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[Music] welcome to another episode of conversations with coleman if you're
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hearing this then you're on the public feed which means you'll get episodes a week after they come out and you'll hear advertisements you can get access to the subscriber feed by going to colemanhughes.org and becoming a supporter this means you'll
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thank you so much for your support my guest today is richard dawkins i assume most of you know who he is but in case you've been living under a rock richard dawkins is an evolutionary biologist and emeritus fellow at oxford
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university and if i listed all the awards he's received in his lifetime we'd never get to the interview his books include the selfish gene the extended phenotype the blind watchmaker
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the god delusion unweaving the rainbow and many others his latest book is called flights of fancy in which he explores and explains the phenomenon of flight both in the
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animal world and in man-made technology we didn't get to discuss this book in this episode but i really recommend you all check it out topics we discuss here include technological progress
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whether race is a social construct or biological reality the mystery of consciousness the concept of a meme which richard invented religion and its relationship to a happy life
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whether wokeness plays the role of a religion in people's lives and finally richard gives his advice to up-and-coming scientists so without further ado richard dawkins
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okay richard dawkins thanks so much for coming on my show thank you very much indeed normally with my guests i would start by asking them to give a summary of their biography and
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how they came to sort of care about the issues that they do but with you that seems rather pointless as pretty much everyone in my audience knows exactly who you are
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and uh most of the basic facts of your biography so it's you know it's hard to know where to start i've i've been a fan for a long time you are one of the greatest
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science uh communicators and science writers ever and this is you know your your reputation precedes you you you know i've i've enjoyed your books
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from the selfish gene to the extended phenotype the blind watchmaker the god delusion and you know to me the selfish gene in
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particular still to this day stands out uh however many years later what what is it almost almost uh 45 i guess yeah 45 years later as
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uh the the most accessible but you know while remaining deep explanation of uh natural selection and the gene-centered view of evolution
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and it's it's remarkable in in an ecosystem where books are born and can become irrelevant two years later that a book
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you know remains so readable and relevant and accessible um so that's that's all just you know keeping praise on you uh that you that i'm sure you've received for from
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from many avenues but it's it's all to say it's just an honor to get you on thank you very much so it is hard to know where to start
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with you but i i am curious just like what you've been up to um you know the past few years what have you what have you been interested in what have you been paying attention to on a
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day-to-day basis well my most recent book my most recent book is flights of fantasy which is a book for young people about flight the evolution of flight in animals and all
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the four main groups of animals that have developed flight and also in humans of course in human technology the technical problems that face a creature that that needs to fly so
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that's the most recent book the one before that was books do furnish your life which was a collection an anthology of my previous journalism and previous book reviews that things
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connected with books writings native with books um book reviews forwards to books afterwards to books and things um i wrote i've written a couple of autobiographies
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um an appetite for wonder and wreath candle in the dark which are um my two memoirs my two autobiographies about my life um
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outgrowing god was a kind of young person's version of the god delusion i suppose those are those are my most recent books so i went out on
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twitter to see what people were most interested in you and i talking about and one of the one of the topics was
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a question about technological progress and the the progress that we are likely to make as a as a race there's this view
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among people like david deutsch and others working on artificial intelligence or integrating the the brain with technology such as elon musk's neural
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neuralink project there's an attitude among many people in that world that eventually we are likely to make any kind of progress that's
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compatible with the laws of physics they you know imagine super intelligent ai and picture a kind of star trek reality where
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we've you know economic scarcity is just a thing of the past and we've through the attainment of knowledge have figured out how to do the most with the least amount of resources
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and how to do anything that isn't ruled out by the laws of physics and you know my perspective on that attitude has
