. >> good evening and welcome hosted by the cultural club of silicon valley. it is my pleasure to introduce our evolutionary biologist and author most

recently of selected writings of a passionate rationalist. coated prospect magazine number one world seeker on "the daily telegraph" 100 top genius this getty and his degrees from serology and his tour doctorate professor for the public understanding of science the blind watchmaker and a selfish she that have sold more than 3 million copies and translated into were the 38 languages worldwide. please join me to welcome our author. [applause]

>> can you hear me? so we have a lot of heavy-duty questions to ponder tonight the game we can start with something a little later there is a wonderful essay toward the beginning of the book "science in the soul" i have bound galleys that is the complete license to write all over the of pages.

>> like to read what you have written. [laughter] so you have a wonderful essay about charles darwin and dr. doolittle. [laughter] how many have read read the book or see the film?. >> pages a there is some similarity between dr. doolittle and the young darlington. dr. doolittle would always say it is like the beagle is great merit naturalists like darwin they both love animals and they can was genuine the influence by dr. doolittle i have never seen any of the films they good as. [laughter] >> they are pretty good. >> well below one.

if you really love the book the film will follow which. but he did influence me to value the nonhuman animals it away and might not have done. he is actually censored in a lot of public libraries because of racism that is just the symptoms of the '20s when he wrote the of books and every row racist type but in a very gentle kind of way dr. doolittle of more than makes up for it. >> the doctor doolittle as you point out fixes over and over but that is held doubt by the animals to figure out what's he needs in that is a

rescue. >> he can talk to don humid levels of that is the plot of the whole story this is the one trick that he has like science fiction then everything else follows from that. >> is struck me in the last couple of years we had quite a number of best-selling books one was called peel woodward's the wonderful marine biologist and they are focused on the animal consciousness and they say animals care about their own life in day care about furthering their own life just the way that you and i do. of course there is a plea at the center of the books to

understand the cannot just write them off the face of the earth but he is helped by the animals the way we are without even the understanding how we are connected consciously all the time. >> yes. is the of bit of a stretch that way. is a children's book. [laughter] >> true. you are so right actually. [laughter] earlier in the book with the concept is disturbing in easy to read but then those that make you sit down and think one that i have been pondering is your discussion of how organisms are adapted

perfectly because of natural selection to bring the next generation of jeans fourth and is pretty well adapted to the past but not to the president or the future so as we have successful cubans these the news that recreate together like the internet. that is of little bit beyond our own capacity to notice perfectly well. we will always be misaligned with our own president. so the idea of time and our placement is framed by the

opening of your book so could you read from that?. >> this is the introduction their burrows specifically for this book. much of the rest of the book is previously published essays although not in this country. i am writing this two days after a breath taking visit to the grand canyon to many native american tribes that is a sacred place from that have this issue if i were forced to choose a religion that is the kind of religion i could go for the grand canyon has stature not just the of petty squabbling

colts that still afflict the of world. [laughter] in "the dark knight" i'll look down along the south rim of the canyon to gaze up at the milky way. looking back in time with this the 100,000 years ago with the light sent out on its quest at dawn the following morning and returned to the spot as a realized where i was lying in the dark i looked down toward the canyon floor gis into the past back to a time with their own the microbes beneath the milky way joined

by a prehistoric creatures in even dinosaurs. won the evening up the canyon a soul spring into existence like a white that came on. in a typical human soul legend the on the scale of beethoven. it is said to silly like an overwhelming sense of personal identity. is an illusion constructed

as to radians might speculate the of a singular purpose that helps us to survive. [applause] >> i will tell you what i wrote is richard dawkins getting spiritual on us?. >> that is not the point to. [laughter] it is meant to be a little provocative to put the word soul in the title but i quoted one of my great heroes a great medical scientist and biologist he said i hope i am not seen ungracious that nothing would allow me to with tent

the type of lecturer i am about to give. [laughter] i hope i am not ungracious but if you've come to witness some type of conversion. [laughter] there are two meetings of the word and sold -- so what but the two definitions of the oxford definition one is the immortal religious natural sold upon death that is not what i'm talking about the other is the spirit of aesthetic and emotional response to the science its universe and life that is the way i used soul in the title. >> could you elaborate on the emergent concept?.

