feel that if they are unintelligible, they’ll be thought to be profound, and that’s what that’s in that’s a hypocrisy which lies at the root of, I fear, some academic disciplines, right? So you always, virtue of obscurity, which is which is pernicious, so you always make sure you don’t do that. You want to make that absolutely.

1:33:34 You want them to see right. Anyone can pick this up and see right through you to see the idea. Certainly, and language doesn’t get in there. You, you open a page of Charles Darwin, and you can immediately see this is somebody who really, really wants to be understood, right? And how would one not?

1:33:50 But, but there are plenty of people, not that well. There are, there are people who positively don’t want to be understood. They want to be thought to be profound. I’ve heard people say that writing is rewriting. Do you agree with that?

1:34:04 Not quite sure what it means, but what do you think they mean by that? Is that if you want to craft something that is a piece of work that can have meaning, it means you need to continually refine. Oh, of course, absolutely. I mean, almost ever all my time has been rewriting. Yes, okay, and I’ve also heard writers that have been on the show said that writing a book is the loneliest thing.

1:34:34 Yes. Sometimes when I’ve written a paragraph that I’m particularly pleased with, I, I want to share it with somebody. confessed to that, and do you, or do you hold off? Yeah, I do. Okay, but can it be lonely when you’re inside your head trying to get out an idea you have, and only you can beat yourself up?

1:34:56 Oh yes, I suppose that’s right. I do. When I’m writing, I do imagine it being read by a particular individual. It’ll be a different individual, like an avatar, certain type of person. Yes, and I don’t do it consciously.

1:35:15 I don’t say, today I’m going to read this through the eyes of so-and-so, but it just happens that I am imagining that person. Oddly enough, I do it sometimes if I’ve just sent a chapter to a particular colleague, and I’ve pressed send, and it’s gone to him. It’s too late to change it as far as he’s concerned, but I nevertheless then read it again through his eyes, and say, oh, I wonder what he, wonder what he’ll make of that. Right? I should have heard that better, you know, and then I, then I do change it.

1:35:50 So that’s one of the avatars that the one way to get to get one, which is that, but it also just may happen to be someone I’ve just spoken to on the phone. He’s in my, or she’s in my head, and so I imagine I imagine her reading it, and and then say, well, okay, she wouldn’t like that. I better change that, and will you ever stop writing books, or for you is it kind of like water and air and food and writing? Oh, I’ve no intention of stopping. It’s part of who you are.

1:36:31 Yes, I think so. Yes, expressing ideas, thinking of ideas, coming out with new ways to present these ideas. Yes, exactly. Okay, what’s it like being 81? It’s pretty much like being any other age, actually.

1:36:44 I don’t feel any different. That’s amazing. What, you mentioned your stroke earlier, that was six years ago. How did that change your life at all? Well, not a lot.

1:36:56 As I said, it makes me clear my throat sometimes, because it makes me croak sometimes. And no, I think there’s not a lot. I mean, like, I can’t bend certain that finger. I can bend fine, right? That one I can’t bend further than that, so that’s not a big not a big.

1:37:18 And then was there a temporary paralysis at the time that you had to get back and rehab? Not a lot. No, no, no, not really. I mean, just at the moment of the stroke that there was. I mean, I couldn’t control my arms properly.

1:37:29 And was it scary? Yes. It would make you look at life differently. After? Not really.

1:37:34 I mean, I was, I was just grateful to the ambulance people and the doctors and the nurses who rallied around very quickly, and and took me to hospital very quickly, and and explained what was going on, and I was out of hospital in about four days, and I had physiotherapy after that, but I’m not sure how necessary that was. Okay. And what are the next 10 years looking like for you? You’re writing this book. You’ve got the foundation, you actively teach and tour.

1:38:11 No, I’ve retired from Oxford. I suppose, I, I mean, I kind of go around the world giving talks and things, and doing interviews like this, and foundation is going fine. That’s the foundation in America has merged with the Center for Inquiry, which is a much larger organization, much better financed organization, which is partly about, sort of, the free-thinking atheism, but it’s also about skepticism of nonsense, like, oh, telepathy and water divining and anything that you can’t, I mean, well, you know, it’s the wrong way to put it really.

1:38:59 It’s skepticism in the sense of doing experiments to test whether these things work. So we don’t say water divining is nonsense. We say, let’s test it. Right, you do a double-blind trial so the water diviner doesn’t know where you put the experimental water, and wave, wave, you have, say, a platform under which there are certain places where there’s water and other places where there isn’t, and you have challenged them to find it, and they’re all confident that they can do it, because it’s always worked before, but then when it’s, when it’s double-blind, when there’s no possible way they can know where the water is, they can’t do it.

1:39:39 Right? So we do do experiments like that to kind of expose these things. Yes. And if one of these things turns out to work, that’s fine. I mean, and then it would be great.

