#174 — Life & Mind
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Summary
Sam Harris sits down with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to discuss his new book, "Outgrowing God: A Beginner's Guide." They discuss Dawkins' theory of evolution, the concept of the extended phenotype, and psychedelics and meditation. And, of course, there's a brief discussion of the God Delusion. Sam and Richard discuss all of this and much more in this episode of The Making Sense Podcast, hosted by Sam Harris, and recorded at the Biltmore Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, on the last Sunday of every month. You can expect weekly episodes every available as Video, Podcast, and blogposts. Please note that this podcast is not meant to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment of disease, which is already available on the National Institute of Neurological and Neuropsychology website. Please refer to your doctor if you are in need of medical or mental health care, or if you would like to refer to a physician. You can also contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or visit their website at suicidepreventionlifeline.org.org to get help with your mental health problems, including depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, and other forms of post traumatic stress disorder. If you are struggling with anxiety, insomnia, or another medical problem, please talk to a trained professional who can assist you. if you can be of service, such as a trained counsellor. Thank you for listening to this podcast and share it on your social media. Make sure to let us know what you think of it. Thanks for listening and sharing it with your friends and posting it on social media! It helps us spread the word about this podcast! Make sense? and other things we can help spread it around the word of this podcast. and help us spread it to the world. . Thanks again for listening thank you for your support to others like it in the making sense or share it everywhere you are listening to it! and spreading it everywhere else we are making sense, it helps us make sense, thank you, more of it, more people are listening, more than you can do it, and we are grateful for it, thanks you are helping us, more and more, and more of us are grateful, more knowledge is being heard, more
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, do I have housekeeping
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today? I don't think so. Today I'm speaking with Richard Dawkins. Richard really needs
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no introduction on this podcast, but please note that he has a new book out titled Outgrowing
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God, A Beginner's Guide. In this conversation, we mostly take your questions and we start
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by discussing the strangeness of the gene's eye view of the world. We then move on to
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the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life. We talk about his concept of
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the extended phenotype and memetics. We look at how ideologies act as meme complexes. We
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talk about whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon and therefore might not have
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been evolved under selective pressure. And then we talk about psychedelics and meditation.
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I actually lead Richard in a guided meditation. And the effects of that, you can hear for
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yourself. And I'll have something more to say in my afterward. So now, without further
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Be you still, be you still, trembling heart, remember the wisdom out of the old days.
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Him who trembles before the flame and the flood and the winds that blow through the starry ways,
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let the starry winds and the flame and the flood cover over and hide, for he has no part
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It's an early one. It's from The Wind Among the Reeds, I think.
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Well, that was a wonderful reading and the perfect sound check. I am here with Richard Dawkins.
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Richard, thanks for joining me again on the podcast.
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Thank you very much. And thank you for coming to the Biltmore Hotel rather than making me go
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to your studio, which I thought I should have done.
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This is old school. I love it. So, you know, you and I have done a bunch of events together.
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Yes, I hope we haven't run out of things to talk about. I worry about that kind of thing.
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Yeah. Yeah. You know, so in the interest of not running to that problem, I decided to go out on
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social media and ask for questions. And this is, you know, this is, that's the perfect algorithm
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because I can, I know what kinds of questions we've hit in the past. And this simultaneously gets
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us what our respective audiences want to hear. And, and I have no fear that we're going to cover
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the same territory in the same way again. I hope one or two of them may have seen my new book.
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Maybe not, maybe too recently out. I don't know. So let's just mention the new books just so that
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we, we've done that. The new book is Outgrowing God. Outgrowing God, yes.
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And this is for teenagers, right? Yes. It's sort of, quite a lot of complaints have been that it's
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just like the God delusion. It actually isn't just like the God delusion. It's different.
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And it's, it's sort of designed for teenagers, yes. And we can obviously spend as much time or as
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little time on these questions as we want and open any doors that they suggest to us. But the first
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frivolous question is, and this, this surprises me, this means nothing, but do you realize that
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the most prominent atheists are all Aries, right? So you're an Aries, I'm an Aries, Hitch was an Aries,
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Dennett is an Aries, Matt Dillahunty is an Aries.
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The great film director, Otto Preminger, was once approached by a starlet on, on the set of one
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of his films. She said, oh gee, Mr. Preminger, what sign are you? And he said, I am a do not
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disturb sign. That's my attitude towards astrology.
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Right. Well, I guess Aries don't believe in astrology. So the first question, which I think
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was, will set us on a nice path, it won't preempt everything else, but this is somebody
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who clearly is exasperated with the prospect that we might focus exclusively on atheism or
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bashing religion. And he says, for goodness sake, get him talking in detail about the genes-eye view
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of natural selection, the extended phenotype, the argument surrounding group selection, and
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punctuated equilibrium, the way memetics has rather ironically taken on a life of its own,
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So this covers a lot of ground, and I do want to do those topics justice. So let's, I think people
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are so casually aware of the revolution that has been wrought in our thinking based on our
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understanding of Darwinism, and it was really crystallized in your book, The Selfish Gene.