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has always been that you know isn't our progress going to run up against the the basic fact of evolutionary psychology that we are not built to
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understand and manipulate the universe but to survive in a very narrow slice of the universe and and so i'm curious how you as an evolutionary biologist think of the
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really optimistic perspective on how much progress we'll make okay i sympathize with your point of view on that on the other hand um isn't it remarkable that although we
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were built by natural selection to survive in a kind of serengeti like environment hunting and gathering and nothing else isn't it remarkable that nevertheless we've managed to do
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quantum theory relativity um higher mathematics so somehow the human brain does seem to at least some human brains do seem capable of
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far outreaching uh what we were evolutionarily designed to do so that's on the one hand that suggests that the speculators that you've mentioned are right that
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um anything that's physically possible we will eventually be able to do on the other hand where i think evolutionary psychology really might kick in is in the political will to do it
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and it could be that although the sort of scientific elite among us by in which i don't include myself by the way i'm talking of physicists like
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like david deutsch you mentioned uh max tag mark people like that that they will be pushing up into sort of furthest limits furthest reaches of
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what's possible on the other hand humanity being fallible and being political uh may uh never achieve what we are potentially
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capable of um i mean for example climate change is a thing that worries most of us and although it may well be that if we deploy the full
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power of science we can get around these problems nevertheless we need the political will to do it and that may be that the barrier will come from the political will so if we were to somehow figure out
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how to solve the political problems is it your view that you know the the amount of progress we'll make in the next few hundred years may be
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really in line with what folks like elon musk and yeah i think so but but i think so but but it's a very big if because because you've got people like donald trump in the in the world with
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power and and so um it as i say it is a very big big if so one solution that would suggest itself based on what you just said is for
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billionaires to essentially steer around the political obstacles by doing things privately i mean elon musk would be the the best example but there are there are others
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like patrick collison and you know other very scientifically literate and curious billionaires that want to be on the forefront of progress to just fund and put their
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just put their shoulder to these kinds of projects um does does that seem like a plausible solution i think it does yes i think i mean that you've got elon musk you mentioned jeff bezos um
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richard branson um there are quite a few who are who are very scientifically savvy um and charles simone they're very there are
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many like that and so i suppose they could do yes so one area where i i am fairly persuaded that the limits of our evolutionary minds are
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preventing us from understanding an issue or at least might be is the problem of consciousness why why there is something it's like to be
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this hunk of machinery to be these survival machines as you call them in in the selfish gene there's nothing in the theory of evolution or in the laws of physics as i
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understand them that would explain why it feels like something to be a brain as opposed to a table which i assume there's nothing it's like to be
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although the further into this conversation the more you question even those kinds of assumptions is is this something you've given much thought to i have tried to i i i don't
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uh i mean i think it's a baffling problem um it seems to me that uh a zombie a robot um could be programmed and there's no reason why natural
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selection could not have programmed a robot-like creature to do everything that we can do in the in the way of behaving in such a ways to survive the way of
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analyzing sense data and controlling muscles in in a um in an intelligent way actually um artificial intelligence as we know it so
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far is i'm convinced not conscious so that the great chess programs the go program um the the great artificial intelligence programs are so far not conscious
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and they don't know what it's like to be a computer they don't know what it's like to be a chess playing computer um and i suppose as a darwinian i'm committed
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to the view that since we are conscious there must have been a darwinian survival value in it that an unconscious intelligent robot wouldn't do the job as well as a
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conscious one which is what we are um but i don't really understand why and i don't think anybody else really does doesn't the existence of things like locked in syndrome where
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you know there's a what looks to be basically a coma patient that can't move or almost do anything but we know once they wake up for the co from the coma that they were
