RICHARD DAWKINS: Thank you very much.
Some of my titles may be good.
I'm quite pleased with "The Blind Watchmaker,"
"The Selfish Gene" is not a bad title.
But it's unfortunately been rather
Various critics have omitted to read the rather substantial
footnote, which is the book itself.
This new book, "An Appetite for Wonder,"
the subtitle is "The Making of a Scientist,"
it is a memoir of the first half of my life,
up to the age of 35, and it culminates
in the writing of "The Selfish Gene."
So there's going to be a volume two, in two year's time.
It was all supposed to have been one volume.
But I kind of lost a bit of stamina halfway
through and decided I needed a bit of positive reinforcement.
So I asked the publisher if I could split it in half
and produce it in two volumes.
And so it is actually a rather natural breakpoint.
"The Selfish Gene" was a fairly natural breakpoint in my life.
So I'm going to go through with a set of readings, kind
of strung together with a bit of talk.
The book begins with ancestors, and goes on
to my childhood, and school days.
And I got one or two little anecdotes
from school days, which might be vaguely amusing.
I was sent to boarding schools of a rather British kind
I was first sent to boarding school
at the age of seven, which is a bit too
young to be sent away to school.
I used to have fantasies that the matron would
And I thought that since both of them had dark, curly hair,
it wouldn't take too much of a miracle to achieve that.
So I'm going to read a little bit about school days.
I was an exceptionally untidy and disorganized little boy
My first school reports dwelt insistently
Headmaster's report-- He has produced some good work
A very inky little boy at present,
which is apt to spoil his work.
Latin-- He has made steady progress.
But unfortunately when using ink,
his written work becomes very untidy.
Mathematics-- He works very well.
But I am not always able to read his work.
He must learn that ink is for writing, not washing purposes.
Ms. Benson, my elderly French teacher,
somehow managed to omit the ink leitmotif.
But even her report had a sting in the tale.
French-- Plenty of ability, good pronunciation,
and a wonderful facility in escaping work.
I then went on to another school, a secondary school,
which was rather more spartan in some ways.
And I went through a religious phase, which I then
abandoned, and then became rather rebellious.
And with a couple of friends, we refused
And so everybody else was kneeling down with bowed heads
and we were sitting upright, like islands of rebellion.
It being an Anglican school, they were very decent
They didn't indoctrinate or punish us
in any way, which I think is a nice advertisement
I hate to think what might have happened
if we'd been to a school run by a rival sect.
My housemaster, Mr. Ling, did make
sort of an effort to reform me.
I'm going to read a little bit here.
I've only recently learned that my housemaster, Peter Ling,
actually a nice man, if rather too conformist,
telephoned [? Johan ?] Thomas, my zoology master,
to voice his concern about me.
In a recent letter to me, Mr. Thomas
reported that he warned Mr. Ling that quote,
"requiring someone like you to attend chapel twice a day
on Sunday was doing you positive harm."
The phone went down without comment.
Mr. Ling also summoned my parents
for a heart-to-heart talk over tea--
that's the way we do things in England--
about my rebellious behavior in chapel.
I knew nothing of this at the time and my mother
has only just told me of the incident.
Mr. Ling asked my parents to try to persuade
My father said, approximately, by my mother's recollection,
it's not our business to control him in that sort of way.
That's kind of thing is your problem.
And I'm afraid I must decline your request.
My parents' attitude to the whole affair
with that it wasn't important.
Mr. Ling, as I said, was in his way a decent man.
A contemporary and friend of mine in the same house
recently told me the following nice story.
He was illicitly up in a dormitory during the day,
kissing one of the house maids.
The pair panicked when they had a heavy tread on the stairs.
And my friend hastily bundled the young woman up
onto a window sill and drew the curtains
Mr. Ling came into the room and must
have noticed that only one of the three windows
Even worse, my friend noticed, to his horror,
that the girl's feet were clearly visible,
He firmly believed that Mr. Ling must
have realized what was going on, but pretended not to, perhaps
What are you doing up here in the dormitory at this hour?
Just came up to change my socks, sir.
