Richard Dawkins On Genes, Memes, AI, Religion, and Life Beyond Earth

40%, 45% of the american people believe literally in Adam and Eve. Believe literally that the world is only 6000 years old. I mean, that's a shocking figure and you can't duck out of it.

Imagine being able to decipher the history of every creature ever to have lived on earth based on its evolution. Why are men's sect drives so powerful? Why does this peculiar desert lizard have such intricate patterns on its back? 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 guests 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 because it goes against a traditional faith.

In our widely ranging conversation, we explore 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 and a scholar with a career ranging over 50 years. And 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. Richard, I've always wanted to ask you, why is the sex drive in men so strong? I mean, surely we could have gone through the replication of the species if it were 10% less powerful, maybe even 25% less powerful. I mean, what accounts for the behavior in men such that they will copulate with female angler fishes in ways that allow them to be digested or ingested into their female target? Or, say, a male human being who buys a social media app when he already has a quarter trillion dollars and eleven or twelve children.

What is make? What is the reason, the biological necessity that the male sex drive is as strong as it is?

I think perhaps you're misled when you say something like replicate the species. It's not about replicating the species. It's about replicating genes. And genes that are in males have a different way of getting themselves into the next generation than genes that are in females. And because sperms are so numerous and eggs are rather few in number, eggs are economically valuable. Well, endowed with food, sperms are not, and therefore they can afford to be much more numerous. What this means is that in general, throughout the animal kingdom, males can pass on their genes by mating with lots of females, whereas with a female, mating with lots of males doesn't benefit her, because once she's in a mammal, pregnant, let's say, talk about mammals, there's no benefit in mating with another male, whereas in the male's case, once he's mated with a female, there is some benefit in mating with another one, because you've got lots of sperms to go round. And therefore the male sex drive is when there's any difference between them.

The male sex drive does tend to be stronger, males tend to be more promiscuous, tend to be more open to mating with lots of different females. Males tend to be less fussy about who they mate with, etcetera. So that's, I think, the answer. It's about gene replication, not species replication.

And if it were diminished by a few percent, would that affect the relative fecundity of replication of genes? Or is that level that we have it at as males? Does that seem to be a necessity, or could it be diminished a bit?

It varies from species to species. I mean, not all species are promiscuous. In the males, there are many species in which the sexes contribute equally to reproducing and to nurturing the young. And that's different. I mean, different species differ according to their ecological circumstances. So you're talking about diminishing. Yes, it does happen. It happens.

In some species, monogamous species, it is diminished. Yes.

We in physics, and especially our friend Sir Roger, have looked at the possibility of the destruction of information, what's called the information paradox of black holes, where there's actually pretty vehement disagreements, agreement between scientists on whether or not information is truly conserved, or can it be destroyed? And hawking radiation plays a significant role in that? Can genetic information be destroyed? Richard, is there a sense in the same way that at some level, you cannot destroy genes any more than you can destroy information, even when you throw it into a black hole?

I think it's less philosophically interesting than in the case of the physics you're talking about. The information in DNA is preserved in living organisms over millions of years. But if you want to actually look at the DNA itself, ancient DNA people who, for example, dig up neanderthal people and look at their DNA that decays. So there's almost certainly no hope of Jurassic park of actually getting dinosaur DNA. It decays. You're talking about 10,000 years, maybe 100,000 years, but not millions of years. So, yes, it does decay.

Some have suggested that DNA is sort of the nucleator, the originator of life in some sense. And I do want to talk to you about that. I'm here at UC San Diego, wherever Jeffrey and Margaret Burbage, the late, great Burbage duo, used to work. And they would bring, quite frequently, Fred Hoyle, who, as you know, is a proponent of panspermia, which I always remind my listeners, if you're young, it sounds dirty, but it's not a dirty word. The notion of origin of life is obviously a question. I always point out it's not exactly related to life itself, right? I mean, I can study cosmology, the evolution of the universe, without knowing exactly how it came about. In fact, we don't know how it came about exactly. Can you say something about origin of life? Is that possible to divine or to read the genetic book of the Dead and learn about the origin of life itself? Or is it merely.

Not merely. It's a huge topic, obviously, but is the genetic book of that are the encryptions and encoding and the carving of natural selection? Does that not have the ability to penetrate the firewall of the origin of life itself?

There has to have been originally a self replicating entity like DNA. That has to have been the start. Once you've got a self replicating entity, then you have the capacity for darwinian evolution to get going. But it cannot have been DNA. DNA is what's been called a high tech replicator. It needs a sophisticated infrastructure of cellular machinery to copy itself, and so that wouldn't have been available. So there has to have been a forerunner, a kind of John the Baptist molecule, a forerunner which was capable of replicating without sophisticated copying machinery. It may not ever be possible to definitively prove one or the other.

