Darwin’s Daring Idea with Richard Dawkins

Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with evolutionary biologist and author of The Genetic Book of the Dead Richard Dawkins to talk about evolution, whether we were “designed,” how we are living reflections of our ancestors, and much much more.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, a one-on-one conversation between me and Professor Richard Dawkins. And we explore his life as not only a biologist, evolutionary biologist, but as an author. And we pluck snippets from many of his books to find out what messages he wanted to lay down. Join us.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. And today, I am in conversation with the one, the only, Richard Dawkins. Richard, welcome back to my office.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Thank you very much.

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is like your fourth time here or something?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I think it is something like that. Always a pleasure, Neil.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome. I mean, we have a lot of catching up to do, I think. So recently, or at least this year, we lost Daniel Dennett, philosopher Daniel Dennett. And I recently learned, I didn't read all of his books, I read some of them. He declared that Darwin's evolution by natural selection was the greatest idea anybody ever had. And he's coming to it not as a biologist, but as a philosopher. So how do you reflect on that declaration?

• 1:34Speaker 01

  He said that at the beginning of his book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea. And his point was that before Darwin came along, it seemed obvious to everyone that big, complicated things like humans and oak trees and things had to have an explanation in terms of design. And it was a huge... Stroke of insight for Darwin to see that it didn't, that the laws of physics alone could produce this prodigious amount of complexity filtered through this odd process of natural selection. To me, it's always been strange that it took so long, that it took until the middle of the 19th century for Darwin and Wallace, and even maybe one or two other people.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is thousands of years of thought.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliant people have come before.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Aristotle could have had it and didn't. I mean, when you think how much cleverer you had to be to do what Newton did, or Leibniz, inventing calculus, working out about the laws of how gravity...

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Newton finger puppet here.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. You'd think that somebody would have tumbled to evolution by natural selection before the middle of the 19th century, yet they didn't. And so that's an astonishing thing, and it needs an explanation.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did Daniel Dennett explain why it took that long? And if he didn't, what would be your explanation?

• 3:01Speaker 01

  I don't remember whether he did. Mine would be, well, first of all, Ernst Meyer, the great, I mean, he was here, I think.

• 3:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the...

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here at the American Museum of Natural History.

• 3:14Speaker 01

  He thought it was because of essentialism. He thought that because of Aristotle and Plato, who thought that, just because they thought like geometrists, I mean, a right angle triangle is a kind of perfect form, sort of hanging out there. And they thought that the perfect rabbit, the perfect rhinoceros, was hanging out there just like a right angle triangle. So you couldn't imagine how a rabbit could turn into anything different. That was his explanation, that wouldn't be mine. I mean, I think it's just that...

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's an interesting one, though, because it speaks to the bias that we have observing nature. So my people, including Copernicus, could not shake the idea of orbits that were perfect circles. They couldn't shake that. Why would God design a universe with a shape that wasn't geometrically perfect? So even Copernicus, putting the sun back in the middle of the known universe, had circular orbits, and since the orbits are not circles, they actually differed from predictions on the night sky. So... That was a problem at the time. It's like, because this might work, but it still doesn't fit. The epicycles are doing much better.

• 4:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, so it wasn't instantly taken up, including the resistance, the church resistance, of course.

• 4:34Speaker 01

  Of course, yes.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Earth wasn't in the middle anymore. So, so our counterpart to what I think you're describing is the urge to try to presume nature was perfect and then account for it with everything we know that is.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yes, all I was thinking was that I find an ellipse a pretty neat geometric figure as well as a circle. But anyway, going back to why it took so long and the idea of the perfect rabbit, the perfect rhinoceros, the perfect horse. In a way, that's a bit silly, because if you want to look at them, I mean, a population of rabbits is pretty variable. And anyway, that was Ernst Meyer's explanation for why it took so long. Darwin did it by going via artificial selection. Everybody knew, farmers knew, horticulturists knew, gardeners knew, you could change a rose, you could change a cabbage by just breeding.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  And really Darwin's insight was, say, you don't actually need a breeder. You don't need a human to do the breeding. Nature does it for you. Survival does it for you. It's not that difficult. I mean, it doesn't require any sort of higher mathematics or anything. And yet nobody got it until Darwin and Wallace.

