Making Sense - Sam Harris - #382

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Just a note to say that if

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00:00:45.280 Well, today's guest needs no introduction. Often one says that and then just gives the introduction

00:00:51.560 anyway, but no, Richard Dawkins actually needs no introduction on this podcast, except to say that

00:00:58.460 he has a new book, which is titled The Genetic Book of the Dead, which we speak about in the

00:01:04.420 first part of the podcast, where we talk about the genome as a kind of palimpsest, what scientists

00:01:12.380 of the future may be able to do with our genetic information, genotypes and phenotypes, embryology

00:01:18.720 and epigenetics, why the Lamarckian theory of acquired characteristics just couldn't be true,

00:01:24.240 how environmental selection pressure actually works, why evolution is so hard to think about,

00:01:30.620 human dependence on material culture, the future of genetic enhancement of human beings,

00:01:37.620 viral DNA, symbiotic bacteria, AI and the future of intellectual life, the prospect of resurrecting

00:01:46.300 extinct species. And then we pivot to politics. We talk about the problem of free speech in the UK,

00:01:52.480 which has reached surprising proportions, as well as the problem of political Islam and

00:01:59.500 anti-Semitism. And then we close with some reflections on our friend Dan Dennett. And now I

00:02:06.520 bring you the one and only Richard Dawkins. I am here with Richard Dawkins. Richard, thanks for joining

00:02:17.680 me again. Great pleasure, Sam. Thank you. So you have a new book, which I'm sorry to say I have not

00:02:24.660 read in its entirety because I can only spend so much time reading a PDF that gets sent to me. I do

00:02:30.460 not have the physical book yet, but I have read enough to declare that it is fascinating and that

00:02:36.020 people should go out and buy it. So we'll talk a little bit about it, but there are a few other

00:02:40.600 things I want to talk to you about. Yes. But first, how are you and what is your life like

00:02:46.380 these days? I think you and I had lunch about, I don't know, a couple of months ago, but... Yes,

00:02:50.480 we did. Are you traveling or what's happening? Yes, well, I'm doing a tour of North America at

00:02:56.160 the moment and then it carries on in Britain and Europe. And I've said it's my final tour and

00:03:02.140 it's partly to promote the book. In fact, I suppose it's mostly different to promote the book.

00:03:06.280 And how long are you on the road for? Five weeks in North America and then

00:03:12.220 indefinitely, well, a couple of weeks in Britain and Europe.

00:03:16.960 Mm-hmm. Nice. Well, needless to say, I hope it's not your final tour, but... Or I hope that

00:03:21.880 doesn't say anything about your longevity, but... Yeah, I hope so too. Yeah. My last tour might

00:03:27.200 have been my final tour too, so you never know. So let's touch on the book. The title is the...

00:03:34.800 The Genetic Book of the Dead. The Genetic Book of the Dead, yeah. And it's a reference which

00:03:39.080 you disavow early on. It produces an echo which you disavow early on. That's right. It's an echo

00:03:45.160 to the Egyptian books of the dead. And the Tibetan, I would point out, there's also a Tibetan book.

00:03:49.600 Yes, and the Tibetan. It's just a kind of poetic allusion, really. It doesn't really discuss

00:03:55.200 those books. There's a kind of vague relevance in that I talk about genes as being immortal in the

00:04:02.960 sense that they go on for generation after generation, whereas bodies are cast aside and

00:04:06.780 die. And so the genes are a kind of set of instructions to the body as to how to not proceed

00:04:14.800 to the afterlife, as it would be in the Egyptian books of the dead, but how to hand the genes

00:04:19.640 on to the afterlife, which is the next generation and the next and the next and so on.

00:04:24.240 Right. So if we were going to take the analogy literally, and you also draw an analogy, a similar

00:04:31.480 analogy to a palimpsest, which you might describe what that is, but these are both analogies to

00:04:38.100 books. We'll tell our listeners or remind them not to be too pedantic what a palimpsest is.

00:04:43.560 Okay. A palimpsest is a piece of writing which is partially or wholly erased so that you can write

00:04:51.400 again on the same medium. So in the days when there wasn't an abundant ability of paper,

00:04:57.620 people would reuse the same parchment and they would erase what was already there and then write

00:05:04.840 over it. And I had a dear friend, Bill Hamilton, a very distinguished evolutionist who wrote postcards

00:05:12.380 where he would economize by writing in blue horizontally, and then he would turn it to a

00:05:17.880 right angle and write in red, carrying on the message. And you could read it by deciphering

00:05:22.700 the coding red, blue, and which way it was pointing.