The currently most favored theory probably is it was RNA, which, as you know, is related to DNA, but is a bit different. The reason why DNA can't be the origin is that it requires enzymes, catalysts in order to replicate the catalyst. The enzymes that it requires are proteins, and proteins require DNA. So we got a catch 22. RNA is a moderately good replicator and a moderately good enzyme. DNA is a superb replicator and is not an enzyme at all. Protein is a superb enzyme is not a replicator at all. So protein and DNA are great partners, but neither of them can do the job that the other one can do.

RNA can do both. So RNA, in a rudimentary kind of way, can act as a catalyst and it can even catalyze its own replication. So the RNA, so called rna world theory, is a good candidate for something like what must have gone on in the origin of life. I think all I would prepare proud to say is that the origin of life must have been the origin of a self replicating molecule. Self replicating without the need for sophisticated machinery and therefore without the cat 22. I suppose we know roughly when it was. I mean, since the earth itself is, what, four and a half billion years old, and the first fossils are 3.8 or so billion years. So somewhere between those two dates must have been when it happened.

You mentioned Fred Holl and panspermia. I wouldn't rule out panspermia, but I would rule out Fred Hoyle's reason for wanting it. I mean, Fred Hoyle thought it was too improbable to have arisen on earth, and therefore you needed to have panspermia. Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, also in San Diego, played around with the idea of directed panspermia, the idea that actually life on earth was seeded by an intelligent life form elsewhere in the universe. I think they were tongue in cheek. I don't think they really believed it. But it was an interesting idea to sort of toy with.

Yeah. I had Thomas Cech, winner of the Nobel Prize for the catalytic properties of RNA, on, and he and I definitely came to the agreement that RNA is much more interesting and useful. He was almost trash talking DNA, but Nobel Prize winners are. Want to do that, I guess the argument I've always made. I'd love to run this by you, if you'll indulge me for a moment. But when we look at Mars, Mars is fairly similar to Earth in size. It's not too smaller, but it's not microscopic in comparison. It's in the so called Goldilocks zone of the Earth.

It has exchanged materials with the Earth for literally billions of years. I actually have a fragment of Mars here, which I would give you if we were in person. Yeah. And I give out other. I give out meteorites to my listeners who are listening and enjoying the show. But I point out that I have a Mars meteorite, which means that Mars has a lot of earth meteorites on it and probably a lot more. And some of those could have carried genetic material. But the fact that we don't see life on Mars, and yes, we haven't explored every square millimeter of it to know that.

But it seems pretty probable that at least the surface of Mars is not inhabited by macroscopic life form forms. Can that be seen as sort of a. An estimate or be used to estimate in a bayesian sense, how hard it is for life? We always hear about how easy life is to start. Yes, as you just said, once it got kicked off. But can we use just the other data point? We have so few data points, and we have no obvious data that suggests life is abundant in the universe other than the probability that it could be so. But that's not an argument. So what would you make of these? Of an argument that we haven't discovered life with all these technology? It's actually, maybe it's a lot harder to get started than we naively might have thought.

If we found life on Mars or Enceladus or anywhere in the solar system, then you do your bayesian statistics and you immediately say, right, that means life is, the universe is crawling with life. I mean, it's immediately, it's a huge data point to change the estimate of the likelihood of life being elsewhere, provided it's a separate life form. I mean, you'd have to look at its genetic system. If it uses DNA, especially if it uses the same genetic code, then it's been transferred by a meteorite going either from Earth to Mars or from mars to Earth. A key question would be to look at its genetic code and say, first, is it DNA? Second, does it have the same genetic code? If it has the same genetic code, it's far too improbable that that would arise spontaneously twice over. That must mean contamination. If it has a different genetic code, and I stick my neck out and say, there must be a genetic code of some sort, and I think I'd stick it so far as to say it must be digital. But it doesn't necessarily have to be quaternary.

It doesn't necessarily have to be binary. It could be octal. I mean, there are various other possibilities, but if it's different, then immediately we know that life is common rather than rare. Now, what's the chance? I mean, could it be that we are literally unique? Could it be that we are the only life form in the universe? Well, I think yes. I mean, we can't disprove that. If you want to believe that we're the only life form in the universe, then that immediately commits you to the belief that the origin of life on this planet was a quite stupendously improbable event, because the sheer number of available planets in which life could have started is so huge. That means that when we think about theories for the origin of life. We are not looking for a plausible theory.