• 5:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this is why I'm intrigued that Daniel Dennett, a philosopher who, in principle, any philosopher could have come up with this, because unlike relativity and unlike quantum physics, which are realms of behavior of the universe, large and small, that you can't just deduce from your armchair.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 6:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Evolution by natural selection could have been deduced in an armchair. It just wasn't.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  I think it could. It's surprising that it didn't. It's interesting that both Darwin and Wallace were traveling naturalists. And they both were collectors in South America, both in South America. Wallace lost his entire South American collection in a fire. And then he went to the Far East. But they were both collectors of natural history specimens. And the other person who might have thought of it is Patrick Matthew, who was a gardener and an orchard keeper. But philosophers know they didn't do it.

• 6:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They didn't, and they could have.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  They could have, yes.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've written, I mean, I have a list here of like all your books. You've been out of control over.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  Not as much as some people.

• 7:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got you here. Was The Selfish Gene your first book?

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back in 1976?

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was, that was the year I graduated high school. No, I remember because it was like the bicentennial year. Everybody made a big deal of this. It was my first presidential election that I could vote in. And I voted for Jimmy Carter. And I got to tell him this so cliched line. But when I met him, I said, "You are my first president that I voted for." And it was one month after my birthday, I got to vote for him. So I thought I'd have a short exercise here. I'm going to mention your books, not all of them, you have too many of them. Could you just tell me what your favorite bit of that book was that you were communicating with the reader, if I may?

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So start off, The Selfish Gene.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Natural selection chooses between genes. Genes are the only thing, the information contained in genes. Digital information is the only thing that goes from generation to generation. That which survives is information, digital information. Some genes survive better than others. We, the bodies, we, the animals, we, the plants, are just the machines that are there to preserve the genes that ride inside us.

• 8:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. Okay.

• 8:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That reminds me of how I describe your gut bacteria. I say, people wanna think they're like top of the world, and I say, "All you are to those bacteria is a darkened vessel of anaerobic fecal matter."

• 8:41Speaker 01

  That's right. And it's pretty much the same with your genes. I mean, it's not fecal matter, it's testicular matter or ovarian matter.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so they're the ones carrying themselves forward.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if it's just information, can you imagine a day where the biology is no longer necessary? And you just have the digital information stored or duplicated in some way?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Yes, certainly. I mean, already you could preserve your entire genome. I mean, I've got my entire genome on one disk. And I once-

• 9:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have a backup? Just checking. Is it on the cloud? Is it?

• 9:17Speaker 01

  The idea was, I don't have a backup. The idea was, it was a television program, and the conceit of the program was it was going to be posted into the family vault, the Dawkins family vault in the church at Chipping Norton.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  To be dug up in a thousand years.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a time capsule?

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And the idea was that in a thousand years, they'd dig it up and make a duplicate of me. And of course, then we talk about why it wouldn't actually be me, because it would just be an identical twin of me. But that was the idea.

• 9:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Was it you? Yes, it must have been you, because who else would do this? Posted on social media. Was it you? If you had a book of your ancestors? And it was, no, if you had a book of, a picture of your mother? Was this you who did this?

• 10:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me this again.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  I think you're thinking of-

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of your mother's mother.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you pile them up. It's just one of many ways of dramatizing the enormity of geological time. I forget exactly how it goes. There are lots of ways of doing it.

• 10:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but you do this, and if you keep doing it- One of those pictures is-

• 10:25Speaker 01

  Is a fish.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is a fish.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Exactly. And yet, and yet, every single generation looks like the previous one and the next one. There's no sudden-

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no sudden, it's not sudden.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And many people can't grasp this. They think, well, there must have been a time when it stopped being a fish and, you know, there wasn't. It just gradually, gradually, gradually, gradually changed.

• 10:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, will you allow me, given this, which I completely understand, you have to allow me my explanation for the chicken and the egg?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I tell people, but I've never gotten your blessings on this. Can I use that word with you?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I'm all for blessings.

• 11:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I simply tell people. They say, what came first, chicken or egg? I said, the egg. It was just laid by a bird that was not a chicken.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a fair state.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  It was laid by a dinosaur.

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm compressing-

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A billion, you know, a hundred million years of time there.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But at some point, you're gonna say, what comes out of the egg is a chicken. And, but that's a, that's a genetic, um, alteration from the previous generation.

• 11:36Speaker 01

  There never was a moment when a bird that was not a chicken gave rise to a chicken. It was, it never was-

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of course, so this is a very compressed-

• 11:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, it's a shorthand-

• 11:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For what you just said, with the book of your ancestors.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 11:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Going back to the fish.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Yes. I, I mean, I, I once had a letter from a lawyer who said, um, uh, roughly speaking, you, evolution can't be true because it's, because a species is defined as members can always interbreed with each other. And you can't imagine that there was a time when a child generation was incapable of breeding with the previous generation. Of course, you couldn't. But he thought that meant that somehow evolution was invalid. He couldn't grasp that.