That boy went on to become probably
the most successful alumnus of his generation,
the mighty chief executive officer
of one of the largest international corporations
in the world and a generous benefactor of the school,
endowing, among other things, the Peter Ling Fellowship.
I don't mention the name in the book.
But I can divulge to you that that boy was Sir Howard
Stringer, who became the head of the Sony Corporation, the only
I then went on to Oxford, which was
I think the turning point in my life really.
It was wonderful to be educated to become a scholar
and to think, rather than educated
to learn about what was in textbooks.
And so I think a tremendous lot to the Oxford experience.
And in particular to various mentors at Oxford
and especially one, Michael Cullen,
who was the number two to Niko Tinbergen,
the great ethologist, animal behaviorist, who
Niko Tinbergen was my official research supervisor
as a graduate student, but Mike Cullen
was the one who really looked after me.
And I want to read to you-- I hope
I didn't break down when I do so.
I occasionally choke up a bit-- the eulogy
that I wrote for him his at his funeral,
in one of the Oxford college chapels.
He did not publish many papers himself.
Yet he worked prodigiously hard, both in teaching and research.
He was probably the most sought after tutor
in the entire zoology department.
The rest of his time-- he was always in a hurry
and worked a hugely long day-- was devoted to research,
Everybody who knew him has the same story to tell.
All the obituaries told it in revealingly similar terms.
You would have a problem with your research.
You knew exactly where to go for help
and there he would be for you.
I see the scene as yesterday, the lunchtime conversation
in the kitchen, the wiry, boyish figure in the red sweater,
slightly hunched like a spring wound up,
with intense intellectual energy,
sometimes rocking back and forth with concentration.
The deeply intelligent eyes, understanding
what you meant even before the words came out.
The back of the envelope to aid explanation, the occasionally
skeptical, quizzical tilt to the eyebrows,
Then he would have to rush off.
He always rushed everywhere and disappeared.
But next morning, the answer to your problem
would arrive, in Mike's small, distinctive handwriting,
two pages, often some algebra, diagrams,
a key reference to the literature,
sometimes an apt verse of his own composition,
a fragment of Latin or classical Greek, always encouragement.
We were grateful, but not grateful enough.
If we had thought about it, we would
have realized he must have been working
on that mathematical model of my research all evening.
And it isn't only for me for whom he does this,
everybody in the research group gets the same treatment,
and not just his own students.
I was officially Niko's student, not Mike's.
Mike took me on, without payment and
without official recognition when my research became
more mathematical than Niko could handle.
When the time came to me to write my thesis,
it was my Mike Cullen who read it, criticized it,
And all this while he was doing the same thing
for his own, official students.
When, we all should have wondered,
does he get time for ordinary family life?
When does he get time for his own research?
No wonder he so seldom published anything.
No wonder he never wrote his long awaited book
In truth, he should have been joint author
of just about every one of the hundreds of papers that
came out of that research group during that golden period.
In fact, his name appears on virtually none of them,
except in the acknowledgement section.
The worldly success of scientists
is charged for promotion or honors
Mike did not rate highly on this index.
But if he had consented to add his name to his students'
publications as readily as modern supervisors insist
on putting their names on papers to which they contribute much
less, Mike would have been a conventionally successful
scientist, lauded with conventional honors.
As it is, he was a brilliantly successful scientist,
in a far deeper and truer sense.
And I think we know which kind of scientist we really admire.
Oxford sadly lost him to Australia.
Years later in Melbourne, at a party for me
as visiting lecturer, I was standing, probably rather
stiffly, with a drink in my hand.
Suddenly, a familiar figure shot into the room,
The rest of us were in suits, but not this familiar figure.
Though he must been well into his 60s by then,
he seemed still to be in his 30s,
the glow of boyish enthusiasm, even the red sweater.
Next day, he drove me to the coast
to see his beloved penguins, stopping on the way
to look at giant Australian earthworms, many feet long.
We tired the Sun with talking.
Not, I think, about old times and old friends,
and certainly not about ambition,
grant getting, and papers in "Nature."
