Darwin's Daring Idea with Richard Dawkins

This episode features a deep dive into Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, discussing its implications and evolution's impact on scientific thinking.

1. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was a groundbreaking shift in understanding biological complexity without invoking supernatural design.
2. The concept of genes as the primary units of natural selection underscores the genetic continuity and the survival-driven nature of evolution.
3. Philosophical resistance to evolutionary theory historically stemmed from the inability to conceive of complex life forms evolving from simpler organisms without intentional design.
4. The discussion highlights the importance of incremental changes in evolutionary biology, contrasting with the idea of sudden leaps in species development.
5. Dawkins and Tyson discuss the educational and societal implications of evolutionary theory, advocating for a broader acceptance and understanding of its principles.

1: Introduction

Neil deGrasse Tyson introduces the episode's theme and guest, setting the stage for a discussion on Darwin's impact on science. Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Welcome to an exploration of Darwin's revolutionary idea with Richard Dawkins."

2: The Power of Natural Selection

Dawkins explains natural selection and its capacity to produce complex biological features without divine intervention. Richard Dawkins: "Natural selection suffices to explain the complexity and functionality of biological organisms without needing a designer."

3: Historical Resistance to Evolution

The hosts discuss historical and philosophical resistance to evolution, emphasizing the role of traditional frameworks in obstructing scientific acceptance. Richard Dawkins: "It's astonishing that such a simple, powerful idea took so long to be accepted."

4: Genetic Insights

Exploration of how genes play a crucial role in evolution, with Dawkins explaining the concept of the "selfish gene" and its implications. Richard Dawkins: "We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes."

5: Educational Implications

Discussion on the educational and societal impacts of Darwin's theory, advocating for its acceptance to enhance scientific literacy. Neil deGrasse Tyson: "Understanding evolution is essential not just for biologists but for the public to appreciate the natural world fully."

1. Educate Yourself About Evolution: Start with foundational texts like Darwin's "On the Origin of Species" to understand the basics of natural selection.
2. Engage in Discussions: Use knowledge from this episode to discuss evolution's implications with peers, which helps dispel myths and spread scientific understanding.
3. Follow the Evidence: Embrace a scientific mindset that values evidence over preconceived notions, critical in appreciating evolutionary theory.
4. Support Science Education: Advocate for comprehensive science education in schools that includes evolution to foster a scientifically literate society.
5. Explore Genetic Research: Delve into genetic studies that illustrate the ongoing impact of natural selection in contemporary science.

Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with evolutionary biologist and author of The Genetic Book of the Dead Richard Dawkins to talk about evolution, whether we were “designed,” how we are living reflections of our ancestors, and much much more.

People

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins

Companies

-None-

Books

"Darwin's Dangerous Idea" by Daniel Dennett, "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins

Guest Name(s):

Richard Dawkins

Content Warnings:

None

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Give Jefferson's ocean bourbon and Jefferson's Ocean bourbon rye. Please sit responsibly. Copyright 2023. Jefferson's Bourbon company Crestwood, Kentucky this episode is brought to you by Progressif, where drivers who save by switching save nearly $750 on average. Plus auto customers qualify for an average of seven discounts.

Quote now@progressive.com to see if you could save progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates national averaged twelve month savings of $744 by new customers surveyed who saved with progressive between June 2022 and May 2023. Potential savings will vary, discounts not available in all states and and situations. Coming up on Startalk, a one on one conversation between me and Professor Richard Dawkins, and we explore his life as not only a biologist, evolutionary biologist, but as an author. And we pluck snippets from many of his books to find out what messages he wanted to lay down. Join us.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Welcome to Startalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. Startalk begins right now. This is startalk. Neil degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today I am in conversation with the one, the only, Richard Dawkins.

Richard, welcome back to my office. Thank you very much. This is like your fourth time here or something? I think it is something like that. Always a pleasure, Neil.

Welcome. I mean, we have a lot of catching up to do. I think so. Recently, or at least this year, we lost Daniel Dennett, Philosopher Daniel Dennett. And I recently learned I didn't read all of his books.

I read some of them. He declared that Darwin's evolution by natural selection was the greatest idea anybody ever had. And he's coming to it not as a biologist, but as a philosopher. So how do you reflect on that declaration? He said that at the beginning of his book, Darwin's dangerous idea.

Richard Dawkins
And his point was that before Darwin came along, it seemed obvious to everyone that big complicated things like humans and oak trees and things had to have an explanation in terms of design. And it was a huge stroke of insight for Darwin to see that it didn't, that the laws of physics alone could produce this prodigious amount of complexity filtered through this odd process of natural selection. To me, it's always been strange that it took so long, that it took until the middle of the 19th century. For Darwin and Wallace and even maybe one or two other people, this is. Thousands of years of thought.

Yes. Brilliant people have come before. Aristotle could have had it and didn't. I mean, when you think how much cleverer you had to be to do what Newton did, or Leibniz inventing calculus, working out about the laws of how. Gravity, the Newton finger puppet here.

You'D think that somebody would have tumbled to evolution by natural selection before the middle of the 19th century. Yet they didn't. So that's an astonishing thing, and it needs an explanation. So did Daniel Dennett explain why it took that long? And if he didn't, what would be your explanation?

I don't remember whether he did. Mine would be. Well, first of all, Ernst Meyer the great, he was here, I think, here. At the American Museum of Natural History. He thought it was because of essentialism.