• 12:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That everything was specially created.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. Everything is-

• 12:23Speaker 01

  It's a gradual process all the way through and, and, and as you step back through your ancestors, they become slightly less like a human, slightly less like a human, but you'd never notice it as, as you walk past them. If you imagine.

• 12:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to see a fish. It's just funny. So you skip ahead and there's a fish. You say, that's my parent.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's.

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a little freaky for people. You gotta appreciate.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  As you walk along the generations, you'd never see, you'd never see them getting more fish-like. It would just be so, so gradual, you would never notice it.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because generations are only thirty, forty years. They were talking billions.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. Yeah.

• 13:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you needed deep time for evolution to do what it needed to do. Did we have deep time in the middle nineteenth century?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  Well, not really, no, because, um.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We didn't in astronomy. We were, we were satisfied with a ten thousand year old universe.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because before we understood nuclear energy.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is a huge repository. We were thinking the sun was just a lump of coal.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  It was George Darwin was one of the, Darwin's son George, Charles Darwin's son George, was one of the people who pointed out eventually that nuclear energy could do the trick.

• 13:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Nice little poetical justice there.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And which of the Darwins explained tides for the first time?

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Probably George. I'm not sure.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was a Darwin and Newton and Galileo did not understand tides. It was, even though they had all the gravity necessary.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 13:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To account for it. There's a subtle point with tides where if you look at any textbook, any textbook, it'll have like the moon and earth and it'll have a tidal bulge pointing towards the moon.

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Yes, that's wrong.

• 14:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's wrong. It doesn't, the moon would want that to happen, but that's not how it is.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tidal bulge is in advance, it's. The tidal bulge is in advance of the moon in its orbit.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and that's Earth's rotation pushing the tides ahead of the moon. And it's that interaction that has remarkable consequences. The moon is slowing down Earth's rotation. And Earth already slowed down the moon's rotation, so it's tidally locked to us.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  We'll one day be tidally locked.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll be double tidally locked. And when that happens, then the tides will line up because we're not be pushing it ahead of the moon. So that had to, somebody had to figure all that out.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was another Darwin. Thank you for your Darwin's.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  Hello, I'm Alexander Harvey and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 15:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So which book? You came up with the word meme. I know it was you.

• 15:24Speaker 01

  That was in the selfish gene.

• 15:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was in the selfish gene.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You invented the word. And people long forgot how, how, what, how. Tell me the authentic definition of meme. Because that's not how anybody's using it today.

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Unit of cultural inheritance, the analog of the gene in cultural inheritance.

• 15:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this is, this is communicated from one person to another.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And certain memes have higher communicability.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. I really wanted to say that because the whole book had been about the gene as the unit of selection, that's how I described it when you asked me earlier. It didn't have to be genes. It could be anything that is self-replicating. And nowadays, I would have used a computer virus as my analogy probably for the gene. But in those days, computer viruses, well, maybe they'd been invented. I didn't know about them anyway. So I used the unit of cultural inheritance, something like a.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So M is for memory, so memory gene. It's a portmanteau of.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  It's, that's right. It comes from the same root as memory.

• 16:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So if I say something. We have alligators in the New York City subway.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yes, if that spreads, if that if that spreads because it's a repeatable lie, or or even might be true, whatever it is, if it's spread.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whatever it is, doesn't matter what it is.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  It doesn't matter. If it spreads, then it's a successful meme.

• 16:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's so interesting to me, I have to tell someone else.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. We love to tell stories which surprise people or amuse people, whether or not they're true.

• 17:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so nowadays, it's just an image of something kind of cool, you know.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm really sorry about that.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, that's not your fault.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it's you've contributed to our culture. The best of the memes are the ones that are spread around the most.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a meme of me doing this, okay?

• 17:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, I think, what is it called? Uh, watch out, you got a badass over here. I never said that.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And there is a picture of me doing this.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  But it spreads.

• 17:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It spread, and there are people in South America who saw me in the street. There were tourists, I said, we know you from the meme. This is like 10 years ago or something. I think, meme, really? That's not even me. Why does that? So somehow, that spread. I don't have any understanding of it.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Shall I tell you my John Cleese story about that? He was...

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is that?

