The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author

of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality,

and The Greatest Show of Earth and His Latest Allgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer

of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including,

funny enough, the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene,

which, in the context of a gene centered view of evolution, is an exceptionally powerful idea.

He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason,

and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.

This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic for everyone feeling the medical,

psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I'm sending love your way. Stay strong,

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an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people

around the world. And now here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins. Do you think there's

intelligent life out there in the universe? Well, if we accept there's intelligent life here and

we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic. I mean, 10 to 22 stars has

been estimated. It seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe

elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the view

that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean, ludicrously,

off the charts improbable. And I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly the origin of life

itself. There are really two steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable,

and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable.

So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say, is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22

improbable. It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming onto it, how we would recognize

intelligence from outer space if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them

would be by radio. It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us. But it's not it's not that unlikely

that we would pick up radio signals. And then we would have to have some means of deciding that

it was intelligent. People have people involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it

and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to an obvious way for them to broadcast

to say we are intelligent, we are here. I suspect it probably would be obvious, actually.

That's interesting, prime numbers. So the mathematical patterns, it's an open question

whether mathematics is the same for us as it would be for aliens. I suppose we could assume

that ultimately if we're governed by the same laws of physics, and we should be governed by

the same laws of mathematics. I think so. I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem,

etc. I don't think that their mathematics will be that different.

Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets as well?

I stuck my neck out and said that if we do, if ever that we do discover life elsewhere,

it will be Darwinian life in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection,

the non random survival of randomly generated codes. It doesn't mean that the genetic would

have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn't be

actually. But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.

So some kind of selection process?

Yes. In the general sense, it will be Darwinian.

So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence engineering question. So you've been an outspoken

critic of I guess what could be called intelligent design, which is an attempt to describe the

creation of a human mind, a body by some religious folks that religious folks use to describe.

So broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know, again, you can correct me,

is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life.

Like there's no alternative theory as far as I understand.

None has ever been suggested, and I suspect it never will be.

Well, of course, whenever somebody says that 100 years later.

I know. It's a risk. But what a bet. I mean, I'm pretty confident.

But it would look, sorry, yes, it would probably look very similar, but it's almost like

Einstein's general relativity versus Newtonian physics. It'll be maybe an alteration of the

theory or something like that, but it won't be fundamentally different. But okay.

So now for the past 70 years, even before the AI community has been trying to engineer

intelligence in a sense to do what intelligent design says was done here on Earth.

What's your intuition? Do you think it's possible to build intelligence, to build computers that

are intelligent, or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process? There's no

shortcuts here. That's an interesting question. I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately

possible because I think there's nothing nonphysical in our brains. I think our brains work by the

laws of physics. And so it must, in principle, be possible to replicate that. In practice,

though, it might be very difficult. And as you suggest, it might, it may be the only way to do

it is by something like an evolutionary process. I'd be surprised. I suspect that it will come.

But it's certainly been slower incoming than some of the early pioneers thought.

Thought it would be, yeah. But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient?

So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in one perspective. But at the same time,

maybe that is the only path. It's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably

wasteful. It's fundamentally based on waste. On the other hand, it does produce magnificent

results. I mean, the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle is superb.

An engineer would be proud to have done it. On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud

to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up. Some of the sort of

botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they

don't look well designed. Do you have examples of bad design? My favorite example is the current

laryngeal nerve. I've used this many times. This is a nerve. It's one of the cranial nerves,

which goes from the brain. And the end organ that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx.

But it doesn't go straight to the larynx. It goes right into the chest and then loops around

an artery in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the larynx.

And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck, which happened to have died in a zoo.

And we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going, whizzing straight past the larynx,

within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest and then back up again,

which is a detour of many feet, very, very inefficient. The reason is historical.

The ancestors are fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish. The most direct

pathway of that, of the equivalent of that nerve, there wasn't a larynx in those days,

but it innovated one of the gills. The most direct pathway was behind that artery. And then when the

mammal, when the tetrapods, when the land vertebra started evolving and then the neck started to

stretch, the marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the

artery was too great or rather was, was each step of the way was a very small cost, but the

marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large. As the neck

lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length, the length of the detour,

tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference. And so,

but finally, when you get to a giraffe, it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient. Now,

that's bad design. Any engineer would reject that piece of design. It's ridiculous. And there are

quite a number of examples, as you'd expect. It's not surprising that we find examples of that sort.

In a way, what's surprising is there aren't more of them. In a way, what's surprising

is that the design of living things is so good. So natural selection manages to achieve excellent

results partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes. And as

it were, making the best of a bad job. That's really interesting. I mean, it is surprising and

beautiful. And it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well designed.

I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die for that.

That's the inefficiency of it. Yes, that's the horrible wastefulness of it.

So yeah, we marvel at the final product. But yeah, the process is painful.

Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially what he calls the biological

bootloader for artificial intelligence or artificial general intelligence as used as the

term is kind of like superintelligence. Do you see superhuman level intelligence as potentially

the next step in the evolutionary process? Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence is to

be found, it will be artificial. I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains will go on

getting larger in ordinary biological evolution. I think that's probably come to an end. It is

the dominant trend or one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three

million years. Brain size? Brain size, yes. So it's been swelling rather dramatically over the

last two or three million years. That is unlikely to continue. The only way that happens is because

natural selection favors those individuals with the biggest brains. And that's not happening anymore.

Right. So in general, humans, the selection pressures are not... I mean, are they active in

any form? Well, in order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most... Let's

call it intelligence. Not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let's

talk about intelligence. In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent

beings have the most... Individuals have the most children. And so intelligence may buy you money,

it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that,

if you successful career. It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn't

increase the number of offspring that you have. It doesn't increase your genetic

legacy to the next generation. On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and

technology generally is evolving by a non genetic means, by leaps and bounds, of course.

And so what do you think... I don't know if you're familiar, there's a company called Neuralink,

but there's a general effort of brain computer interfaces, which is to try to build a connection

between the computer and the brain, to send signals both directions. And the long term dream

there is to do exactly that, which is expand... I guess expand the size of the brain, expand

the capabilities of the brain. Do you see this as interesting? Do you see this as a promising

possible technology, or is the interface you see in the computer and the brain, like the brain is

this wet, messy thing that's just impossible to interface with? Well, of course, it's interesting,

whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling is that the brain

being as small as it is compared to a computer and the individual components being as slow as

they are compared to our electronic components, it is astonishing what it can do. I mean, imagine

building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull. And with the equivalent of

transistors or integrated circuits, which work as slowly as neurons do, it's something mysterious

about that. Something must be going on that we don't understand. So I've just talked to Roger

Penrose, I'm not sure if you're familiar with this work. He also describes this kind of mystery in

the mind, in the brain, that he sees a materialist. So there's no sort of mystical thing going on,

but there's so much about the material of the brain that we don't understand.

And that might be quantum mechanical and nature and so on. So there are the ideas about consciousness.

Have you ever thought about, do you ever think about ideas of consciousness or a little bit

more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up just like

you're saying from our brain? I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there.

He's one of the world's greatest physicists. I can't possibly argue with his...

But nobody knows anything about consciousness. And in fact, if we talk about religion and so on,

the mystery of consciousness is so awe inspiring and we know so little about it

that the leap to religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make.

I think that it's just an act of cowardice to leap to religious explanations and Roger

doesn't do that, of course. But I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it.

So correct me if I'm wrong, but in your book Selfish Gene, the gene centered view of evolution

allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software

of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate. So maybe can we start just with the basics?

What in this context does the word meme mean? It would mean the cultural equivalent of a

gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the

transmission of culture and the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense. And it's only a useful

word if there's something Darwinian going on. Obviously culture is transmitted, but is there

anything Darwinian going on? And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene,

which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population. So it can replicate?

It can replicate. Well, it clearly does replicate. There's no question about that.

The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion?

Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool?

In a sort of trivial sense you can. Would you wish to say though that in the same way as a

animal body is modified, adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes?

Is it also a machine for propagating memes? Could you actually say that something about the way a

human is, is modified, adapted for the function of meme propagation? That's such a fascinating

possibility if that's true. It's not just about the genes which seem somehow more

comprehensible. It's like these things of biology. The idea that culture or maybe ideas,

you can really broadly define it, operates under these mechanisms. Even morphology, even anatomy

does evolve by memetic means. I mean, things like hairstyles, styles of makeup, circumcision,

these things are actual changes in the body form, which are non genetic and which get

passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus in a quasi genetic way.

But the moment you start drifting away from the physical, it becomes interesting because the

space of ideas, ideologies, political systems. Of course, yes. So what's in your, what's your

sense? Are memes a metaphor more or are they really, is there something fundamental, almost

physical presence of memes? Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor. And I think that,

and I mentioned that physical bodily characteristics, which are a bit trivial in a way, but

when things like the propagation of religious ideas, both longitudinally down generations

and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas, when a charismatic preacher

converts people, that resembles viral transmission. Whereas the longitude

nor transmission from grandparent to parent to child, et cetera, is more like conventional

genetic transmission. That's such a beautiful, especially in the modern day idea. Do you think

about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas, the viral propagation

of ideas, enhance the new use of the word meme to describe? Well, the internet, of course, provides

extremely rapid method of transmission. And before, when I first coined the word,

the internet didn't exist. And so I was thinking that in terms of books, newspapers,

broader radio, television, that kind of thing, now an idea can just leap around the world

in all directions instantly. And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation

of memes. How does that make you feel? Isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas, it's like you

have Galapagos Islands or something, is the 70s. And the internet allows all these species to just

like globalize. And in a matter of seconds, you can spread a message to millions of people.