He thought that because of Aristotle and Plato, who thought that just because they thought, like geometers, I mean, a right angled triangle is a kind of perfect form sort of hanging out there. And they thought that the perfect rabbit, the perfect rhinoceros, was hanging out there, just like a right angle triangle. So you couldn't imagine how a rabbit could turn into anything different. That was his. Excellent.

That wouldn't be mine. I mean, I think it's just that. That'S an interesting one, though, because it speaks to the bias that we have observing nature. So my people, including Copernicus, could not shake the idea of orbits that were perfect circles. They couldn't shake that.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Why would God design a universe with a shape that wasn't geometrically perfect? So even Copernicus putting the sun back in the middle of the known universe, had circular orbits. And since the orbits are not circles, they actually differed from predictions on the night sky. So that was a problem at the time. It's Copernicus.

This might work, but it still doesn't fit. The epicycles are doing much better. And so it wasn't instantly taken up, including the resistance, the church resistance, of course, because earth wasn't in the middle anymore. So our counterpart to what I think you're describing is the urge to try to presume nature was perfect and then account for it with everything we know, that is. Yes.

Richard Dawkins
All I was thinking was that I find an ellipse, a pretty neat geometric figure, as well as a circle. But anyway, going back to why it took so long, and the idea of the perfect rabbit, the perfect rhinoceros, the perfect horse. In a way, that was a bit silly, because if you were to look at, I mean, a population of rabbits is pretty variable. And anyway, that was Ernst Meyer's explanation for why it took so long. Darwin did it by going via artificial selection.

Everybody knew, farmers knew, horticulturalists knew, gardeners knew that you could change a rose, you could change a cabbage by just breeding. And really, Darwin's insight was, you don't actually need a breeder, you don't need a human to do the breeding. Nature does it for you, survival does it for you. It's not that difficult. I mean, it doesn't require any sort of higher mathematics or anything.

And yet nobody got it until Darwin and Wallace. And this is why I'm intrigued that Daniel Dennett, a philosopher, who in principle, any philosopher, could have come up with this, because unlike relativity and unlike quantum physics, which are realms of behavior of the universe, large and small, that you can't just deduce from your armchair, but evolution by natural selection could have been deduced in an armchair. It just was. It could. It's surprising that it didn't.

It's interesting that both Darwin and Wallace were traveling naturalists and they both were collectors in South America. Both were in South America. Wallace lost his entire south american collection in a fire. And then he went to the far east. But they were both collectors of natural history specimens.

And the other person who might have thought of it is Patrick Matthew, who was a gardener and an orchard keeper. But philosophers know they didn't do it. They didn't. And they could have. They could have.

Yes. So you've written. I mean, I have a list here of, like, all your books you've been out of control over. Not as much as some people. I got you here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Was the selfish gene your first book? Yes. Back in 1976. Yes.

That was the year I graduated high school.

No, I remember because it was like the bicentennial year. Everybody made a big deal of this. It was my first presidential election that I could vote in, and I voted for Jimmy Carter, and I got to tell him this so cliched line, but when I met him, I said, you were my first president that I voted for. And it was one month after my birthday I got to vote for him. So I thought I'd have a short exercise here.

I'm going to mention your books. Not all of them. You have too many of them. Could you just tell me what your favorite bit of that book was that you were communicating with the reader, if I may. So start off the selfish gene.

Richard Dawkins
Natural selection chooses between genes. Genes are the only thing the information contained in genes. Digital information is the only thing that goes from generation to generation. That which survives is information. Digital information.

Some genes survive better than others. We the bodies, we the animals, we the plants are just the machines that are there to preserve the genes that ride inside us. Whoa. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That reminds me of how I describe your gut bacteria. I say people want to think they're like, top of the world. And I say all you are to those bacteria is a darkened vessel of anaerobic fecal matter. That's right. And it's pretty much the same with your genes.

Richard Dawkins
I mean, it's not fecal matter, it's testicular matter or ovarian matter. Yes. Okay, so they're the ones. And they're the ones carrying themselves forward. Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So if it's just information, can you imagine a day where the biology is no longer necessary and you just have the digital information stored or duplicated in some way? Yes, certainly you could. I mean, already you could preserve your entire genome. I mean, I've got my entire genome on one disc, and I once. Do you have a backup?

Richard Dawkins
Just checking. Is it on the cloud? Is it the idea? I don't have a backup. The idea was a television program, and the conceit of the program was it was going to be posted into the family vault, the Dawkins family vault in the church at Chipping Norton.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Oh, my God. To be dug up in a thousand years. Uh huh. And they were. And like a time capsule.

Richard Dawkins
Yeah, exactly. And the idea was that in a thousand years, they dig it up and make a duplicate of me. And of course, then we talk about why it wouldn't actually be me, because it would just be an identical twin of me. But that was the idea. Was it you?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes. It must have been you, because who else would do this? Post it on social media? Was it you? If you had a book of your ancestors, and it was.

No, if you had a book of the. A picture of your mother, was this you who did this? Yes. Tell me this again. I think you're thinking of your mother's mother.

Richard Dawkins
Yeah. You pile them up. It's just one. One of many ways of dramatizing the enormity of geological time. I forget exactly how it goes.

There are lots of ways of doing it. No, but you do this, and if you keep doing it, one of those pictures is a fish. Is a fish. Exactly. And yet.