We're looking for a highly implausible theory. Because if there's a plausible theory, then the universe has got to have a lot of life forms we don't know. But if you're the kind of person who thinks that we are unique in the universe, then be aware that you are committed, therefore, to the belief that the origin of life on this planet is so implausible, is so improbable, that any theory that a chemist comes up with has got to be vanishingly implausible. And that's an interesting kind of paradoxical result.

Scientific advances are often frightening as well as exciting. An example of this is Elon Musk's new Neuralink, a brain computer interface designed to assist paralyze patients in controlling technology with their thoughts. While this technology holds immense promise for restoring movement and communication, ethical concerns linger around safety, privacy, and the potential long term effects. Despite the controversy, Neuralink is planning upcoming trials in more and more patients, aiming for high single digits by the end of the year. If successful, this could mark a significant step towards revolutionizing humanity. Computer interaction I love staying up to date on news, especially related to science, technology, and artificial intelligence. And with the rapid speed of today's news cycle, it's crucial to stay informed and trust where you're getting your information.

I'm excited.

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Last week I spoke with a neighbor of yours, George F. Statue, who's at Cambridge University. I guess you guys aren't neighbors, but.

Well, he was an Oxford.

George is eminent. That's right. Yes, he is an eminent cosmo. Yeah, we've poached him for one of our. As an advisor for our observatory in Chile. But he quoted something that startled me, and it was a quote from Francis Crick, who you mentioned earlier. This is George summarizing what Francis Crick said. And then I want your reaction.

So this is very many meta layers, Richard. I hope you'll indulge me.

Okay, sure.

Francis said. Yeah. Francis said that if your theory agrees with all the data, it's bound to be wrong. How do you react to that? Are there theories that are too good?

That seems to be typically sort of provocative? I mean, you could say it's a. It's a useless theory or something like that, but it's not bound to be wrong. I mean, that can't be right. I think he was just being provocative.

Yeah, that would not surprise me. Although not as provocative as Jim Watson. Right. I want to talk about artificial intelligence and so forth. But before I do, I'd like you to, if you're willing to indulge me in another one of my Abba questions, where I ask you to, to not say sing dancing queen. But it's impossible for me, Richard, to not ask you about to define a meme. Would you please, for the benefit of my audience who may not know, can you explain meme? And my question is, if there are gene pools, are there also meme pools? So, first, could you start with a meme? What is a meme? And are there meme pools?

Yes. A meme is a unit of cultural inheritance. I was interested in the last chapter of the self regeneration, the first edition of the selfish gene. The whole book has been about the gene as the unit of selection, and darwinian selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools. And I wanted to make the point that there's nothing magic about DNA. Anything self replicating can potentially be a unit of natural selection. And a computer virus, for example, would have been a good example if I'd known about computer viruses then. But what I did know about was human culture.

Not much about it, but it was clear to me that certain aspects of human culture could behave as replicators because they get imitated. So something like clothes, fashions or tunes. Yes, and habits of speech, things like that. Anything that gets copied around the meme pool, the meme pool being the set of humans which imitate in a position to imitate each other. So something like. The one example I use is the reverse baseball cap, which spread as an epidemic of memes, because people think it looks cool, so they turn their cap backwards, and so that the act of imitation is analogous to DNA replication, but it's memetic replication, not DNA replication. I mean, it's quite clear that memes exist in that sense. What's not clear is whether they really are subject to darwinian selection.

I think they have to be in some sense. There are certain things. Well, I said the back baseball cap is cool. Cool means in this case, it has good survival value. It's equivalent to a gene which is good at surviving in the gene pool. So something like that, or a catchy tune that when you hear somebody whistling it or singing it, it infects your mind, and you find yourself whistling or singing it yourself, and that infects somebody else. So that is a catchy meme, something like a craze at school. You know, when we were at school, there would be a craze for particular toy or particular game, a particular way of doing things, a particular word, a private word that people in the school use and is not used outside the school.

I think many schools have such. Such words. These are all memes which, if they spread successfully by definition, they therefore have high survival value. That is a kind of darwinian selection. What's more problematic is whether that can give rise to interesting evolution. And there, I think, we come to the idea of the meme complex, something like a collection of memes which go well together, which cooperate well together, rather like I was talking earlier about the genes cooperating with each other because they have the same exit route. Well, a cooperative of memes might be something like the roman catholic church, where a whole lot of different replicating ideas survive in each other's presence and therefore could be regarded as a meme complex or memeplex. And you perhaps can think of other examples of possible memeplexes.

I've talked a lot this past year to friends of yours, Sam Harris. And I actually was honored to give the do the last final interview with Daniel Dennett before he passed away.

Oh, right.

Earlier this year. And I've also spoken with Donald Hoffman. It's been a year of talking to a lot of eminent thinkers on natural selection, evolution, but also consciousness, free will, et cetera. What are your recollections of Dan Dennett now that he's departed this mortal coil? We miss him so much. You have any favorite stories of interactions with Daniel?