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But it has kind of receded into the background of our thinking, and it is such a strange view of
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the mechanics of things and the logic of things. And so maybe let's just spend a little time talking
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I mean, I like to think if it has receded into the background, that's because it's simply accepted,
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which among professional biologists of the sort of field type, it has.
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Yeah, I'm thinking the general public that has kind of lost sight of how strange it is.
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Perhaps the general public. It's not, well, I suppose it is a bit strange, and it sort of is a
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turning on its head of the, what used to be the more orthodox view. Darwin saw natural selection
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at the level of the individual. So he thought of individuals as competing with each other
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within the species. It was always a within-species competition. And he was, of course, aware that
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survival is only a means to the end of reproduction. And his other great book, well, one of his other
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great books, The Descent of Man, is largely about sexual selections. And Darwin was thoroughly aware
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that success at reproduction was also vitally important. And any hereditary tendency to be,
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for example, sexually attractive or good at competing with members of your own sex would also
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be favored. But Darwin didn't have gene language. He had no concept of the particulate gene, which Mendel
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introduced. And that particulate view of genetics was actually essential to natural selection. Because,
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as was pointed out in Darwin's own time, if genetics was blending, as everybody in the 19th century,
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except Mendel thought, if we were all a kind of mixture of our father and our mother, then variation
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would disappear as the generations went by. Each generation would be more uniform than the previous
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one, in which case there would be no variation left for natural selection to work on. This was actually
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advanced as an argument against natural selection. Actually, of course, it's an argument against
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manifest facts, because we don't get more alike as the generations go by. Mendel solved that problem,
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but Darwin didn't realize it. I don't think Mendel realized it properly. And it wasn't until the
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neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s that it was realized that actually a natural selection is all about
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genes changing their frequency. So some genes become more frequent in the population, others less
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frequent in the population. That's what it's all about. I suppose all that I did really was to take
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that neo-Darwinian view and put it in a more, slightly more poetic way, and say that that means
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that the individual is just a vehicle for carrying genes around and passing them on. And it's temporary.
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I called it a throwaway survival machine. That's the strange idea where you call it strange. And
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that is a bit strange, I suppose, that I call them a robot survival machine. An individual organism
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is a device for passing on genes. The selfish gene is quite largely about not selfishness. It's often
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misunderstood because of the title as being about selfishness or even an advocacy of selfishness.
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It's actually mostly about altruism. The selfish gene explains altruism at the individual level.
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Right. But if you take a genes-eye view of human life, many strange things happen. First, you
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see that there's a logic by which certain genes would have been selected for and the behaviors they would
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they would encode would be grandfathered into the human condition. And yet, evolution can't see
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most of what we care about. The logic of evolution is anything that has allowed these specific
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replicators to perpetuate themselves has been selected for, right? So we are here to spawn and
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to ensure that our progeny successfully spawn. And I don't know, I mean, what age do you think
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historically evolution ceases to care about us? I guess grandparents are still valuable.
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Oh, there's no sudden cutoff. I mean, it's a gradual process. But the older an animal is,
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the more likely it is already to have reproduced.
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And so we're all descended from ancestors, most of whom reproduced when they were relatively young.
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A few of whom may have been reproduced when they were old. And this, of course, is why we age,
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because we're descended from young ancestors. And very often, whatever it took to be successful
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when you were young made you actually more likely to die. And this is especially true, of course,
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sexual selection, where brilliantly colored male birds, say, are more likely to propagate genes for
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being brilliantly colored, but then dying, because brilliant colors attract predators just as much
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as they attract females. And that's an extreme case, but that's the sort of model for the Darwinian
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Right, right. So, but there's still something about the extended family that would have been
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selected. I mean, you would think grandparents are good for something.
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That's right. And in those species where grandparents can, well, there may be a kind of
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changeover point where when you get to a certain age, you can do your genes more good by caring for
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grandchildren than you can by having more children. That, again, wouldn't be a sudden cutoff point,
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but that probably is true of humans and a number of other species, perhaps.
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But if we're talking about running viable governments and societies into democracies,
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capitalism, pursuing scientific interests, building technology that doesn't destroy us,
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these are things that obviously are parasitic on cognitive traits that have been evolved,
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No, that's right. I mean, I think that so much of our human life has gone beyond natural selection.