And yet every single generation. Looks like the previous one and the next one. There's no sudden disease. It's not certain. And many people can't grasp this.

They think, well, there must have been a time when it stopped being a fish. And, you know. But there wasn't. It just gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually changed. Okay, will you allow me, given this, which I completely understand, you have to allow me my explanation for the chicken and the egg.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay. Okay. So I tell people, but I've never gotten your blessings on this. Can I use that word with you? Yeah, of course.

Richard Dawkins
I'm all for blessings. So I simply tell people, they say, what came first? Chicken. The egg. I said the egg.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
It was just laid by a bird. That was not a chicken. Yes, that's a fair statement. It was laid by a dinosaur. I'm compressing a billion, you know, 100 million years of time there.

But at some point you're gonna say, what comes out of the egg is a chicken and. But that's a genetic alteration from the previous generation. There never was a moment when a bird that was not a chicken gave rise to a chicken. It never was, of course. So this is a very compressed.

It's a shorthand for what you just said with the book of your ancestors going back to the fish. Yes. I mean, I once had a letter from a lawyer who said, roughly speaking, evolution can't be true because it's because a species is defined as members can always interbreed with each other. And you can't imagine that there was a time when a child generation was incapable of breeding with the previous generation. Of course you couldn't.

Richard Dawkins
But he thought that meant that somewhere evolution was invalid. He couldn't grasp that everything was specially created. Everything is. It's a gradual process all the way through. And as you step back through your ancestors, they become slightly less like a human, slightly less like a human.

But you never notice it as. As you walk past them. If you imagine I see a fish, it's just funny. So you skip ahead and there's a fish. You say, that's my parent.

Yes. It's a little freaky for people, but. You gotta appreciate, as you walk along the generations, you'd never see them getting more fish. Like, it would just be so gradual, you would never notice it. Because generations are only 30, 40 years and we're talking billions.

Yes, that's right. Yeah. So you needed deep time for evolution to do what it needed to do. Did we have deep time in the middle 19th century? Well, not really, no.

Because we didn't. In astronomy, we were satisfied with a 10,000 year old universe because before we understood nuclear energy, which is a huge repository, we were thinking the sun was just a lump of coal. It was George. Darwin was one of the. George who told Darwin's son, George who?

Charles Darwin's son. George was one of the people who pointed out eventually that nuclear energy could do the trick. Oh, nice little. Okay. Perfect justice for him.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And which of the darwins explained tides for the first time? Probably George. I'm not sure it was a. Darwin and Newton and Galileo did not understand tides. It was.

Even though they had all the gravity necessary. Is that right? To account for it? Yes. There's a subtle point with tides where if you look at any textbook, any textbook, it'll have, like, the moon and Earth, and it'll have a tidal bulge pointing towards the moon.

Richard Dawkins
Yes. That's wrong. It's wrong. It doesn't. The moon would want that to happen, but that's not how it is.

Yes. Tidal bulge is in advance. The tidal bones is in advance of the moon in its orbit. Yes. Okay.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And that's Earth's rotation pushing the tides ahead of the moon. And it's that interaction that has remarkable consequences. The moon is slowing down Earth's rotation, and Earth already slowed down the moon's rotation. So it's tidally locked to us. We'll one day be tidally locked.

We'll be double tidally locked. And when that happens, then the tides will line up. Cause we'll not be pushing it ahead of the moon. So that had to. Somebody had to figure all that out.

Yeah, that was another Darwin. Thank you for your darwins.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey, and I support startalk on Patreon. This is startalk with doctor Neil degrasse Tyson.

So which book? You came up with the word meme. I know it was you. That was in the selfish gene. That was in the selfish gene?

Richard Dawkins
Yes. You invented the word and people long forgot.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Tell me the authentic definition of meme. Cause that's not how anybody's using it today. Unit of cultural inheritance. The analog of the gene in cultural inheritance. Okay, so this is communicated from one person to another?

Richard Dawkins
Yes. And certain memes have higher communicability. Yes, that's right. I mean, I really wanted to say that because the whole book had been about the gene as a unit of selection. That's how I described it when you asked me earlier.

It didn't have to be genes. It could be anything. That is self replicating. And nowadays I would have used a computer viruses as my analogy, probably for the gene. But in those days, computer viruses, maybe they've been invented.

I didn't know about them anyway, so I used the unit of cultural inheritance. It's something like a tune. M is for memory. So memory gene, it's a portmanteau of. That's right.

It comes from the same root as memory. Okay, so if I say something, we have alligators in the New York City subway. Yes. If that spreads. If that spreads because it's a repeatable lie or even might be true, whatever it is.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
If it spreads, whatever it is. Doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter. If it spreads, then it's a successful meme. Because it's so interesting to me, I have to tell someone else.

Richard Dawkins
Exactly. Exactly. We love to tell stories which surprises. Whether or not they're true. Whether or not they're true.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, so nowadays it's just an image of something kind of cool, you know? Yes. I'm really sorry about that. Yeah, no, no, that's not your fault. But you've contributed to our culture.

The best of the memes are the ones that are spread around the most. Yes. There's a meme of me doing this. Okay. Yes.

Like, I think. What is it called? Watch out. You got a badass over here. I never said that.

Richard Dawkins
Okay. And there is a picture of me doing this. When it spreads, it spread. And there are people in South America who saw me in the street. They were tourists.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I said, we know you from the meme. This is like ten years ago or something. It's like the meme, really. That's not even me. Why does that.