And these ideas, these memes can breed, can evolve, can mutate, and there's a selection,

and there's like different, I guess, groups that have all like there's a dynamics that's fascinating

here. Do you think? Yes. Basically, do you think your work in this direction, while fundamentally

was focused on life on earth, do you think it should continue like to be taken further?

I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing.

We can mentionly think of the transmission of ideas from an evolutionary context as being

limited to, I mean, in our ancestors, people living in villages, living in small bands where

everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop

to a neighboring village occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually.

And that was a slow process. Nowadays, villages are international. I mean, you have people,

it's been called echo chambers where people are in a sort of internet village where the other

members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world, but they just

happen to be interested in the same things, use the same terminology, the same jargon,

have the same enthusiasm. So people like the Flat Earth Society, they don't all live in one place,

they find each other and they talk the same language to each other, they talk the same

nonsense to each other. But so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of

people living in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way.

Is there Darwinist parallel here? So is there an evolutionary purpose of villages or is that just

a... Oh, I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose in that case, but villages or villages

will be something that just emerged. That's the way people happen to live. And in just the same

kind of way, the Flat Earth Society, societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this

digital space. Yes, yes. Is there something interesting to say about the... I guess,

from a perspective of Darwin, could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction and

these social networks? Or are some much more complicated things need to be developed? What's

your sense? Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread

and which don't. So some ideas don't have the ability to spread. I mean, the Flat Earth,

the Flat Earthism, there are a few people believing it, but it's not going to spread

because it's obvious nonsense. But other ideas, even if they are wrong, can spread because they

are attractive in some sense. So the spreading and the selection in the Darwinian context

is just to be attractive in some sense. We don't have to define... It doesn't have to be

attractive in the way that animals attract each other. It could be attractive in some other way.

Yes. All that matters is all that is needed is that it should spread. And it doesn't have to be

true to spread. In truth, there's one criterion which might help an idea to spread. But there are

other criteria which might help it to spread. As you say, attraction in animals is not necessarily

valuable for survival. The famous peacock's tail doesn't help the peacock to survive. It helps it

to pass on its genes. Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish but which people don't know is

rubbish and think is very attractive will spread in the same way as a peacock's genes spread.

There's a small side step. I remember reading somewhere, I think recently, that in some species

of birds, sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some

birds... I'm being ineliquent here, but there are some aspects of their feathers and so on

that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever. There's somebody making an argument that there

are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose. Does that ring a bell

for you? It sounds ridiculous. I think it's a rather distorted bell. Darwin, when he coined the

phrase sexual selection, didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females,

usually is male attractive females, that what females found attractive had to be useful. He

said it didn't have to be useful. It was enough that females found it attractive and so it could

be completely useless, probably was completely useless in the conventional sense, but was not

at all useless in the sense of passing on... Darwin didn't call them genes, but in a sense of reproducing.

Others, starting with Wallace, the co discoverer of natural selection, didn't like that idea and they

wanted sexually selected characteristics like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful.

It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail as being useful, but in the sense of survival,

but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date. There are two schools

of thought on sexual selection which are still active and about equally supported now. Those

who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow

Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful. Do you fall into one category or the

other? No, I'm open minded. I think they both could be correct in different cases.

I mean, they've both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense, more so than when Darwin

and Wallace first started talking about it. I'm Russian, I romanticize things, so I prefer the

former where the beauty in itself is a powerful attraction, is a powerful force in evolution.

On religion, do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody

believes in God or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?

Yes, I do. I think it may happen after a very long time. I think it may take a long time for

that to happen. Do you think ultimately for everybody on earth, religion,

other forms of doctrine's ideas could do better job than what religion does?

Yes. I mean, following truth. Well, truth is a funny word and reason too.

It's a difficult idea now with truth on the internet and fake news and so on.

I suppose when you say reason, you mean the very basic sort of

inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better.

Yes, yes. I mean truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by not just by the

more rigorous methods of science but by just ordinary sensory observation.

So do you think there will ever be a time when we move past it? I guess another way to ask it,

are we hopelessly fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions?

Well, clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe.

You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly,

something like that. And some people have suggested that.

What's your intuition on that?

Well, I've read books on it and they're persuasive. I don't think they're that persuasive though.

I mean, some people suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead which can be a

non existent figurehead in order to function properly. I think there's something rather

patronizing about the idea that, well, you and I are intelligent enough not to believe in God,

but the plebs need it sort of thing. I think that's patronizing and I'd like to think that

that was not the right way to proceed.

But at the individual level, do you think there's some value

of spirituality? If I think sort of as a scientist, the amount of things we actually

know about our universe is a tiny, tiny, tiny percentage of what we could possibly know.