Oh, well, a great bear of a man. Genial, jovial, very kind, but also strong and didn't suffer fools gladly. But if anybody was sincerely interested in learning, he was up for it. I miss him enormously. I mean, not just as a friend, but as an intellectual go to person, really. I mean, I would. He's so intelligent and so good at talking about anything. You know, there are some people who, when you talk to them, sort of feel they raise your game.

And I would say that he did, that he not only was a highly intelligent converser himself, but he raised what intelligence one has oneself to a higher plane by just being there. I admired him enormously and miss him hugely.

Yeah. One of the things that spoke to me so loudly. Yeah, he was such a mensch. You could ask him anything, but yes, he would harrumph away the foolish questions, but he was always a gentleman, and he just had such a good cheer. And I regret that I only had a chance to talk to him just before he passed away because he could literally fill an entire podcast with him. I wonder if you've encountered in your work, Richard, or just in your natural intellectual peripatetism and being so curious about ideas from other fields that kind of enter into the role of natural selection. I'm thinking about two people in particular, Donald Hoffman, who's got this perception based reality concept, and Lee Small, and both past guests on the podcast who talk about black holes as nucleating what he calls cosmic darwinian evolution. What do you make of these sort of concepts? Where are they legitimate venues to pursue? Are they mainly trying to hitch their wagon to the star that is natural selection, the brilliant idea that is perhaps the most foundational idea in all of science?

As a darwinian, I very much like. I mean, I warm to the kind of smolin idea whether it's plausible. I think that's for a physicist to answer to me. What I like about it is that it does the same job in cosmology as natural selection, darwinian natural selection does in life, insofar as people sometimes point to the fine tuning of the universe, the idea that the physical constants are fine tuned in such a way that if any one of them was different, life wouldn't be here, perhaps galaxies wouldn't be here, stars wouldn't be here, chemistry wouldn't be here. It's a challenge to think, well, how did this fine tuning come about? Talking about a multiverse is obviously one way to do it, and if we have a very large number of universes, all with different physical constants, then by the anthropic principle, we have to be in one of the minority of universes that happens to have physical constants which give rise to stars and chemistry and life. The smolin spin on that refinement of that helps, because instead of just saying we've got billions of universes, and some of them just happen to be conducive to producing the world as we see it and live in it. Because he postulates a kind of darwinian selection of universes and the qualities that make for fecundity, that make for reproductive success of a universe good at making baby universes, those very same qualities are the qualities that eventually make for chemistry and life. That's got to be an appealing idea to any darwinian.

But when I talk to physicists about it, some of them say it's rubbish, and some of them say it's a nice idea.

Sorry for this brief interruption and this wonderful conversation with Richard. I just wanted to let you know that to get these great guests, like Richard and many, many others, their time is so limited. They often look to see how many subscribers I have to this channel on YouTube and the audio feed. And I'm sorry to say it, but I understand it. They want to make use of their time. They don't have infinite amount of time. None of us do. So you can really help me out, and this will help you out to get even more of the great guests, like of Richard Caliber, to come on the Internet Impossible podcast.

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You're right. It is. It is somewhat controversial, as is the multiverse. I know you were very, very generous with your encomium for our mutual friend Lawrence Krauss and his book a universe from nothing. I think you did call it comparable to the origin of species, which a lot of cosmologists were quite startled to hear, because the multiverse is really, right now, it's a consequence of an unproven theory and actually more view it as a paradigm rather than elevated to the true level of a. I thought it.

Was a consequence of inflation.

Yes. No, that's absolutely correct. But inflation itself. In fact, my research is to build experimental apparatuses that can look for the imprimatur of inflation, which are gravitational waves, but primordial gravitational waves, not from black holes that Ligo and other instruments have detected relatively recently, but from the origin of the universe, the quantum field that causes the nucleation of our universe and then can potentially spawn other universes. But there's no necessarily physical evidence for that, or else I wouldn't be building the $100 million Simons observatory with my colleagues and friends. So we don't know. It is consistent. Inflation is consistent, but that's not quite enough to rise to the level of, in my opinion, and I've told this to Lawrence, comparison with the great Charles Darwin.

If we did have access to truly artificially intelligent agents that are human level AGI, as my past guest and your neighbor there, Nick Bostrom, asserts, more than that, it will lead to a form of utopia. I'm less sanguine and I'm concerned about these agents, as I think Jeremy Bentham said, not whether they can, are they human, but can they experience pain? Will we have obligations to AI agents if they achieve the Turing test or the Keating test or the Dawkins test, whatever we want to formulate, once they pass some critical threshold that people ignore, will they have rights? Will we ask if they suffer too?