So somehow that spread. I don't have any understanding of it. Shall I tell you my John Cleese story about that? He was. What is that?

Richard Dawkins
Do you remember faulty towers and. Yes, yes. Okay. Do you remember the episode of the. Well, I don't remember episodes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Come on now. The Germans don't mention the war. Do you remember that? No. Okay, well, there's an episode where some Germans visit the hotel and Basil folk don't mention the war, don't mention the wall.

Richard Dawkins
And of course he does mention it. He was in, I think it was Munich airport, and he was going up the escalator, and there was a man way over there and going down the escalator right across the hall, and he recognized him and he shouted, don't mention the wall. Okay, so that meme was spreading in Germany. All right, so that's a selfish gene. So let's move ahead here.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
The blind watchmaker. Oh, that's my favorite book of yours, if I may. Okay. Well, the watchmaker comes from William Paley, the theologian, who said that there must be a God, because if you find a watch, you pick up the watch, he's crossing a heath. He said, you open it up.

Richard Dawkins
It was a great big pocket watch. In those days, back when watches were watches. Yeah, that's right. And you see all the cog wheels and springs and things. It had to have a designer.

Of course. It's. And so how much more would you say that of an eye or a knee joint or anything living? So that's the Paley watchmaker argument. Natural selection is the blind watchmaker.

It produces results that are like watches. They're beautifully designed. Eyes are beautifully designed, certain flaws, but they are beautifully designed. And they come about not through any design process, not through any deliberate design, but through the blind watchmaker, which is natural selection. So it's a.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So that's hard for people to accept, especially if they're deeply religious. Yes. Because they already have an account. Yes. Now you're saying that their God is some random, one of the acts of their God is some random force operating.

Richard Dawkins
He didn't have to be there at all. He didn't have to be there at all. And I think where people get confused is, and even some of our people have made this mistake. Fred Hoyle, who was the architect of the steady state universe, who pejoratively invented the name Big Bang to describe the universe, beginning in one point, he said that in a pejorative way, he wanted the universe to be a steady state. He did a calculation for how you would get an eye, a fully functioning eye, and how long that would take.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And it was some impossibly ten to some very high power number of years, given the rate at which you have defects in a genome. And correct me if I'm wrong, the rebuttal to that is, natural selection is not completely random. Well, no, that's right. It actually wasn't an eye. It was a hemoglobin molecule.

Richard Dawkins
But it's the same argument. Anyway, what he overlooked was that it doesn't happen all in one go. He imagined all the bits coming together at random, and that's one thing that. Doesn'T work and has another random thing that doesn't work. And you do that forever.

You can use that forever. Of course you won't. But what you need is, let's use the eye. Even though he didn't you need a slightly less good eye and then a slightly less good eye and a slightly less good eye. If you start with just a sheet of light sensitive cells, which just detect whether it's light or dark, that's useful.

It's not light. It's better than not having. It's better than not having it. You can tell when it's night or day. You can tell whether there's a predator flying overhead.

And then if you have a slightly cup shaped. If you bend that retina from a flat thing into a slight cup, then if it's coming from that direction, it hits that side of the. And so you get. It's not an image, but it. But it gives us directionality.

And then you close up and you start to get a pinhole camera. It's a very crude, out of focus, but it's sort of an image. And then you need a little bit of transparent gunk in there. It's not a proper lens, but it does something like a lens. And all these stages, one by one, they, step by step, they incrementally improve.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And every improvement is the new starting place for the variations at that generation. That's right. And then you get improvement because every. Generation is not starting from zero. That's right.

Richard Dawkins
Yes. Okay. Yes. So the blind watchmaker, I just thought that was brilliantly written. And it was my benchmark for if I were to ever write a book for the public, I want to be this articulate.

Oh, wow. That's high praise, Neil. Thank you very much. I just want you to know. Thank you for that.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, just let the record show. And let me just skip coming down. Oh, I like this. A climbing mountain probable. Well, that's what we've just been talking about.

Yes. Mount Improbable is just that metaphor. Describe the. It's a metaphor where you've got a mountain with a sheer cliff, a vertical cliff, and on the top of the cliff is an eye. And to produce the eye in the Fred Hoyle manor would be to leap from the bottom of the cliff to the top in one go.

Richard Dawkins
You cannot do it. You go around the other side of the mountain and you find a nice gentle slope. And so you just climb step by step and you reach the summit. Okay. So if you think it got there in one fell swoop, there's no.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Of course you're going to invent a God because what? That's right. But not imagining that there's another way. Yes. You're stuck in one religious philosophy versus any other philosophy.

Richard Dawkins
Yes. Okay. All right. Got that. And this one much was written about unweaving the rainbow.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So tell me about that. Okay, we're up to 1998 now. That comes from Keats. I did not know that Keats complained. About Newton spoiling all the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it.

Richard Dawkins
And so my point was, the point, which you've made often enough, that actually there's far more poetry and really understanding the spectrum. So did I tell you this? Do you remember? There was. This was on YouTube.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I forgot the title. It was called Double Rainbow Guy. Have you ever seen this? No. Double Rainbow.

You should check it out. Okay. Okay. This is now, back when social media was just people posting things, it wasn't the cesspool that it is today. Yes.