So just from everything, even the certainty we have about the laws of physics,

it seems to be that there's yet a huge amount to discover.

And therefore, we're sitting where 99.999% of things are just still shrouded in mystery. Do

you think there's a role in a kind of spiritual view of that, sort of a humbled spiritual?

I think it's right to be humble. I think it's right to admit that there's a lot we don't know,

a lot that we don't understand, a lot that we still need to work on. We're working on it.

What I don't think is that it helps to invoke supernatural explanations.

If our current scientific explanations aren't adequate to do the job,

then we need better ones. We need to work more. And of course, the history of science shows just

that, that as science goes on, problems get solved one after another. And the science advances,

the science gets better. But to invoke a non scientific, non physical explanation is simply

to lie down in a cowardly way and say, we can't solve it. So we're going to invoke magic.

Don't let's do that. Let's say we need better science. We need more science.

It may be that the science will never do it. It may be that we will never actually understand

everything. And that's okay. But let's keep working on it.

A challenging question there is, do you think science can lead us astray in terms of the

humbleness? So there's some aspect of science. Maybe it's the aspect of scientists and not science,

but of sort of a mix of ego and confidence that can lead us astray in terms of discovering the,

you know, some of the big open questions about the universe.

I think that's right. I mean, there are arrogant people in any walk of life and

scientists are no exception to that. And so there are arrogant scientists who think we've

solved everything. And of course, we haven't. So humility is a proper stance for a scientist.

I mean, it's a proper working stance because it encourages further work. But in a way to resort

to a supernatural explanation is a kind of arrogance because it's saying, well, we don't

understand it scientifically. Therefore, the non scientific religious supernatural explanation

must be the right one. That's arrogant. What is what is humble is to say, we don't know.

And we need to work further on it. So maybe if I could psychoanalyze you

for a second, you have at times been just slightly frustrated with people who have

supernatural, you know, have a supernatural. Has that changed over the years? Have you become,

like, how do people that kind of have seek supernatural explanations? How do you see

those people as human beings? Do you see them as dishonest? Do you see them as

sort of ignorant? Do you see them as, I don't know, like, how do you think of?

Certainly not dishonest. And I mean, obviously, many of them are perfectly nice people. So I don't

sort of despise them in that sense. I think it's often a misunderstanding that

that people will jump from the admission that we don't understand something. They will jump

straight to what they think of as an alternative explanation, which is the supernatural one,

which is not an alternative. It's a non explanation. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that

science needs more work, that we need to actually do some better, better science.

So I don't have, I mean, personal antipathy towards such people. I just think they're

misguided. So what about this really interesting space that I have trouble with? So religion,

I have a bit of grasp on, but there's large communities, like you said, Flat Earth community,

that I've recently, because I've made a few jokes about it, I saw that there's, I've noticed that

there's people that take it quite seriously. So there's this bigger world of conspiracy theorists,

which is a kind of, I mean, there's elements of it that are religious as well. But I think

they're also scientific. So the basic credo of a conspiracy theorist is to question everything,

which is also the credo of a good scientist, I would say. So what do you make of this?

Yes. I mean, I think it's probably too easy to say that by labeling something a conspiracy,

you therefore dismiss it. I mean, occasionally conspiracies are right. And so we shouldn't

dismiss conspiracy theories out of hand. We should examine them on their own merits. Flat

Earth is an obvious nonsense. We don't have to examine that much further. But I mean, there may

be other conspiracy theories which are actually right. So I've grew up in the Soviet Union. So

the space race was very influential for me on both sides of the coin. There's

conspiracy theory that we never went to the moon, right? And it's like, I can understand it. And

it's very difficult to rigorously scientifically show one way or the other. It's just you have to

use some of the human intuition about who would have to lie, who would have to work together.

And it's clear that very unlikely, good. Behind that is my general intuition that most people

in this world are good. You know, in order to really put together some conspiracy theories,

there has to be a large number of people working together and essentially being dishonest.

Yes, which is improbable. The sheer number who would have to be in on this conspiracy and

the sheer detail, the attention to detail they'd have had to have had and so on.

I'd also worry about the motive. And why would anyone want to suggest that it didn't happen?

What's the, why is it so hard to believe? I mean, the physics of it, the mathematics of it,

the idea of computing orbits and trajectories and things, it all works mathematically.

Why wouldn't you believe it? It's a psychology question because there's

something really pleasant about, you know, pointing out that the emperor has no clothes when

everybody, like, you know, thinking outside the box and coming up with a true answer where

everybody else is deluded. There's something, I mean, I have that for science, right?

You want to prove the entire scientific community wrong. That's the whole.

No, that's right. And of course, historically, lone geniuses have come out right sometimes,

but often people who think they're a lone genius much more often turn out not to.

So you have to judge each case on its merits. The mere fact that you're a maverick, the mere

fact that you're going against the current tide doesn't make you right. You've got to

show you're right by looking at the evidence.