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actually conscious the whole time wouldn't that undermine the assumption that the computer programs are definitely not conscious because how would we know how would we
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know indeed um i mean there's no doubt about it that we are conscious i mean i know i'm conscious and i suspect you are um because we're similar we come from the same
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source um but um yes i mean i think locked-in syndrome is interesting from that point of view so as a darwinian you
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you it would make sense or or one would believe that consciousness must have some survival value um you know but but it's it's certainly hard to see
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what it would be i mean i i guess you know i'm influenced by the philosopher colin mcginn on this point who essentially makes the point that just like
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certain animals don't grasp the concept of reflection because it's just beyond their ken so when they see their reflection in a mirror they just
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can't and are never going to understand that that's them consciousness is something like that to humans like it's just beyond our ken so that we're probably not even asking the right
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questions and even the smartest among us actually aren't capable because we're not built to understand what's true at bottom there is that a thesis you're familiar with i
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am i mean colin mcginn is i suppose one extreme of those who feel that uh the problem is just simply too difficult that we might as well simply give up it's a bit defeatist um
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i mean it it if people always have that kind of defeatist attitude they've never solved any problems but admittedly it is an extremely difficult problem so i do sympathize with it
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as an evolutionist i agree that we were certainly never designed to understand not just consciousness but modern physics
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and yet we do but i would take a kind of colin mcginn line when it comes to the possibility that there may be
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things in physics that we were never designed to understand it may be that we've already reached the limit quantum theory and and relativity uh entanglement things like that are already pushing up against the limit of
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what the human brain can understand um i mean i think we're already quantum theory we don't understand we just know that it produces predictions which are accurate to a formidable number of
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decimal places and i think the same may be of true of consciousness that we simply are not built to to understand it so totally different question you know looking back on your life
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what piece of advice would you give to your 35 year old self so you hear you know the the selfish gene is coming out tomorrow yeah you can tell that version of richard dawkins one thing
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what would it be don't waste so much time as doing computer programming i've wasted an enormous amount of my life because i love it and i became addicted to computer programming
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and uh it was it consumed not just a lot of my time but a lot of my intellect as well and um but the fact is it's a thing that other people do much better and so i would have done better to have
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done more biology interesting so you you regret spending too much time doing computer programming because it's a kind of hobby rather than yeah i mean regret's a strong word because it was
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enormous fun and i think it did help me to think about certain things for example it's helped me to think about language um i mean i i think i understand chomsky better
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shopify today once again you can go to shopify.com coleman right now okay so another topic that people on twitter wanted us to discuss
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there is a long-standing debate among biologists but also anthropologists about whether race is real or a social construct and uh yeah i can feel my blood pressure
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go up simply broaching the topic because it's a third rail and and you know it makes perfect sense that it's a third rail because in the 20th century the nazis committed a genocide
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based partly on this belief and many governments including the u.s government instituted eugenics policies my my great grandmother was was sterilized in puerto rico as a result of
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one of these policies in the eugenics era nevertheless i think people of goodwill ought to be able to ask the question which is
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given that when our ancestors migrated out of africa many groups of them were geographically isolated for long enough to develop all of the
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all of the differences in appearance that make someone like me look different than someone like you and you know the question whether that isolation was was long enough and the
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the evolution divergent enough to justify biologically valid categories whether we want to call them races or populations you know that it seems people of
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goodwill who are not nazis ought to be able to ask that question and explore its its implications whether medical or or otherwise so what do you make of that debate
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okay i i mean i quite agree with you i i think the the fact that such appalling things were done by the nazis and by the eugenic sterilization movements in the united states in the early part of the 20th century and so on
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the fact that that happened doesn't nullify the validity of the concept of race i mean it's obvious there are geographically separated groups of humans who who have um