So he was hiking somewhere. There's some guy back when you needed a camcorder to take videos. Not a cell phone, not a smartphone. He's hiking in. Was it Sierra Madres?

I don't remember where. And you hear him sort of narrating his. Oh, that's a nice cliff. Then he turns a corner and he says, oh, a rainbow. Oh, my gosh.

What could it mean? A double rainbow. Oh, my gosh. And he's tearing. You don't see him, but you can easily interpret just his emotions and his breath.

And then he goes prostrate to the ground and he can't contain himself. What does it mean? This is a sign. And so I felt bad doing this. You might be proud of me, but I felt bad doing this.

I tweeted, I put a link to this, to this video, and I said, this is how you behave if you've never studied physics. Yes, but I thought that was kind of mean. He's having his moment. Well, in a way, that's what Keats was doing to Newton. Yes, that's right.

Richard Dawkins
But anyway, I can cap your story in the opposite direction. I read a story about a woman in California. She had a lawn sprinkler, and she saw a rainbow in the lawn sprinkler, and she said, what are they doing to our water supply?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That's funny. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. So, all right. So she missed all the beauty of the rainbow. Yeah. Okay.

Are they putting colors in the thing? So I did not know that. That. That Keats had that to say about Newton, because Newton. Yeah, he decoded the rainbow.

That was his thing. It's what he. One of his things. By the way, you mentioned how beautiful the eye is, even with some flaws. As an astrophysicist, when I would learn this very early when I took classes here, actually, when I was in middle school at the Hayden planetarium, that's when I learned about the entire electromagnetic spectrum and that the visible part of the spectrum is tiny.

It's not even a full octave. That's right. Of what's out there. And then I was just disappointed with my sight. I said, is this the best nature?

Richard Dawkins
Why don't I see x rays? Let me go back in line and see what else is there. And later on in Star Trek the next generation, there'd be a character called Geordi, who. Either he was born without sight or he went blind. And he had this visor, V I s O R, which was an acronym, visual instrument, sight organ replacement.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
But with it, he sees all wavelengths of light. Yes. And so they get him to look at scenes that they're coming upon. Was high in x rays. It's high in this, it's high in that.

And then I worried that if you could see all bands of light, that would be very visually noisy, wouldn't it? Yes. I mean, if you see right through to radio waves where you wouldn't. I mean, well, then everything becomes transparent. Long wavelengths.

Richard Dawkins
Yes. Then there are no walls in this office. You wouldn't see things. That's right. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So that'd be a weird. I mean, to have that power in practice. I think ideally you would tune it. You'd have a little tuner. So that you can target.

Yes, so that you can target across. In the God delusion. The last chapter. I think I said that the. I made your point about the visible spectrum being so tiny.

Richard Dawkins
Science opens up that spectrum. Yes. And it would be like hearing Beethoven's 9th Symphony played in one octave in the middle of the piano. Yes, yeah. Yes, that's right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
You've coined this term, and we've even appeared on stage together under this title, the poetry of reality. And I'm all in. But if you're actually a poet, then surely there are parts of reality that are best expressed by a poet. Would you agree? I suppose so.

Richard Dawkins
I've never quite understood. I mean, I don't write verse, but I suppose, like you, I try to evoke emotion at the same time as. Otherwise it's just a wiki page. Yes. Right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
You want some? And I'm not entirely clear what you mean by poetic. I sort of feel intuitively, I know what it means, but I can't quite put it into words. Maybe that's no accident, but, yes. I defend in my own mind the idea that science is the poetry of reality.

Richard Dawkins
It makes me feel poetic, and I think it makes you feel poetic, so. It might be self serving on that level. What would matter if others can be convinced of the same? Because otherwise it's just a self licking ice cream cone. That's right.

But if you're skilled in writing, I think you can bring others with you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
I have my own valuation of poetry. I share it with you and get your reaction to it. For me, poetry, art more broadly, best serves us when it highlights something you might have otherwise missed or never noticed. My best example of that was July 21 22nd. Was it?

After we landed on the moon in 1969, the New York Times had a special section, people reacting to the fact that we walked on the moon and there were all these famous poets of the day. It was Archibald McLeish and people who carried the soul of creative expression in the day. And I read these poems. They were awful. We pierced the sky and touched the sky.

And I'm thinking, none of this is greater than the act of walking on the moon itself. So maybe I don't need artists to interpret that for me. Maybe I need them to interpret the tree that I'm walking by. Then you get Joyce Kilmer's poem, the tree. I will never see something as lovely as a tree, arms pressed to the sky, in american poetry.

American Longfellow, Henry Wattsford Longfellow, who wrote the midnight ride of Paul Revere. That might not be heralded as great poetry, but we all know it here in America. And that's a poem about a guy who told other people that the enemy was coming. Is that an important person? No.

Yet we all know that person's name because there's a poem about him. You do not know that corresponding person for any other war that has ever been fought in the history of the world. The person who told other people that the enemy was coming, that is not a person. But for us it is, because it was a poem about him. It was somebody who would otherwise go forgotten.

So for me, art is best when it captures that. I don't need artists saying, oh, I saw this hubble photo. Here's my painting of that hubble photo. I don't need that because I got the Hubble photo. Give me a point of view that science does not give me, then we can hang out together in the sandbox.

That's how I feel about it. Okay, the tree poem you mentioned, that's a religious poem. I mean, only God can make a. Tree at the end, but no, God was just in the culture. So is it religious when you say goodbye?

