#60 — An Evening with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (2)
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Summary
After a stroke, Richard and Sam discuss the effects of time travel, and whether or not it's possible to travel back in time to a time and time machine. Plus, a new episode of Making Sense featuring a special guest: a man who had a stroke and is now recovering. Sam and Richard discuss their experience with time travel and the effects it has on their lives, and how it can affect our understanding of the past, present, and future. And, of course, there's a quiz from you, the listeners! Have a question or would like to debate a particular trend or idea? Please e-mail us your questions, suggestions, thoughts, or suggestions for future episodes of the podcast. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our listeners, so if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. You'll get access to access to full episodes of The Making Sense Podcast, where you'll need to subscribe to our private RSS feed to access the full episode, plus other premium-quality, non-advertiser-only episodes. If you're not a subscriber yet, you can still become one by becoming a supporter of our podcast by becoming one by subscribing to Making Sense. Thanks for listening to the podcast and listening to this podcast! Please consider becoming a member! Sincerely, Sam Harris -- and . (Sam's Note: Please forgive me if I've just had a minor stroke. I'm sorry for my voice does not up to this episode, but I can do better than that. I can't sing in tune in tune, I can be a little better than you can do that, can you do better, I really do. ) Thank you all for being a good friend of The Huffington Post? -- Sam Harris, too. -- Timestamps: 1:00 - 2:00:00 3:30 - What's a good thing? 4:15 - What would you do? 5: What do you think of a time machine? 6:40 - Is time travel in the future? 7:20 - How does it matter? 8: Is it possible? 9:10 - What are you better? 11:50 - Does time travel possible? 12:10 13:30 14:40
Transcript
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Basal ganglion on the right makes me walk as if I'm tight.
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So if my voice descends to squawking, Sam will have to do the talking.
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This is what a sold-out house looks like when the Cubs are in the seventh game of the World
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There's a place in hell for those people who bought tickets and didn't use them.
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Needless to say, it's an honor to be here and a real honor to be doing this with Richard,
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This is the second night that I think you know.
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We were worried about this event because we thought we would have a great conversation
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last night, and then we didn't want to spend an hour in front of you here trying to recapitulate
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So as a way of avoiding that fate, I went out to all of you, I think, online asking for
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questions, and I got thousands of questions, and I picked many.
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So the questions we'll track through tonight are different from the ones we did last night,
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and this is all being videotaped, and you can see what you missed last night once that
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And I wasn't actually planning to ask this, but I wanted to talk about your stroke because
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And I'm going to guess that the sock choice is not evidence of your stroke.
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Well, I was explaining last night that at the recent skeptics conference in Las Vegas,
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we had a workshop on cold reading, which you know that system whereby you pretend to thought
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read, and all you're doing really is sizing the other person up.
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And my partner was a young woman who said, I seem to see there's something wrong with
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Now, this is not for the reason given in Stephen Potter's lifemanship.
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Under womanship, he recommends the odd socks ploy as a way of arousing the maternal instincts.
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And then there's a footnote that says, buy our patent odd socks brand.
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It is that we should not be compelled to buy socks in pairs, because unlike shoes, which
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have genuine chirality, you can't switch a left shoe and a right shoe.
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Socks do not have this property, and therefore it's ridiculous having to buy socks in pairs.
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If you lose one sock, you have to throw the other one away.
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So I want to make the point in as vivid a fashion as possible, and encourage everybody
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Tell us about the experience of having a stroke.
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I just suddenly became aware that my left hand wasn't working.
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Or if I managed to pick something up, I couldn't let go of it again, which is sort of kind of
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And I was sort of staggering about and not able to stand up straight.
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I never could sing very well, but I could at least sing in tune, and now I can't.
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And my voice does tend to croak, so hence my introductory apology.
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Well, was there any immediate emotional or cognitive or perceptual component to it, or
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It's in the basal ganglion, as I said, which doesn't affect cognitive function.
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So, I hope that will become evident tonight, as I've got to.
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If you come out as a Mormon at any point in the next hour.
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I think it would take more than a stroke to do that to me.
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Our first question that one of you may have asked, if you had a time machine and could
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travel 500 years into the future, what do you think you would find biologically, assuming
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our direct descendants still exist and haven't uploaded themselves into the matrix, will
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500 years is too short a time to expect any genetic evolutionary change.
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What about with our own meddling, the genetic engineering that we're surely going to do?
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If by then we've colonized Mars, such that there's a barrier to gene flow between the parent
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planet Earth and the colony on Mars, then it's possible that the Mars colony might have
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But how much of an appetite do you think we will have, given what we currently are, to
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change ourselves, given the ability to do so in radical ways?
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Well, we've had the ability to change cows and horses and pigs and cabbages and dogs and
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And although we've changed all those species, almost beyond recognition, when you think that
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a Pekingese or a poodle or a pug or a bulldog is a wolf, he still thinks it's a wolf.