00:05:27.600 You provide an example in the book, which I must say I found difficult to read. I mean,

00:05:31.080 that seemed like a provocation to one's friends to be sending them letters of that kind.

00:05:35.920 Actually, I did manage to decipher, I think it's the red, I forget which color it was.

00:05:40.420 It's really rather dramatic. It's something to do with somebody getting his bike

00:05:43.540 rammed or something like that. I didn't really read too much of it. But the point is that the

00:05:52.340 genetic book of the dead is a description in the genes and in the body of an animal of all its

00:06:00.300 ancestral worlds, all the worlds in which its ancestors lived, because natural selection has

00:06:05.140 shaped it, has shaped the genes to survive in those worlds. But of course, since its ancestors lived in

00:06:11.500 so many different worlds, old, very old, slightly old, and so on, until relatively recent, and then

00:06:16.780 now, it is a palimpsest of writings from all these different ages where they've been partially erased

00:06:23.460 and then written over and then partially erased and written over again.

00:06:27.360 Yeah, I want to go over that statement again, just because it's beautiful and I don't want people to

00:06:31.560 miss the import of it. So to come at it from the other side, if we could read the genetic book

00:06:38.500 of the dead, what would we read there?

00:06:42.340 In the case of any of a human or any mammal, we would read old writings about the sea when our

00:06:49.440 ancestors before the Devonian era lived in the sea. Then we would read writings about the emergence onto

00:06:56.220 the land. We would read writings about subsequent history and so on. In the case of primates going up

00:07:01.800 into the trees, some animals went back into the water, which is remarkable, having sort of got all

00:07:06.920 tooled up to come onto the land to then go back into the water. And I've got a subchapter where

00:07:11.800 turtles and tortoises actually came back for the third time. So they came out of the water onto the

00:07:18.020 land, back to the water. So there were land tortoises in the Triassic era, back to the water as sea

00:07:26.100 turtles, where some of them remain, and then back to the land again as modern land tortoises. So that's

00:07:32.860 a double, double doubling back.

00:07:36.780 And what do you imagine future biologists will be able to do with the genome?

00:07:43.800 Okay, I have a sort of recurrent fantasy about a zoologist of the future, a scientist of the future.

00:07:49.740 I make her female and I call her SOF, a scientist of the future. And I believe that scientists of the

00:07:57.680 future will be able to read the book which is the animal and its genes and piece together the entire

00:08:04.680 palimpsest of its ancestral history. It's something we can't do at the moment. And parts of the book

00:08:13.620 are about the little preliminary fumbling steps, nursery slopes steps, which we can make towards that

00:08:21.440 end. Given an unspecified genome, how close are we to being able to predict the phenotype of the

00:08:31.100 animal? Not very close. And that, of course, would be a big problem for the genetic book of the dead.

00:08:37.580 And much of the book actually is not about genes at all. It's about using the phenotype of an animal

00:08:42.640 to reconstruct the book, which is its set of ancestral histories. SOF, in the future, will be able to do it

00:08:50.080 with the genes. And we can't really do that now. There is no decoding process whereby you can get

00:08:56.960 a genotype and say what the ancestral worlds of this animal were.

00:09:02.580 I think, Richard, we should probably remind people of just, we should define our terms here. What's

00:09:07.240 the difference between a genotype and a phenotype?

00:09:09.480 Well, a genotype is the set of genes in the animal. And the phenotype is what the genes manifest

00:09:14.540 themselves as. So the phenotype is the body, its behavior, everything that we actually see of the

00:09:19.440 animal. So what I asked you, given the genome, the series of base pairs, the code that's in the

00:09:26.980 nucleus of almost every cell in an animal's body, could we predict what that animal would look like?

00:09:35.620 No.

00:09:35.880 Are we close at all to your knowledge?

00:09:39.860 Not really. What you can do is to say exactly what proteins would be programmed by that animal's

00:09:48.600 genome. But the problem then is that the animal itself is produced by the processes of embryonic

00:09:55.440 development, which are masterminded by genes via the proteins. But the actual process itself is such

00:10:03.500 that unless you know a lot about the animal already, you can't really tell. If you're given

00:10:08.500 a wholly new animal that's been found in the seas, sorry, a whole new genome that has been found,

00:10:14.540 and you have no idea what kind of animal it is, then you couldn't reconstruct it. But if you could

00:10:18.320 say, ah, yes, well, this evidently is a species of kangaroo, because it looks like existing kangaroos,

00:10:25.460 then you're away, and then you can do something with it. But if you know nothing about it, the

00:10:32.900 only way to really find out what that animal would develop as would be to put the genome

00:10:37.860 into a, well, into a female, or the species concerned, and let it develop.