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different genetic clusters in common now what is true is that the variance between between humans between different different races is
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much less than the variance within within races in other words um well one way it's been put is that if you wiped out um all of humanity except one
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sub population most of the variation would be preserved in other words most of the available human variation is present in all different races that doesn't mean that race is invalid
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racism is a valid concept it is real really it are differences which are correlated with each other skin color shape but very various different things blood groups but all these things are correlated with each other
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and so it i think it's nonsense to say that race is a social construct race is a real biological phenomenon um the important thing is not to base any decisions to base any policies
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upon that which i think that's truly wicked and that's what was making about the nazis and was wicked about the uh eugenic sterilization movements of the uh 1920s and so on so the way i view
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this and you know i've looked at papers that have been written ever since the genome was sequenced a couple decades ago which have allowed scientists to look at
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a representative sample of genomes from all across the world identify the locations in the genome where people have different genes because most spots in the genome were all the same
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but isolating those spots which vary coming up with an index of similarity where my and my sister's genome would score as very highly similar
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whereas mine and yours for instance would score as relatively different and then doing a standard clustering analysis to see how clustered the data are and
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you know on on a pot many people are going to be listening to this so if you're not familiar with what it means for there to be a clustering analysis i am familiar no i know believe me i know you are i'm time
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speaking sorry to my listeners okay fine yeah um i just want to ensure that they know what we're talking about you know imagine you know imagine you were measuring
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people's height and weight just two variables and you were to measure everyone in america and plot them on x y graph where say like x is the height and y is the weight
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you probably wouldn't see all that much clustering it would just look like a mess of evenly distributed dots now say you were to do the same thing but just look at a class of
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kindergartners and the nba now you're going to find two completely separate clusters where the kindergartners are going to be clustered in a circle around here and the nba is going to be over here and
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there's going to be no overlap and then in a third scenario you might have a group that clusters but has significant overlap in the clusters that are nevertheless visible
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and from the papers i've looked at race or populations tend to look like that third scenario where there is visible clustering in the data but significant overlap no discrete
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boundaries so that tens or maybe hundreds of millions of people will be more genetically similar to some members of other races than to some people in their own race
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that's certainly true yes undoubtedly yeah but there will be certain characteristics like skin color which which will be which will separate out geographical populations most characteristics won't
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but but certain things will uh and that you will find correlated characteristics which will do which will do that there's a separate question here which is whether discussion of
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these kinds of issues can actually cause harm to society this is a you know is everything true worth discussing or worth amplifying and
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there was one set of studies that really brought this question to my attention recently by a researcher named brian donovan where he took a group of eighth or ninth graders
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presented them with a passage on sickle cell which essentially said that black people are more likely to get sickle cell for these reasons and then presented them with an
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identical question an identical passage that talked about sickle cell in race neutral terms that just said these many americans get sickle cell because
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know their ancestors were from regions of the world that were had lots of malaria so there was one race neutral version version of the passage and one that was framed in terms of race and they were
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both true and then he tested those two sets of kids as to whether they believed race was a sort of essential character trait and
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whether racial inequality was due to genetics and found that there was a significant difference in the group that has that had just been that had just been read the racialized
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or the the one that was framed racially which would suggest that you know at least it's possible that talking about these facts in a way that
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that puts at the forefront the racial differences even if true could result in a net increase in beliefs about racial difference and racial
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essentialism that we all want to minimize so i guess the basic question is are there things that are true but not worth discussing
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and how do you how do you deal with that i didn't quite understand uh the problem with the sickle cell case because um for example if um doctors