Well, earlier you said just sort of knock out a capacitor to make them feel pain. Only if the programming has built in something equivalent to real pain, I suppose, but, yes, if that were the case, then I think they probably would have rights.

Talking about artificial intelligence, it makes me think of the threats and opportunities to what you and I do, which I sometimes call the second oldest profession, maybe the third oldest profession, depending on who's counting. But being professors, it's a core part of your identity, and it is for me as well. What threats or opportunities are you seeing come about thanks to perhaps artificial intelligence that may or may not threaten what we do, because it hasn't changed much in 1000 years, since the University of Bologna opened and there was a guy scratching with a piece of rock on another rock and sitting in front of rapt attention. The only thing I point out, Richard, is that back then, as you know, the students could go on strike. And that was barbaric because then the professors wouldn't get paid. And so, thank God we have tenure now. How has your job and my job, how has it changed? Has it gotten better, more enjoyable? Less enjoyable? And what do you see as the future threats to what we do for a living?

Well, if you're asking could our job as professors be taken over by an intelligent AI? I think, yes. I don't see why not. Whether they'd be better at it, certainly better at it than some of one of the colleagues. But I suppose since we are human, we empathize with a human who's lecturing. If he's a really good lecturer, then somehow the fact that he or she is human and is gesturing and seems to be sort of seizing ideas out of the air and passing them on and thinking aloud, it might be harder to simulate that in an artificial environment than simply to simulate the imparting of knowledge. The imparting of knowledge is certainly this kind of thing that can be done is already done, actually. It doesn't have to be an intelligent professor. It can just be a.

I mean, Google is a. Is a, is a. Or Wikipedia is a teacher, if you. If you use it right, I think, got a long way to go before. Before you can simulate a really great lecturer who really does inspire students. But I expect that could happen as well.

And now, pivoting to another one of these AbBA questions, you're not going to sing dancing Queen. I wonder if you could recapitulate the concept of the shifting moral zeitgeist. And then I want to apply it to what's come about on campuses. I dated for about ten years now something has changed. It's palpable on campus. Speakers will be protested, shut down, there'll be violent threats against administrators. I just testified to the US Congress two weeks ago about my experiences with anti semitism. I'm a jew and my experiences and my students experiences here at the University of California.

I wonder, first, could you define the shifting moral zeitgeist? And then could we explain and perhaps segue how it is as a subset affecting campus culture. Again, where you and I do our work.

Yes, I think if you think about going back a few centuries, going back decades, actually, you don't need to go back centuries. You'll find a completely, well, gradually shifting moral positions. If you look at, say, just trivial crime fiction detective stories, Agatha Christie, Bulldog Drummond, James Bond, Agatha Christie, I think 1920s, 1930s, perhaps youll find rather shocking antisemitism, racial prejudice of various sorts, anti women prejudice, and which would have been normal and expected if you go back further to, say, the middle of the 19th century and look at, say, somebody like Abraham Lincoln or Thomas Henry Huxley, both of whom were in the vanguard of advanced liberal thought of their own time, yet they were, by modern standards, flagrant racists. I mean, both Lincoln and Huxley took it for granted that black people were inferior to white and were incapable of having the same reasoning processes. Women didn't get the vote in various countries until the 20th century, in Switzerland until rather late in the 20th century, in America, I think in the 1920s. In Britain in the 1920s, the assumption was that women were incapable of exercising proper judgment and so they couldn't be trusted with the vote. I mean, it's palpable, manifest that the moral zeitgeist shifts as the decades go bye. As to why it shifts, I think that's an interesting and complex question.

It's a sort of quasi evolutionary process. It changes gradually. And what changes it, I'm not really sure. I think it's a combination of one says sort of, it's in the air when it's dinner table conversation, it's politician speeches, it's legal decisions, journalistic articles, its books, all these things conspire together to move on the moral zeitgeist. So I think its an empirically observable phenomenon and a very important one. You go back to medieval times and you get truly appalling things. I mean, public executions for entertainment. People would.

The idea of a good day out to entertain the children would be to go to a public hanging. Inconceivable nowadays, but routine and normal in medieval times, in roman times, gladiatorial contests, people getting entertainment in the colosseum from watching prisoners being mauled by lions and bears. The shifting moral zeitgeist is an empirically observable phenomenon.

Let me pivot to a different question for you. Let's say you open your email today and you get an email from a friend. It says, richard, I am very poorly today and very stupid, and I hate everybody and everything one lives only to make blunders. I'm going to write a little book for Murray on orchids today. I hate them worse than anything. So farewell, and in a sweet frame of mind, I am forever yours. What would you say to a colleague if you opened your email one day and got such a message?