00:10:43.460 Yeah. You actually have a very seditious sentence at some point early in the book, which I think

00:10:50.780 you say something like, forgive me for putting dangerous words into your mouth, but they were

00:10:58.080 dangerous on the page. You say something like the best machine for translating a genotype into a

00:11:04.280 phenotype that we know of is a woman, or something like that.

00:11:07.360 Yes, that's right. That's right, yes. I could have said any female.

00:11:11.420 Yes, right. Well, perhaps we'll return to that combustible topic.

00:11:15.580 Yes.

00:11:15.900 So, what is meant by the word epigenetics, and where does that concept come into play here?

00:11:23.240 Epigenetics is, I think, a much misused word. It's really just a word for embryology. The thing

00:11:29.600 is that every cell in your body, every cell in our bodies, has the same genome, the same diploid

00:11:35.700 set of genes, and yet the cells are all different. So liver cells are different from kidney cells,

00:11:40.960 different from muscle cells, and so on. And the reason is epigenetics. The reason is that some

00:11:45.880 genes are turned on in liver cells, and different genes are turned on in kidney cells, different

00:11:50.580 genes are turned on in nerve cells, and so on. That's epigenetics. Now, there has very recently

00:11:56.800 been a suggestion that some of these turnings on of genes can get passed on to the next generation.

00:12:04.800 And this has been shown for a few cases. And the word epigenetics has come to be dubbed onto that

00:12:13.580 process of passing on to the next generation. And that's unfortunate, because it's become a kind of

00:12:20.520 vogue word of great popularity, suggesting a kind of major revolution. Some people have even thought

00:12:26.020 that it looks like Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics, which it really isn't.

00:12:30.760 Well, let's just circle on that concept for a second again, just to capture everybody's

00:12:35.740 understanding. What was the Lamarckian thesis, and to what degree does the heritability of some

00:12:43.020 epigenetic settings cash out that thesis?

00:12:47.460 Okay. Lamarck lived before Darwin, and he had really the only other theory for how evolution could

00:12:55.200 work. And it was a bit mystical. He had this idea that animals kind of strive to change their way of

00:13:03.460 life, and they stretch their... The giraffe by striving to reach higher and higher leaves.

00:13:08.960 That's right. It stretches its neck. And then he had two main principles, the principle of use and

00:13:14.620 disuse. The more you use a bit of your body, the bigger it gets. So the more you use certain muscles,

00:13:20.480 the bigger they get. That's why you go to training. And as the giraffe stretches its neck,

00:13:25.440 everything about the neck stretches. So that's the principle of use and disuse.

00:13:29.520 Then he had the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics. An animal inherits

00:13:35.060 from its parents those changes which occur during the parent's own lifetime. So the giraffe's

00:13:41.840 babies inherit a slightly longer neck because the parents stretch their necks.

00:13:47.300 If you exercise your muscles with weight lifting, then your children are born with slightly bigger

00:13:54.240 muscles. That would be the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics plus use and disuse.

00:13:59.440 And it's all false. It doesn't happen. I mean, use and disuse happens, but acquired characteristics

00:14:04.500 are not inherited. Now, the modern vogue for what they call epigenetics, where certain genes get

00:14:11.080 turned on, which they do during embryology, those genes that get turned on, if that turning on gets

00:14:16.680 passed on to the next generation, then that is a kind of inheritance of an acquired characteristic.

00:14:23.220 But it's very different from the giraffe's neck. It doesn't have the same adaptive potential. It

00:14:28.660 doesn't have the potential to pass on to the next generation the improved capacity to survive,

00:14:35.480 which the principle of use and disuse would. That's one reason why it's not Lamarckian.

00:14:41.300 Another reason is that it doesn't go on to subsequent generations. It works only for the

00:14:45.040 next generation, not for the indefinite future, which it would have to in order to be evolutionarily

00:14:49.520 relevant.

00:14:50.780 Yeah, so let's clarify that point. So let's give an example of what we think actually could

00:14:56.240 be transmitted from generation to generation by way of epigenetics. I mean, what is, forgive me,

00:15:03.080 I'm not close to this literature at all, but I believe I've consumed somewhere the idea that,

00:15:07.720 you know, various environmental stresses, let's say the subjection of one population to a near

00:15:15.440 genocide. I mean, some, you know, generational trauma meted out to people.

00:15:19.920 Yes, starvation, say.