When that draws from God be with you. It's just a cultural expression. Carl Sagan's chapter headings.

Richard Dawkins
You probably help me with this. I mean, they inspire me. Just every single one of his chapter headings. Yes. And by the way, his bone of night, his widow, Andrew, who is highly literate unto herself and co author of all three cosmos, even the two that I had the privilege of hosting.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
She was a major force in that poetic voice. I just want to give credit where that's due there. Andrea. Yes. So, yes, a lot of thought goes.

Richard Dawkins
Into those across the backbone of night. I mean, that is a poetic phrase. It immediately speaks to me. I see the Milky Way. I'm not sure I meant to.

And I guess I try to do something similar. Some of my books. Okay.

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Neil deGrasse Tyson
The ancestor's tale that is a title that reminds me of the Sagan book shadows of forgotten ancestors. Yes, it kind of feels the same to me. What happened in ancestors tales? Well, it's a reference to Chaucer. Oh, Canterbury Tales.

But one of his tales was not the ancestor. No, no, no. Oh, you just. There's a miller's tale and now the ancestors tale. It's a history of life, but it's going backwards.

Richard Dawkins
So it's in the form of a pilgrimage, chaucerian pilgrimage, going backwards in time. So we human pilgrims set off into the past and we're joined by the chimpanzee pilgrims and then the guerrilla pilgrims, and we finally get back to the origin of life. So it's a way of doing the history of life, but do it backwards, because if you do it forwards, then you end up with the idea that humans are kind of the climax, which you don't want. That's not a good way of looking at it. So if you go backwards, then you start.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Okay, I was getting on your case, but that's brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks for deliver. I'm going to now read that. Okay.

Because I missed that one. Here's one we all saw and know about whether or not we read it. The God delusion, that's 2006. That puts you in the same plateau as. That puts you on a plateau to be identified as one of the four horsemen.

Richard Dawkins
Oh, right. Not a phrase that any of us actually. It was bestowed upon you. Yes, it was. Daniel Dannett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Both of them are passed. Sam Harris and you? Yes. Okay. The four horsemen, who have each been quite vocal about their atheism.

Richard Dawkins
Yes. And the God delusion. If that's not atheist, I don't know what is. It is. Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
In the title. Yes. Right. So we spoke about this book before. Didn't you say there were religious groups that wanted people to read it so that they know the face of their enemy?

Was that. I forget. It's quite possible. There are some people who say they were converted to religion by it. Really?

Richard Dawkins
I'm not quite sure how they managed to get that. It doesn't say much of my rhetorical skills. So is this your single biggest selling book, the God Delusion? Yes, just about. Yes.

It was equal to the selfish gene, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, plus you have. And I've taken you to task on the very first day I met you.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
And I think it's worth repeating here. The first day I ever knew you again, like I said, I read your books and I aspired to have the vocabulary, the command of vocabulary that you. That spills off your plate. I took you to task in the front of a group. It was one of the.

What's the name of that conference, a beyond belief conference. Oh, yes, which gathered. Oh yes, which gathered scientists, biologists, theologians, philosophers, and it was to discuss, are we in an era beyond where belief matters? Yes. Does belief still matter?

So it was quite the juxtaposition of points of view. You and I are up in front in a panel. Two other people are there. And I heard you speak. I'd only ever read what you wrote.

Then I heard you speak. It was more articulate and more barbed than anything I'd ever read that you had written. And I said, oh my gosh, I'm glad we are on the same side because. Because if you had spoke to me, I'd feel like a complete idiot. I would feel not worthy of life.

And then I thought, you are so potent. Is this turning people off because they reject it, because you are not investing in how they think. Everybody has little receptors for receiving information. And if you're just going to say I'm right and I know I'm right and you all are just wrong and you're idiots, maybe that's not as effective as you can be. So I challenged you to be a little more sensitive to people who are just trying to explore the world and that you could be more effective than you are.

Do you remember your reply to me? I said, I gratefully accept the rebuke. Yes. By the way, in that moment there was like 5 seconds of silence. Cause I'm just some young whippersnapper and you're like, story famous guy on stage.

Nobody made a sound. They laughed. No, no, no, no. Just in that moment of silence as how is he gonna react? It was one of these what's he gonna say?

In that moment it was total silence. And then you broke the silence with. I gratefully accept the rebuke. And then people, people were calmed after that. Yes.

And you gave a worst example. What was it? Do you remember the editor? Oh yeah. The editor of new Scientist who was asked, what is your policy at New Scientist magazine?

Richard Dawkins
And he said, our policy at New Scientist magazine is science is interesting. If you don't agree, you can f off. So that was. That's so we could feel better about you. Yes, that's right.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
All right, only a few more minutes here. Let's keep going. The greatest show on Earth 2009, subtitled the Evidence for Evolution. Was that motivated? Because around that time there was the rise of what they called intelligent design.

Richard Dawkins
Well, that had come before. I mean, this was, in a way, the blind watchmaker was a response to that. Yes, of course. But this was really to set out the evidence for evolution, which I hadn't really done before. I just sort of assumed it assumed.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That everyone knew it. Well, not really. Yes, maybe. Yes, maybe. Okay, yeah.