I didn't understand that. What are you getting at there?

Sorry. This is a quote from Charles Darwin that he apparently wrote to. Looking up who he wrote this to. He said, it's a quote where he was depressed from 1861. He wrote, I am very poorly today and very stupid, and I hate everybody and everything one lives only to make blunders. I'm going to write a little book for Murray on orchids. And today I hate them worse than everything.

Fascinating.

I use that as a.

Come across that. Yeah. I never come across that.

I'll send it to you.

Yeah. Murray was his publisher. He did write a book about orchids. And I don't think I've been quite that depressed. But I'm interested to hear that's a genuine letter. Is it?

I have a picture of his handwriting. I'll email it to you. I posted on Twitter.

Okay. That's very interesting.

Yeah. The comment is, if you had a colleague and you got such a mess. Not you, but if you got a colleague like that, someone who's doing work, it's very tedious to do science, as you know. And I wonder if part of the tedium and boredom and just the committee work and the stuff that is not so great about what you and I do, if you find a great satisfaction from your public facing side, your writing, your popular writing, where does it rank? How do you compare your research life and writing, you know, papers? And you're extremely highly cited to writing books, to communicating with the public. Is it a tonic? Is it something that buoys you to be with the public, to go on tour as you are going, how do you balance the public life with the academic life and synthesize them into one coherent intellectual whole?

Yes. Well, first of all, before we leave Darwin, your quote begins by him very poorly today. And Darwin was, of course, the chronic invalid. And so he had an illness, a mysterious illness. Nobody quite knows what it was, but he was permanently, more or less permanently ill. And so, on a bad day, I could well imagine that he would be hating everybody and hating life and things. I mean, just simply something like being seasick. You sort of want to die.

I mean, if Darwin felt like that, I could understand him anyway. But going back to your question about balancing talking to the writing for the public and writing for scientific colleagues. I try to do both, I think, insofar as it's possible, and I think it probably isn't possible in physics, or is much harder in physics to. To write for colleagues and for the general public at the same time, because physics is so difficult, modern physics is so difficult. Both cosmology and quantum physics are so difficult that you couldn't really imagine papers to nature being written in a way that could be understood by any layperson. I think my field is, because I've concentrated on evolution, it is possible to write in a way that is understandable by the intelligent layperson and at the same time makes a contribution to the field. My late colleague John Maynard Smith, in reviewing two of my books, the Self Regine and the extended phenotype, said that both books were unusual in his opinion, in that they attracted tempted to talk to both audiences at the same time. He said that David Lack, the ornithologist David Lack, was another example of somebody who did that, but it was rather unusual.

That is what I try to do. I'm not sure how successfully, but I do try to make contributions at the same time as talking to laypeople.

I sometimes joke that we have almost a moral obligation as scientists who get paid by the public. After all, here in the US and there in the UK to explain things. And if you were to work as a plumber or installing stone countertops, and your employer said to you, well, what are you doing today, Richard? And he said, I can't explain it to you. You can't possibly understand what I'm doing. I mean, you probably get fired pretty quickly. And yet we have a whole host of people. I've had this kind of online battle with Sabina Hassenfeldere, you know, about the fact that all scientists should receive at least some training in communication to the public. And yet it's almost looked down upon.

I mean, you surely know of the travails that Carl Sagan had in the US and never being elected to the national academy, some say out of spite for his popularity. And we have many examples of that. Oh, you know, a real scientist is in the lab or at the computer and not communicating with the public. How do you react to my statement? Scientists who are paid by the public have a moral obligation to give some return on investment to the public who pays their salary.

I think there was a time when the National Science foundation, when giving a grant, demanded that a certain percentage of the output of the grantee should be devoted to explaining to the public, what the research was all about. I'm not sure if that's still the case, but I think that's a very good idea. You mentioned the Carl Sagan effect, and it's notorious, of course, that he obviously should have been a member of the National Academy and wasn't. I've been sometimes asked whether I suffer from the same thing. I actually have been elected to the Royal Society despite the fact that most of my books are aimed at the general public. So I haven't suffered from the sagan effect, happy to say. Yeah. I mean, I think that communication to the public should not just be left to professional journalists who do a good job of actually reading up the science and then translating it into lay terms.

I think the scientists themselves ought to do it themselves and ideally even make contributions to their science in language which is generally understandable. Darwin, he wrote for the general public and was at the same time making a stupendous contribution to science. And that's a model which we might well follow.

This is an out of this world conversation, isn't it? And if you're interested in getting a fragment of our early solar system, something that's truly out of this world, I know you're going to want to go to my Monday morning magic mailing list, and you can subscribe@briankeating.com. list and if you have a email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties, a real fragment of our early solar system.