00:15:20.280 Right, starvation could do something to the epigenetic settings of the people.

00:15:25.220 Yeah, it could change the physiology of the children in some way.

00:15:29.760 Right.

00:15:30.020 But it would not go forward to the grandchildren or the great-grandchildren or the great-great-grandchildren.

00:15:35.180 Because it doesn't change the germline of the children.

00:15:37.980 Exactly. It doesn't change the germline. It changes which members of the germline got switched

00:15:43.460 on. But I don't think it's interesting because it's at least not evolutionary. I mean, it's quite

00:15:48.360 interesting from some points of view. It's not evolutionarily interesting because it doesn't

00:15:51.680 go on to the indefinite future. It would have to go on to the indefinite future to be evolutionarily

00:15:56.720 interesting. By the way, I mean, I think it's quite important, quite interesting to think about

00:16:03.120 why the Lamarckian theory doesn't work. I mean, even if it were true that acquired characteristics

00:16:09.620 were inherited, even if the giraffe's neck was inherited, it would not be good enough,

00:16:15.940 it would not be a powerful enough theory to explain almost everything about evolution. If you

00:16:20.720 take something like an eye, where eyes get progressively better at focusing, more clarity,

00:16:28.640 more detail, more precision, that doesn't happen by just use and disuse. It's not the case that the

00:16:35.860 more you use an eye, the more acute the vision becomes. On Darwin's principle, Darwin actually used

00:16:43.260 the phrase, nature is daily and hourly scrutinizing every detail. That's one of the main themes of the

00:16:48.780 genetic book of the dead that daily and hourly, any tiny detail inside the animal buried, however,

00:16:54.640 deeply within the animal, which improves the animal's chance of surviving, then that survives

00:16:59.180 and that can go on to the next generation and the next and the next and the next.

00:17:03.040 Actually, perhaps you can discuss an example of that. I know you go through many in the book,

00:17:07.720 but the one that I recall is with camouflage with respect to, you know, lizards and moths.

00:17:13.540 Okay. Yes. So the thing I want you to illustrate is the point you're making about the daily and

00:17:19.920 hourly scrutiny of the environment. Yes. That's a lovely phrase of Darwin, by the way. The first

00:17:25.580 picture in the book, I think, is this lizard. It lives in the desert and all over its back,

00:17:32.140 it's got pictures of sand and stones and pebbles. It looks as though it's got a desert painted on its

00:17:38.620 back. And this is camouflage, of course. And there are many other examples, beautiful examples of

00:17:44.080 camouflage where in every case you can say that the animals, or rather the environment of the

00:17:48.940 ancestors is painted on the animal's back. Well, those are very spectacular examples.

00:17:55.460 But the thesis of the genetic book of the dead is that it's more than just skin deep. Exactly the same

00:18:01.200 attention to detail must pervade every tiny scrap of detail all the way through the animal. It's not

00:18:08.320 just the skin. It's more than skin deep. It goes right through the animal. The daily and hourly

00:18:13.820 scrutinizing produces the picture of a desert on the lizard's back, but it also produces every little

00:18:20.300 tiny mote of detail inside the animal, which assists its survival. Anything that assists survival

00:18:27.080 and passing on of genes is fair game for natural selection. That just doesn't, the principle of

00:18:33.060 use and disuse and inheritance of acquired characteristics can't do that because it doesn't

00:18:38.760 have this sort of power to adjust to every single detail that Darwinism does. Because if it assists

00:18:46.280 survival, it gets through to the next generation and therefore into the future.

00:18:50.280 But to explain how this could be so incremental, I mean, so you have a moth that looks now exactly

00:18:58.300 like the bark of the tree that is its habitual stopping point, but obviously no moth could have

00:19:06.080 evolved fully in one generation to look that way. So how is each increment justified and solidified

00:19:16.300 by this, by the attention of the daily and hourly attention of the environment?

00:19:22.320 You have to start from an ancestor which looked hardly anything like the bark of a tree. Or think

00:19:29.960 of a stick caterpillar, which is another beautiful example where a modern stick caterpillar looks

00:19:35.900 uncannily like a stick. It's got little leaf bud scars and everything looks like a stick. Well,

00:19:41.620 originally the ancestor would hardly have looked like a stick at all. It would have just been a

00:19:45.980 vaguely long shaped thing, which most caterpillars are. So why, how did the, you're asking the

00:19:52.120 question, how did the incremental process proceed step by step by step to go from a very crude ancestral

00:19:58.760 resemblance to a stick right up to a modern extreme perfection of resemblance to a stick? And the answer,

00:20:06.900 I think, is that the final perfecting stages were provided by full frontal vision by a predator in a good

00:20:15.520 light with full attention playing on the object. Whereas the early stages might have been predators who were

00:20:23.560 just sort of, might have caught sight of this thing out of the corner of their eye while flashing past, or maybe

00:20:29.760 in a poor light. Well, under those bad, or from a long distance away. So from a long distance away in a poor

00:20:36.280 light and out of the corner of your eye, even a very crude resemblance to a stick will escape the

00:20:42.940 attention, escape the notice of the predator. And that provides the selection pressure to slightly

00:20:48.340 improve the resemblance to a stick.