But about new science and new ideas.
It was a perfect day, the last day I saw him.
We may know other scientists as intelligent as Mike Cullen,
We may know other scientists who were as generous in support,
But I declare that we have no nobody who had so much to give,
combined with so much generosity in giving it.
From Oxford, I moved on to Berkeley,
where I spent two years as a very
junior assistant professor, who loved it.
But was then lured back to Oxford,
where I became a university lecturer
and eventually wrote "The Selfish Gene,"
after quite a while there at Oxford.
Throughout the book, I tried to put, in addition
to just stories about my life and the people I knew,
I tried to put little asides, perhaps little
And I want now to read a couple of them.
They could have come anywhere, almost.
The first is about-- actually the first two--
are about the luck that we all have in being here at all.
And I introduce it in the very first part
of the book, where I'm talking about my ancestors,
including one Clinton George Augustus Dawkins, 1808 to '71.
He was the British consul in Venice
and he was there during the war against Austria.
I have a cannonball in my possession,
sitting on a plinth, bearing an inscription on a brass plate.
I don't know who's is the authorial voice
and I don't know how reliable it is.
But for what it is worth, here is my translation
from French, then the language of diplomacy.
One night, when he was in bed, a cannonball
penetrated the bed covers and passed between his legs,
but happily did him no more than superficial damage.
This narrow escape of my ancestor's vital parts
took place before he was to put them to use.
And it is tempting to attribute my own existence
to a stroke of ballistic luck.
A few inches closer to the fork of Shakespeare's radish and--
But actually, my existence, and yours,
and the postman's, hangs from a far narrower thread of luck
We owe it to the precise timing and placing of everything
that ever happened since the universe began.
The incident of a cannonball is only a dramatic example
of a much more general phenomenon.
As I put it before, if the second dinosaur
to the left of the tall Cycad tree had not happened to sneeze
and thereby failed to catch the tiny shrew-like ancestor of all
the mammals, we would none of us be here.
We all can regard ourselves as exquisitely improbable.
But here, in a triumph of hindsight, we are.
And that theme of being lucky to be here I come back to
in the very last chapter, which is called "Looking Back Along
the Path," in which I tried to talk about all
the different things I described in my life
and say what would have happened if they
had been a bit different, if things
What if Alois Schicklgruber had happened
to sneeze at a particular moment, rather
than some other particular moment
during any year before mid-1888, when his son, Adolf Hitler,
You may know that Hitler's real surname was Schicklgruber.
Heil Schicklgruber doesn't have the same ring, does it?
Obviously, I have not the faintest idea
of the exact sequence of events involved.
And there are surely no historical records
of Herr Schicklgruber's sternutations,
but I'm confident that a change as trivial as a sneeze,
in say 1858, would have been more than enough to alter
The evil omen sperm that engendered
Adolf Hitler was one of countless billions
produced during his father's life.
And the same goes for his two grandfathers, four
great grandfathers, and so on back.
It is not only plausible, but I think certain,
that a sneeze many years before Hitler's conception
would have had knock-on effects sufficient to derail
the trivial circumstance that one particular sperm, that one
particular egg, thereby changing the entire course
of the 20th century, including my existence.
Of course, I'm not denying that something like the Second World
War might well have happened even without Hitler.
Nor am I saying that Hitler's evil madness was inevitably
With a different upbringing, Hitler
might have turned out good, or at least uninfluential.
But certainly, his very existence,
and the war as it turned out, depended
upon the fortunate-- well, unfortunate-- happenstance
And I end that with a poem from Aldous Huxley.
A million million spermatozoa All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah Dare hope to survive.
And of that billion minus one Might have been Shakespeare,
another Newton, a new Donne-- But the One was Me.
Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,
Well, I was told to stop at 1:30.
So I think maybe I'll stop and take questions at that point.
RAY KURTZWEIL: So that's a very interesting thought.
I've had that thought of the incredible improbability
So I wonder what you thought is on the incredible improbability
of our universe having a standard model with these 15
or so constants, which is so precisely what they need
to be to allow for a universe that encodes information, which
is the enabling property for evolution
It's a very interesting point.