There's a lot of misunderstanding. I have found people think that an organism adapts to its environment, and I say, no, it either survives or dies. Yes, that's right. And there's a great quote at the end of war, the world where, as you remember, HG Wells, at the end, there's a recitation, and he says, I'm paraphrasing, he says, these creatures from another planet, they were doomed, undone by the smallest creatures on Earth to which we had developed immunity. No man, and it ends with a very poetic phrase, no man lives nor dies in vain.

Through the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright on this earth, and it is his against all comers. And it would have still been his had the Martians been ten times as mighty as they are, because no man lives nor dies in vain. And I thought that was potent. He was, of course, scientifically literate. And he's saying there are generations that die because they didn't have, they can't make it through this next.

Stress to the environment. It's rather horrifying when you think that actually that's what happened to the native South Americans when the Spanish arrived. I mean, they were killed by epidemics of things like measles, which they had no immunity, and in Europe, build up immunity to these diseases, so. But the better analogy would have been had the South Americans wanted to invade Europe, yes, they would have then died by the european diseases. But that's not how european colonialism works.

You're a colonist? Yeah. No history. Don't you invert that colony story on me. Just a couple more books here.

I'm skipping over, like a half a dozen, with your permission. One that I delighted because not only because I received a book, a copy of it in the mail from your publisher. It was just delightfully done. Flights of fancy, defying gravity by design and evolution. That was 2021.

Beautiful book illustrated. And who was the illustrator of that? Jana Lantzova. She's Slovak. Okay.

And just something that I think is underappreciated in this world because we can't fly. So, especially in the idea that we're at the top of the evolutionary scale and everything else is less than us. What does the Condor say about that? Who flaps its wings once every ten minutes because it coasts the rest of the time? So it's just a celebration of flight in evolution.

I was delighted by that. Thank you. Well, that was sort of designed for young people. It started out as a children. Well, that's why I liked it, too.

That accounted for its accessibility. I mean, it was just very fun to see the illustrations and the like. And right now there's a book coming out called the Genetic Book of the Dead. Yes. A publisher actually let you use that title?

Richard Dawkins
Why wouldn't they? Because it's so, it's like what? A book of the Dead? That worries me. I don't know.

I think it's rather an uplifting title. The genetic book of the Dead? Yes. It doesn't mean human dead. Well, does this have a subtitle?

Neil deGrasse Tyson
What's the subtitle? Yes, it does have a subtitle. A darwinian reverie. Well, so tell me about this. I haven't read it yet.

Richard Dawkins
Okay. If you look at a highly camouflaged animal, a desert lizard is one that I use. It's got pebbles and sand all over its back. It was just a dummy painting of a desert on its back. Okay, so that is a description of the worlds in which its ancestors lived.

You can read that animal as a book describing the desert world in which its ancestors lived. And thats an easy example because its got it painted on its back. But it must be true, right the way through every bit of every cell of the animal, every molecule of the animal has got the same description written. And some of it is baggage. Baggage as in burdensome rather than.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Yes, but we have an appendix that can burst. That's true. You have a pinky toe. When was the last time you made good use of that? You'd be surprised.

I don't want to ask what your feet look like. They could look like full chimp feet. Do you grab stuff with your feet at home? Things are much more useful than you think. You didn't answer that question.

Do you grab things with your feet? Out of a kinship with our primate. I've known people play the piano with their toes. Okay.

Richard Dawkins
The point is that natural selection is very, very fussy, is very, very intricate in its choice, far more than we even know about. We are poor judges of what's important for survival. When you think that the genes that survive, going back to the selfish gene, the genes that survive have to survive through lots and lots of different individuals and through a huge amount of geological time. And so any statistical estimate that you and I make about the likelihood that your pinkie will be of any use to you is a statistical mistake. Natural selection is a much better statistician than we are.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So I need to think harder about my pinky toe. Well, natural selection has millions of years in which to choose between successful toes and unsuccessful toes. JBS Haldane did a calculation. JBS Haldane, the great geneticist, did a calculation. He imagined a feature like a toad, something that seems trivial to you, and he said, let's allow that.

Richard Dawkins
It's so trivial that for every thousand individuals who have it and survive, 999 die, so there's only a tiny, tiny margin of advantage. The point is that an actuarial calculation, a life insurance calculator, factors in, would say it's negligible. Forget it. It's not important what really matters, whether you smoke, which is hugely important. But natural selection is a much better actuary than any human statistician, because this feature, the toe, whatever it is, has been repeated thousands of times in lots of different individuals and through lots of different millions of years, and it's got to survive through all those times.

I'm explaining this very badly. The main point is that we are very bad estimators of what's important in natural selection is a much better estimator of that. Okay, how about male pattern baldness? Well, you got that one. Well, that's a variable.

I mean, some people have it and some people don't. You might take another example. Maybe fingerprints.

Why do we have fingerprints? Well, the fact that they're different doesn't matter. But are they important for clinging onto the trees? When we had our boreal ancestors, that kind of thing. Oh, I see.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
So even if they're not useful now, they were useful to get us to where we are now. Hence the genetic book of the dead. I mean, we're talking about the past. Damn, you're right. There it is.

The genetic book of the dead. Yes. Enabling us to get to where we are at all. Yes. Yeah, we are.

Richard Dawkins
A description of the worlds in which our dead ancestors survived until they. Until they died. Survived it long enough to reproduce. Because if we didn't survive, we'd be extinct and we wouldn't be here to talk about it. In modern times.

