welcome back to the big picture i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. coming up in this half hour we'll revisit a conversations with great minds that i had back in september with professor richard dawkins in that interview professor dawkins talked about his work on gene center evolution and explain the relationship between genetics and a person's politics or worldview here's another look at our conversations with great minds with professor richard dawkins. of the nice conversations of great minds i'm very pleased to be joined by a british a follower just an evolutionary biologist professor richard dawkins is a scientist and author whose life work has educated millions and challenge the popular beliefs of a generation professor dawkins is best known for the ideas laid out as his landmark book the selfish gene and develop further in the extended phenotype which is the

radical notion that darwinian selection happens not at the level of the individual but at the level of our d.n.a. and implies that humans evolved for only one purpose to serve our genes he's also equally well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design is an atheist and humanist and a vice president of the british minister association and supporter of the brights movement professor dawkins is becoming has become a leading figure of new atheism the english language version of his groundbreaking book the god delusion argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion has sold more than two million copies and been translated into more than thirty languages is an emeritus fellow at the university of oxford and founder of the richard dawkins dawkins foundation for reason and science he joins me now from our studios in miami professor dawkins welcome. it's a pleasure thank you it's a pleasure and an honor to have you with us in the selfish gene you shook up the

discussion of natural selection you coined the term the selfish gene as a way if you correct me if i have this wrong place as way of expressing the genes centered view of evolution as opposed to the views focused on group selection given that you also say that genes just are they can survive independently of the cell the cell can survive in a better the organism how do you reckon to reconcile the need for biological cooperation with your hypothesis of a selfish gene. cooperation takes place at the level of the individual or individuals cooperate genes are selfish the whole point about my book the selfish gene is not that individuals are selfish but individuals may well very well be co-operative as a result of their genes being being selfish and obviously that takes a book to explain but it does not mean that individuals are selfish still less that they should be selfish. point taken and a good point i'm curious about the the genes bean's selfish the vidual genes

themselves you said it would take a book to explain we have actually. twenty some odd minutes here to talk can you can you explain. your your reasoning on this yeah well obviously genes that there are in a mate of d.n.a. so they can't actually be selfish in the same sense as we are they don't actually have have motives they're not conscious they don't think but a gene that causes individuals to behave in such a way as to foster the welfare of that gene will survive and so it's the self interest of the gene in that sort of metaphorical sense but i mean what you will not get is natural selection favoring a gene that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other genes but you may very well get an individual that sacrifices itself for the benefit of other individuals wouldn't wouldn't that. willingness to sacrifice yourself

for other individuals the gene driven behavior. yes you would and that's the point that a gene that makes an individual sacrifice itself the individual self for the benefit of the gene will survive and that would often mean for the benefit of copies of the gene in other individuals notably close relatives right so in other words our are all touristic impulses the desire not to be selfish but to care for our for family for friends for community and to sacrifice for them actually perpetuates our genes even if we don't produce offspring because those genes are also appearing in others of our of our local family. that's correct ok genes aren't static will express various or wheels in response to the environment around spontaneous development so we act as a response to food poisoning for example or i think

a pretty good example so how does that entire concept of an interactive phenotype fit into your theory. what you are talking about is the expression of genes so that's the genes that are in you may or may not express themselves and whether they express themselves may depend upon the environment they depend upon your food may depend upon your age and so on so the genes themselves. just in you and they may or may not get passed on to your offspring but how they express themselves will depend very much on the environment notably by the of the genes that happen to share the body with them and not just in an individual organ or cell or close area but. more broadly. yes. and also it would be their interaction with. with other genetic material for example my understanding is that more than half of the total d.n.a.

in our body is not human genes it's all the viruses and bacteria and fungi and other things as well that's been hit that's true i mean that's very interesting and and yes interaction with with the the bacteria for example which are massively numerous. and even within every one of our cells the mitochondria which of these vital little organelles that are responsible for giving us energy they will once upon a time bacteria and they reproduce by the same means as bacteria do reproduce as it entirely independent population inside ourselves and they get paul storm in the egg to the next generation so at some point in the past. cells were infected by bacteria and thus began the evolutionary process that led to modern condrey in cells. in the very remote i'm curious if if in your