Not all physicists accept that argument.
Victor Stenger, for example, says
that actually the alleged improbability of the universe
is less than many people think.
But assuming that it's right and that we have these 15 knobs,
that each one represents a fundamental constant
and if any one of those knobs had been tuned ever so slightly
different, the universe as we know
it would not have been possible.
Galaxies would not have formed.
Perhaps, stars would not have formed.
Therefore, the elements would not have formed.
Therefore, chemistry wasn't impossible.
Therefore, life wouldn't have been possible, and so on.
So there's a temptation to see the universe as a put-up job
and to see a divine creator as a divine knob twiddler, who
twiddled these knobs to exactly the right value in order
to foreshadow, foreordain, life, perhaps even human life.
I find that a deeply unsatisfying idea because
of course it leaves totally unexplained the divine knob
You need exactly the same problem.
If you can magic him into existence,
you might as well just magically the fine-tuning into existence.
Other physicists have resorted to a multiverse theory, where
they propose that this universe, our visible universe,
is only one of a bubbling foam of universes.
And the other bubbles in the foam
have different physical constants.
So there are billions of universes in the multiverse,
all with different values of the physical constants, all
with different settings of the knobs.
And with hindsight, since we're here,
we obviously had to be in one of the bubbles, however
small a minority, which had the right physical constants
to give rise to galaxies, and stars, and chemistry, and life.
That's the anthropic principle.
It's obviously a lot more satisfying
than the divine knob twiddler idea.
Other physicists say that the 15 knobs,
or how many ever there are, are not free to vary anyway.
There's only one way for them to be.
But the standard model of physics
doesn't yet tell us what that way is.
And we need a better physics, which will one day tell us
that the values of the fundamental constants
As Einstein put it, rather unfortunately,
in unfortunate language, Einstein
said what really interests me is whether God
had any choice in setting up the universe?
What he meant, of course, was is there only one kind of universe
that is possible to have or are there
lots of alternative ways in which a universe might exist,
in which case the multiverse theory works?
OK.
I probably said enough about that.
Something very interesting I've noticed,
I mean this is about belief in a deity.
What I've usually seen is that some of the people
who are exposed to natural sciences,
especially through high school and college,
they kind of start to understand that-- I mean at least go away
Interestingly, I've seen several scientists,
usually in abstract mathematics and sometimes computer science,
who actually, as the kind of grew up,
they start believing in maybe the abstract idea that
is kind of similar to what they've been experiencing.
I was wondering what's your thoughts on that
and what do you have to say to those people?
Some research has been done on fellows of the National
Academy of Sciences in the United States,
the elite scientists of the United States
and the equivalent elite scientists
of the British Commonwealth, the Royal Society.
And these two independent studies
have both come up with the same result.
That about 90% of these elite scientists are nonbelievers.
About 10% have some kind of religious belief.
And within that 10%, there is a slightly greater tendency
for physical scientists and mathematical scientists
to be believers than for biological scientists,
which agrees with the observation
Quite often when you meet a religious scientist,
it's worth asking what he really does believe.
It often turns out to be a kind of Einsteinian religion.
I mean Einstein did not believe in a personal god.
Einstein used the language of religion,
used the language of God, to refer
to that which we don't yet understand.
And he had a deep and fitting reverence
for that which we don't understand.
And I think many of us would agree
that we feel-- some might call it spiritual
when we think about the enormous amount that we don't yet know,
the deep mysteries of existence, the deep mysteries
But that's hugely different from believing
in a personal god, the god of Abraham, the god of Moses,
the god of Jesus, the god of Muhammad.
And I think it does a disservice to use
the same language for those two things.
As to why biologists should be slightly more
likely to be nonreligious than physicists,
I think that might come from the fact
that Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection
is deeply anti-design in the sense of deliberate design
If you think about it, the great achievement of Darwin
was to show that we don't need a creative intelligence.
What Darwin showed is that entities complicated
enough to be creative designers, things like a human brain--
the human brain is perhaps the only one
we know-- entities complex enough
to do that don't suddenly get magicked into existence.
