suburb. >> i am a big believer in democracy and i think there is nothing wrong if the voters in a particular region say we make some use of the museums in the city and pittsburgh has done this with the system and so we are willing to pay the tax that they have both had. i would like to hear that the date back and forth. the problem of regional tax based sharing -- and it's either constitution says that all the powers that don't explicitly go in the constitution to the federal government devolve upon the state. by tradition the states still give tremendous flexibility to the localities. local control is in a sense the basis of the constitutional system even though it isn't technically in the constitution. but with the regional equity people you could almost call this a constitutional loophole to go to a place like minnesota and technically they can do anything they want.

it can evolves the distance of the party and it can grab its tax money and give it to someone else. states don't generally use that power because we believe in the local control. if someone wants to propose the tax suburbanites will pay that is discussed and debated for the sert in city services and i would have to look at the particular case but that is very different than the state coming in and breaking of the traditions of local control and ordering the redistribution of the funds. but increasingly that is what california was trying to do although they didn't want to be open about it because there are cities oliver california parchin bankruptcy that are not in the streets that detroit is in but not that far from it and the way they are looking to get money is by grabbing it from the suburbs and that's what they try to sneak in and that is in the right way to do things openly talking about supporting this issue and having a public debate and then the vote is fine with me.

>> i'm from the university of missouri columbia and right now i am working to advocate against and hoping to stop common core. what is the detriment facing the common core? >> first i think it involves a dumbing down. common core advocates say we are actually raising the standards for a certain number of states. that is true that the idea is to find a kind of middle ground that you can pull the lowest performers up to but also effectively lowers the standards for the rest of the country. it sounds crazy when you tell people this. why would anyone want to lower standards and the reason, again i think it is a misplaced idea of equity and fairness that there is some sense that too many people who have a certain amount of money were litany

certain place are getting into swap more and how we change that? if anybody gets a less quality education of people tell the difference and if people start getting randomly distributed at the universities this is a crazy idea of equity whereas if you look at massachusetts, which has the best curriculum in the country, they were middle performers and all the adopted this high-quality curriculum focused on classic literature, traditional the education and the whole state zoomed up to be the number one performer in the country and it turns out that the poor and minority students improved at a an even higher rate than the more well-to-do students. this was the best way to help people that needed the help not by dumbing everyone down artificially to level you can't tell the difference between anyone's performance but by raising everyone's performance in a way that the people who are

not performing well are going to raise higher so that's the right way to do it and that is the most crucial argument and that is what is motivating the common core people even though they don't want to say it is that the having misplaced notion of equity and i think massachusetts is the best example. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> an appetite for wonder is the name of the book. the author dr. richard daw25ns

who has written the selfish gene, best seller. why did you choose to write an autobiography at this point? >> it seemed like a good moment. my mother is 96 and a very useful and is in effect interviewing -- it seemed like the right time to do it. this is in fact the first half watershed in my life i suppose. it didn't make sense to divided into two books. this is the first one taking you through childhood, through the university. >> why was she the selfish gene a natural halfway point for you?

>> it changed my life. before that i was an ordinary research scientist and after that i stayed on the faculty and went on doing some research but it was more a public figure writing books for the large audiences >> who were john and jean? >> and they were my parents. my mother is still alive. my father was a biologist. his career began later than mine that at the same time in school. he was at oxford

[inaudible] he did research and i did research and it was posted in malawi in central and east africa and then was called up to fight in the war. and i was born around that time. my mother came from a corn - family and they had a shared love of wildflowers so i was brought up in an atmosphere of a love of nature. >> were you brought up in the anglican church? >> my parents had no interest in religion but i did go to anglican schools.

>> when did you lose that connection? >> at the age of 16i had my doubts from earlier when i was brought up i'm not the only one. >> when you ask your parents about religion how do they respond? >> i think my mother told me the standard of stories but when i went to school i got it all from school. >> richard dawkins, how did the selfish gene come about as a book?

>> i wrote it in 1966 and i was asked by my staff the nobel prize-winning if i'd stand in and give lectures for him and i wrote a course of lectures on animal behavior which is pretty much foreshadowed the rhetoric in the working genes in the carving of special bodies dealing with those factors in 1966. i might write it all down and in 1976 it was published. if you can find the selfish gene as well as electors i gave in 1986. i don't know why yet delayed so long. i started to put not tend to peter but typewriter to paper.

in about 1972 or 73 when they had the strike in britain and the frequent power i couldn't do my research and now is the time to stop writing. >> because you didn't need electricity? >> was in manual typewriter. >> in an appetite for wonder you talk about john maynard smith. who was he? >> he was a very distinguished biologist, a wonderful character. students loved him. he was funny, constantly talking to students can felt real work and didn't do things other professors to. he just went on with it and the tools of the trade for a pencil and paper and he inspired

generations of students and he inspired me. many of his ideas were incorporated into the selfish gene. >> after the selfish gene is published how did your life change as a professor? did you become a celebrity professor in a sense? >> not immediately. it's the book itself very well and i think it sells well as for a million copies in total. it did cause a bit of -- i did find myself being invited to lots of things i hadn't been before, talking to people like you, actually. that did start to happen and it did change my life and put me on the new course of writing off the other books after that.

>> you are quite well known not only as a scientist but also as an atheist. when did you start writing about that in ernest? >> of the social jeanne house relations with that and it doesn't conceal the fact. the book i refer a popular audience is all about the argument from design which is still i think the reason most people believe in a supreme being. they say look at the changes, the flowers, and of course it is too complicated to come by by chance. it's the opposite of chance. so the blind watchmaker was an attempt taken as an atheistic

look. i think the subtitle is something like why the evolution shows. as of the blind watchmaker wasn't interpreted as an atheistic book and my other books since then could be interpreted in the same way. the only other book that is explicitly linked the is the god illusion published in 2006 which i think that is my biggest seller that sold more than two copies in english. but apart from that, it hasn't been devoted to atheism. >> you are a hero you say in an appetite for wonder. >> charles darwin was a brilliant thinker and explainer. one of the things i find

surprising is that his idea which is really simple and anybody should be able to understand it it came so late 200 years later and really you might think what he did was never more difficult to think of them the calculus, law of mechanics' hand motion, they were all of the human mind. you can't help wondering why somebody like newton or aristotle didn't think the powerful idea. >> semidey that has written about science and ideas what was it like to write about yourself? >> quite difficult. there is an embarrassment about writing about yourself. they said i should overcome pipit i hope it is a good humor

book. i like to think it is humorous. finally i enjoyed writing it. >> did you end up enjoying it? why? >> reliving memories. it's not execs do execs the systematic memory of my life. it is a working title that i had in mind when i started writing it. they are kind of round memories that i hope they are put together in such a way to encapsulate a life. ..