• 17:56Speaker 01

  Do you remember Faulty Towers?

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yes, okay. Do you remember the episode of the...

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't remember episodes. Come on now.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  The Germans, don't mention the war. Do you remember that?

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, okay.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Well, there's an episode where some Germans visit the hotel. And Basil Faulty's going, don't mention the war, don't don't mention the war. And of course, he does mention it. Anyway, he was in, I think it was Munich Airport, and he was going up the escalator. And there was a man way over there and going down the escalator, right across the hall. And he recognized him and he shouted, don't mention the war!

• 18:36Speaker 01

  So that meme is spreading in Germany.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so that's a selfish gene, so let's move ahead here. The Blind Watchmaker. Oh. That's my favorite book of yours, if I may.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Okay, well, the watchmaker comes from William Paley, the theologian, who said that there must be a god, because if you find a watch, you pick up the watch, he's crossing a heath, he said. You open it up, it was a great big pocket watch in those days.

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back when watches were watches.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, right. And you see all the cog wheels and springs and things. It had to have a designer, of course it did. And so, how much more would you say that of an eye? Or a knee joint, or anything living? So that's the Paley watchmaker argument. Natural selection is the blind watchmaker. It produces results that are like watches. They're beautifully designed, eyes are beautifully designed. Certain flaws, but they are beautifully designed. And they come about not through any design process, not through any deliberate design, but through the blind watchmaker, which is natural selection. So it's a...

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's hard for people to accept, especially if they're deeply religious.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they already have an account.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now you're saying that their god is some random... One of the acts of their god is some random force operating.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  He didn't have to be there at all.

• 19:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He didn't have to be there at all.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I think where people get confused is... And even some of our people have made this mistake. Fred Hoyle, who was the architect of the steady-state universe, who pejoratively invented the name Big Bang to describe the universe beginning in one point. He said that in a pejorative way. He wanted the universe to be a steady state. He did a calculation for how you would get an eye, a fully functioning eye, and how long that would take. And it was some impossibly, you know, tend to some very high-power number of years, given the rate at which you have

• 20:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  defects in a genome. And what... Correct me if I'm wrong... The rebuttal to that is, natural selection is not completely random.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  Well, no, that's right. It actually wasn't an eye, it was a hemoglobin molecule, but it's the same argument anyways. What he overlooked was that it doesn't happen all in one go. He imagined all the bits coming together at random.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's one case that doesn't work, and it has another random thing that doesn't work.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you do that forever.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  You do that forever, of course you want, but what you need is, let's use the eye, even though he didn't. You need a slightly less good eye, and then a slightly less good eye, and a slightly less good eye. If you start with just a sheet of light-sensitive cells, which just detect whether it's light or dark, that's useful. It's not like

• 21:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better than not having it.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  Better than not having it. You can tell when it's night or day, you can tell whether there's a predator flying overhead. And then, if you have a slightly cup-shaped, if you bend that retina from a flat thing into a slight cup, then if it's coming from that direction, it hits that side of the, and so you get, it's not an image, but it gives a slight directionality. And then you close up, and you start to get a pinhole camera. It's a very crude, it's out of focus, but it's sort of an image. And then, you need a little bit of transparent gunk in there. It's not a proper lens, but it does something like a lens. And all these

• 22:17Speaker 01

  stages, one by one, they're step by step, they incrementally improve.

• 22:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And every improvement is the new starting place for the variations at that generation.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  That's right, and then you get improvement.

• 22:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because every generation is not starting from zero.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  That's right, yes.

• 22:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so the Blind Watchmaker, I just thought that was brilliantly written, and it was my benchmark for, if I were to ever write a book for the public, I want to be this articulate.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, that's high praise, Neil. Thank you for that.

• 22:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want you to know that.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Thank you for that.

• 22:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just let the record show.

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, let me just skip coming to him, oh, I like this, a climbing mountain probable.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Well, that's what we've just been talking about.

• 23:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Mountain probable is

• 23:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just that metaphor, describe it to me.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  It's a metaphor, where you've got a mountain, with a sheer cliff, a vertical cliff, and on the top of the cliff is an eye. And to produce the eye in the Fred Hoyle manner would be to leap from the bottom of the cliff to the top in one go.

• 23:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In one go.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  You cannot do it, but you go around the other side of the mountain and you find a nice gentle slope and so you just climb.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ah.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Step by step and you can reach the summit.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you think it got there in one fell swoop, there's no, of course you're gonna invent a god, because what if...