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Natural selection put us in the world in the way that we are, and our brains and our bodies are
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designed by natural selection to survive under wild conditions in Africa. And we've now moved beyond
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that. And so what we think of as successful in our society has really sort of pretty much left
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Yes, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an observation that several of us have made in
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various contexts. If you were going to take a rigorously genes-eye view of the human circumstance,
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certainly as a man, the thing you would want to do most, the thing that you would find most
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fulfilling in life, the thing to which you would purpose more or less every day, is to donate
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your sperm to a sperm bank so that you could have tens of thousands of children for whom you have no
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The fact that sperm donors are actually paid is thoroughly un-Darwinian and is a wonderful
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example of how far we have actually advanced. It's not that surprising because natural selection
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cannot build into our brains a kind of cognitive awareness of what our genes, so to speak, would
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want. All it can do is build in rules of thumb which would work under natural conditions. And so
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a desire for sex makes perfect sense because that, for the whole of history, the whole of, I mean,
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evolutionary history, has tended to lead to reproduction. But a desire to donate your sperm
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I mean, there have been a few notorious cases of doctors who have been substituting their
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own sperm for donors and things like that. But it is, to a naive Darwinian, it is a surprising
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fact that sperm donors have to be paid. A naive Darwinian would think that they would pay to
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So let's just talk about what genes are for a moment. So genes are a kind of memory. They're
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a kind of encoding of knowledge in the sense that, and stop me if you think at any point
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these analogies break down, but I'm hearing echoes of David Deutsch here, where it's knowledge
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as a kind of solution to a problem. It's a genetically inscribed solution to problems
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Exactly. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I have a chapter in Unweaving the Rainbow called The Genetic
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Book of the Dead, which sort of takes off from the, is it a Hindu classic?
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The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Sorry, Buddhist, yes. So The Genetic Book of the Dead, I see the
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genome. Well, let's say the genes of a species as a coded document describing ancestral worlds
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in which ancestors survived. That's sort of true because they are a filtered subset of genes
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which have helped ancestors to survive. And in principle, it should be possible at some
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future date for when technology has advanced, for a knowledgeable geneticist to read the genome
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of an individual and actually read off a description of the worlds in which the ancestors
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Sure. To a lesser extent, I think perhaps it's easier, you can read the body of the animal. I mean,
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I like to think that if you took a whole lot of water-dwelling animals, say mammals, so it would be
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otters, seals, whales, water shrews, marsupials, swimming animals and things, they'd all have webbed feet,
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say for example, except whales. And so that's an obvious one. But if you actually made a list of
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characteristics of water-dwelling mammals and compared it with, say, desert-dwelling mammals,
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you'd find a whole lot of things that all the water-dwelling ones have in common, including probably
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some biochemical ones, some genetic ones. And so that's part of the description. The genetic book
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of the dead describes water or describes desert. Right. And one day, maybe I'll even write a book
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called The Genetic Book of the Dead, trying to flesh out this idea. Yeah. And of course, it could
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also look forward prospectively to situations which we, now to take the human case, are not
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well adapted to figure out. That's right. I mean, the genetic book of the dead has always got to be
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a description of the past. And it helps the animal to survive to the extent that the future resembles
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the past. Yeah. Which, on the whole, it does. I mean, if the world were totally capricious, such that
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you could not predict the future on the basis of the past, then natural selection wouldn't work. But
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nature doesn't vary capriciously as the years go by. On the whole, tomorrow is pretty similar to
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yesterday. Actually, there was a specific question that touches on that point,
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that someone asks, why do we need vaccinations or acquired immunity to diseases at all? Why can't
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the mother pass on her immunity to her offspring? Wouldn't that be an enormous evolutionary benefit?
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So we have acquired immunity because they're on the assumption that the environment does
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change enough that that's the best algorithm to run.
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Yes. I suppose the immune system is a kind of short-term, moment-to-moment substitute for natural
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selection. Natural selection works over generations and equips the animal to deal with circumstances
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that arise perennially, or at least over a long period. The immune system is all about equipping the
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animal, adapting the animal to insults that attack it during its own lifetime from moment to moment.
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There are always new epidemics, always new viruses cropping up. So that's what the immune system is
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about. And vaccination is, of course, sort of preparing the immune system.
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There's a gaming of that, yeah. But it would seem good to be immune to everything that your
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It would. I suppose we tend to be immune to everything that most of our ancestors have
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encountered, but just our mother. We don't seem to have a mechanism for passing on the particular,
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if the mother's had chicken pox, we don't inherit an immunity to chicken pox.
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Yeah. One thing that's framing this part of the conversation for me is I watched your somewhat
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stifling conversation with Brett Weinstein, who I greatly admire, who I've done many events with.
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But he had a kind of axe to grind with you around, if not group selection, something he was
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calling lineage selection. And more broadly speaking, a sense that evolutionary thinking
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should cover many of the details of human life, like war-making, genocide, nationalism,
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to a degree that you were disinclined to extend it. And also just this notion that
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you know, religion should certainly be considered an extended phenotype.
