Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its bang? And what does it tell you about its long dead relatives? Today, we have the extraordinary privilege of exploring these topics and more with one of our greatest living treasures, Richard Dawkins, one of the world's most influential and thought provoking scientists.

Genes are predicting the future because they will not survive unless they get the prediction right.

Richard is a renowned evolutionary biologist, zoologist, and author, a prominent figure in the new atheism along the other so called horsemen of the apocalypse. Past guest Sam Harris and the late great Daniel Dennett. He's well known criticism of creationism and intelligent design.

You can't opt out of science be because it goes against a traditional faith.

In our wildly ranging conversation, we explored the evolution of sex drive and the aesthetic appreciation of genetics, as well as the way genetics intersect in theoretical and experimental science. We talk about the potential evolutionary outcomes of artificial intelligence as it augments humanity. We talk about what it's like to be a scientist in a scholar with a career ranging over 50 years. Then we encounter along our journey some of the greatest figures in all of science. I know you're gonna love this episode, so let's go.

So would you do us a favor of doing what you're never supposed to do, which is to judge the book by its covers? Tell us the name, choice, the subtitle, and cover of art.

Well, here can can you see the book there? Or Yeah. Is that visible? Yes. Okay. Yeah. It will be. So that's the front cover, and that that's the back cover. It's called the genetic book of the dead. It's a kind of play on the Egyptian books of the dead which were, books that were buried with important people in ancient Egypt and as a sort of guide book to guide them into the into the afterlife.

The connection is pretty tenuous, but I suppose you could say that the genes Clarke, guiding the animal into, how to propagate the genes into not exactly the afterlife, but into the next the next generation. The subtitle is a Darwinian reverie, and it means it's a kind of meditation on evolution. It's it's not a particular one theme. It's a it's a meditation by the author of The Selfish Gene 40 or so years later. And not, climbing down from The Selfish Gene, but expanding in various directions. The the art on the back cover is, cobbled together from the art in the book which is, drawn by Jana Lentsover, in color, computer art in color. The theme of the book, insofar as there is a single theme, is this. The animal, any animal, and its genome can be regarded as a description of a written description, a book about the ancestral worlds in which the animal's ancestors survived.

The animal is a product of Darwinian natural selection of its ancestor's genes. Those genes that were successful in the past in getting themselves passed on are the ones that survive to the present, obviously. And therefore, they can be regarded as a kind of description of those selection pressures, those worlds in which the ancestors survived and reproduced, were successful in reproduction, successful in attracting mates, successful in rearing offspring. The book begins the the first illustration in the book is a is a picture of a Mojave Desert lizard which has its desert environment painted on its back, so to speak. It looks as though somebody's come along and literally painted the desert stones and sand on the back of the lizard. And you can see the same kind of thing in any camouflage animal, camouflaged Arthur camouflage, snail a camouflaged frog, etcetera. Natural selection has favored those ancestral animals that resembled their background, and in some cases, the resemblance is uncannily exact. It's really remarkable.