• 23:43Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But not imagining that there's another way.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're stuck in one religious philosophy versus any other philosophy.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright, got that. And this one, much was written about unweaving the rainbow. So tell me about that.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, we're up to 1998 now.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  That comes from Keats.

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I did not know that.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Keats complained about Newton spoiling all the poetry of the rainbow by explaining it. And so my point was a point which you've made often enough that actually, there's far more poetry in really understanding the spectrum.

• 24:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did I tell you this? Do you remember there was this, it was on YouTube? I forgot the title, it was just called Double Rainbow Guy? Have you ever seen this?

• 24:31Speaker 01

  No.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Double rainbow, you should check it out.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, this is now, back when social media was just people posting things, it wasn't this cesspool that it is today.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he was hiking somewhere, there's some guy, back when you needed a camcorder to take videos, not a cell phone, not a iPhone, a smartphone. He's hiking in, it was Sierra Madres, I don't remember where. And he's, you hear him sort of narrating his, "Oh, that's a nice cliff." Then he turns a corner and he says, "Oh, a rainbow. Oh my gosh, what could it mean? Oh, a double rainbow. Oh my gosh." And he's tearing, you don't see him, but you can easily interpret just his emotions and his breath. And then he goes prostrate to the ground.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and he can't contain himself. What does it mean? This is a sign. And so I felt bad doing this. You might be proud of me, but I felt bad doing this. I tweeted, I put a link to this, to this video, and I said, "This is how you behave if you've never studied physics."

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I thought that was kinda mean. He's having his moment.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Well, in a way, that's what Keats was doing.

• 25:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To Newton.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. But anyway, I can cap your story in the opposite direction. I read a story about a woman in California. She had a lawn sprinkler. And she saw a rainbow in the lawn sprinkler, and she said, "What are they doing to our water supply?"

• 26:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's funny. Oh my gosh.

• 26:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, alright, so she missed all the beauty of the rainbow. Yeah, okay. And they're putting colors in the thing. So I did not know that Keats had that to say about Newton, because Newton, yeah, he decoded the rainbow. That was his thing.

• 26:30Speaker 01

  One of his things.

• 26:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, you mentioned how beautiful the eye is, even with some flaws. As an astrophysicist, when I would learn this very early, when I took classes here, actually, when I was in middle school at the Hayden Planetarium, that's when I learned about the entire electromagnetic spectrum. And that the visible part of the spectrum is tiny. It's not even a full octave

• 26:56Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 26:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of what's out there. And then, I was just disappointed with my sight. I said, "Is this the best nature could do?"

• 27:04Speaker 01

  Why can't I see x-rays?

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you know, let me go back in line and see what else is there. And later on, in Star Trek: The Next Generation, there'd be a character called Geordi, who, either he was born without sight, or he went blind, and they, he had this visor, V I S O R, which was an acronym, Visual Instrument Sight Organ Replacement. But with it, he sees all wavelengths of light.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so they get him to look at scenes that they're coming upon. It's high in x-rays, it's high in this, it's high in that. And then I worried that if you could see all bands of light, that would be very visually noisy, wouldn't it?

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, if you see right through to radio waves, where you wouldn't, I mean...

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, then, everything becomes transparent.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Long wavelengths, yes.

• 27:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then there are no walls in this office.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  You wouldn't see things, that's right.

• 27:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so that'd be a weird, I mean, to have that power in practice, I think ideally you would tune it, you would have a little tuner, so that you can target.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that you can target across.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  In The God Delusion, the last chapter, I think, I said that the, I made your point about the visible spectrum being so tiny. SARS opens up that spectrum.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And...

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It would be like hearing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, played in one octave in the middle of the piano.

• 28:27Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, that's right.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've coined this term, and we've even appeared on stage together under this title, "The Poetry of Reality", and...

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm all in. But if you're actually a poet, then...

• 28:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Surely there are parts of reality that are best expressed by a poet, would you agree?

• 28:52Speaker 01

  I suppose so, I've never quite understood... I mean, I don't write verse, but I suppose, like you, I try to evoke emotion at the same time as science.

• 29:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, it's just a Wiki page.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right. And I'm not entirely clear what you mean by poetic. I sort of feel intuitively I know what it means, but I can't quite put it into words, maybe that's no accident. But, yes, I defend in my own mind the idea that science is the poetry of reality, it makes me feel poetic. And I think it makes you feel poetic.