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Mimetics generally should be considered an extended phenotype. And I'm just wondering what the,
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I mean, I can't do a good impersonation of Brett for this conversation, but I'm wondering just what
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are your concerns there and what are the limitations in Darwinian thinking when we're
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talking about high-level human social phenomenon and psychological phenomenon?
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Well, first of all, I, I, I hugely admire Brett Weinstein's
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stand at that ridiculous university that he used to be a member of.
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Evergreen, yes. I mean, he's a real hero standing up against that nonsense.
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The extended phenotype, I think, is often misused. The idea of the extended phenotype is often misused.
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Yes, I should. A phenotype is that which the genes engineer in a body, which in a Darwinian sense
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would help the genes to survive. So wings are part of the phenotype of genes that help the genes
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survive and behavior patterns and crests and sharp talons and sharp teeth and things. So we normally
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think of genes program bodies to develop phenotypes. Phenotypes help bodies to survive. And that helps
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the genes that built them survive. That's the normal way it happens. And genes do it by the processes
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of embryonic development, causing the body to develop the necessary phenotypes. The extended phenotype
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is phenotype, which is outside the body in which the gene sits. And my classic examples of this are animal
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artifacts, things like birds' nests, where the nest, especially a complicated nest like that of a
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weaver bird, obviously an adaptation. I mean, it's just like an organ. It's beautifully shaped
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for a particular purpose, beautifully shaped, for example, a long tubular nest to prevent snakes
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getting in. That is a perfectly good phenotype, but it's not part of the body.
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The genes are producing that, and they're producing it. They're still doing it via embryology,
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but the embryology then, as it were, reaches outside the body in the form of behavior,
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in this case, nest-building behavior. But that's only of yet one more step in the embryonic chain
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of causation. The embryonic chain of causation begins with DNA influencing proteins, and that
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influences something else. It influences something else. Cell division, neuron production in the brain,
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which has the eventual consequence of causing the bird to build a nest of a particular shape.
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So there's just this chain of causation, starting with DNA protein and going through various
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complicated steps in embryology. And then the final steps are outside the body. That's why I call it
00:22:00.420
the extended phenotype. Well, then the idea is generalized to, for example...
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I just want to pause here. At the risk of derailing you, I want to pause here to close the door to a
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certain species of doubt that evolution can explain the diversity of life that we see. So now I'm just
00:22:20.340
closing the door to the creationists and the intelligent designers for the moment. Because
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one of the concerns is that when you take any example of phenotype, you take a bat's wing, for instance,
00:22:31.780
evolution could not have produced a bat's wing de novo, you know, a bifunctional bat's wing. What
00:22:39.060
you need is some incremental path from no wing at all to a bat's wing. And each increment has to
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survive the logic of evolution. It has to be useful and lead to differential success. So you have to
00:22:53.300
imagine here to explain any speciation and any path by which we have reached the diversity of life that
00:23:01.860
we see. You have to explain how each increment, the first little bump that became the wing, how that in
00:23:09.700
itself was useful. And many people just throw up their hands there and say, well, there's clearly no way
00:23:14.740
you can do that. So there must be some other explanation. Yes, thank you for reminding people of
00:23:19.140
that. I mean, that is, of course, very important. And of course, evolution has to take whatever is
00:23:24.580
there and modify it. So it's not like a little bump that appears. In this case, it's an already
00:23:29.620
existing arm. In the case of insects, it probably was a little bump because that's not using an existing
00:23:36.420
limb. But yes, you're, of course, right about that. With a bat, it's literally the hand.
00:23:40.900
Yeah. And as a membrane stretched between the fingers, which is not difficult to engineer
00:23:45.380
embryologically, because in the embryo, there already is a membrane between the fingers. And
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actually, it's carved away. There's a kind of sculpture process whereby the membrane is removed.
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All that needed to happen in bats is that that sculpting process didn't happen in the membrane
00:24:03.220
state. And of course, the fingers get hugely long. Pterosaurs do it differently. They just have one big
00:24:09.140
finger. Right. And they stretch that between the legs. And birds do it differently again. But in
00:24:14.980
every case, it makes use of what's already there. It modifies what's already there, rather than starting
00:24:20.500
de novo, which is what a human engineer would do. We start with a clean design on the drawing board.
00:24:28.340
Yeah. But I was saying about the extended phenotype.
