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