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So it looks as though we don't seem to have had much of an appetite to do that with respect
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to the selection part of the Darwinian equation.
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We're now just beginning to have the possibility of doing it to the mutation part of the Darwinian
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But it's not obvious why, if we didn't have the motivation to selectively breed humans,
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why we should have the motivation to selectively mutate humans.
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Kind of a related point, you're obviously very famous for having introduced this concept
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How seriously should we take the analogy to a gene with a meme?
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And the idea is that anywhere in the universe where self-replicating coded information arises,
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that could be fair game for Darwinian evolution, for Darwinian selection.
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And I wanted to end the selfish gene by making that point, because the whole of the rest of
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the book had been extolling the gene as the unit of selection.
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So I wanted to make the point, it doesn't have to be DNA.
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It could be anything which is self-replicating.
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Well, one could speculate about life on other planets being mediated by a replicator other
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But then I thought, or a computer virus would have done the job as well, but I didn't know
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So I thought, well, what about cultural inheritance?
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Anything where we have imitation is potentially analogous to genetic replication.
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So something like a craze at a school, something like a craze for a particular kind of toy.
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I introduced to my boarding school a craze for origami paper folding to make a Chinese junk.
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And it spread exactly like a measles epidemic through the school, and then died away like
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Interestingly, I had learned to do this from my father, and he had learned it from an almost
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identical epidemic at the same school 26 years earlier.
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So the epidemiology of meme spread is very similar to gene spread.
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But it's only interesting from a Darwinian point of view if the memes that spread are the
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If there is some kind of selective effect, and it's plausible that it should be, clothes
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fashion spread because people find them cool, or something like a reverse baseball cap, which
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That's probably the first remark that he's going to get in trouble for.
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But I think you can probably treat religious memes in the same way.
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So they either pass down the generations like DNA does.
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And of course, obviously, religions pass down generations.
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But they also spread sideways in epidemics when you've got a particularly charismatic vector
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of the virus like Billy Graham or one of those types.
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So I think it's a genuinely interesting question whether the really successful religions like
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Roman Catholicism and Islam spread because the memes have high spreadability in their own
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right, like genes in Darwinism, or whether they're spread by Machiavellian priests who get
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together and work out what's the best marketing strategy to spread them.
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And I'm inclined to think that the pure memetic spread is plausible, and I'm interested in that.
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I haven't really run very much with the meme idea.
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The people who have are Dan Dennett, the philosopher who talks in a very interesting way about memes
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And Susan Blackmore is another one who wrote a book called The Meme Machine.
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Actually, there are about 20 books now with the word meme in the title, which emphasise various
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The fact that memes don't change truly randomly, does that run roughshod over the analogy?
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Genes mutate randomly in the sense that mutation is not directed towards improvement.
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But mutation, nevertheless, is induced by things like cosmic rays, radioactivity, various mutagenic
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The fact that memes are introduced by human creativity doesn't detract from the idea that
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some memes spread better than others for selective reasons.
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What do you think your most important contribution to science or culture at large has been or will
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I suppose The Extended Phenotype, which is the title of my second book.
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It's the only book that I wrote with a professional audience in mind.
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I could expound it, but this is supposed to be a conversation, not a monologue.
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The question is for both of us, so I can answer it.
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I don't tend to think in these terms globally, but I think what I'm doing most of the time
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and have done in most of my books is attempt to argue for the unity of knowledge and to
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resist this balkanization of our epistemology by essentially what I view as the dictates of
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The fact that there's the biology department over here where you study biology and then
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there's the psychology department over there, that seems to articulate two separate spheres
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of inquiry that in the centers, they do have different methods, but there really are no
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And I see that as true for not just for canonical scientific disciplines, but just fact-based thinking
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And also the distinction that people make between third-person facts, classically physical facts,
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And some people think that distinction is so hard and fast that they imagine there are no
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subjective facts, that I think is a boundary that I am consciously trying to erode.
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And I think questions about moral truth and the truth of possible human experience or the
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experience of conscious systems, those are questions that are every bit as grounded in reality as
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any questions we ask in physics or chemistry or...
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So introspection is a way of getting scientific data, do you mean?
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I mean, there are ways in which introspection is a dead end.
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I mean, for instance, I can't tell even with my best efforts, I cannot tell that I have a brain.
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But there are many things that you can introspect about, which give you scientifically valid data.
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I mean, if you're studying the mind, if you're studying what it's like to be a person,
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at some point you are correlating third-person, quote, objective methods with first-person report.
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You know, somebody says, you know, I ask you what it's like to have a stroke, or your neurologist
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does, and he needs to know what your experience is.
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The final analysis seems to be looking at your brain at the, you know, actually what has been
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physically affected, but the cash value of those physical effects is always what is showing up
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in your experience and what is showing up in your function.