1:39:51 If, if an experiment on telepathy under double-blind conditions really did work, then that would be terrific. Homeopathy, well, that one actually can’t work, because there’s no difference between the control and the experimental. But other forms of alternative medicine, if you test it, and if it works, it ceases to be alternative. It becomes just medicine. Right, so your foundation drills down to the science?

1:40:23 Yes, exactly. Yeah, and tries to show that. Yes, this is the Center for Inquiry, which is quite, which is what we’ve merged with, so we’re now on under the umbrella of the Center for Inquiry. Are you ever surprised that humans continue to concoct these things that are not based in science? And do you think that 10,000 years from now that the Center for Inquiry will be just as busy as it is now?

1:40:45 It astonishes me that that I don’t know. I think people seem to have a desire to believe things without, I mean, you, you, it takes a certain leap to recognize that you may be fooling yourself. Right? We, we are there’s such a lot of random things going on in the in the world, and I mean I I know it from taking pills that I suffer from restless leg syndrome, which is an annoying complaint, and, and, um, all sorts of things sometimes seem to work, another and, and it’s because rather like we were talking about earlier before we started the interview, pigeons uh, superstitiously responding to random, the random delivery of a reward, and the pigeon, so to speak, thinks that what it did before the reward was delivered, like preen its left wing or something, was what did it.

1:41:45 And we are all susceptible. We’re a pattern-seeking species, and we, we tend to see things that aren’t really there, and we tend to miss things that aren’t really there. So these two types of error, what psychologists call type one and type two errors, we’re very susceptible to them, and and we’re constantly seeing pattern when there isn’t any pattern. We say we think that you can divine the future by looking in the tea leaves, and or looking at people’s palms, or and it takes a a scientific leap of skepticism to recognize that that has to be actually tested properly without your having any possibility of influencing it or knowing what’s behind the scenes.

1:42:33 Yeah, we, we search out the mystical or humans. Do they tend to do? Do you think that’s because of our mortality, that we’re always looking for something to ultimately explain that? And I suppose it could be, but I think it doesn’t, it doesn’t have to be that. I mean, I think, I think that we, where pattern seeking is a good thing to do because patterns are important, but it’s very difficult to steer this middle course between being fooled when there isn’t a pattern and overlooking when there is.

1:43:03 Right, you know, before we started, I asked you about being in Berkeley in 1968 and what it was like then with the protests, and you know, must have been an incredible place, and you said to me, well, back then we seemed to be, the youth was fighting for freedom of speech, and sometimes today feels like they’re not fighting. This is a freedom of speech. Exactly. What do you make of that? And sometimes the technology that goes around that, I’m very depressed by people who try to the very people who, when I was in Berkeley, the leftists, well, the Free Speech Movement, FSM, in Berkeley in the 1960s, and I was closing down freedom of speech, stopping people speaking, cancelling people who because you think you’re going to disagree with them, feeling insecure, unsafe, unsafe if somebody comes to the campus and says something that that I don’t like, I’ll feel unsafe.

1:43:57 I mean, how pathetic is that? What do you make of that? What’s happening here? There’s a meme that’s spreading. Yeah, I mean, it’s an interesting thought, actually.

1:44:05 Yes, you could maybe do a memetic analysis of it. It’s some type of evolution because it’s replicating. Yes, it’s going in one direction. Quite true. It is a bit worrying.

1:44:14 Yes, you must have colleagues, or maybe even yourself, that have been cancelled from speaking at universities? Yes. It’s worrying. My daughter’s about to go to university. I’ve encouraged her to go, and I look at what’s happening there, and I’m thinking, I’m just sending her into the in, into the arena, yes, and without a good firm head on her shoulders.

1:44:32 It seems like a very difficult place for a youngster to kind of grow up, maybe not exposed to ideas, or typically a university is where you would be exposed to. The university is precisely where you should be exposed to ideas, especially ideas that are maybe unpalatable to you. Yeah, yeah. And so that concerns you when we see freedom of speech? I mean, it concerns me very much indeed.

1:44:54 Yes, and sometimes the technology platforms that can, that can magnify that or shut that down. How come something like Twitter, that’s kind of controlled by people in Silicon Valley with certain types of values, is now kind of exporting those values to the world and can magnify certain points of view to where it just, it can take over? Yeah, I’m not sure about. I mean, the, the thing about Twitter is the awful people who go on it, rather than the people who control it.

1:45:21 I think I try to stay off of it. It’s, it’s sometimes not a pleasant place to be. Just a couple final questions. First of all, what is the best place for them to pick up the book? Where’s the best place?

1:45:32 I know it’s on Amazon and probably your website as well. Oh, um, I would have thought all good bookshops as well. But, but Amazon certainly. Yes, yeah, and it’s beautiful, colors and everything like that. I was just finishing and trying to ask a few questions of my guest at the end, and I’m gonna ask you this one: if you could pick up a phone and call up the 20-year-old Richard Dawkins and give that young man some advice?