00:20:50.900 So just the slightest change in the probability of being, of not surviving there is because now

00:20:58.580 you're dealing with just the, all those occasions where you were barely in the field of view of the

00:21:04.700 predator. Just that slight modification is enough to encourage that, that differential success of that

00:21:11.760 adaptation. Exactly. Exactly. And then, and then the gradient goes steadily upwards because you've got

00:21:16.880 a whole gradient, a whole spectrum of improved seeing conditions. I mean, if the very poor resemblance

00:21:24.340 is good enough to fool a predator at a hundred yards away, then at 90 yards away, it's got to be

00:21:30.260 slightly better in order to, and there are going to be predators that are seeing caterpillars at all

00:21:35.960 those distances. And under poor seeing conditions, the selection pressure produces the, the first stages

00:21:42.880 in the gradient of improvement to the, to the mimicry. And then the last stages are provided by

00:21:49.260 predators that are looking straight at the caterpillar in a good light, and they're still fooled by it

00:21:55.040 because the resemblance is so perfect. Yeah. It's really just an amazingly beautiful process to think

00:22:02.020 about in, in that regard. Yes. Why is it so hard to understand this intuitively? I mean, or perhaps

00:22:11.060 another way of asking the question is, what do you think the barriers are for, um, just a, just a

00:22:17.740 widespread intuitive understanding of the reality of evolution? I suppose partly it's that the time

00:22:26.500 scale involved is so huge and we're not equipped to deal with millions of years, let alone hundreds

00:22:32.180 of millions of years. That's one thing. Isn't the time scale sometimes surprisingly compressed?

00:22:38.680 It's short. It is indeed. That's right. And, and, and that's perfectly true. And, and in the case of

00:22:43.360 the evolution of, of mimicry, it could, it could be quite fast.

00:22:48.160 But sort of either present their own impediment, because if it's too short, it just seems like

00:22:53.140 there's not enough time to have accomplished that miracle. And if it's too long, it's very hard

00:22:57.520 to think about.

00:22:58.360 That's right. Yes.

00:22:59.440 There's no sweet spot. Yeah.

00:23:01.140 Well, maybe there is a sweet spot. Maybe, but it, but it'll, it'll vary in, in the different

00:23:05.680 cases.

00:23:06.680 One hundred thousand years. That's the sweet spot. Yeah.

00:23:08.680 Well, well, it depends. I mean, it, it might be for some, for some cases in, in, and it

00:23:13.960 might be a million years in others. Um, but it probably is surprisingly fast. Another thing

00:23:19.080 I think is that people don't realize that a very, very slight advantage is enough to exert

00:23:26.420 evolutionary change. So when, when you think about the, you know, can it really be a good,

00:23:32.300 can it really matter whether you've got, say, eyebrows? I have no idea why we have eyebrows,

00:23:37.840 but suppose it's to stop sweat trickling into our eyes. I don't think it is, but just,

00:23:41.860 just imagine that we have that.

00:23:42.960 I've noticed it does not do a perfect job.

00:23:44.900 Yes.

00:23:45.220 That could just be my problem.

00:23:46.800 Okay. Um, well, you might say, oh, well, what does, why does it matter if sweat trickles

00:23:52.080 into your eyes? I mean, does that really affect survival? Well, it might, because you,

00:23:56.640 you might not see the, the saber tooth approaching quite so soon if your eyes are all gummed up with

00:24:02.740 sweat. Especially if there's sunblock mingled in with the sweat.

00:24:06.120 Especially, yes. And the point is that it, that because we're dealing with genes and the statistical

00:24:12.340 frequencies of genes as they change in frequency over generations, any gene that tends to make

00:24:18.560 eyebrows stop the sweat trickling into your, into your eyes. It's not just the one occasion. It's all

00:24:24.300 those thousands of occasions of different individuals where the same gene has its beneficial

00:24:29.660 effect, not only the same individuals at the same time, but through, through different times. So

00:24:35.680 statistically, a gene can have a very small beneficial effect, but that beneficial effect

00:24:41.500 is kind of multiplied up over all the different individuals that it influences over a larger stretch

00:24:46.720 of time where it does its influencing. And because of that, those genes, which are good at helping

00:24:53.380 individuals to survive, are the ones that we see, the ones that actually come through the generations.