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uh need to know whether somebody's like to have sickle cell they i mean to know skin color would will be correlated with the probability of get getting sickle cell
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for having sickle cell right is there is there a problem with that i don't really get understand or is it just that it raises the consciousness of people in a way that's superfluous is unnecessary
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yes it will be the second thing there's no problem with the fact as stated it's that on a secondary test the kids that were given the passage that way would answer separate questions
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uh and score high on measures of racial essentialism right like the notion that you know races have discrete essences that are shared by all members of the
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race and not others and and other problematic beliefs yes so it's it's of a piece with those psychological studies where subjects are primed by a story and then
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that changes their attitude to a different point right yes i mean well you asked a more general question are there some things in science that we should not study because that was the more general questions you were asking yes
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i suspect that that's there are yes i mean i think i think that there are certain questions that um it it's not it's not worth studying because it would not it wouldn't affect anything we do
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whatever we find out about in in the in in those subjects so they should be irrelevant they should not uh they shouldn't um impinge on anything that we do
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so it's not worth studying them there's been a line of argument over the past few years which has seen the development of wokeness
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in the past five or six years as a consequence of the decline of christianity and religion in the culture and the argument basically says
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there is a religion shaped hole in the human psyche and as christianity has declined in the west something has something has now there's
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been a vacuum that something now has to fill and that's been filled with uh you know the belief that essentially the social justice catechism
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that speech is harm and that only members of your race can truly understand your suffering and um and that you know
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straight white men are evil and at the top of an oppressive hierarchy and that group traits can be applied to to individuals and i can dismiss what you're saying because of your identity
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and this whole thing has ha in some ways had a religious character to it you've seen the development of things like white fragility and rob and d'angelo where
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her best-selling book is preaching this kind of this kind of masochism this kind of masochism on the part of of white people to constantly apologize for
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the original sin of their racism every little sin is exactly right i mean it's right on that's what yeah quite right so all of this had i mean part of this has been inflected with a critique of of the quote new atheists of yourself
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and and dennett and sam harris and uh hitchens by saying well doesn't this prove that you know you can't just get rid of religion because what might replace it
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could be worse what do you make of that if there's a at least the idea is that there's a religious shape a religion shaped hole which needs to be filled i think that's
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condescending and unnecessarily contemptuous of humanity it would be pathetic if humans had a need to have if what if they've lost christianity say they have to have
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something else they can't just take the world as it is take reality as it is take science as it is they have to fill it with something equally silly
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having given up christianity i think that will be i think that that's a condescending attitude to um to to humanity and i would very much hope it's not true i would i would prefer
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that when people lose religion when people lose supernatural religion they do not fill it with some other notion of original sin as you put it quite correctly
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but that they might fill it with an a love of truth a love of science a love of the study of reality i guess a related question here is well
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let me start by just saying this you know i was raised with no religion at all and i never i never missed it as a result
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but i i've talked to lots of people that were raised religious and then you know later either became skeptical or something like that and
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often i think they have the feeling of some sort of sacredness melting away it's like you know or at least when when times get tough they wish that they could turn to god or turn to
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religion for some kind of solace and you know again that's something i've never felt i think partly because i never had it to begin with and all life always seemed quite beautiful and sacred
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to me on its own but to those people that do feel some sense of loss at the religious character of the world
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um what do you have to say to that feeling well like you i empathize with the idea of some feeling of sacredness but to me i get that from science i get
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that from contemplation of the vastness of the universe and the vastness of life's complexity i don't feel any need to