>> you said earlier it was an interesting point how we are adapted to the part said genes that made us that have survived through countless generations with every single one of your ancestors died before achieving that least one heterosexual population. it is obvious but significant because many of their contemporaries died without succeeded in reproducing. so we contain the genes that help our ancestors to survive. i have a phrase called the genetic book of the dead. the g and said a modern and

all that describes the past as a digital description of the world of our ancestors of the past survived. not the present for the future. in the merchant properties mean it will be very different with our changing environment data break that -- breakneck pace in the way it is amazing we do thrive so well in this environment that is rapidly different in which our genes survive in the past. we have close and huge cities, fast cars, we do

suffer from psychological problems because the world is so different this all comes under the heading to the merchant. >> that is very beautiful with the timeframe than the cosmic time frame talking about the past that we are responding so with that rate of change why has that increased? that because of the numbers?. >> is increasing.

. . a computers we are living in an astonishingly fast changing world, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. >> two questions related to that. if c. is, it seems we are driven

by our own tools in this telescope of satellite technology, the microscope, the ability to drill down to evermore granulated discernment. it becomes a social the internet and facebook and twitter in the way we organize ourselves socially. it would seem it is driving the social behavior in many ways. and i wonder what you think about that. the art, culture, understanding of history would be what would determine us but the toolmaking is the thing it would seem.

>> they make way for the next advance and in our case in the world of computers we have hardware and software where the advances in hardware make possible software that wouldn't have been possible before the hardware was invented, so each one page the way as it opens the door for the next advance, and that is getting faster. >> one thing that is kind of willy-nilly as we go is biology. the biological reality of other species. one of the things it seems a couple thresholds that we've passed, one is the aggregate number of human beings have become a bio geographical force

in the record, the american society for the geophysicists were i never get this right but they want to now call this to reflect on its profound impact of humans on life on earth. one of the things we are doing is reducing biodiversity and other species the way that some scientists put it is depriving other species that other it is taking away the habitat because we are putting so many more human body is on the earth that we are making buildings and we are doing something very scary and dangerous and tragic which is reducing diversity itself and i wonder if you can tell us about diversity going back to the profound and simple mechanism of natural selection

and how it depends on diversity and how do you see the horizon as we take it out? >> >> i mourn the diversity and the extinction of species. there've been mass extinctions before and sometimes as people say the so-called but it's tragic and i respond to it in an emotional way and i mourn the

life of cyrus and the passenger pigeon but what you are saying is more than that. ecologists tell us that it is necessary for the continuation of the balance of the ecosystem. >> i think this intersects pretty strongly with your expertise because you were talking about this genetic book of life but when i first started writing about evolution myself and i was taugh told by evolutiy biologists have some have conserved genes in it that it is all different and in some cases

no longer exists but it existed through the eons and are likely to be the most hardy in the future scenarios, so it is very important to conserve the ancient lineages. >> that's very interesting. i didn't know that. it's very fascinating how some have things for a long time in this variance. right in that introduction the

growth of consciousness mirrors a similar progression over the longer time of evolution do they have a rudimentary feeling of consciousness and to connect to that a little bit of a really fascinating essay about the internet in which you wonder if, here is a sentence from its called next game and it's how the internet may be changing the way we think. the worldwide unification mirrors the nervous system and cellular animals end up in a little bit later you say that it's a interstellar traveler whose nervous system consists of units that communicate with each other by radio, orders of magnitude faster than our nerve impulses. but in what sense is it to be seen as a single individual rather than a society?

>> i should interject this cloud as you are talking about is from science fiction, not science fiction but fred was a great astronomer and he wrote a love of science fiction much of it not very good but his first book is extremely good called the black cloud that the obnoxious hero you can't help but wonder may be modeled. [laughter] it keeps turning up under a different name and character. the black cloud is a mega super human that appears to be on the

energy of the sun and eventually they get in touch with this and managed to communicate with it and learn about it. different parts communicate with each other by radio and the scientists raise a very interesting question in what sense are you the cloud a single individual and the cloud replies if the question doesn't mean very much when the rate of communication, the speed of communication between the different communicators is very fast you might stop talking about them altogether and if all of us could communicate telepathically with each other instead of a slow lack of speech

to communicate our thoughts directly at the speed of light and speed of radio waves than it wouldn't mean anything to us we wouldn't talk about ourselves as separate individuals. i think the point you are getting at is the internet may be moving towards a sort of non- science-fiction future where it becomes a single being, a single living organism of some kind of. the passage that you read made the analogy where it's been suggested that the consciousness forms of self as a kind of melding of separate entities in a single agent at all as we have just been talking about.