They come about through a very slow, gradual process,
exactly like the carving out of the Grand Canyon,
So biologists are predisposed to be hostile to any attempt
to smuggle in an intelligence by magic
because we know how intelligence comes about.
We know how it comes about that brains
exist which are capable of designing
planes, and cameras, and computers.
So that may be why there's a slightly greater bias.
But all scientists of these two elite groups, the Royal Society
and the National Academy, only about 10% are religious.
And even they, one wonders whether they're
religious in the Einsteinian sense, rather
You've done all kinds of great works.
I'm sorry to follow up a religion question
with another religion question, but--
RICHARD DAWKINS: They usually are, I have to say.
RAY KURTZWEIL: This might be a gross oversimplification
or perhaps even a misinterpretation of your work.
But something that struck me as one of the arguments
in "The God Delusion" is sort of we
can as biological entities, conscious ones,
realize maybe the pull towards religion
and how that affects us and choose to not follow that.
And I'm wondering how you would compare that
with other things that might be a part of our nature,
sort of chemically and physically as
biological beings, what that means to how we react
to other things, in addition to religion,
such as sexual desire, or love, and other aspects that
might be considered "better?"
So I think I may have got the question.
Things like sexual desire are built into us
by natural selection for reasons we can clearly understand.
I mean obviously natural selection
is all about the surviving of genes and genes
get passed on by reproduction.
And we need sex for reproduction.
And so we have rules of thumb in our brain
which make us lust after the opposite sex.
Other things, like religion, might come from something
I mean I don't think religion has a direct genetic survival
value in the way that sexual lust does.
But perhaps another way to put it
would be that there are psychological predispositions
which under the right cultural circumstances
manifest themselves as religion.
And I suppose you could say in a way
that sexual lust, under the right cultural conditions,
manifests itself as great poetry like "Romeo and Juliet."
So it's not all that different.
The kind of psychological predisposition I'm thinking of
is well, because we're very social animals,
we have a natural tendency to calculate debts
to others, things that we owe to others because reciprocation
is so important for good Darwinian reasons.
And so we are aware of who owes us what.
We are aware of whom we owe things to.
And when something really good happens,
we swim so much in a sea of other people
that we naturally think we need to thank somebody
because so much of what happens to us
is because of social interactions.
And so we feel a need to thank.
And often there really is somebody to thank.
Often, it really is another person
who is responsible for the good thing that's happened to us
But when there's no other person to be responsible
for-- to be grateful to, if say the weather turns out
nice for our barbecue- take a trivial example--
we still feel the impulse to thank.
I mean nobody actually called the weather to be nice.
So maybe that's a small component
of the psychological predisposition
Another one might be the tendency
for children to obey and believe their parents.
In the wild state, a child is extremely
vulnerable to being killed by accident and by foolishness.
So a child brain might be naturally selected,
comes into the world preprogrammed
with the rule, whatever else you do,
believe what your parents tell you.
If they tell you not to go too close to the cliff,
don't ask questions, just obey.
If they tell you not to pick up a snake, don't ask questions.
Don't obey the sort of scientific curiosity impulse.
Well, if the child brain is preprogrammed
with that rule of thumb, obey and believe your parents,
it has no means of distinguishing
between good advice like "don't touch the snake"
and bad or at least time-wasting advice like
"perform a sacrifice at the time of the full moon"
or "pray five times a day, facing the East."
How could the child know which is good advice
If it knew, it wouldn't need the advice.
So the child brain is preprogrammed,
just as a computer is built, to obey whatever instructions it's
given, in its own machine language.
And that's why computers are vulnerable to computer viruses.
A computer doesn't have any filter
that says the instructions I'm now being given
are evil instructions, designed to wipe somebody's hard disk
and destroy their doctoral thesis.
Why do people do that, by the way?
The computer is simply built to obey whatever instructions it's
given in the appropriate machine language.
And that's why it's vulnerable to computer viruses.
And so another way to put what I've just suggested
is that religions are computer viruses, the mind viruses.