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replace one rather foolish kind of religion with another rather foolish kind of religion which which i think uh the sort of guilt trip which is um
00:35:40
which is dinned into christians you're born in sin if you're if you're a christian especially if you're a catholic born in sin the very moment you're born you have the sin of adam
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inherited in in you um once you got rid of that to replace it with a different kind of guilt trip which is what the um
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original sin of of of white guilt is is about then i don't have any respect for that at all um i think that people need to find a decent
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uh target for their reverence and a decent target for for reverence would be something like science something like the wonders of science and something like humanity
00:36:30
as a whole and a love of humanity as a whole so another related thing people worry about is that science only deals with what is not with
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what ought to be so that if we want to make the world a better place and want to say people should act this way people should act
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you know good rather than like ted bundy that science has nothing to say on that question and can't possibly so how can we really ground our world view and science if that leaves us in an amoral world i
00:37:07
think academic moral philosophy although not strictly science is kind of like science it's applying it's using the systems of logic of reasoning um you cannot say absolutely what is right
00:37:22
and wrong but you can say if you believe that so and so is wrong then you're being inconsistent if you believe it such and such is if so-and-so is right then um in order to be consistent you ought to believe such and such and one can
00:37:34
apply logic uh to moral questions it may be that there are fundamental premises that you can't actually deduce you have to simply assume them but once you have done
00:37:48
then much else follows you can do that by a logical reasoning yeah i was i remain convinced by sam harris's argument on this point which is
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you know there's there's there's nothing cheap about getting an argument off the ground with a brute assumption that's actually how all of our arguments work even within science
00:38:13
it's like at the end of the day i'm not going to convince you that a equals a like the law of identity that's just something you feel in your gut or you don't and if you don't i sort of
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don't believe you [Music] and i am not going to argue for it further because because it actually can't be argued for further and that doesn't make it any less of an invalid assumption and
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if you allow those kinds of assumptions in the domain of morality like like sam harris's know assumption that the worst possible misery for everyone is bad
00:38:51
right if you allow those kind of bootstrapping assumptions you can get a morality every bit as compelling and you know a morality with teeth
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every bit as you must every bit as much as you could from religion uh from science well it's far more than from religion because you get it from religion it's you get all sorts of horrible things i mean
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nobody no no moral person or to base their morality on the old testament for example or on the quran but as you say um you can start with a with a brute
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assumption as as sam harrison i mean suffering is bad and and once you've got that assumption once you've got that axiom then there's a lot of logical work to be done
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working out therefore what what the moral thing to do is given that you take that assumption so i've seen some data to suggest that while
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more secular societies are on average happier than religious societies religious people within secular societies are actually the happiest and are happier than secular people in secular
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societies i'm curious if if you have seen that or have any opinion in general on the relationship between religion secular secular secular beliefs and happiness the data i
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suppose you're thinking of the data of gregory paul on on or maybe other people like him on different societies which have which are religious tend to be less happy it
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seems to go with social welfare societies countries and states within the united states where there's a uh a bedrock of social welfare where people are
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less troubled by poverty where they have more health care and things um are happier and are less likely to be religious um [Music] on the other hand you've just raised the point which i was not aware of
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uh that within um happy societies uh religious people are likely to be the most happy i didn't know that um if that may be related to the
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idea that religious people are less stressed because less um fearful perhaps or perhaps they are less likely to get
00:41:21
stress-related diseased is um that kind of thing i have heard that i'm not i'm not very persuaded by it is the evidence for that good it's been a long time since i've looked at it
00:41:32
so i can't say with any confidence i all i can remember is that it was provoking some interesting conversations at the time well of course it may be true even if it is true it has no bearing on whether religious beliefs are true of course i
00:41:46
mean it's just it's just a it could be a psychological fact that religious people are happier i'd be surprised um but then who cares if i'm surprised i mean the data are what matter
00:41:59
there could also be the conflating variable of belonging to a community you know all sorts of possible conflating variables that's certainly a good one yes what have you made of sort of ubiquity of the concept of a
00:42:12
meme now i mean this is in in a strange way your legacy to people that have no interest in in science is as the guy who invented the word meme which is a little hilarious to me
00:42:26