it's all pretty fascinating. it's the best of times and worst of times. looking at it both ways it seems exciting. >> and it's terrifying at the same time speaking of which, i was reading the selfish gene which was just out in the last year and i was just remarking to myself how timeless your book is and what you are explaining hasn't changed that much in the decade since it was published. a couple things have changed and one is our ability to mess with the gene, so now we can alter it

at the level we can suppress the expression of certain genes and we've developed the ability to insert and flowing as in i wonder if you would explain what crisper is. some of you probably know but not everybody does and tell us what you think about this moment in time. >> yes as it happens i read this on the plane coming over from england a very interesting book by jennifer who is a professor. it's a wonderful opportunity to read books. i read this entire book between london and new york. reading an entire book by the way is more than donald trump has done in his entire career.

' genetic manipulation, the actual changing of genes is something that has been impossible to do until recently. the main way to do that has been to transplant from one organism into another one. you've probably heard about this because they had jellyfish genes. it is a new technique which jennifer was one of the main pioneers of. a wonderful book i do recommend called cracking the creation and it's about her career and explains all about the technique into the misgivings she has. it's a very powerful and fast

technique for changing the programming any organism like. it comes from the bacteria that are heavily afflicted with. that attack bacteria use to recognize viruses is a technique that humans can now exploit in order to edit the any organism that you like so it is a powerful and a new technique giving light to great possibilities and also

misgivings whereas in the past for thousands of years we have controlled the evolution by manipulating the selection part of the equation. we've used that and it's changing from that side to huge great things, cabbages, ko, karate, cauliflower, broccoli, all these things are modified versions. now we can actually change the mutation part of the equation and the selection and it's much

faster, much more powerful, potentially dangerous as people worry about it so we recommend the book very good. >> this might be an over simple question but let's say someone messes with a gene in humans and create some kind of human that is dangerous from science fiction what would happen after that and as a possible somethint something could be released that could never be? >> i suppose it is. it's a sort of discussion partly centered on the distinction is the one thing between the negative and positive manipulation. it's already been used quite successfully for removing

genetic disorders come things like how hemophilia and things like that and people object on ethical grounds doing that and meddling with nature and playing god. what is more come th, people obo the manipulation, trying to change the gene of a human so that they can become better at say music or mathematics or running, things like that. a lot of people have objections to that and i think partly because it sort of snow said hitler. you do make an important distinction between the draconian dictatorial government

imposed genetic changing the. you can still object to going to a doctor and saying i want my doctor to make the child to be a brilliant musician please give her my genes which may be possible. >> there are people who do object to that and i can kind of see why also if you think of it naturally we don't worry too much about parents that are ambitious to make their children and musicians and force them to sit down at the piano for three hours and work at it is it really all that much different than putting this gene into the

child? [laughter] so people are worried about that marching on with the same in the new world order. as you said in the best of times and the worst of times the future can be pretty scary sometimes. >> we have some really fantastic questions and since we are on kind of a technical topic i will read this one. there've been many recent events both in the area of potential components and metabolism what are your views in this area? >> i think that they are talking about the beginnings of life, the creation of life from nonlife that have been at least

once. it may have happened more than once. it's one of the big mysteries that faces biology. we don't know how it happen hapd but it happened about 4 billion years ago and there've been various theories of how it might have happened. we know the kind of things that must have been. it was the origin of the first self replicating entity in effect the first gene. it is almost as if it was not dna. it was a self replicating entity then that's the prerequisite for the selection to get going. once i started, then the whole story kind of takes off, the direct competition between genes and building and then lots of

cells and so on. once that started and we understand what happens and it gave rise to the full complexity but how did the first step has been? is a huge mystery. it couldn't have been dna almost certainly got started because dna was a high tech replicator. it's a very efficient replicator but it needs a complicated infrastructure in order to direct replication and you can't have a complicated. it's a related molecule as many don't know the.