AUDIENCE: I guess just to be blunt about it, to go forward,
to follow that analogy sort of, why
is following those predispositions
I get that impression from-- as opposed to following
say love, which might be another biological process that we
No, I didn't mean to say it's bad.
And I mean I'm not sure how widely it's done,
but it has been suggested that computer viruses too
That you could-- if it comes from anywhere,
it probably come from Google actually-- the idea
that you could use the principle of a program that
spreads itself, because it spreads, because it spreads,
because it spreads, because it contains
the instruction, spread me around the internet.
I mean you could spread a good mind virus, a good computer
So there's nothing that says that the analogy to computer
viruses has to have to be bad.
And in some cases, I think it probably is.
At best, some of them might be time wasting.
I mean it is an awful waste of time spending
hours on your knees praying to some nonexistent spook.
AUDIENCE: I, of course, have another question
[LAUGHTER] So my question, organized religion of course
And you might expect atheism to do better in this regard.
And I think it's true that it does.
But organized atheism also had several incidents
with male-dominated events, both in terms of audience
and in terms of people speaking, and also major incidents,
both at conferences and in online discussions.
And you yourself have been criticized in this regard.
And I'm wondering is there some reason that atheism
falls victim to the same traps as--
RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, I think it's a very unfortunate thing
that many institutions fall victim to.
And it would be quite surprising if atheist conferences
and atheist organizations were completely immune to it.
AUDIENCE: Is there some way we could better?
AUDIENCE: Is there some way we could do better?
I mean I think we all need to do better.
I think it's pretty clear that there's nothing particularly
bad about this in the atheist world.
But there is a need to do better certainly.
AUDIENCE: Is there some way we could do better?
Like something we could do differently maybe?
RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, I mean treat all human beings as
of equal worth and don't looked down upon 50% of the population
because they happen to have different genitals.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: So I don't have a question about religion.
[APPLAUSE] In your book, you were
reflecting on a bunch of different memories, one
of them of somebody who has passed.
I was wondering if you'd be willing to share
a memory about somebody else who has passed,
Is there any favorite memory that you
might find useful to share with us?
RICHARD DAWKINS: I think he was--
I mean I was a friend of his, but only in his later life.
I wasn't one of the early coterie of friends like Martin
Amis, and Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan.
So I only met him I think after 2006, when we both published
books at around the same time, on a similar theme.
He was, I think, the most spellbinding orator
He was a magnificent speaker, a beautiful, resonant voice,
superbly resourceful, with what must have been something
close to a photographic memory, able to pull out examples
with great speed and to best anybody in debate.
I once wrote a puff for him which
said something like if you are a religious apologist invited
to have a debate with Christopher Hitchens, decline.
He didn't suffer fools gladly, but he was patient as well.
I had enormous admiration for him.
I disagreed with him on certain things.
I disagreed with him over the Iraq War, for example.
He was impossible to typecast on sort
of standard left, right continuum.
He was his own man in that, as in so much else.
His approach to atheism came from a slightly different
So for me, what really matters is
And the god hypothesis, it seems to me
to be an alternative hypothesis about the nature
of the universe and its origins, which is I think clearly false.
And so for me, it's a scientific battle.
For Christopher, I think it was more a political one.
I think he saw religions as political organizations.
And he saw God as a sort of divine dictator.
And he saw the kingdom of God as a kind of divine North Korea.
AUDIENCE: I was looking at some of your personal details
And was surprised to see that you're married to the best
AUDIENCE: And I'd like to know are you
RICHARD DAWKINS: Well, I became a big fan of "Doctor Who"
only after I met her actually, I'm ashamed to admit.
But I'd never actually watched any of the episodes.
And then after we married, I did watch, not DVDs,
it was-- what do you call them?
[LAUGHTER]
And I did become a fan of those tapes.
Not least actually, because in her time,
which was the Tom Baker era, who many people regard
as the definitive Doctor as well,
the script was written by Douglas Adams.
And was consequently witty, satirical, and appreciated
on different-- I mean it was a children's program.
