On today's podcast, I play the audio from the first of two live events I did with Richard Dawkins in Los Angeles last month. These were fundraisers for his foundation, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, which is also in the process of merging with the Center for Inquiry, making them the largest foundation for defending science and secularism from politically weaponized religion. And as you'll hear, we had a lot of fun, and it was really satisfying to have a conversation like this live, as opposed to privately over Skype. So, as I say at the end of this episode, this has given me an idea for how to produce more podcasts like this, and now I give you an evening with Dawkins, the first night, and a second event in a later podcast, which will be much, much better. I can guarantee that the two nights will be reasonably different, because different questions will come up. But we won't hew too narrowly to the questions, as we'll just have conversation. And I find that I want to ask you, Richard, what do you think about socks? And I'm not sure what you're not sure about them. And I think that's not a question you should be asking, as as we come out here with a question about socks, is it? I don't know, but I think you should try to figure that out for yourself. . - Sam Harris Sam Harris is the host of the Making Sense Podcast, a podcast that explores the intersection of science, philosophy, and pop culture. His work has been published in The New York Times bestselling books, and other media outlets. He's also a regular contributor to The Huffington Post, and is a frequent contributor to the New York Magazine, and he's a frequent guest on the radio show on the podcast Making Sense. Make sure to subscribe to Making Sense, The Stranger podcast. and subscribe on Apple Podcasts. If you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming a supporter of what we re doing here. We don't run an ad-free version of Making Sense? - it's made possible entirely through the support of our sponsorships, so you'll get a better idea of what's going on in the making sense podcast. Thank you, making sense! by becoming a member of the podcast, and you'll be making sense, too! - by becoming one of us, too, and we're making sense.
00:06:30.020It's a bit like San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, where people have famously jumped to their death.
00:06:34.620And all around this place, Beachy Head, is a very, very high cliff in the south of England.
00:06:40.060There are rather sad little crosses where people have jumped off.
00:06:44.100And we were filming the sequence on suicide, and I had to walk very solemnly and slowly and in a melancholy frame of mind past these crosses.
00:06:54.840And the camera was focused on my feet, walking past these little low crosses.
00:08:04.420Well, I think, I mean, what I've noticed is that there are undoubtedly people who are friends of ours,
00:08:12.240colleagues of ours, who agree with us down the line,
00:08:15.060who seem to feel no temptation to pick all of the individual battles we pick.
00:08:21.960And one doesn't have to be a coward not to want to fight all of these culture war battles, although it helps.
00:08:32.860But we have friends who are decidedly not cowards, who, I mean, someone like Steve Pinker,
00:08:37.380he stakes out controversial positions, but he is not in the trenches in quite the same way as we are.
00:08:44.100And I'm wondering what you think about that.
00:08:46.980I mean, did you see a choice for yourself?
00:08:49.360Do you find yourself revisiting this choice periodically?
00:08:51.960I think it's a perfectly respectable position to take that a scientist has better things to do.
00:08:57.880And I don't take that position, and I think you don't either.
00:09:00.700I do think it's important to fight the good fight when we do have, when science, when reason has vocal and powerful and well-financed enemies.
00:09:15.540And so I'm not sure what particular battles the questioner has in mind when he says we caught controversy.
00:09:22.320But I suppose I believe so strongly in truth, and if I see truth being actively threatened by competing ideologies which actually not only would fight for the opposite of truth,
00:09:41.660but would indoctrinate children in the opposite of truth, I feel impelled to fight only verbally.
00:09:50.660I mean, I don't feel impelled to actually get a rifle or something.
00:15:00.460It's just uncanny that there are the most memorable quips and quotes and phrases.
00:15:07.300Anything that is aphoristic seems to have undue influence on our thinking.
00:15:12.560And there's this aphorism that is usually attributed to Swift.
00:15:16.260And I think he says something like it.
00:15:17.700It's not quite the version that has been passed down to us.
00:15:20.840But this idea that you can't reason someone out of a view that he wasn't reasoned into.