it also has the capacity to be an enzyme. you can't have dna unless you have protein and you can' can he protein unless you have dna and it can do both jobs. so, that sort of current most fashionable independent replication function was taken over by dna and protein. >> i'm going to aggregate a few questions that have to do with

machines and artificial intelligence. how did they adapt to the inevitable evolution to learn and is there a point that we must learn to unplug it is worrying as another one of the questions does about artificial intelligence. if there is another question referenced to the anxieties about a possible threat from artificial intelligence. >> he is a genius and no doubt about it. as a philosophical naturalist i am committed to the view that there's nothing ithere is nothis

or our bodies do this and the view that anything our brains can do potentially can be simulated and done more so by machines, so i think it is definitely possible that they will do everything we can do and likely that they will do it better, so it may not happen for a long time, but in principle it is possible and this people including worried about it some people that are not being necessary anymore if our jobs are to be taken over by a robots and maybe we will be dispensed with altogether if they get to the point they can make new and

they don't need us at all and so we would go extinct in our creations would take over. maybe they will do a better job than we do. [laughter] >> i don't know why we would be so particularly worried about that. i would be worried if shakespeare and mozart were forgotten and nobody knew about them if they would actually appreciate him and remember they do everything that humans can do, fall in love, the wild by

great poetry and music s to the best of times and worst of times is again, scary, terrifying at the same time accelerating. >> we have a number of different questions here about religion. [inaudible] [laughter] if you could ask one question to shake their beliefs but without question be? i have a question about a statement that you make about the religious behavior only after having renamed it and you say we understand religious behavior after we have renamed it so have you understood what religious behavior has been good

for or why it has evolved and then we don't have to call it religion any more. we can just understand that it is for the purpose of perhaps still does. >> i think what you are talking about there is what i was talking about in the evolutionary advantages of religion where in a sense, that has to be we are challenged to produce in the darwinian survival value of religion and the reason is that religion is extremely widespread in the human cultures i think they are something equivalent to religion and the human universal therefore probably does need some kind of explanation. what i said was a we have to rename the question before we can answer it.

it's under the right circumstances, so that is what i mean by the remaining. we are a describing the problem it is obecause of the psychologl predisposition which might be things like the tendency to believe what you're cultures tell you, to be scared of dying. a combination of dispositions which manifest themselves as religion rather than ask the question of survival value of religion. what was the question i didn't

really hear that. >> humans are getting rid of religion how do we get rid of this dangerous emerging trend in another person wondering your thoughts on religion and governmentgovernment in the agef artificial intelligence and never dying superhumans. [laughter] and i think if you were going to puncture someone, a beaver what would i be your main way to do that? >> to take the last one first, a heat the bible. [applause]

are liberals afraid of islam? >> are liberals afraid of islam? yes. the question may be referring to the tendency for sort of nice people, my kind of people to abandon their principles when talking about the horrors of homophobia and misogyny in both the kind of things we hold dearly. but when it comes to islam there are many people that forget all about that. that is part of their culture. what a condescending thing to

say. he now runs a magnificent foundation to try to reform islam. he coined the phrase regressive left to as it were gave a free press when you put the principles of feminism and homophobia and things like that. i think that it's the tendency that stems from this because they think it is a race which of course it isn't. it's very widespread. if you can convert into it or

out of it it isn't a race. [laughter] i think that is part of it. i think also it is a laudable tendency to identify with victims of oppression, and we all do that or at least i hope we do. i think that they have identified the wrong victims. they think muslims are victims of oppression from the west. actually they are the victims of oppression from islam. especially muslim women, ex- muslims, that is the real victimization, that's the real problem. we need to reform islam and that

is a very good thing to try to do. in the liberal community in the west we need to reform our view of who is a victim and who is doing the victimizing. we do have a big problem with this idea of trying to reform religions that are oppressive to people's human rights and get saying that we should reform them is only talking to people that agree we should not be depressing other people's human rights. do we need to replace religion with some other kind of code of behavior? what can be effective in the way people aggregate their communities around values people that will criticize your position on religion say you're not getting the whole thing

about religion because science does not explain everything and there are beliefs people have that are spontaneous and continue through history and literature and arts and music, many of the finest expressions of human creativity has been what we would call religious, so we cannot just get rid of religion. >> there is a lot there and science can't explain everythi everything. science can explain everything about the real world. [laughter] [applause] planes taken. [applause] art and music and morality are a different matter. science cannot tell you what is right and what is wrong probably