And it's appreciated much by children.
But also, there was a witty irony,
which was appreciated by adults as well.
And that's got Douglas Adams written all over it.
And you can appreciate Douglas's episodes of "Doctor Who,"
which included the Tom Baker and Lalla Ward
times as beautiful satire, of the same kind of satire
as he was to use also in the "Hitchhiker's Guide"
and in his Dirk Gently series.
So making science into comedy-- laughing
at, in a sort of genial, benevolent, satirical way,
scientific ideas-- and satirizing contemporary life
was something that he did supremely well.
And that got into "Doctor Who" at that time.
I personally believe that we live
in a universe which is governed by physical laws.
That's it's not necessary to have
spirits or anything like that.
I understand that other people, their behavior
may be explainable using physical processes
and that I should apply that to myself also.
But I'm struggling at the moment with where
does this kind of sensation come from,
my consciousness, my awareness of myself?
And I don't really have an answer for that at the moment.
So I wonder if you could help?
[LAUGHTER]
RICHARD DAWKINS: I mean ditto, ditto, ditto.
I am aware that my brain is the product of natural selection,
evolution by natural selection.
It's helped my ancestors to survive
on the African plains, in the Pleistocene and before.
And somehow an emergent property of that large brain
is the feeling of subjective consciousness, which
makes me know that I'm me and not you.
Makes me believe that you have a personality
and you have a consciousness, which is similar to mine,
that I can never actually get inside your mind,
That doesn't make you a solipsist.
It's the exact opposite, of course.
A solipsist is someone who thinks
that he's the only person that there is
and everybody else is, as it were, part of his dream.
There was a nice story by Bertrand Russell.
That he had a letter from a lady who said, Dear Lord Russell,
I'm delighted to hear that you are a solipsist.
There are so few of us around these days.
I suppose that people like you and me
have to think that something about making a brain which
is good at navigating through the world in a versatile way,
coping with all sorts of different things that happen,
not moving through a stereotype world
like some computer programs, which can only navigate
through a world of colored bricks or a table
We have to navigate through a very versatile world.
Above all, we have to navigate through a world in which
the dominant things that we see, we encounter are other people.
We have to interact with sexual partners, with business rivals,
with business companions, with co-workers,
with possible enemies, with children.
All the time, we're surrounded by people
and we have to interact with them.
I suppose you could say that something
about needing to interact with other people
might facilitate the setting up of a model in the head.
We all have models in the head of the world in which we move.
I mean when we see something, what we're doing
is constructing a model in the head of that something.
And you can show this with visual illusions.
When you construct a similar model of the other people
you're having to deal with and you have to put yourself
in their place, maybe something about the model of other people
that you have to make necessitates the generation
But that doesn't really do it, does it?
That's sort of based on an idea of Nicholas Humphrey.
Daniel Dennett has more advanced ideas
in his book, "Consciousness Explained."
And I think I better not go on too much with that.
But you could look at "Consciousness Explained"
and see if that does it for you.
There's other people who are attempting to do it.
I sort of feel it's one of those things
that maybe one day it'll seem awfully obvious
and how could we be so stupid as not to realize it.
But at present, it does seem to be a deep mystery.
AUDIENCE: So I read the big footnotes
And one of my takeaways from it is
that it's really not about being selfish.
I was absolutely uplifted by how much cooperation helps people.
And somehow like the reasoning in this book kind of
So my plea would be, could you write more articles
with maybe better, catchier titles?
And my suggestion would be-- I don't know who to attribute it,
but I love this one, Snuggle for Survival.
Yes.
I mean you're absolutely right.
That the central message of "The Selfish Gene"
Still less is it that we should be selfish.
It's actually mostly a book about altruism,
snuggling if you wish to put it that way.
And it is true that title-- I think most of my other titles
have been OK, actually, "The Blind Watchmaker,"
"Unweaving the Rainbow," "Climbing Mount Improbable,"
I did show an early pair of chapters
to a well-known London publisher before I gave it
the title, "The Selfish Gene."
He said you can't call it "The Selfish Gene."