00:15:26.100And this just strikes the mind of Homo sapiens as so obviously true.
00:15:31.520And if you look at my inbox, it is so obviously false.
00:15:34.960So tell me about your experience reasoning with your readers.
00:15:42.340I think it would be terribly pessimistic to think that you cannot reason.
00:15:46.020I mean, I think I'd just give up, probably die, if I thought I couldn't reason people out of their silliness.
00:15:54.820I would accept, would you agree with this, that there are some people who demonstrably do know all the evidence and even understand the evidence, but yet still persist in...
00:16:10.820Yeah, well, so there'll be a couple of questions that will bring us onto that territory because there's more to reason about than science has tended to allow or that secular culture has tended to allow.
00:16:24.540So people have these intense transformative experiences or they have these hopes and fears that aren't captured by you saying, don't you understand the evidence for evolution?
00:16:36.560But this is more of a conversation that people don't tend to have.
00:16:41.460But yeah, I would agree that people certainly resist conclusions that they don't like the taste of.
00:16:49.160One I mentioned in the reception beforehand, a professor of astronomy somewhere in America who writes papers, mathematical papers in astronomical journals,
00:17:00.600in which his mathematics, his mathematical ideas, accept that the universe is 13.8 billion years old, and yet he privately believes it's 6,000 years old.
00:17:13.700So here is a man who knows his physics, he knows his astronomy, he knows the evidence that the universe is 13 billion years old.
00:17:21.760And yet, so split-brained is he, that he actually privately departs from everything in his professional life.
00:17:32.520Well, surely we have to accept that he, I don't know, cannot be reasoned out, but I mean, he already knows the evidence and will not be reasoned out of his foolishness.
00:17:45.720Yeah, I didn't say that you could always succeed, but I think, and clearly there are, I mean, I have this bias, as you do,
00:17:55.240that if the conversation could just proceed long enough, the ground for science would continually be conquered and it never gets reversed.
00:18:23.440And actually, most scientists who call themselves religious, if you actually probe them, I mean, they don't believe really stupid things like six-day creation and things.
00:18:33.940Yeah, although I find that Christian scientists, not Christian scientists as in the cult, but scientists who happen to be Christian, believe much more than your average rabbi.
00:19:56.900She presented the Department of Zoology in Oxford with a gigantic blown-up photograph of a mosquito, and it was a fantastic piece of work of art.
00:21:55.300But the idea of getting mosquitoes in amber and extracting DNA and reconstructing dinosaurs, that's an amazingly good science fiction idea.
00:22:37.140So now, you and I were speaking about your books.
00:22:39.960You've written some very important books on 10 years apart, and so you have an anniversary this year of the Selfish Gene, which is the 40th.
00:22:52.720And the Blind Watchmaker has its 30th anniversary.
00:22:58.120And Climbing Mount Improbable is the 20th, and then The God Delusion is the 10th.
00:23:02.380So actually, I wanted to give you a chance to talk about the titles of the first two.
00:23:12.940The Selfish Gene has provoked an inordinate amount of confusion, and The Blind Watchmaker is a phrase that is useful to understand.
00:23:22.560The Selfish Gene is misunderstood, I think, mostly by those who have read it by title only.
00:23:30.700As opposed to the rather substantial footnote to the title, which is the book itself.
00:23:35.760It could equally well have been called The Altruistic Individual, because one of the main messages of the book is that selfish genes give rise to altruistic individuals.
00:23:52.460So it is mostly a book about altruism, mostly a book about the opposite of selfishness.
00:23:58.360So it certainly should not be misunderstood as advocating selfishness or saying that we are, as a matter of fact, always selfish.
00:24:07.160All it really means is that natural selection works at the level of the gene, as opposed to any other level in the hierarchy of life.
00:24:15.680So genes that work for their own survival are the ones that survive, tautologically enough, and they are the ones that build bodies.
00:24:28.040So we, all of us, contain genes that are very, very good at surviving, because they've come down through countless generations.