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So if some canonical language area, say, was affected, but you spoke fine and appreciated
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understood language fine and there was no discernible change in your language use, well, then that
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would be the definition of those being non-linguistic areas of the brain being affected, no matter
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how close they are to, you know, the standard, you know, average atlas of language use.
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So we do always link up with a subjective report, too, and first-person performance.
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And so, yeah, I mean, in terms of the contribution I want to make, I want to argue that there's
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a larger set of truth claims we want to make when we're reasoning about reality, and those
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I mean, they include abstract things like mathematics, you know, which the physical foundation of which
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is kind of hard to specify, and they include the example I always use is, you know, a question like,
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what was JFK thinking the moment before he got shot?
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Well, we know we'll never know, and that's data we'll never get, but there's an infinite number of things
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So it would be wrong to say he was thinking, I wonder what Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins
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think about what I'm thinking right now before I get shot.
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There's an infinite number of things we could assert about the character of his subjectivity
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there, which we know are wrong, you know, and we know that as fully as we know anything
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And there are things that get, it's like, you know, like the mystery or pseudo-mystery of
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how to integrate free will or experience a free will with our scientific worldview, I think
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can be easily resolved if you can introspect with sufficient perspicacity and notice that
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you don't even have evidence for free will in your first-person experience.
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I think that's, those are subjective data that are available.
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So there are ways to get access to interesting things through introspection, but they don't
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But I mean, that's true of many things that we have, we don't begin to doubt.
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I mean, just imagine what it would be like if only 1% of the population had vivid dreams
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There's nothing that it's like to be us for eight hours a night.
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But then some percentage of the population talk about traveling and meeting people and having
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all of these illogical encounters, dreams would be much stranger and many people would doubt
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their existence, but they would exist just as much as they do now.
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And we doubt the sanity of people who had them probably as well.
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But did you answer, did you fully answer your question?
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Do you want to say more about the extended phenotype?
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I mean, what is a, to tell people what a phenotype is.
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The phenotype is the external, not very external, the manifestation of genetic effects.
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And from a Darwinian point of view, the phenotypic effects by which a gene is selected.
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So there'll be genes that affect wing size, eye color, hair color, intelligence.
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Conventionally, phenotypic effects are confined to the body in which the gene sits.
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So genes exert their phenotypic effects by influencing embryonic, embryological processes.
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And so the shape of the body, the color of the body, the behavior of the body are all influenced
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Extended phenotype is phenotypic effects of genes which are outside the body in which the gene sits.
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And the easiest examples to think of are artifacts, things like beaver dams, birds' nests.
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They quite clearly influence the survival of the genes that make them.
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So a bird's nest is made by genes in the same limited sense, or not so limited sense,
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as the bird's tail and the bird's eyes and the bird's wings.
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And the nest contributes to the survival of the genes, which is what matters in the selfish gene view of life,
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just as surely as the wings and the tail of the bird contribute to the survival of the genes that made them.
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So although the nest is not a part of the bird's body, it is a part of the phenotype
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by which the genes lever themselves into the next generation.
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Well, if you buy that, and I think you have to,
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then effects that parasites have on hosts, there are numerous examples, fascinating, rather lurid examples,
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of parasites, which affect the behavior or the morphology of the host in such a way as to improve the survival of the parasite.
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Well, that means that parasite genes are influencing host behavior and host morphology
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in the same kind of way as any gene influences phenotype.
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So when an animal is induced by, there's a thing called a brain worm, for example,
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which is a worm that gets into a fluke or a snail, or various things like that,
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and causes the intermediate host, the snail or the fluke.
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Sorry, the brain worm is a fluke, and it gets into the snail
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and causes the snail to be more likely to be eaten by a sheep.
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And it does so by moving into the eyes of the snail
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and making the eyes pulsate in a sort of rather frightening way
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and calling the attention of an animal like a sheep or a cow to eating the snail,
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which means that the parasite, the fluke, then gets into the next part of its life cycle.
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So the fluke genes are influencing the behavior of the snail and the eyes of the snail.
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The change in the snail is part of the phenotype of fluke genes.
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And if you buy that, which is a sort of further step,
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say male bird's song, which, say, influences female birds,
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actually physically causes the ovaries of the female to swell.
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which make the male sing the song, which has this effect.
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So the extended phenotype then becomes a way of looking at the whole of animal communication,
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where one animal influences the behavior of another.
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I have not done justice to the extended phenotype.
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So what are the prospects that religion or something like it is part of our extended phenotype?
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Well, in order to qualify as extended phenotype,
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who recruited lots and lots of people into his church,
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but only if there was a genetic difference between these two preachers,
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which caused one of them to be an effective recruiter and the other one not.
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That would be, but I don't think that's very likely to be true.
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Just to quite literally play devil's advocate here.
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or a set of genes for susceptibility to that range of experience
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or a lack of concern that what you're saying is true,
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who's filled with the charisma of being absolutely sure
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and energized by his passion for the whole project.
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So the best way to show that would be twin studies.
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then you've shown that there is a genetic effect