00:24:30.820
But actually, before we get there, so what is the argument that some non-functional precursor wing
00:24:42.260
Yes. I mean, this is a favorite problem. What's the use of half a wing? There are a large number of
00:24:48.740
animals that don't exactly fly, but slightly increase their, there's, for example, arboreal animals,
00:24:58.420
squirrels say, who leap from branch to branch. And it's a dangerous process leaping from branch to
00:25:04.980
branch. And so any slight increase in flight surfaces, not really flight surfaces, but any
00:25:10.660
slight increase in the surface area that's presented to the air will increase the distance that a
00:25:16.020
squirrel can leap. The tail, the fluffy tail of a squirrel, acts as a sort of rudimentary aerofoil
00:25:23.940
that increases the distance that a squirrel can jump to. Well, now flying squirrels, they're just
00:25:28.500
squirrels, but they have a membrane between the forelimb and the hind limb, which started out,
00:25:36.260
no doubt, as just a bit of membrane in the armpit. It just slightly increased the, you know,
00:25:41.540
it could just leap one foot further because of that. And then when that was there, then next generation,
00:25:47.140
perhaps the next 10 generations, it could leap 10 feet further. So you have a steady gradient of
00:25:56.020
improvement. Are there orthogonal gradients that could explain some of these intermediate
00:26:01.220
forms like heat regulation or something? Well, that's been suggested for insects, yes.
00:26:06.420
It's been suggested that in the insect, they really did start by just bumps growing out of the thorax,
00:26:12.580
rather than modifying existing limbs. And it has been suggested that originally these were
00:26:20.100
thermoregulatory or were solar panels. And then when they got out to a certain size
00:26:28.260
for their thermoregulatory function, then they then happened to act as aerofoils. And so they then
00:26:36.740
became wings. And insect wings are moved, not by limbs, as I said, but by movements of the thorax.
00:26:44.820
So the thorax is, there are muscles in the thorax that contract it in various ways, which cause these
00:26:51.540
flaps to go up and down. Interestingly, some insects flap their wings up and down with a separate neural
00:27:00.900
command from the central nervous system saying up, down, up, down, up, down. But other insects
00:27:07.140
have a kind of motor, sort of oscillating motor, where all that the central nervous system says is
00:27:13.140
switch on or switch off. And the motor itself does a rhythmic up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down.
00:27:20.260
And the frequency of the oscillation is determined not by the central nervous system, but just by the
00:27:34.980
Yeah, well, the next step, after the idea of artifacts, after the idea of birds' nests, say,
00:27:42.180
there are many cases where parasites manipulate their hosts to increase the chance that they will
00:27:49.620
be propagated to the next stage of the parasitic cycle. So flukes, for example,
00:27:56.100
usually have an intermediate host, which might be a snail or it might be an ant. And they need to
00:28:02.900
get into their definitive host, which might be a sheep or a cow. And so in the case of the so-called
00:28:08.820
brain worm in the ant, for example, the worm in the ant burrows into the brain of the ant and changes
00:28:17.140
the behavior of the ant to make the ant more likely to be eaten by a sheep. It crawls up to the top of
00:28:24.900
stems in the heat of the day rather than going down into the ground. So the parasite is a kind of puppet
00:28:31.620
master, which is manipulating the ant to get, well, now that to me is an extended phenotype
00:28:47.060
Yeah. I think there isn't there some evidence that toxoplasmosis and some other organisms
00:28:53.620
operate in mammals like ourselves and very likely in people in similar ways?
00:29:03.620
I mean, rabies is the classic example. The rabies virus actually makes rabid dog, for example,
00:29:10.980
more likely to bite and froth at the mouth and pass on the virus when it bites. It also makes
00:29:19.220
the animal more likely to roam and wander far and wide rather than stick around at home,
00:29:25.060
which then spreads the virus more widely. So that's extended phenotype of a parasite.
00:29:32.180
And then you can say, well, parasites don't always live inside their hosts. Cuckoos manipulate their hosts.
00:29:42.420
Yeah. Terrible bird. Manipulates the host with beautiful adaptations. I mean,
00:29:47.220
supernormal gape and things like that. This is, again, manipulating the host behavior. The change in
00:29:54.820
the host behavior is an extended phenotype of cuckoo genes. Genes that change host behavior are more
00:30:01.780
likely to survive. Again, it works via cuckoo embryology. But the final stage in that change
00:30:08.500
of events in cuckoo embryology is to produce behavior which seduces the host, the reed warbler,
00:30:16.180
whatever it is. And so that, again, is extended phenotype. And then the next final stage in my
00:30:22.420
argument would be all birdsong, all animal communication, where one animal manipulates
00:30:28.980
another, you can think of as extended phenotypes. So a gene that changes in one animal has an
00:30:36.660
extended phenotypic effect on another animal via a call, a song, a crest, a flash, a conspicuous
00:30:45.380
signal. So my whole vision of animal signaling is a great network of extended phenotypes.