00:24:58.960 So even a very slight advantage, like stopping sweat trickling into your eyes, is enough to do the

00:25:04.320 trick, even though that's counterintuitive. And you ask the question, why is it intuitively so hard

00:25:09.440 to understand? I think that's another, another reason.

00:25:11.580 What do you make of the fact that human beings seem so imperfectly selected to survive without

00:25:22.660 material culture, right? I mean, so like, actually, our David Deutsch, who I know, you know, at least

00:25:29.160 by reputation, if not personally, over there in Oxford, you know, very smart man. He's, he's made

00:25:35.280 the point that, um, the earth already is essentially a spaceship for us, right? So like, if you just

00:25:42.660 leave him out exposed, even to an Oxford night, you know, uh, without the benefit of shelter or

00:25:48.960 clothing or fire, or, you know, he, he's, you know, for at least many nights of the year, he's likely to

00:25:55.040 die of hypothermia, right? So it's like, we're, we're just not, we're, we're these naked apes that are

00:26:00.100 not great at survival apart from being in tribal bands who have produced a, a modicum of material

00:26:08.160 culture that, and, and an ability to pass on that culture to subsequent generations. But in and of

00:26:15.180 themselves, you know, each, you know, representative of the species devoid of culture, you know, put on a

00:26:21.600 desert island is liable to die in, you know, over the course of 72 hours or a week because of just

00:26:27.940 being fundamentally unable to survive when slammed up against raw nature. What do you make of the

00:26:34.900 difference between human beings and basically everything else we see in the living world?

00:26:41.480 I suppose if you were to go back to our time when we lived for such a long time in Africa,

00:26:46.780 in, in the savannah, we would have been a lot better at surviving as individuals then. Even then we would

00:26:53.100 have needed culture, but nothing like so much as we do today. I mean, now we have supermarkets,

00:26:58.560 we get our food prepared for us. We don't have to go and get it. We don't have to go and find it or

00:27:03.240 hunt it or kill it or gather it. We just go into a shop and buy it. And we are mollycoddled by

00:27:09.120 electricity and central heating and all that kind of thing. If you were to take not a, a modern

00:27:16.060 American and, or Englishman and put him out on, on, on the, expose him to the, to the elements,

00:27:21.820 you might die. But if you were to do the same with a Kung Sam from the Kalahari Desert,

00:27:27.460 they're a lot better at surviving. Yeah. Or Australian Aboriginal. At least in the Kalahari

00:27:31.660 Desert, yeah. Yes. Or Australian, a native Australian in, in, in the Australian outback.

00:27:36.920 They do pretty well. And I think we've co-evolved culturally and genetically. And when we've

00:27:43.500 gradually emancipated ourselves, I mean, our genes have, have gradually moved us on into a world in

00:27:52.320 which we, because we are surrounded by culture and culture has been, has been gradually evolving

00:27:56.620 at the same time, well, much faster than we have become dependent upon the culture, which has been

00:28:05.120 evolving at this very rapid rate. Things like wearing clothes, things like taming fire and going

00:28:11.920 onto central heating and cooperative living such that we have farmers who grow food for us so we

00:28:18.740 don't have to grow it ourselves, et cetera. I think it's not that difficult to understand how it's

00:28:23.360 happened, this co-evolution with, with culture and technology. What are you expecting us to do

00:28:30.680 with our increasing power to, to actually engineer changes within our own genomes? If you had a time

00:28:38.900 machine and you could glimpse what we're up to on that front 50 years from now or a hundred years

00:28:45.160 from now, what, what would you expect? We've been changing the genomes of domestic animals and

00:28:51.640 plants for thousands of years, very, really, very radically. And so the sort of domestic animals that

00:28:57.800 we keep like cattle and horses and pigs, chickens, and pets like dogs are incredibly different from

00:29:04.940 their wild ancestors. And that's been achieved not by manipulation of the genes directly, but by

00:29:10.820 artificial selection. So if you think that a Pekingese and a Chihuahua are actually genetically wolves

00:29:16.900 that have been modified by differential selection by humans, you've now, you're now asking the question

00:29:23.720 about the other part of the Darwinian equation, which is mutation. We've shown we've, we can modify

00:29:29.840 animals by selection. We've never done that with humans and the Nazis tried and thank goodness

00:29:35.080 they didn't succeed. But I mean, you could have bred, I mean, one, one could imagine it in thousands

00:29:40.440 of years time. If totalitarian regimes started selecting humans, the way we've selected dogs

00:29:45.760 and cabbages, you could produce all sorts of monstrous humans, analogous to producing Chihuahuas from,

00:29:52.600 from wolves. And yeah, but obviously you could do it much more quickly.