in your work you've come across anything that might indicate that phage is played phages are the super smart for our lives for viewers the super small viruses that in fact only bacteria rather than entire if they have played a role in modifying the genes of bacteria that we then interact with and that may in fact modify our genes are there any evidence of very probably yes very very probably bacteria rather different from us in that bacteria constantly swapping genetic material rather like we with computers copy and paste bits of text from one document into another bacteria a constantly swapping exchanging copying and pasting the genetic material into into other bacteria and viruses phage is playing a role in that yes you know i've i've had over the years a number of political discussions. which is typically the topic of my

programs other than the segment and have active us in particular people who are followers of iran actually quote you and suggest your selfish gene metaphor and the economics of milton friedman or. and the modern libertarian movement are the same thing and that your selfish gene movement or your selfish gene. hypothesis is a assertion what. you'll have to fill in the word i'm sorry i don't have the correct word. and i would informs that not informs that movement but demonstrates the validity of of individual selfishness i'm curious how you would respond to those i'm sure i would decide in that one of the. prising things that happened after the sofa's gene was was published was that i started getting letters from right wing libertarians in america i've never even met a rightwing libertarian but they started writing to me and said total

misunderstanding as i said before genes a selfish and that's nothing to do with whether individuals and selfish or other it's a very complicated relationship and in particular it says nothing whatever about the moral rightness or wrongness of being selfish you could take a stand on that which is based upon something quite different from my stand an evolutionary biology there's no reason why somebody shouldn't read the selfish gene and as it happens be a right wing libertarian but absolutely there's no reason why they should read the selfish gene and therefore become a right libertarian i have always voted on the left in british elections. i'm curious your thoughts on the relationship between genetics and political worldview there's been a fair amount of speculation and writing and in recent months about the genetics or at least the neurobiology of politics

a political worldview. how do you think that all that whole dance plays out at the level of genes. well i mean one's political opinions like everything else about one's one's views about everything are governed by one's brain and brains are of course built by genes interacting with each other and with the environment in the process is of embryology so there are doubtless genetically influence differences in brains which affect political opinions which is going to be very complicated and i would hesitate to say anything in detail about that just so it would be more like . there is no gene for race third just genes for all these various characteristics there is no gene for being a conservative or a liberal there. are genes that might give people certain proclivities that would cause them to draw toward one of the other that's right didn't it yes in very complicated interaction with the genes and with upbringing education and so on you

write and talk a lot and i apologize i've only read two of your books but i've read pieces of many others and. a lot of commentary over the years you write and talk a lot about classical the classical concept of gradual darwinian evolution i'm curious and my apologies if you've already. dealt with this morning or books i just missed it about your thoughts on stephen jay gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium as an enhancement to darwin the concept that. evolution really macroevolution specie evolution is not generally this slow gradual process but rather there are periodic disasters that happen that wipe out ninety plus percent of a of an individual or group and the small subset of their group that is most. adapted to the new environment even though they may have been maladapted to the earlier environment are the ones that continue to survive and maybe even that

accounts for gaps in the fossil record i'm curious your thoughts on that whole thing well what you have just outlined is not really punctuated equilibrium although you could be forgiven for thinking that because punctuated equilibrium was expressed in such a confused way that anybody would be forgiven for muddling up at least three different things what you just described is the phenomenon of mass extinction which is indeed very important and every few every twenty or thirty. million years or so you may get a mass extinction and then occasionally get a very very large mass extinction and after that in a sense evolution kind of starts all over again so when the dinosaurs went extinct sixty five million years ago. the. the mammals which up to then had been rather small bit players in the in the drama suddenly flourished because the dinosaurs had gone and gave rise to all the great diversity of mammals that we see today now that

pattern of periodic mass extinctions followed by a new flowering of evolutionary diversity that is undoubtedly true that happens that is not punctuated equilibrium point to a equilibrium is the idea that there are if you follow the evolution of any one lineage through the fossil record you may see long periods of stacey's where nothing very much happens they stay pretty much the way they are and then suddenly there's a jump to a rather different form now even that is confused it's confusing because it muddles up two different things it muddles up one idea which is that there really is a sudden leap in evolution mutation a child is born of a different species from its parents that's one possible interpretation which i think is wrong the other possible interpretation is that evolution has been going on but very rapidly during the time when as it were paleontologists are looking