It's a down word. "Selfish" is a down word.
And that would have been good, I think,
because it does also convey another aspect of it.
The reason why natural selection can
be said to work at the level of the gene
is that genes are immortal, or potentially immortal.
And therefore, in the long-term, survival of genes
And if they were not potentially immortal,
it wouldn't matter which one survived and which ones didn't.
So "the immortal gene," it's a phrase I use in the book.
And that possibly would have been better.
I also suggested in the book that it
could have been called The Slightly Selfish Big
Bit of Chromosome, With the Even More Selfish Little
RAY KURTZWEIL: Let me ask you to actually follow up
You described religion as a set of mind viruses.
Another word for mind virus is meme,
which is your I think very apt word.
And some of those memes could be bad or good.
And I think one of the good memes from religion
is the golden rule, which is a synonym for altruism,
And you had a very interesting thesis in "The Selfish Gene"
about how altruism originates or evolves in nature.
So maybe you could sum up by sharing
your view of how altruism evolves?
The golden rule, of course, is terribly important.
I think it would be unfair to attribute it to religion.
It's true that many of the great religions have adopted it.
But I think it actually does have older roots than that.
And that's really what you're asking about,
which is the evolutionary roots of the golden rule.
Do as you would be done by, so unto others as you
Altruism has two main evolutionary roots.
One is the survival value of doing good turns because others
And the mathematical theory of that, the best way
to approach it, is the mathematical theory of games.
And the theory has been well worked out.
And it does indeed work in an evolutionary context.
And a lot of "The Selfish Gene" is actually
about the game theory of-- well, game theory generally,
including aggression and reciprocation.
The other main source of altruism is kinship.
It's easy to see nowadays-- it wasn't originally--
but nowadays, we can see that any gene that
makes an individual animal behave altruistically
towards genetic relatives has, other things being equal,
a good chance of propagating itself
because those genetic relatives statistically
are likely to contain copies of the same gene.
And so anyone can see that that's true for offspring.
What W.D. Hamilton showed is that it's also
true of collateral kin, like nephews
and nieces, and cousins, and siblings.
Well, humans probably spent a large part
of their ancestral life in small bands,
perhaps rather like baboons, in which they were surrounded
by a group, a clan, who would have been
mostly cousins, mostly relatives.
And therefore, there would have been a genetic kinship pressure
to be altruistic towards everybody in your band, which
pretty much meant everybody you ever meet.
And at the same time, since you meet the same people
over and over again in your band,
you're going to meet them again and again throughout your life,
that is perfect raw material for reciprocation.
It's perfect conditions for the evolution
of reciprocation, reciprocal altruism, the golden rule
So the fact that humans went around in limited bands,
clans, fostered altruism in these two different ways
and provided what could be called a lust
to be nice, which was analogous to the lust for sex.
The lust for sex worked because before the days
of contraception, sex tended to be followed by babies.
Nowadays, sex very often is not followed by babies
because we're all wise to contraception.
And so we still enjoy sex, even though we know perfectly well
cognitively that we've separated it,
we've dissociated it from its Darwinian function.
And why on earth, shouldn't we?
Because the lust was built into our brains
at a time when contraception had not been invented.
Natural selection doesn't have cognitive wisdom.
Natural selection simply builds in clockwork rules of thumb.
The lust for sex is just such a clockwork rule.
And the lust to be nice is also.
Because it evolved at a time when we did
Nowadays, we don't live in small groups.
We live in large cities, where we are not
And we're not surrounded by people
we're going to meet again and again in our lives.
We're surrounded by perfect strangers.
But the lust to be nice is still there, just as the lust for sex
The lust to be nice still works.
We still feel empathy towards somebody in distress.
We still feel we want to do a good turn to people
who is neither related to us, nor in a position
It's an extremely powerful emotion.
There are a few people, and we call
them psychopaths, who don't have it.
Most of us do have pity for people in misfortune.
Most of us give to charity and so on.
So I think that would be my attempt
at a Darwinian explanation for the origin of altruism.
And it becomes, of course, much more sophisticated