that some people tapped out of your your real your your other achievements may know you simply through that route yeah of that um meme to me is simply a
00:42:39
cultural equivalent of a gene and so if there is um at the end of the selfish gene i wanted to make the point that darwinism works with where there's any
00:42:51
kind of self-replicator and so um a computer virus would be a good example of a self-replicating entity which could be a unit of natural selection
00:43:04
and a meme is another example of that a cultural replicator anything that is imitated anything that is passed from brain to brain it could be done verbally it could be done pictorially it could be done in the form of a tune it
00:43:18
could be done in the form of a dance step a clothes fashion [Music] anything like that if it's self-replicating if it's imitated that is by definition
00:43:29
self-replicating what's more interesting is can that serve as a basis for a darwinian process of selection by definition that would be true
00:43:41
if certain memes survive better than others uh because they are more popular or for one reason or another and i suppose in a sense that's true um
00:43:54
[Music] certain tunes are more catchy than others and are more likely to get spread around that sort of thing whether that gives rise to interesting evolution it's another matter it's a third question i suppose
00:44:06
and i think you could kind of generalize from the idea of a gene complex making i mean very complicated structures like bodies a meme complex or mean plexus as it's
00:44:20
been called could be something like a religion where you have a whole series of mutually compatible mutually reinforcing memes which go along together
00:44:33
um this will all be greek to the people you mentioned who who talk about memes on the internet because what they they what they think a meme is is just a picture with writing on it right and it
00:44:45
says that's not what a meme is at all well well it is a sort of subset of a b i suppose i remember reading susan blackmore's book on memes yes the
00:44:56
meme machine yes when i was in college and it was a really attractive idea to me but it also seemed to me that the analogy to jeans uh could be taken too far
00:45:10
um and maybe was being taken too far because you know ultimately i think what's so incredible about darwinian natural selection and this really came out in your book the blind watchmaker
00:45:22
is that the appearance of design comes from a process that has no intentions behind it no conscious intentions
00:45:33
but it ends up creating something that looks to us like it could only have been designed by a creator whereas meme complexes or memes
00:45:47
don't have that character because we we do create them to begin with and we know we create them at least yes i suppose that's right i mean no mystery yeah on the other hand if you
00:45:59
take something like a religion a religion like roman catholicism is a very complicated set of different at different components and it could be it could have been designed it could be that a whole lot of
00:46:14
cardinals got together and sat down and conclaved and worked out how shall we design our religion like um uh oh that charleston did who invented um scientology he literally did sit down
00:46:27
and invent it i think it's more probable that roman catholicism for example was not invented by by people but came together
00:46:40
possibly in a kind of darwinian way possibly uh certain memes like um [Music] belief in the sanctity of the virgin
00:46:51
mary um belief in life after death um belief in indulgences you that you can pay to have to be have time off purgatory and things like that that
00:47:05
they were mutually supportive and were favored by a kind of natural selection rather than popes and cardinals
00:47:17
in a kind of machiavellian way sitting down together and designing them [Music] now you seem to be suggesting that they're designed and maybe you're right but it's not obvious i think they could
00:47:29
have come about in a kind of darwinian way what advice would you give to someone listening to this podcast who is say a college student
00:47:43
that wants to be a scientist wants to contribute and advance our collective knowledge of science and you know admires the contributions
00:47:55
you've made what what advice would you give them now starting out their careers i hate the advice question yeah i know i know it's tough well i think they they must be
00:48:08
enthusiastic about it they they shouldn't do it unless they really really uh love it and love truth and are infinitely curious curious about the infinite curiosity and cures to push it
00:48:22
as far as they can um you have to work hard i suppose you need to pick your subject carefully pick your pick a subject that you're really interested in that you really can excel
00:48:34
at i mean some people are no good at the sort of higher mathematics they would need to do physics for example and so they might be better off choosing another a less mathematical subject that they could excel at
00:48:47
if they're good at say field work something like that i don't know i i say i just hate the advice question i i i i don't know what to say what you say your advice reminds me of
00:48:58
jerry seinfeld's comment about what he tells up-and-coming comedians that he meets he tells them all to quit because he knows the ones that are really meant
00:49:10
to be comics and would really be happy doing it won't listen to him yes on the assignment herb silverman who was an atheist who who ran for governor of i think south carolina um with no intent with no hope of
00:49:23
winning and when he he was asked by a journalist um what would you do if you won and he would say i would demand a recount [Laughter]
00:49:36
i i'm not sure i've been aware of your if you've made any comment on on covid publicly a pandemic that could have we could have seen coming i mean
00:49:49
in a way we've been lucky not to have had one like it before and maybe it's it's a wake-up call to expect uh similar things in the future i have been
00:50:00
um horrified by the way it the attitude to things like vaccination um have become politicized and and the way um people's attitude to vaccination
00:50:14
has become tribal uh and uh opposition to vaccination has been a kind of that's what our people believe that's what that's that's what my people my
00:50:26
tribe believes that that's horrifying because it's purely a scientific question it's possible to disagree about the science i mean it's perfectly respectable to say i've looked at the science and i
00:50:38
disagree about about vaccination might be unlikely but you could do that you could do that but to simply objective vaccination on
00:50:50