00:30:52.980
Right. Okay. So before we talk about the prospect of something like religion or any
00:30:59.140
other doctrine or institution being an extended phenotype for humankind, let's briefly talk about
00:31:07.860
this other species of replicator, the meme, which is a term of your coinage, which has an
00:31:13.540
importantly different connotation now that we've all spent our lives on social media.
00:31:18.580
That's right. But these are also, it's not, it's actually a decent analogy to the meme.
00:31:23.620
Yes. I mean, I wanted to make the point that what matters is replication. And genes are consummate
00:31:32.580
replicators and they achieve their replication success by manipulating bodies via the processes
00:31:38.500
of embryology. But I wanted to make the point that any replicator could do that. It doesn't have to be
00:31:43.460
DNA. And of course, on other planets, it almost certainly isn't DNA if there is life on other
00:31:48.260
planets, which there probably is. But then I said, well, maybe we don't have to go to other planets
00:31:52.580
because maybe memes, maybe cultural replicators could be the basis of Darwinian selection.
00:32:01.700
There certainly are cultural replicators, no doubt about that. I mean, things spread.
00:32:05.460
Does it matter that they don't randomly vary? The mutation isn't random?
00:32:09.780
I don't think that matters, no. I mean, it incidentally happens to be true that genetic
00:32:13.940
mutation is random. But even that is only random in the sense that it's not guided towards improvement.
00:32:21.220
But mutation is not random in other senses. Mutations are induced by cosmic rays, for example.
00:32:27.140
That's non-random. But mutation is random in the sense that it's not...
00:32:31.780
What do you mean it's non-random if it comes from cosmic ray bombardment?
00:32:35.460
Well, it has a cause. It's predictable that if you subject yourself to...
00:32:40.980
But the specific base pair that's being targeted is random, presumably.
00:32:45.620
That's true. Yes, that's true. But what's more important is that it's
00:32:49.380
random with respect to improvement. So there's no tendency for mutation to be, as it were,
00:32:55.780
anticipating what's necessary for survival. It is random in that sense. And the great majority of
00:33:02.820
Yes. Okay. So when we talk about memes, right? So now a meme is almost any cultural product,
00:33:14.180
So it could be a clothes fashion or something like that, or a speech mannerism.
00:33:26.820
Do you? I never use it. I've given up. I mean, it's such a wonderful word to mean
00:33:41.860
I mean, no, it's a good case, because language does evolve, and so we have to accept that.
00:33:47.060
Yeah. And I think there probably is some randomness, and not to say cosmic ray bombardment,
00:33:53.300
that accounts for the changes in speech patterns. But most memes, it seems to me,
00:33:59.940
the changes in them are engineered, at least with some forward thought...
00:34:06.180
It doesn't really matter. I mean, natural selection would still work, even if mutation,
00:34:11.620
genetic mutation was engineered. And of course it can be.
00:34:18.900
Which we'll talk about. So the fact that the basis for the change, directed or not,
00:34:26.260
you still have an environment where things are competing, and there's differential success,
00:34:32.820
and so the environment is providing a kind of selection mechanism.
00:34:37.380
So memes, ideas, ways of doing things, really all of human culture and ideology,
00:34:44.980
this is being continually produced and spread and going in and out of fashion.
00:34:51.140
And so this is this domain of memetics, and there literally are what are now called,
00:34:56.260
you know, memes on the internet, you know, graphics paired with text that spread on social media,
00:35:01.540
that spread various ideas. I don't know, how do you feel about that appropriation?
00:35:07.140
I'm not particularly keen on that appropriation because they are a very specific example of a meme.
00:35:13.220
I would rather think about whether natural selection of a sort actually guides the spread of memes.
00:35:23.220
And I like the idea of a meme complex or memeplex where something like a religion, like Roman Catholicism,
00:35:37.380
And individual memes might be the idea of life after death or the idea that you have to confess your sins or something like that.
00:35:45.540
Virgin birth. And just like gene complexes are sets of genes which flourish in each other's presence.
00:35:55.460
And that, I think, is an extremely important idea in genetic evolution.
00:36:01.060
So there might be something similar in meme complexes.
00:36:04.340
Yeah, so there's a common fate to these various genes and various memes.
00:36:11.140
That's right. And so I like to think of, say, the gene complex of a carnivore species like leopards,
00:36:21.300
where you have carnivorous teeth, carnivorous eyes, carnivorous brains, carnivorous limbs.
00:36:26.980
They all go together. And on the other hand, you have antelope, I mean, the herbivore prey,
00:36:33.380
eyes, noses, limbs, etc., which go together. If you suddenly plonked an antelope gene into a leopard gene pool,
00:36:43.540
it probably wouldn't work. It wouldn't cooperate well with the other genes of the leopard gene complex.
00:36:56.820
The cowardly leopard. And so a species is a collection of mutually compatible genes,
00:37:03.620
which go well together, as opposed to another species, which is complex of different genes.