So because you focus so much on religion and disassemble a lot of ideas there and

I just, I was wondering if you have ideas about conspiracy theory groups, because it's such a

problem even reaching into presidential politics and so on. It seems like it's a very large

communities that believe different kinds of conspiracy theories. Is there some connection

there to your thinking on religion?

It is curious. It's an obvious, difficult thing. I don't understand why people believe

things that are clearly nonsense like, well, Flat Earth and also the conspiracy about not

landing on the moon or that the United States engineered 9.11, that kind of thing.

So it's not clearly nonsense. It's extremely unlikely.

Okay. It's extremely unlikely.

Religion is a bit different because it's passed down from generation to generation.

So many of the people who are religious got it from their parents, who got it from their

parents, who got it from their parents and childhood indoctrination is a very powerful force.

But these things like the 9.11 conspiracy theory, the Kennedy assassination conspiracy

theory, the man on the moon conspiracy theory, these are not childhood indoctrination. These are

presumably dreamed up by somebody who then tells somebody else, who then wants to believe it.

And I don't know why people are so eager to fall in line with some, just some person that they

happen to read or meet who spins some yarn. I can kind of understand why they believe

what their parents and teachers told them when they were very tiny and not capable of critical

thinking for themselves. So I sort of get why the great religions of the world like Catholicism and

Islam go on persisting. It's because of childhood indoctrination. But that's not true of Flat

Earthism. And sure enough, Flat Earthism is a very minority cult.

Way larger than I ever realized.

Well, yes, I know.

But so that's a really clean idea. And you've articulated that in your new book and the

Algorand God and in God Delusion is the early indoctrination. That's really interesting.

You can get away with a lot of out there ideas in terms of religious texts, if the age which you

convey those ideas at first is a young age. So indoctrination is sort of an essential element

of propagation of religion. So let me ask on the morality side, in the books that I mentioned,

God Delusion, Algorand God, you described that human beings don't need religion to be moral.

So from an engineering perspective, we want to engineer morality into AI systems. So in general,

where do you think morals come from in humans?

A very complicated and interesting question. It's clear to me that the moral standards,

the moral values of our civilization changes as the decades go by, certainly as the centuries

go by, even as the decades go by. And we in the 21st century are quite clearly labeled 21st century

people in terms of our moral values. There's a spread. I mean, some of us are a little bit more

ruthless, some of us more conservative, some of us more more liberal and so on.

But we all subscribe to pretty much the same views when you compare us with, say, 18th century,

17th century people, even 19th century, 20th century people. So we're much less racist,

we're much less sexist and so on, than we used to be. Some people are still racist and some are

still sexist. But the spread has shifted that the Gaussian distribution has moved and moves

steadily as the centuries go by. And that is the most powerful influence I can see on our

moral values. And that doesn't have anything to do with religion. I mean, the morals of the

Old Testament are Bronze Age models. They're deplorable. And they are to be understood in

terms of the people in the desert who made them up at the time. And so human sacrifice,

an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, petty revenge, killing people for breaking the Sabbath,

all that kind of thing, inconceivable now. So at some point, religious texts may have in part

reflected that Gaussian distribution at that time. I'm sure they did. I'm sure they always reflect

that, yes. And then now, but the sort of almost like the meme, as you describe it, of ideas moves

much faster than religious texts do, than your religion. Yeah. So basing your morals on religious

texts, which were written millennia ago, is not a great way to proceed. I think that's

pretty clear. So not only should we not get our morals from such texts, but we don't. We quite

clearly don't. If we did, then we'd be discriminating against women and we'd be racist, we'd be

be killing homosexuals and so on. So we don't and we shouldn't. Now, of course, it's possible to

use your 21st century standards of morality and you can look at the Bible and you can cherry pick

particular verses which conform to our modern morality. And you'll find that Jesus says

some pretty nice things, which is great. But you're using your 21st century morality to decide

which verses to pick, which verses to reject. And so why not cut out the middleman of the Bible

and go straight to the 21st century morality, which is where that comes from. It's a much

more complicated question. Why is it that morality, moral values change as the centuries go by?

They undoubtedly do. And it's a very interesting question to ask why. So it's another example

of cultural evolution just as technology progresses. So moral values progress for probably very

different reasons. But it's interesting if the direction in which that progress is happening

has some evolutionary value or if it's merely a drift that can go into any direction.

I'm not sure it's any direction and I'm not sure it's evolutionally valuable. What it is is

progressive in the sense that each step is a step in the same direction as the previous step.

So it becomes more gentle, more decent by modern standards, more liberal, less violent.