political tribal grounds this is awful um i've been very positively impressed by the way science has come forward has stepped up and has produced vaccines
00:51:04
at an astonishing pace uh never have such advances being produced so quickly so effectively and
00:51:17
some of the vaccines that have been produced the mrna vaccines are using a method which is generalizable to other viruses and even to cancer
00:51:31
and so it's it's could be a major benefit sort of paradoxical silver lining to the covid pandemic that vaccine-developing scientists have
00:51:47
developed techniques which can be used in future not just for this virus but for any other virus that comes along uh because the way it's done is generalizable
00:51:59
to other viruses and as i say even to cancer yeah no i agree with all that one of the things that has troubled me during the pandemic is that i think it
00:52:11
it has probably diminished the credibility of science in the public eye because you know our institutions that claim the mantle of science like the cdc
00:52:26
will often make errors um you know because partly because i think they're they're somewhat partisan and they don't
00:52:37
want to concede any any small fact you know to to the anti-vaxxers you know even if so you know so for example they you know it recently came out in
00:52:52
the new york times that they hid a lot of the data during 2021 they didn't release data on the efficacy of vaccines for young people of booster shots in particular because
00:53:05
they didn't show enough efficacy to clearly indicate that it was worth it for say a young healthy person to get a booster shot and the spokesperson for the cdc admitted that part of the reason we
00:53:18
didn't release all the data is because we didn't want it to be misinterpreted as fodder for the anti-vaxxers essentially and you know a series of actions like this i
00:53:31
think has led to a diminishment in the credibility of our flagship scientific uh institutions such that people are beginning to roll their eyes
00:53:44
when they hear the phrase trust the science and that's something that worries me because we want people to trust the science we want our institutions to be worthy of that trust
00:53:56
and as public trust in those institutions goes down it just makes it harder and harder the next time a pandemic comes for uh for for people to sort of
00:54:09
trust what what they're being told and so i worry about the long-term credibility of science and i'm curious if that is something you ever think about that may be an american thing i i i wasn't aware of that and i'm rather
00:54:22
surprised because to me i i thought the effect of the um pandemic has been rather the reverse that the brothers prestige of sounds has increased rather than decreased i i didn't know about the
00:54:36
particular cases you're talking about they don't sound to me i mean europe western europe from what i've seen has had a much a much more rational
00:54:49
sort of policy approach to kovit a less divided or less partisan but it sounded to me as though the um the sort of mild cover-up you were talking about was
00:55:02
as it were provoked by the anti-vaxxers and so it's a kind of byproduct of the political anti-vaxx movement as you said they didn't want to provide fodder for the anti-vaxxers
00:55:16
and that would never have arisen had the politically motivated anti-vaxxers been on the scene but still it's it's not it's not uh laudable i would agree with that yeah no it's
00:55:29
you're right that it was i mean there's a huge contingent in america that's simply anti-vaxx and spreading total misinformation about the safety and efficacy of it but
00:55:41
i mean in response the solution has not been to maintain total transparency it's been essentially to either lie or just you know hide the truth in some
00:55:53
ways for the public benefit which i didn't know that that's that's okay that's not good well yeah anybody enough anthony fauci has admitted that you know rather than tell the public
00:56:06
exactly the percentage of people that ought to get vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity he sort of tailored the number to what he thought the public was ready to hear i didn't i didn't know that yeah he has publicly admitted that and
00:56:20
you know i don't think that makes these folks evil necessarily i i do think they are well they are bureaucrats with the mixed incentives that they do that that politicians will
00:56:31
always have partly thinking about the public good and partly thinking about the maintenance of their own status and so forth but there is this philosophy of not showing the public everything
00:56:44
not letting the public decide for themselves because the masses are are too dumb to handle the nuance essentially yeah okay well and i mean just all of this i just raised because
00:56:56
you know i see you as someone that has you know given science a lot of credibility in your lifetime and and has been just an extremely effective defender of
00:57:11
science against its enemies for the betterment of humanity and you know i think in in the long run one of the things we have to worry about is
00:57:23
the reputation of science not being tarnished by those who who claim it's mantle if it is being tarnished i would certainly worry about that yes okay so i i guess
00:57:36
before i before i let you go can you discuss at all anything you're working on now that that maybe hasn't seen the light of day yet i'm working on a book called the genetic book of the dead
00:57:49
which is a book aimed at about the same audience as the selfish gene and the idea is that um because animals are
00:58:01
all of us living things are a product of the natural selection of our ancestors information about the environment which selected our ancestors information about the environment in which our ancestors
00:58:15
lived is in some sense written down in our bodies and in our genes and so theoretically it would be possible to take any animal
00:58:28
say an unknown animal hitherto unknown animal and read it read the information in it read it the information is genes read out information about its
00:58:40
ancestral way of life its ancestral environment and its genes and the ancestral genes it's a beautiful concept i uh i'm excited for that book to to come out thank you richard dawkins
00:58:53
thank you so much for your time thank you very much if you appreciate the work i do the best ways to support me are to subscribe directly through my website colemanhughes.org and to subscribe to my youtube channel so you'll never miss my
00:59:05
new content as always thanks for your support [Music]
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