Who knows?

Perhaps some of the schmutz was on this very meteorite that brought life to earth some billions of years ago. I don't know about that, but I'll teach you all about meteorites and how to observe meteor showers in a follow up message once you join my Monday magic mailing list. And if you have a email address, you're guaranteed to win one of these beauties. If you live in the United States, go to Brian keating.com.edu if you're a fellow academic like me and Richard. Now back to the episode. Absolutely, yeah. And the people that we look to most of all, at least in physics, Richard Feynman, you know, nowadays we have no real peer of his, but Sir Roger Penrose, your colleague as well, these are exceptional writers as well as scientists. I mean, you really can't do climb higher.

I have a question from a listener who asked, Thomas Paine is his name, is evolution not being taught in America at the k twelve level? Is that still a problem affecting society? And how would you change the educational system in America or maybe even in the UK, if you could, what is sort of the best educational system right now?

I don't know what k through twelve means. What is that?

This person's asking everything from a five year old up to a 17 year old, but let's just restrict it to 14 to 17 year olds.

Well, I think it's a pity that if you look at textbooks of biology, commonly evolution comes rather near the end of the textbook. And that doesn't make any sense because you're learning all about the facts of biology without being taught. Why I. And it really should be the first chapter because otherwise nothing makes sense. So that would be. One change would be to put it early in the curriculum rather than late. Another thing would be to teach it unashamedly and without intimidation from religious fundamentalist interests who try to stop you doing so. I mean, some of my colleagues feel the need to bowdlerize their teaching so as not to give offense to religious fundamentalists.

And so instead of talking about evolution, they'll talk about, I don't know, modification by descent, or use a euphemism. I think we need to confront it head on and say, this is science and you've got to learn the science and you can't opt out of science because it goes against a traditional faith.

Would you advocate dialogue with trying to teach, say, the concept of religion as part of an extended phenotype? Is that something that you would expect would curry favor with proponents of intelligent design or in your opinion, should they be ignored?

It wouldn't curry favour. I think they'd hate it. One of the things that Dan Dennett's book breaking the spell does is try to explain why people believe in evolution or, sorry, why people believe in religion. And I differ from many of my colleagues who bend over backwards to say evolution and religion are totally compatible. You don't have to give up your, your faith and you can see why they do it. It's politically very sound because otherwise you're going to just turn people away. But I'm too much wedded to the actual truth to do that. And so I would be a very bad teacher in America, probably because I would have people walking out of my classes rather than trying to seduce them.

I've been accused of just setting it out there and nothing, not engaging in an exercise of persuasion or seduction. And I just believe in just telling it like it is. I was once talking to one of the lawyers in that famous case, Kitz Miller case in, I think, somewhere in Pennsylvania. After talking to me, he said, well, thank goodness we didn't call you as an expert witness. You would have lost the case for us, because, I mean, what they did was they got religious scientists to come along and explain that they're fully compatible.

So I want to conclude with a set of questions that I have basically stolen from the late, great Sir Arthur C. Clarke. And that is because I am here at UC San Diego. We're honored to have the Arthur C. Clarke center for Human Imagination, and the center was endowed by his charitable foundation, and I'm honored to be the associate co director of it. So I have all sorts of different questions that mainly relate to different sayings. As you know, Sir Arthur was quite quotable, and he said things like, for every expert, there's an equal and opposite expert. But I want to start with the first one that is probably very familiar to you and my audience, and that's his famous quote.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. You've surely heard that, Richard, right?

Yes.

So I want to ask you, what form of technology or invention of the human mind is most magical?

If you could go back to the time of, say, Elizabeth first in a Boeing 747 and get out your smartphone and I mean indistinguishable from magic, obviously. I mean, it would be just mind blowing for them. And I suppose if people from 500 years ahead were to time travel back to us now, we would be so overawed that we might fall on our knees and worship them as gods because they would have godlike powers. I think Clarke's third law is very wise and obviously true.

Another question that is somewhat related to that and we touched upon it comes from 2001 a space Odyssey, where there are these monoliths that appear on the african savannah, and then later on in space, and there are hominids hitting it with bones and so forth. But we don't really know what they are. They could be time capsules. They could be other types of phenomena. I want to ask you, if you had a time capsule and it could last a billion years, what would you put on it or in it? It doesn't have to be your work. It could be, or it could be a bach cantata or something like that. What would you put in order to time travel throughout all of eternity?