See, but more decent, I think you're using terms and interpreting everything

in the context of the 21st century, because Genghis Khan would probably say that this is

not more decent because we're now, you know, there's a lot of weak members of society that

we're not murdering. I was careful to say by the standards of the 21st century,

by our standards, if we with hindsight look back at history, what we see is a trend in

the direction towards us, towards our present values. So for us, we see progress, but it's

an open question whether that won't, you know, I don't see necessarily why we can never return

to Genghis Khan times. Well, we could. I suspect we won't, but if you look at the history of moral

values over the centuries, it is in a progressive, I use the word progressive, not in a value

judgment sense, in the sense of a transitive sense, each step is the same direction as the

previous step. So things like we don't derive entertainment from torturing cats. We don't

derive entertainment from like the Romans did in the Colosseum from that stage.

Or rather, or rather, we suppress the desire to get, I mean, to have, it's probably in us

somewhere. So there's a bunch of parts of our brain, one that probably, you know,

limbic system that wants certain pleasures. And that's, I mean, I wouldn't have said that,

but you're at liberty to think that. Well, no, there's a, there's a Dan Carlin of Hardcore History,

there's a really nice explanation of how we've enjoyed watching the torture of people,

the fighting of people, just the torture, the suffering of people throughout history

as entertainment until quite recently. And now everything we do with sports,

we're kind of channeling that feeling into something else. I mean, there's some dark aspects

of human nature that are underneath everything. And I do hope this like higher level software

we've built will keep us at bay. Yes. I'm also Jewish and have history with the Soviet Union

and the Holocaust. And I clearly remember that some of the darker aspects of human nature creeped

up there. They do. There have been, there have been steps backwards admittedly. And the Holocaust

is on this one. But if you take a broad view of history, it's in the same direction.

So Pamela McCordick in Machines Who Think has written that AI began with an ancient wish to

forge the gods. Do you see, it's a poetic description, I suppose, but do you see a connection

between our civilizations, historic desire to create gods, to create religions, and our modern

desire to create technology and intelligent technology? I suppose there's a link between

an ancient desire to explain a way of mystery and science, but artificial intelligence creating

gods, creating new gods. And I forget, I read somewhere a somewhat facetious paper which said

that we have a new god. It's called Google. And we pray to it and we worship it and we

ask its advice like an oracle and so on. That's fun. But you don't see that, you see that as a

fun statement, a facetious statement. You don't see that as a kind of truth of us creating things

that are more powerful than ourselves and natural. It has a kind of poetic resonance to it, which I

get. But I wouldn't have bothered to make the point myself put it that way. All right. So you

don't think AI will become a new religion and new gods like Google?

Well, yes. I mean, I can see that the future of intelligent machines or indeed intelligent aliens

from outer space might yield beings that we would regard as gods in the sense that they are so

superior to us that we might as well worship them. That's highly plausible, I think. But I see a very

fundamental distinction between a god who is simply defined as something very, very powerful and

intelligent on the one hand and a god who doesn't need explaining by a progressive step by step

process like evolution or like engineering design. So suppose we did meet an alien from outer space

who was marvelously, magnificently more intelligent than us and we would sort of worship it and for

that reason. Nevertheless, it would not be a god in the very important sense that it did not just

happen to be there like God is supposed to. It must have come about by a gradual step by step

incremental progressive process, presumably like Darwinian evolution. There's all the difference

all the difference in the world between those two. Intelligence, design comes into the universe late

as a product of a progressive evolutionary process or a progressive engineering design process.

So most of the work is done through this slow moving progress. Exactly.

Yeah. But there's still this desire to get answers to the why question. If the world

is a simulation, if we're living in a simulation that there's a programmer

like creature that we can ask questions of. Okay. Well, let's pursue the idea that we're

living in a simulation, which is not totally ridiculous, by the way. There we go.

Then you still need to explain the programmer. The programmer had to come into existence by some

even if we're in a simulation, the programmer must have evolved. Or if he's in a sort of

or she or she she's in a meta simulation, then the meta, meta programmer must have evolved by

by a gradual process. You can't escape that. Fundamentally, you've got to come back to a gradual

incremental process of explanation to start with. There's no shortcuts in this world.

But maybe to linger on that point about the simulation, do you think it's an interesting

basically talk to board the the heck out of everybody asking this question, but

whether you live in a simulation, do you think first, do you think we live in a simulation?

Second, do you think it's an interesting thought experiment?

It's certainly an interesting thought experiment. I first met it in a science fiction novel by

Daniel Galloy, called Counterfeit World, in which it's all about our heroes are running

a gigantic computer which which simulates the world. And something goes wrong. And so one of

them has to go down into the simulated world in order to fix it. And then the the the denouement

of the thing, the climax of the novel is that they discover that they themselves are in another

simulation at a high level. So I was intrigued by this. And I love others of Daniel Galloy's

science fiction novels. Then it was revived seriously by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom talking to him in an

hour. Okay. And he goes further, not just treat it as a science fiction speculation, he actually

thinks it's positively likely. I mean, I think it's very likely, actually. Well, he's he makes

like a probabilistic argument, which you can use to come up with very interesting conclusions about

the nature of this universe. I mean, he thinks that that that we're in a simulation done by,

so to speak, our descendants of the future that the products. But it's still a product of evolution.