1:45:58 I guess you would be at college at this point. What were you, were you at, oh, gosh, I mean, but if you could say something to him, a piece of advice, what would you say? What was that? 20-year-old Richard, like, I think I would say, well, don’t make the mistakes I made, because that’s obvious. What mistakes did you?

1:46:19 Well, then I thought you’re going to ask that, and it’s hard for me to say. I mean, I think, be more confident than I was. Believe in yourself more. It took me a while to be confident enough to say what I thought. I thought I my 18-year-old self certainly just thought I had to say what other, what I’ve been taught, and and I think soon you realize that you should have some confidence in developing your own.

1:46:53 I wouldn’t want to say opinion, but your own abilities. Believe in yourself, but I, I hate the question, the question about what advice would I give? I actually once, was taking part in a television documentary, presenting a television documentary, in which one part of the ideas was what I would say to my, a clone of me who would be born a thousand years hence. The idea was to take my, my genome sequence, put it on a disk, and bury it for a thousand years, and then and then in the television fantasies, somebody would dig it up in a thousand years, build a clone of me, and what what would I say to him?

1:47:40 And it was a similar question. I don’t like the question. Yeah, it’s a strange question. I’m trying to think if you, you know, will recreate a thousand years from now, and then all of a sudden you saw yourself giving you advice. I mean, should you just turn yourself well?

1:47:54 Rather more he would give advice to me in the light of what is known, of course. I mean, by then, a thousand years’ time, they’ll know so much more. I would be fascinated to listen to what he had to say. And how old were you until you became confident? Was it like 27, 28, 30?

1:48:08 Oh, no, not really. Until no, maybe about then. Yes, okay, okay. Just on that same note, best advice you ever received, could it come from a professor or your dad or somebody in writing or anything? Does it stick out?

1:48:24 Is something that someone said to you that that was profound or helped you in your career? I wouldn’t say advice. No, I mean, no, I mean, I’ve learned a huge amount from books and from professors and people, but it’s more about science, and often, but not about as it were self-help-type advice. Yeah, okay. And then I guess the last part of that is there’s a 20-year old right now that’s watching us or listening to us from all different parts of the world, growing up in a world today of technology or free speech being questions, or all these things like that.

1:48:55 What do you think is important for them to pay attention to? Evidence. Um, evidence is more important than opinions. Don’t believe anything unless there’s evidence for it, and never believe what somebody tells you as a result of their personal opinion, or what’s said in some book or other, or tradition. Always seek for the actual evidence for it.

1:49:27 Importance of free speech. Before we just talked about that. Don’t be too scared to, don’t, I mean, be adventurous. Be prepared to take risks. I don’t mean physical risks with your life, but, but risks of hearing things that you, that you might find distasteful.

1:49:54 Don’t cross it yourself. Free speech is an interesting one, because if you’re really practicing freedom of speech, you have to be willing to listen to something that you disagree with, precisely yes, especially as a university, which is just where that should be going. Yeah, it’s so important to get comfortable being uncomfortable when someone says something that challenges you, or yeah, or bothers you, or a counterfactual hypothetical possibility. Imagine that it were true that something which isn’t true, but suppose it were, what would that, what would be the consequences of that?

1:50:30 There are some people just can’t handle that, because it won’t even entertain it. Just close it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Richard, I’ve had so many guests on this show that when they sat in that chair, I thought they were out of their minds, and three years later I, I was believing in 70 80 of what they said. Uh-huh, and yes, and when I, and this happened repeatedly, repeatedly, and it just shows me how close-minded I am, or how my initial reaction to a new idea is one of aversion, but when I give it time, I find out that I’m actually changing.

1:51:01 Uh-huh, often times, yeah, and so even if I’m aware of it, sometimes I still have to convince myself to stay open to it, because I know it’ll turn me into a more evolved person. Interesting, yes, I can be open to those ideas. And so that’s why we have these conversations, is to where people can hear a nuanced point of view that you can’t get in say one message or one meme. And so yeah, so I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, me too.

1:51:29 Um, the book is Flights of Fancy. It’s a beautiful book. ages eight to eighty. I’m going to take my printed copy home to my boys, five and six. I’m gonna read it to them, and they’re gonna love the images, and it’s gonna get them fascinated about flight, and Tanya, these boys know the name of every animal in the zoo.

1:51:46 That’s terrific. You know, I’m from San Diego, California, where we have a sea world, and one time there was like a killer whale. I said, this is a killer whale, and my son was five, and he said, that’s an orca. That’s very good. Yeah, corrected me.

1:51:58 So they know all the dinosaurs, so they’re going to love this book as well. So thank you for all of your great work, and thank you for continuing to write, and please come back when the next book is ready. Thank you very much indeed. All right, very much appreciate you, sir, and we’ll see you next time. Okay, all right, thank you everybody, take care you