during the time when fossils are not being laid down perhaps the fossils have been laid down in a different geographical area so if you dig in any one place you don't see the change what you see is a what looks like a sudden change because. animals that have been evolving in a different area suddenly read migrate into the area where you're digging so that looks like a sudden jump now that's perfectly plausible that probably happened that probably doesn't count for some of the apparent gaps in the fossil record but i do deprecate the use of the word of the phrase punctuated equilibrium because from the very start from eldridge and gould's initial introduction of it it has been confused not least by older jingled themselves very interesting that it's been twenty years or more since i since i read gould so thank you for correcting me on this we will get back we like to get back to. back to i'd like to get into

a conversation of religion and spirituality and some of the other issues you tackled some of your other books in just a moment first we have to take a break just for a second more conversations with great minds with richard dawkins when we come back in just a moment. drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who makes decisions to break through it's already been made can you trust no one who is in view with the global machinery to see where we had a state controlled capital in this court sessions when nobody dares to ask we do our t. question more. or the back conversations the great minds that i'm speaking with evolutionary scientists richard dawkins his work has made him a leading figure in new atheism dawkins new book the magic of reality how we know

what's really true will be released in the united states on october fourth and professor dawkins welcome back. your new book the magic of reality how we know is really true and some of your other works the god delusion for example you were in. well actually let me let me go to the magic of reality first i this is just a beautifully illustrated book and and make science so excessive bold to basically people of any age you asked the first question of the first chapter what is reality what is magic is almost an existential question you want to take a whack at that. well this is a book designed for young people primarily but actually four for all ages and i'm trying to make the point that magic as in the in the sense of supernatural magic magic spells as in fairy tales and miracles and harry potter and things but

reality real science where there aren't any miracles is much more exciting and much more magical in the good sense some sort of poetic magic when we say it's magical looking up at the milky way at night that kind of thing so i'm trying to show that it's going to be fun and there are plenty of myths in the book but science is better science is more interesting more fascinating more thrilling and that takes reality seriously we don't have miracles we don't have supernatural spells we don't have have magic in that sense what we have is reality which is magical is wonderful and we study it by the methods of science and speaking of reality and and magic and i would put probably most religions in the category of magic or perhaps you do in the u.k.

you have religious fundamentalists but they're largely politically marginalized here in the united states basically the religious fundamentalists have become a portal through which candidates for the presidency as particularly republican side do you think this may have something to do with your country having had the experience of religious zealots like cromwell and guy fawkes or as we've been here where they've never heard of for theocracy. it's very difficult to know it's a curious them normally because if you look worldwide religion is pretty much a third world problem religion goes with lack of education goes with poverty it goes with despair and i mean that's why in western europe religion is dying all except for the muslims but in. christendom in western europe christendom religion is dying because of prosperity and everything that one would think that america has and indeed does have and yet half of america very nearly half is not only

religious but preposterously so i mean half forty percent of the american electorate actually believe that the world is only six thousand years old or less than ten thousand years old which is a quite ludicrous error it's not a slight error it's a massive error and this is something which is stands out like a sore thumb you expect to find that in islamic countries and you do you expect to find that in iran pakistan afghanistan and so on you do not expect to find it in the richest and most highly educated country in the in the world in spite i think you possibly can get a clue to it by noticing that those parts of the united states which are most. influenced by this kind of fundamentalism tend to be those parts that that are less well educated that are. less less prosperous less looked looked after and so there might be

a tendency for people who have. who don't have a very very nice life for one reason or another to turn to religion as a kind of of refuge and that's one theory that i've heard advanced there are others been another theory is that because the united states has a constitution which church and state is very rigidly separated unlike in western europe where. many countries including britain have an established church and because we have an established church it's been argued religion has become sort of boring it's a church is the place you go to to be married and to be buried but otherwise you don't go to church but in america where there is a constitutional separation between church and state perhaps this is freed up religion to become free enterprise and to use all the sort of tricks of capitalism of advertising and so on and that may be why it's taken such

a hold of the less educated classes in america and not only that we give them complete tax breaks so you end up with tax breaks and just shocking yes indeed so you know but people like pat robertson is a billionaire with a b as a result of this i'm curious if our genes are controlling our behavior and many people have had experiences that they would describe as deeply spiritual and maybe draw them to religion why would a gene echo why would such a gene echo down through the generations. well it's a difficult thing to say that genes control us we are. very much influenced by our education by our environment so i'm not sure that i would want to. ask that in a in a sort of genetic way it's probably true as we've said in earlier on in our conversation i mean genes do influence brains and brains are what decide whether your are going to be religious or not and so there might be