00:37:09.300
Well, I believe you might do the same kind of thing with meme complexes,
00:37:13.540
but the theory hasn't been really sort of worked out.
00:37:19.300
Okay. So we have meme complexes, something like Roman Catholicism. And what was being urged
00:37:28.260
upon you in your conversation with Brett, and I've seen this come up many times before,
00:37:33.380
is that something like Roman Catholicism should be, or religion in general,
00:37:38.580
should be considered part of the extended phenotype of human beings.
00:37:43.940
I've never liked that. I've never liked, I think that's taking the idea of the extended phenotype
00:37:49.540
beyond where it should be. And I think it detracts from people's ability to comprehend the idea of
00:37:56.100
the extended phenotype. Extended phenotype is supposed to be a genetic effect, which manifests itself
00:38:02.340
outside the body in the same kind of ways, genetic effect manifests itself inside the body. And people
00:38:08.980
have some, I don't think Brett does this, but people have sometimes said to me,
00:38:12.260
isn't a building like the building we're in at the moment, an extended phenotype.
00:38:18.020
And I think that would only be true if, say, there were genes that caused architects
00:38:23.940
to design a different kind of building. And there aren't. I mean, there's no gene that makes an
00:38:31.540
architect more likely to make Gothic arches rather than Romanesque arches.
00:38:36.180
So our mere survival dependence on buildings is not enough to have it?
00:38:42.660
No, I don't think so, because variation in buildings is not under genetic control.
00:38:48.260
And I doubt very much that variation in religious habits is under genetic control. If it was,
00:38:56.580
then you might make some sort of a case for talking about extended phenotype. But it's not like that.
00:39:03.140
And so I think that it's possible to push an idea too far. And I think that's what's going on here.
00:39:09.300
Yeah. So what about the prospect that having religions led to differential success of various
00:39:20.820
Well, that's quite a different idea. And that's worth considering in its own right. And also,
00:39:24.900
it's what's worth considering in its own right is the idea that individuals having religions might
00:39:30.180
survive better. That's been suggested and might be true. This opens the door to what's been called
00:39:37.140
Yes. And I've never been a fan of group selection. Darwin himself was, it wasn't called group selection
00:39:44.580
then. Darwin almost always was talking about individuals surviving better within a species. But
00:39:52.180
Darwin did, again in The Descent of Man, in one passage, talk about a kind of group selection,
00:39:59.780
where he suggested that groups of humans who had some kind of social cohesion, who behaved well
00:40:10.100
towards each other, had altruism toward each other, cooperation, would be more likely to survive
00:40:14.900
than groups that didn't. And so that would be a form of group selection, I suppose.
00:40:21.780
In some ways, I prefer to compare that not to group selection, but to species competition.
00:40:29.620
A bit like when the gray squirrel was introduced from America into Britain as a sort of frivolous
00:40:38.180
Wait, we did that to you? Was that a good idea or a bad idea?
00:40:44.340
And so I think that would be a better analogy for a group that, say, has a
00:40:51.780
has a warlike aggressive god like Yahweh or like some of the Norse gods. You could make a case that
00:40:58.500
having a militaristic god, maybe one who rewards martyrs in a martyr's heaven, that kind of
00:41:07.780
religion might spread as a kind of group effect, as a kind of species effect, an ecological
00:41:12.900
competition effect. But I would call that ecological competition rather than group selection, I think.
00:41:19.620
Well, yeah, because it's, so let's just create an example. Let's say that Hitler won
00:41:29.140
the Second World War and we are now living under the Thousand Year Reich and everyone who's not a Nazi is
00:41:34.740
now dead. So Nazism would have triumphed over all competing political ideologies so that we,
00:41:44.660
on some level you can say, well, this is a selective effect, right? This is, there were
00:41:49.780
various competitors for political ways of thinking and one has finally dominated and
00:41:55.460
cancelled all others. But that doesn't seem to suggest an analogy to the replication model.
00:42:03.140
I don't think it does. No, I don't think it does. I mean, slightly closer would be if, say,
00:42:07.860
within any country, individuals who espouse Nazi beliefs were more likely to survive than individuals
00:42:15.140
who didn't. So there would be an individual differential survival effect, which probably would
00:42:20.020
also have been the case. That would be a closer analogy to Darwinian selection and we might do a
00:42:26.660
kind of mimetic analysis of that. Nazi memes survive better than anti-Nazi memes, for example. That would
00:42:32.980
be the case of mimetics. Yeah, I think that might actually be the environment we're currently in on
00:42:38.180
social media. I can forbear to comment on that. Sorry, I guess one final question here. So are there
00:42:47.140
outstanding questions in what is now called the neo-Darwinian picture that are significant
00:42:57.380
challenges to the model? I mean, there are many people, and Brett, you know, frankly, is one of
00:43:02.020
these people. There are many people speaking as though neo-Darwinism, and perhaps you should actually
00:43:08.020
define that term, is basically flawed in a way that should be troubling to biologists and public
00:43:15.540
intellectuals. Yes, I don't think that. I mean, any flourishing science will change, of course.