00:29:56.960 Yes, it's much quicker. And, and, but, but you couldn't, you, you, you don't know what you're

00:30:00.880 doing. Coming back to your earlier question, you, we don't actually know very much about how to do

00:30:05.920 that. If, if you wanted to produce a, not just as a human, say, say you want to produce an animal,

00:30:12.340 take one that hasn't been domesticated, like say a hedgehog. You want to produce a hedgehog,

00:30:16.820 which could do the high jump and jump impressively high fences. In principle, you could do it, you

00:30:23.520 could do it by selective breeding. It would take a while, but, but there's no reason why you couldn't

00:30:28.340 gradually improve the jumping ability of a hedgehog until it could jump a foot and then two feet and

00:30:33.140 so on. Just the way you be bred dogs to change from wolves into, into Pomeranians and Spaniels.

00:30:40.180 But to go into the genome of a hedgehog and say, let's change the genes to make it into a high

00:30:45.340 jumper. That's in principle possible, but would take a lot more knowledge than we have at present

00:30:51.620 how to, how to do that. The same with humans. But I would think that if we just keep making

00:30:57.500 progress, we will eventually have the, the understanding of, of the relevant genomes and

00:31:04.060 the technology by which to intrude into our own genomes. And we are essentially, we already have

00:31:09.760 CRISPR and presumably that's only going to get better and better and better understood in terms of

00:31:15.320 the implications of making any change. At a certain point, I mean, we, we, we already see

00:31:20.720 an appetite for body modification and general strangeness in, among humans, right? We see people

00:31:28.600 who tattoo their entire body bodies. We see bodybuilders who develop their, their musculature

00:31:34.780 to the, the absolute maximum capacity, you know, with the aid of a pharmacology that compromises

00:31:40.320 their physical health, right? And this also happens among athletes. So there's clearly an appetite

00:31:45.480 for extreme performance and extreme aesthetics that, you know, completely divorced from performance

00:31:54.360 of any kind. You know, even degraded performance, you know, that, that allows for extreme aesthetics.

00:32:00.340 There's an appetite for that. So once we get the ability to, let's say, modify the tendons and

00:32:10.780 ligaments and muscles in such a way as to make, make a person, you know, analogously strong to,

00:32:19.060 you know, to a gorilla or a chimpanzee, do you have any doubt that people are going to start doing

00:32:25.480 that the moment that technology becomes remotely democratized?

00:32:29.440 You know, if you're asking me about whether I have doubt to whether people would take advantage

00:32:33.120 of the opportunity, I mean, I don't have any doubt. Whereas people do the most extraordinary

00:32:36.740 things. Yes, I think that they would. I sort of, I sometimes say, say, well, we, we haven't changed

00:32:41.500 humans by selection the way we've changed dogs. So why would we change them by genetic manipulation?

00:32:47.560 But of course there is an important difference, which is that selection is something that takes

00:32:50.720 many generations. Yeah. And it could be done by totalitarian regime.

00:32:55.400 This is the question of what you could do to yourself as a consenting adult.

00:32:58.800 What you could do to yourself is another matter, because, because that could be much quicker.

00:33:02.280 And yes, I suppose that's true because bodybuilders already, I mean, some, if you look at some of the

00:33:07.660 pictures of extreme bodybuilders, they are, well, I don't, I was going to say, I was going to say

00:33:12.340 grotesque, perhaps that's not unkind, but, but it shows what can be done by various sorts of

00:33:17.900 manipulation and genetic manipulation could be even more powerful than that. So yes, I could

00:33:23.440 imagine that whether it would just be physical, I mean, maybe you could even produce musical geniuses,

00:33:28.740 make it, make another Mozart or another Bach by this means is a tantalizing thought.