a genetic component in whether you are. in whether you tend to be drawn to religion now you mentioned the word spiritual and that's a much misused word because people often use spiritual to mean the kind of thing that i mean by the magic of reality the kind of thing i mean by looking up at the stars and being filled with wonder being filled with joy at seeing this. the stupendous sight of the universe or looking down a microscope or thinking or going to the grand canyon and looking down through the layers of geological time i mean that's magical in the sense of the magic of reality and you could even call that spiritual but i rather resent the hijacking of that call it spiritual if you like i prefer not to i rather resent the hijacking of that feeling which i feel that in which any of my scientist friends feel hijacking my religion is not a monopoly of religion we all feel it all we all are capable of feeling is the

human condition. very well so in the god delusion you're asserting that a supernatural creator doesn't exist in the belief that a personal god qualifies as a delusion you also make that argument for the belief in any sort of consciousness beyond the individual for example could it be that the universe itself is a conscious organism and works one expression of it within it or for that matter what is consciousness. well i don't know what consciousness is and it's a very difficult philosophical question i don't think it's probably going to be helpful to talk about the universe as a whole being conscious i know that some rather mystical philosophers have suggested something like that i think that whatever consciousness is it's manifested by brains it's something to do with brains all the functional equivalent of brains i mean i wouldn't rule out that one day somebody might build an electronic computer which was programmed in such

a way that that it was conscious that seems to me to be actually quite likely. but it comes from very very complex organization such as the brain which is an extremely complicated organization of billions of of neurons and if anybody makes a computer that's conscious that again will be extremely complicated with many many many. units electronic units if you think there are no. i don't think it's helpful to think that consciousness resides in the universe as a whole i think consciousness is something that emerges by the evolutionary process in the universe wherever in the universe brains or something functionally equivalent to brains evolve do you think it's conceivable that as the internet of the number of computers connected to it begins to approach. the numbers that are similar to the number of axioms and ganglions and synopses of the brain. that the internet itself may use and consciousness emerges from it the consciousness may

emerge from the. that is a fascinating science fiction speculation and before we laugh it away we should remember that that's pretty much what did happen in the evolution of brains because brains started off as very simple nervous systems and then the simple nervous systems got bigger and bigger and bigger more and more interconnected in complicated ways and that is what's happening to the internet and so i wouldn't absolutely rule out the possibility that sometime in the future something like the internet probably very different from the way the internet is now but something like the internet a global network of electronic connections between computing devices all over the world might develop something like the same properties as the brain evolved millions of years ago quite remarkable want to turn your computer on an ever well

hello there professor. i'm sure that's already possible i'm sure that's already possible but i mean really it would be a bit of a trick it would be a bit of a bit of a faker with worldwide and to back to your book the magic of reality we have just two minutes left here and i want to be sure. you ask a number of great questions and you're always the first person for example. well yes i mean that's chapter two of the book every every chapter in the book is a question like that and every chapter begins with myths and then goes into the science so who really was the first person well it never really was a first person because every animal ever born is of the same species was of the same species as its parents and so there never was a first homo sapien hens born to a homo erectus parent it all happened gradually but if you stick together enough generations going back into the past then you will find a gradual turning into apes and monkeys and troops and. going back to

fish. and beyond so we are descended from fish. but every single creature that was ever born is of the same species was of the same species as its parents the process is so gradual rather like the movement of the hand of your watch you can't see it move but if you wait long enough you see that it has a professor it's extraordinary we have just only thirty seconds left the main message that you would want our viewers to know about your work. i'm passionate about the truth and the truth can be ascertained by science by evidence never believe anything until you've seen the evidence that's brilliant professor richard dawkins thank you so very much. thank you very much that's it for the big picture tonight for more information or to see any segment of the show you may have missed check out our web site at tell marvin dot com and don't forget democracy begins

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from the streets of canada. showing corporations are on the day. walk of the line or show at the real headlines with none of the mersey or can live in washington d.c. now tonight we're going to take a look at the t.s.a. millions of holiday travelers prepare to have a hellish experience this weekend and our guest tonight argues that the federal government airlines all suffer from a complete lack of imagination when it comes to anticipating the next kind of terrorist attack the t.s.a. is doing it all wrong so we'll see if he has any better ideas then there's a new debate over the.