00:43:21.780
And Steve Gould was fond of saying that the modern synthesis is effectively dead. And I thought that
00:43:29.380
was a rather irritating attempt at almost self-publicity. Well, he was irritating in many
00:43:37.540
ways, as it turns out. Okay, yes. But what is your, so first define neo-Darwinism. Well, okay,
00:43:44.820
neo-Darwinism is the, the neo-Darwinian synthesis was a joint effort in the 1930s, really, of,
00:43:54.660
I think, above all, R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, Sewell Wright, Ernst Meyer,
00:44:00.900
Theodosius Dobzhansky, G.G. Simpson, and others. And it was,
00:44:07.700
seeing Darwinian evolution as changes in gene frequency in populations. That was the population
00:44:15.380
genetic part of it. Seeing, well, the paleontological part of it would be
00:44:21.540
seeing major macro evolutionary change as micro evolution writ large. So the geneticists
00:44:30.420
were showing how from generation to generation you could get slight changes in gene frequency. And
00:44:37.540
paleontologists like Simpson was showing that such micro evolutionary changes
00:44:44.820
extrapolated over millions of years, tens, hundreds of millions of years, could produce changes from,
00:44:50.900
from fish to mammal. So the, the, this, this movement of the 1930s and 40s, we're still in it.
00:44:58.900
It, it hasn't really changed much. There've been, I suppose, W.D. Hamilton with his analysis of
00:45:11.220
advance of the 1960s and 70s. But, but we're still in the neo-Darwinian era.
00:45:16.180
And you don't think there are gaping holes in the theory that, that should keep people?
00:45:21.220
No, I don't. I mean, there are, there are questions that remain to be answered. One of
00:45:24.980
the big riddles is the evolution of sex, you know, what, what, what, what sex is good for.
00:45:30.580
And lots of the most distinguished neo-Darwinian theorists have grappled, grappled with that
00:45:37.140
problem. The origin of the Darwinian process is, is still a bit of a mystery. How, how did the first
00:45:43.460
replicator arise? And was it, it almost certainly wasn't DNA actually. I mean, the first replicator
00:45:51.220
Maybe. That, that's a good possibility. And that's one of the more fashionable ideas, but
00:45:56.260
that is still in the realm of theory. It may never become
00:46:00.020
settled because it's happened a long time ago and maybe
00:46:03.780
impossible to, to repeat exactly what happened. We know the kind of thing, it must have been,
00:46:09.780
it was the origin of something self-replicating, possibly RNA.
00:46:14.020
And so what about epigenetics and the way in which they, this feature of our biology seems to
00:46:22.740
suggest a, almost a quasi Lamarckian kind of an inheritance?
00:46:26.420
Yes. This is a strange word epigenetics, because actually,
00:46:30.500
originally it was just another word for the way we see embryology. I mean,
00:46:34.900
every, every cell in, in the mitotic, every mitotic reproducing cell in the body has the same genes.
00:46:41.940
Right. So your, your liver cell has all the genes that your brain cells have.
00:46:46.340
That's right. Yes. And, and different genes get, get, get turned on. And so the, the epigenetic
00:46:52.980
environment of a, of a gene in the, in, in, in a brain cell is different from that in a, in a,
00:46:57.380
in a liver cell. And, and so that's epigenetics. The, the word has been hijacked fashionably recently
00:47:05.700
by people with, as you say, a kind of neo Lamarckian bent to suggest that some of that
00:47:11.940
epigenetic cytoplasmic environment, in which some genes are turned on and others are not,
00:47:18.900
can get inherited to the next generation. And that does seem to happen in some cases.
00:47:25.620
So examples like the stress experienced by the mother with the infant in utero.
00:47:33.940
The, the, the, the change in hormonal environment there, it can actually create some durable effect
00:47:38.660
on the, the expression of, of genes in the baby.
00:47:41.460
Yes. That, that, that does seem to be, that there are a few rare cases like that. I, I don't think it's
00:47:48.500
worth the attention that it's been given. I, I prefer to reserve the word epigenetics for the ordinary
00:47:55.620
process of embryology and say, just occasionally there may be epigenetic effects, which do pass
00:48:02.100
on to the next generation, maybe even to the grandchild generation, but it's not one of these
00:48:06.020
things that goes on forever, like true genetic mutation.
00:48:09.300
So what, what is the current frontier of evolutionary biology? If you'd like to continue listening to
00:48:20.660
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