00:33:34.020 I guess I'm, I spend very little time thinking about this, you know, the far future or even the,

00:33:39.340 the near far future with respect to this. But I spend much more time thinking about the

00:33:44.120 implications of artificial intelligence with respect to this kind of time horizon. But

00:33:48.220 when you think of genetic engineering, it's very, it's very hard for me to imagine what would

00:33:55.120 prevent us from going some significant distance down this path, right? I mean, I, I, obviously we,

00:34:03.060 there are concerns about synthetic biology and the engineered pandemics and, and all of that. And,

00:34:08.440 and also there are ethical concerns of the sort that you, you reference with, with respect to

00:34:13.360 eugenics and, you know, totalitarian control of populations. But when you just imagine the

00:34:19.260 technology becoming more and more available to the, to the individual user and in the way that,

00:34:25.400 you know, by analogy, in the way that drugs illegal and otherwise are, are legal and otherwise are,

00:34:30.720 are available to people now, you know, the anabolic steroids being the example we're, we're using

00:34:36.440 with respect to bodybuilding. I just, it's very hard to imagine us avoid culturally,

00:34:42.340 you know, perfectly collaborating to avoid extreme outcomes on a global level. I mean,

00:34:48.400 I just don't see how we avoid it. Yeah. Yeah. I quite agree.

00:34:53.260 Okay. Well, is there anything else in the book that you want to draw listeners attention to in

00:34:58.780 terms of your purpose in writing it or what you was, what was most interesting to you and

00:35:03.640 researching it? There is a sort of sting in the tail, I suppose, in the, in the last chapter,

00:35:07.700 which you won't have got to yet, where I make the suggestion that we should regard all our own

00:35:13.940 genes, what we call our own genes as symbiotic viruses, a gigantic colony of symbiotic viruses.

00:35:24.500 And that's not as radical as it sounds. It, it, it, it does, it doesn't mean that a whole lot of

00:35:29.720 independent viruses sort of like the flu virus and COVID virus and so on came together in us.

00:35:35.740 It doesn't mean that it's rather that I make a distinction when looking at parasites or looking

00:35:41.160 at symbionts like, like viruses or bacteria between those that get to a new victim by passing through

00:35:48.980 the gametes, passing through the sperms and eggs of the present victim. So imagine a bacterium or a,

00:35:55.260 or a virus whose method of getting from human to human is by eggs or sperms. Then if you think about

00:36:05.780 what they want of their, of the body in which they sit, what they want is exactly the same as what the

00:36:12.280 body's own genes want. They want the animal to reproduce. They want it to survive, therefore,

00:36:18.140 in order to reproduce. They want it to be sexually attractive. They want it to be a good parent.

00:36:22.660 They want it to rear its young because that's their ticket to the future. So every one of our

00:36:30.100 own genes cooperates with each, with the other genes in our own genome, all the genes in, in our

00:36:36.280 body cooperate to produce a body because that's their hope for the future. That's the only way

00:36:40.980 they're going to get into the future. And that's what natural selection is all about. Selfish genes

00:36:44.840 are being selected for their capacity to go into the distant future. Now, a virus whose method of

00:36:52.200 getting into the next generation is also via eggs or sperms has the identical interests at heart,

00:37:00.540 so to speak, as your own genes do. And whereas a virus that has a different method of egress from

00:37:07.620 the present body, like being sneezed out and then breathed in by the next one, or coughed out, or

00:37:15.540 coming out as diarrhea and getting into the water supply and getting drunk by the next victim,

00:37:22.240 those viruses or bacteria have not the same interests at heart. They might want the body to

00:37:28.480 stay alive just long enough to get to have the next sneeze. But they're not, if you make a list of

00:37:35.100 all the desiderata, all the things that they want their body to do, it does not include surviving to

00:37:41.460 reproduce. It does not include being sexually attractive. It does not include all the other

00:37:44.940 things I mentioned. But it might include being sexually attractive if the parasite gets passed

00:37:50.500 on by, if it's a sexually transmitted disease. That would be a special case, which kind of proves

00:37:55.400 the rule. So if you were to look at all our own genes, they're just like viruses that have the same

00:38:01.880 interest at heart. And that's what I mean when I say that all our own genes can be thought of

00:38:05.900 as a gigantic colony of viruses, which cooperate with each other because they all have the only

00:38:14.080 one, the only hope of getting into the future is to pass through the same exit route, the same

00:38:19.340 little vessels, which are the sperms or eggs. And so why make a distinction between viruses which

00:38:26.960 get passed on by that route and our own genes? You might as well call them all viruses or call them all

00:38:34.060 genes. That's the sort of sting in the tail in the book anyway.

00:38:38.560 It's a provocative analogy. What is it? Are we aware of any viruses that target the gametes that way?

00:38:45.120 Oh yes. And I think it's something like 8% of what we think of as our genome really did come in.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - September 06, 2024

#382 — The Eye of Nature

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