It's still ultimately going to be a product of evolution, even though the super intelligent

people of the future have created our world. And you and I are just a simulation and this

table is a simulation and so on. I don't actually, in my heart of hearts believe it, but I like his

argument. Well, so the interesting thing is that I agree with you. But the interesting thing to me,

if I would say if we're living in a simulation, that in that simulation to make it work, you still

have to do everything gradually, just like you said, that even though it's programmed, I don't think

there could be miracles. Otherwise, well, no, I mean, the programmer, the higher the upper ones

have to have evolved gradually. However, the simulation they create could be instantaneous.

I mean, it could be switched on and we come into the world with fabricated memories.

True. But what I'm what I'm trying to convey, so you're saying the broader statement, but I'm

saying from an engineering perspective, both the programmer has to be slowly evolved and the

simulation because it's like from an engineering perspective, it takes a long time to write a

program. No, like just I don't think you can create the universe in a snap. I think you have to grow

it. Okay, well, that's a good point. That's an arguable point. By the way, I have thought about

using the Nick Bostrom idea to solve the riddle of how we were talking earlier about why the

human brain can achieve so much. I thought of this when my then 100 year old mother

was marveling at what I could do with it with a smartphone. And I could, you know,

call look up anything and it's like the PDR, I could play her music that she liked and so on.

She says, all in that in that tiny little phone. No, it's out there. It's in the cloud. And maybe

what most of what we do is in a cloud. So maybe if we are a simulation, then all the power that

we think is in our skull, it actually may be like the power that we think is in the iPhone.

But is that actually out there in an interface to something else? I mean, that's what

including Roger Prenrose with panpsychism, that consciousness is somehow a fundamental

part of physics that it doesn't have to actually all reside inside. But Roger thinks it does reside

in the skull. Whereas I'm suggesting that it doesn't. That there's a cloud.

That'd be a fascinating, fascinating notion on a small tangent. Are you familiar with the work

of Donald Hoffman, I guess? Maybe not saying his name correctly, but just forget the name,

the idea that there's a difference between reality and perception. So like we biological

organisms perceive the world in order for the natural selection process to be able to survive

and so on. But that doesn't mean that our perception actually reflects the fundamental

reality, the physical reality underneath. Well, I do think that although it reflects the

fundamental reality, I do believe there is a fundamental reality. I do think that our perception

is constructive in the sense that we construct in our minds a model of what we're seeing. And this

is really the view of people who work on visual illusions like Richard Gregory, who point out

the things like a Necker cube, which flip from a two dimensional picture of a cube on

sheet of paper. We see it as a three dimensional cube, and it flips from one orientation to another.

At regular intervals. What's going on is that the brain is constructing a cube,

but the sense data are compatible with two alternative cubes. And so rather than stick

with one of them, it alternates between them. I think that's just a model for what we do all

the time when we see a table, when we see a person, when we see anything. We're using the

sense data to construct or make use of a perhaps previously constructed model. I noticed this

when I meet somebody who actually is say a friend of mine. But until I kind of realized that that

is him, he looks different. And then I finally clocked that it's him, his features switch

like a Necker cube into the familiar form. As it were, I've taken his face out of the

filing cabinet inside and grafted it onto or used the sense data to invoke it.

Yeah, we do some kind of miraculous compression on this whole thing to be able to filter most of

the sense data and make sense of it. That's just the magical thing that we do. So you've written

several many amazing books. But let me ask, what books, technical or fiction or philosophical,

had a big impact on your own life? What books would you recommend people consider reading in

their own intellectual journey? Darwin, of course. The original, I've actually

ashamed to say I've never read Darwin. He's astonishingly prescient because considering

he was writing the middle of the 19th century, Michael Gieselin said he's working 100 years

ahead of his time. Everything except genetics is amazingly right and amazingly far ahead of his time.

And of course, you need to read the the updates that have happened since his time as well.

I mean, he would be astonished by, well, let alone Watson and Crick of course,

but he'd be astonished by Mendelian genetics as well.

Yeah, if you're fascinated to see what he thought about, he would think about DNA.

Oh, I mean, yes, it would. Because in many ways, it clears up what appeared in his time to be a riddle.

The digital nature of genetics clears up what was a problem, what was a big problem.

Gosh, there's so much that I could think of. I can't really.

Is there something outside sort of more fiction? When you think young, was there books that just

kind of outside of kind of the realm of science and religion, they just kind of sparked your

Yes. Well, actually, I have, I suppose I could say that I've learned some

some science from science fiction. I mentioned Daniel Gallo and that's one example,

but another of his novels called Dark Universe, which is not terribly well known,

but it's a very, very nice science fiction story. It's about a world of perpetual darkness.