Perhaps send it out into space as a sort of cosmic tombstone for humanity, because we're going to be destroyed, obviously, eventually. And it would be nice to think that something of our culture would be at least slight possibility of being discovered by other civilizations so we wouldn't be totally forgotten. Well, I would put Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and hope that if they didn't have ears, at least they could appreciate them in some mathematical form. Shakespeare. Well, the problem is language, I suppose, but again, they'll be very advanced, so maybe they can decode the language. And as for science, well, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Darwin, Watson and crick, there's so much that we would wish to preserve, to advertise ourselves, I suppose. Lots of, I suppose, various different languages. I like to think of a cosmic tombstone.

I asked that question to. This is a finger puppet of Carl Sagan. We have to get Richard Dawkins finger puppet. I do have a Noam Chomsky one, and he was a guest on the show, so I think we can get a Dawkins one, if there's not already. But, Richard, I asked this of Carl Sagan's widow. I never got to meet Carl, but I asked his widow, andrewian, the same question I just asked you about putting basically a time capsule out in the cosmos. And she said, oh, I did that. And I said, oh, really? She said, yeah.

When they were launching Voyager two, Carl and I just started dating, and he put me in an EEG scanner and scanned my brainwaves as we were just falling in love. And that was put on the Voyager golden disk. So she was told by NASA that that will last at least 4 billion years. She was the first person that actually did embody that question. Okay, the second, penultimate question, Richard, and then I'll let you go. I know it's getting late, and I just am so appreciative for your forbearance and indulgence of these silly little questions. But a question that Sir Arthur asked, or statement that he made, was the following. He said, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they say something's impossible, they're probably wrong.

And Arthur C. Clarke called these failures of imagination in his book profiles of the future. Nowadays, we call them limiting beliefs. But I want to ask you the question in the form of. In this way, what have you been wrong about? What have you changed your mind about, if anything?

Well, I have, but it's sort of too small in a way, to. I mean, I can give you one example, but first, you know, there's some wonderful ones of. I think it was Lord Kelvin in the 19th century who said that flying machines are impossible. Maybe it wasn't Lord Kelvin. Maybe he said, radio will turn out to be a hoax. The various 19th century eminent physicists who got egg all over their faces by denying the possibility of things which are now absolutely commonplace. But anyway, you asked me about, it was Calvin Kelvin.

Yes, Kelvin. Who said, heavier than air flying machines are impossible.

That's right.

That was in 1895, eight years before the Wright brothers proved him wrong.

Yes. Yes, that's right. There are quite a few of those which are well worth quoting as a cautionary tale. I was wrong about the so called handicap principle of animal communication, particular sexual selection. The idea of the israeli scientist Amat Sahavi that the reason why sexually selected signals like Peacock's tails are so extravagant and beautiful and wasteful is precisely because they're extravagantly wasteful and costly. And handicaps, that's why they work. That's why they are favored by natural selection. Always before, and I went along with this, I admitted that they were handicaps, but I thought that they survived despite being handicaps.

So Harvey's revolutionary thought was that they survived because they're handicaps, because they're costly. And only by being costly do they establish their credentials with whoever they're trying to impress, which might be a female. And I was wrong about that. And this was proved by my ex student and now colleague and now actually mentor, Alan Graffen, who'd done mathematical modeling to show that the Harvey's handicap principle really does work. And costly signals really are favored precisely because they are costly. And if they were not costly, they would not be favored. So I was wrong, and I had to climb down.

Hey, there's a good chance you might be a scientist or an engineer or aspiring to be maybe going to school, graduate school or after school. Or maybe you're a professor like me. If you're wanting to learn the greatest tips and ways to become your best scientist, you might want to get my book into the impossible. Think like a Nobel Prize winner with a foreword by my friend, Nobel laureate Barry Barish. In it, we describe an incredible series of tips on how to collaborate better on unlock your creative genius and get over common pitfalls like the imposter syndrome. I hope you'll take a deep dive into it, and I know you'll enjoy it. You can read a free chapter at my website, Brian keating.com books, and you can buy it@Amazon.com in ebook, audiobook, or in physical hard copy or paperback form. Thanks a lot.

Very good. Okay, Richard, the last question I have relates to Arthur's law that actually is the namesake of this podcast or which gave this podcast its name. And it goes like, the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them a little way into the impossible. So that's why this podcast has its name. I want to ask you, if you could go back and see 20 year old, 30 year old Richard and you had 30 seconds to speak to him, what would you say to him to give him the confidence to do as you've done to go into the impossible?

Well, something pretty similar to what Arthur C. Clarke said. Believe that you can do it and go ahead and do it. Have confidence to actually do it.

Richard, this has been a delight for me and for my audience. Like I said, we will make it into many versions and I hope you will continue to write and be well. And if I don't see you in San Francisco, I hope to visit you at Oxford or the UK. This has been a great honor and a great delight and I want to thank you so much.

Thank you very much. It has been a delight for me as well.

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