We are only here because our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce. Yes, and they survived because of the highly detailed features that they had, which their rivals. I think differently about my pinky toe, because without the pinky toe, there might have been some dead ancestor that would have ended that branch of the tree of life and we would have never been here. That's right. Yes.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Man, that's going to be a good book. Do you have hope for civilization as it's currently manifested in the world, I. Think we have to have hope to live our lives at all. It doesn't mean that at an intellectual level I necessarily have.

Richard Dawkins
I live my life as though I have hope. Yes. So I've become. Cynical is not the right word, a practical cynic. It's.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
There are people who think this way or feel that way or behave this other way, and I've stopped trying to change them. What I try to do is offer a way of looking at the world that maybe they'll take, maybe they won't. Maybe as an educator, it's my job to make this as tasty as possible so that, hey, that's a good idea. I never thought about it that way, but otherwise, I just gave a presentation to a christian school, k through twelve. I talked about optics, and at the end it was open q and a, and they were 11th graders, and they started grilling me on science versus the Bible.

And I said, I'm not here to stop you from being religious at all, okay? We live in a country that protects your freedom to be religious, and you're in a private school, so the government is not going to come after you and say, you have to get this out of the public coffers. So I made that clear. But I didn't have the urge to try to convert them. And I get the sense that you've had this urge your entire life to convert people with no less zeal than a religious person, a religious evangelical religious person would have trying to convert people.

Richard Dawkins
Who are not that insofar as their religious belief conflicts with science, I think we would agree. And in my field, perhaps the conflict is more alarming because, I mean, did I tell you? I didn't tell you this. We have a big bang theater here. And back when we first opened here at the Hayden Planetarium, there's a separate theater space where we just talked about the big Bang.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Someone came out of the big bang, saw me and says, how come you didn't mention God in there? And then I realized, okay, what am I going to do? I say, how about this? Why don't you go to our hall of human evolution and then come back here? And when I tell them to do that, they never come back because that's way more offensive to them.

Having monkeys and humans hold hands in the dioramas than anything we could ever say in the Big Bang here. I thought they'd rather like the big Bang. I mean, the big Bang sounds pretty much like Genesis. It's a creation event. Yeah, maybe that's why they thought we should have mentioned God and didn't.

But I just. I don't even have the conversation. I just send them over to your part of the music. Yes, but I think you're being too pusillanimous. You shouldn't duck the question.

Well, I don't duck it so much as sometimes I don't have the energy. Oh, that's different. I get that, too. You feel that. I understand that.

Richard Dawkins
But in my field, that really is an absolute opposition. It's not something you can complete. Although the Catholic Church, they've met you in the middle. Yeah, yeah, they have. They said we have this branch of primates, and then God breathed the soul into them, and they're humans allowing evolution all up to that point.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
You gotta give them something you got. No. Not a step, not a total cop out. No, it's. It's.

But. But the world is not that binary. It's not that binary. I don't see it that way. There are religious people who are per.

Who. Where Jesus is their savior, but they're perfectly fine with a four and a half billion year old earth. Yes, they are. Okay. They're not at the extreme.

Richard Dawkins
They don't see the contradiction, but yes. So maybe the plurality of the world is a virtue rather than a. Than a. It's so not a virtue. I shouldn't use that word.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
Maybe the plurality of the world is a feature rather than a bug of the programming of what it is to be human. But the truth is so much more grand and so much more elegant and so much more poetic and so much more beautiful. Why drag Jesus in? And I would still claim you could get more of that across if people didn't feel stupid talking to you. Yeah, that's true.

Richard Dawkins
I accept that. Just saying. Yes. So you're a professor at Oxford. Are you retired yet?

I am retired. You're retired. Okay. And you were professor of public understanding aside. Yes, I remembered that.

Yes. That was a post created by Charles Simone. To Charles Simone. Yes. And he created multiples of those around the world.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
That wasn't the only. No. He wanted the Princeton advanced, the Institute. For Advanced Study, maybe.

Richard Dawkins
I think that was in a different field. I think that was. Oh, okay, okay. But it's interesting, he's a very generous. Yeah.

Neil deGrasse Tyson
If you're wealthy and you want to make a change in the world, that's a way to sort of keep that going. Absolutely, yes. Right. And there's another professorship somewhere in the UK, a professorship of the public understanding of risk. Oh, that's good.

That is a. That's a professorship. Yes. And forgive me, I don't remember where, but I know that exists. Yes, that's good.

And people have no way to judge or to think about that as a challenge in their lives. That is a fascinating subject. People get so wrong. Yes. Yes.

Even smart people get that wrong. People who would otherwise think should be smart don't get it. Well, Richard, it's been a delight to. As always, thank you so much to have you here. Let me just end this with some brief reflections.

There's those among us who are educated on a level where you can't just hold it in. You have to sort of share the knowledge, wisdom, insights one gleans from having committed your life to studying a subject and its related components. And Richard Dawkins is an example of that. Carl Sagan used to say, when you're in love, you want to tell the world and where. There are two dozen books on this list that I just read, this is, Professor Dawkins can't contain his love.

He's gotta share it. For all those who seek a deeper understanding of life, not only their own lives, but the lives of everyone around them. And the lives of all that came before us, and the lives of all those yet to be born. But in there, our messages of protecting our civilization, because without it, there will be no future lives to be born. And then what of our branch in the tree of life?

We can't let the roaches and the rats take over after us. Help us.

That is a cosmic perspective. Neil degrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.

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