00:24:34.540And they are copied accurately, with very high fidelity, from generation to generation, such that there are genes in you that have been around for hundreds of millions of years.
00:24:47.900And that's not true of anything else in the hierarchy of life.
00:24:55.060They don't, they survive only as a means to the end of propagating the genes that built them.
00:25:01.780So individual bodies, organisms, should be seen as vehicles, machines, built by the genes that ride inside them, for passing on those very same genes.
00:25:13.360And it is the potential eternal long-livedness of genes that makes them the unit of selection.
00:25:21.040So that's really the meaning of the selfish gene.
00:25:24.900As I say, the book could have been called the altruistic individual.
00:25:27.940It could have been called the cooperative gene for another reason.
00:25:30.300It could have been called the immortal gene, which is a more sort of Carl Sagan-esque title.
00:25:48.840There's a common, I think, misunderstanding of evolution that leads people to believe that absolutely everything about us must have been selected for.
00:26:02.360So people ask about what's the evolutionary rationale for post-traumatic stress disorder or depression.
00:26:11.700I'm not saying that there is no conceivable one, but it need not be the case that everything we notice about ourselves was selected for or that there's a gene for that.
00:26:22.840I mean, I'm actually a bit of an outlier here.
00:26:26.920I mean, I'm about as close as biologists come to accepting what you've described as a misconception.
00:26:34.100Because I do think that selection is incredibly powerful, and mathematical models show this.
00:26:44.420J.B.S. Haldane, one of the three founding fathers of population genetics, did theoretical calculation in which he postulated an extremely trivial character.
00:27:00.420He didn't mention it, but it might have been eyebrows.
00:27:04.960Suppose you believe that eyebrows have been selected because they stop sweat running down your forehead into your eyes.
00:27:12.560And it sort of sounds totally trivial.
00:27:39.900But Haldane actually did a mathematical calculation.
00:27:46.980He said, let us postulate a character so trivial that the difference between an individual who has it and an individual who doesn't have it is only one in a thousand.
00:28:00.140That's to say, for every thousand individuals who have this, say, the eyebrows and survive, 999 who don't have it survive.
00:28:08.560So from any actuarial point of view, a life insurance calculator would say, well, it's totally trivial.
00:28:18.180But it's not trivial when you think that the genes concerned is represented in thousands of individuals in the population and through thousands of generations.
00:28:29.820That multiplies up the odds, and Haldane's calculation was that if you postulate that one in a thousand advantage, he then worked out how long would it take for the gene to spread from being, I forget exactly the figures, but say 1% of the population up to 50% of the population.
00:28:50.700And it was a number of generations so short that it would be negligible on the geological timescale.
00:28:58.220So it would appear to be an instantaneous piece of evolutionary change, even though the selection pressure was trivial.
00:29:06.740Well, actually, selection pressures in the wild, when they've been measured, have been far, far stronger than that.
00:29:11.780But there's another way of approaching the question you raise when you say something like selective advantage in various psychological diseases or something like that.
00:29:23.040It may be that you're asking the wrong question.
00:29:25.740It may be that by focusing on the particular characteristic which you ask the question about, you're ignoring the fact that there's something associated with that.
00:29:40.820You know that at night, if you've got a lamp outside, or a candle is better, if you've got a candle, insects, moths say, come and sort of, as it were, commit suicide.
00:29:53.740I mean, they just burn themselves up in the candle.
00:29:57.260And you could ask the question, what on earth is the survival value of suicidal self-immolation behavior in moths?
00:30:05.800Well, it's the wrong question, because a probable explanation for it is that many insects use a light compass to steer a straight line.
00:30:17.960Lights at night, until humans came along and invented candles, lights at night were always at optical infinity.
00:30:23.960They were things like the moon, the stars, or the sun during the day.
00:30:29.380And if you maintain a fixed angle relative to these rays that are coming from optical infinity,
00:30:35.640then you just cruise at a straight line, which is just what you want to do.