although sam harris might agree on that. it can help you enormously in thinking clearly about what to do what is right and what is wrong. you can identify logical inconsistencies in your position using scientific reasoning in the kind of application of the scientific method. you mentioned art and music. many great works of art and music are inspired by religion. it is a great mistake of course to think that makes it valid or true. it's nothing of the sort. it is entirely natural and great music and great art to be very inspired by religion because in past century that is where the

money was and they are sponsored by rich benefactors. michelangelo was sponsored to paint the sistine chapel. but also it has or does provide. there's the story of jesus is passion and crucifixion that is a tragic story that not surprisingly inspired great artists and musicians. we shall never know if it had been the creation oratory of beethoven's symphony.

[laughter] what do we replace religion by well, there's all sorts of different purposes that we replace it by a. science and indeed reality could provide inspiration perhaps every bit as beautiful. community, religion has provided community. we can do that in different ways. we don't need religion to provide a sense of community or. what do you think is going on? why do we have donald trump for

president? scientifically speaking? [laughter] well i mean partly because we have this electoral college system. [applause] which by the way isn't quite so difficult to get rid of as people often think. on paper it is very difficult to get rid of because you need a two thirds majority in both houses of congress and then it needs to be ratified by a substantial number of states legislatures. it can be a very difficult thing to do but the constitution does allow each state to change the way it chooses its delegates to the electoral college.

maine and nebraska it doesn't make much difference. if california were to do with nebraska and maine do a you can't do that. what you could do is what individual states in their own way decide that they will load the constitution & all of their electoral college delegates one way or the other but california could decide the fate of the entire country votes and that

can be done on a state-by-state basis it would be a drastic sudden change. you don't have to wait until a substantial number of states agree to do it but there is this movement afoot as you may know waiting for a certain number of states to agree. individual states could do with the make a difference to begin with. it would get rid of the number at present. i think the electoral college when i first started was a good idea and instead of the members being pledged to vote for particular candidates if it were a group of people elected to go to washington, saddam together and collaborate on who would

make the best president like when we choose a new professor or chancellor at a university or something, take a preferences, read their books interview them. i would recommend michael moore's analysis of. he was one of the few people who got a prediction right talking about rust belt people feeling inferior and that their world is disappearing. if you haven't seen his analysis it is worth looking at. >> to tie this back to the

scientific question since we do have donald trump as president, if a catastrophic event resulted in the death of most humans how long would it take for humans to evolve to survive without technology and then a related question from another person asking do you think humans will ever equal to the point is pc and s severe split off into one species. >> well, speciation requires directly a separation. normally this happens they accident, through a geographical accident where a population gets split and finds itself on an island and so there is no flow

between them so they are free to evolve in different directions. that isn't going to happen on this planet now. >> is that the office of where we are becoming so much of slowing into each other. >> there is the chance that if there was a colony set up on mars or something that would be little flow to. since we only have time for one last question i think i would like to ask is there something you didn't come up tonight you are a person to whom we are looking very earnestly for guidance and helpin in helping o synthesize things that often feel very separate, our moral values, knowledge of science, technologies, our past,

comprehension, our place in the universe, and what would you like us to understand and what do you feel most of us are not getting? >> i think evidence is the only reason to believe that anything is true. [applause] so, personal opinions, feelings, emotions are fine and we all have them, but they do not tell you what's true and they shouldn't guide important decisions like who you vote for and what would you do with policy positions as the only reason to believe anything a.

where morality is concerned in the ethics is concerned, that needs to be intelligently designed. don't base your morality or politics or ethics on holy books or tradition or revelation or authority. base it on intelligent design to design the kind of society you want to live. that's it. [applause] i hope you have enjoyed tonight's program brought to you

by the commonwealth club of silicon valley. we would like to thank richard, the author o office of science l selected writings of a passionate rationalist. our audience here and those of you joining on the radio and on the web now the meeting of the commonwealth club is a churn. [applause] mr. dawkins will be signing books and would like you to sign up to have that occur over on the left because of a number of people here tonight, there's no personalization, just an autograph and no southeast. [laughter]