And we don't, we're not told at the beginning of the book why these people are in darkness.

They stumble around in some kind of underground world of caverns and passages,

using echolocation like bats and whales to get around. And they've adapted,

presumably by Darwinian means to survive in perpetual total darkness. But what's interesting

is that their mythology, their religion has echoes of Christianity, but it's based on light.

And so there's been a fall from a, from a, a paradise world that once existed where light

reigned supreme. And because of the sin of mankind, light banished them. So then they no

longer are in light's presence, but, but light survives in the form of mythology and in the

form of sayings like they're great light almighty over light's sake, don't do that.

And I, and I, I hear what you mean rather than I see what you, what you mean.

So the, some of the same religious elements are present in this other totally kind of

absurd different form. Yes. And so it's a wonderful, I wouldn't call it satire because

it's too good natured for that. I mean, a wonderful parable about Christianity and the

doctrine, the theological doctrine of the fall. So I find that, that kind of science fiction

immensely stimulating. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. Oh, by the way, anything by Arthur C.

Clarke, I find very, very wonderful too. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud,

his first science fiction novel where he, well, I learned, I learned a lot of science from that.

It has, it suffers from an obnoxious hero, unfortunately, but apart from that,

you learn a lot of science from it. Another of his novels, Apha Andromeda,

which by the way, the theme of that is taken up by Carl Sagan's science fiction novel,

another wonderful writer, Carl Sagan Contact, where the idea is, again, we will not be visited from

outer space by physical bodies. We will be visited possibly, we might be visited by radio,

but the radio signals could manipulate us and actually have a concrete influence on the world

if they make us or persuade us to build a computer which runs their software so that they can then

transmit their software by radio. And then the computer takes over the world. And this is the

same theme in both Hoyle's book and Sagan's book, I presume, I don't know whether Sagan knew about

Hoyle's book, he probably did. And it's a clever idea that we will never be invaded by physical

bodies. The war of the worlds of HD worlds will never happen, but we could be invaded by radio

signals, code, coded information, which is sort of like DNA. And we are, I call them, we are

survival machines of our DNA. So it has great resonance for me because I think of us, I think

of bodies, physical bodies, biological bodies as being manipulated by coded information in DNA

which has come down through generations. And in a space of memes, it doesn't have to be physical,

it can be transmitted through the space of information. That's a fascinating possibility

that from outer space we can be infiltrated by other memes, by other ideas, and thereby controlled

in that way. Let me ask the last, the silliest or maybe the most important question, what is the

meaning of life? What gives your life fulfillment, purpose, happiness, meaning?

From a scientific point of view, the meaning of life is the propagation of DNA, but that's not

what I feel. That's not the meaning of my life. So the meaning of my life is something which is

probably different from yours and different from other people's, but we each make our own meaning.

So we set up goals, we want to achieve, we want to write a book, we want to

do whatever it is we do, write a quartet, we want to win a football match.

And these are short term goals, well, maybe even quite long term goals, which are set up by our

brains, which have goal seeking machinery built into them. But what we feel, we don't feel

motivated by the desire to pass on our DNA mostly. We have other goals, which can be very

moving, very important. They could even be called spiritual in some cases. We want to understand

the real of the universe, we want to understand consciousness, we want to understand how the

brain works. These are all noble goals. Some of them can be noble goals anyway. And they are

a far cry from the fundamental biological goal, which is the propagation of DNA.

But the machinery that enables us to set up these higher level goals is originally programmed into

us by natural selection of DNA. The propagation of DNA. But what do you make of this unfortunate

fact that we are mortal? Do you ponder your mortality? Does it make you sad?

I ponder it. It makes me sad that I shall have to leave and not see what's going to happen next.

If there's something frightening about mortality, apart from sort of missing, as I've said,

something more deeply, darkly frightening, it's the idea of eternity. But eternity is only

frightening if you're there. Eternity before we were born, billions of years before we were born,

and we were effectively dead before we were born. As I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for

billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience.

That's how it's going to be after we leave. So I think of it as really, eternity is a frightening

prospect. And so the best way to spend it is under a general anesthetic, which is what it'll be.

Beautifully put, Richard, it is a huge honor to meet you, to talk to you. Thank you so much for

your time. Thank you very much. Thanks for listening to this conversation with Richard Dawkins,

and thank you to our presenting sponsor, Cash App. Please consider supporting the podcast by

downloading Cash App and using code Lex Podcast. If you enjoy this podcast, subscribe on YouTube,

review with five stars on Apple Podcast, support on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter

at Lex Freedman. And now let me leave you with some words of wisdom from Richard Dawkins.

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because

they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place,

but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.

Certainly, those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton.

We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set

of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds, it is you and I in our ordinariness that

are here. We privileged few who won the lottery of birth against all odds. How dare we whine at

our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred.

Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.