• 29:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it might be self-serving on that level. What would matter if others can be convinced of the same? Because otherwise, it's just a self-licking ice cream cone.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  That's right, but if you're skilled in writing, I think you can bring out others with you.

• 29:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I have my own valuation of poetry. I'd share it with you and get your reaction to it. For me, poetry, art more broadly, best serves us when it highlights something you might have otherwise missed or never noticed. My best example of that was July 21st, 22nd, was it? After we landed on the moon in 1969, The New York Times had a special section, people reacting to the fact that we walked on the moon. And there were these, all these famous poets of the day. It was Archibald McLeish and, you know, people who, who, who carried the soul of creative expression in the day.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I read these poems. They were awful. They're, "We pierced the sky and touched the sky." And I'm thinking, none of this is greater than the act of walking on the moon itself. So maybe I don't need artists to interpret that for me. Maybe I need them to interpret the tree that I'm walking by. Then you get Joyce Kilmer's poem, "The Tree." "I will never see something as lovely as a tree." Arms pressed to the sky. It, there's, in American poetry, American, Longfellow, Henry Watson Longfellow, who

• 31:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  wrote "The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere," that might not be heralded as great poetry, but we all know it here in America. And that's a poem about a guy who told other people that the enemy was coming? Is that an important person? No! Yet we all know that person's name because it's a poem about him. You do not know that corresponding person for any other war that has ever been fought in the history of the world. The person who told other people that the enemy was coming, that is not a person. But for us it is because it was a poem about him. It was somebody who would otherwise go forgotten. So for me, art is best when it captures that. I don't need, I don't need artists saying, "Oh, I saw this Hubble photo?

• 32:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's my painting of that Hubble photo." I don't need that because I got the Hubble photo. Give me a point of view that science does not give me, then we can hang out together in the sandbox. That's how I feel about it. Okay.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  The tree poem you mentioned, that's a religious poem. I mean, only God can make a tree.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end, but no, God was just in the culture.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 32:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it religious when you say goodbye, when that draws from God be with you? It's just a cultural expression.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  Think of Carl Sagan's chapter headings.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  You probably helped me with this. They inspire me, just every single one of his chapter headings.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. And by the way, his widow...

• 32:49Speaker 01

  The backbone of night, has it?

• 32:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His widow, Andrian, who is highly literate unto herself and co-author of all three Cosmoses, even the two that I have the privilege of hosting. She was a major force in that poetic voice. I just want to give credit where that's due there. Andrian.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yes, a lot of thought goes into those chapter headings.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Across the backbone of night, that is a poetic phrase. It immediately speaks to me. I see the Milky Way, I'm not sure I meant to.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  I guess I try to do something similar, at least in some of my books.

• 33:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, I'm up to 2004. The Ancestor's Tale. That is a title that reminds me of the Sagan book Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors. It kind of feels the same to me. And what happened in Ancestor's Tale?

• 33:58Speaker 01

  Well, it's a reference to Chaucer, the Canterbury Tales.

• 34:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But one of his tales was not The Ancestor's Tale.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you just... There's the Miller's Tale and now The Ancestor's Tale.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  It's a history of life, but it's going backwards. So it's in the form of a pilgrimage, Chaucerian pilgrimage, going backwards in time. So we human pilgrims set off into the past and we're joined by the chimpanzee pilgrims and then the gorilla pilgrims.

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's brilliant, I love that.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  And then we finally get back to the origin of life. So it's a way of doing the history of life, but do it backwards. Because if you do it forwards, then you end up with the idea that humans are kind of the climax, which you don't want. I mean, that's not a good way of looking at it. So if you go backwards... Um, and you start.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's, I was getting on your case, but that's brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks for deliver. I want to now read that. Okay.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Good.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, well, I missed that one. Uh, here's one we all saw and know about, whether or not we read it. The God Delusion. Uh, that's 2006. That puts you in the same plateau as... That puts you on a plateau to be identified as one of the four horsemen.

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Oh, right. Yes. Not, not a phrase that, that any of us actually.

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was bestowed upon you?

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so it was, uh, it was Daniel Danit, Christopher Hicken, Itchins.

• 35:25Speaker 01

  Sam Harris.

• 35:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, and both of them are past. Sam Harris and you.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The four horsemen who have each been quite vocal about their atheism.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the God Delusion, if that's not atheist, I don't know what is.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  It is, yes.

• 35:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the title.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So, so I, we spoke about this book before. Didn't you say there were religious groups that wanted people to read it? So that they know the face of their enemy? Was that?

• 35:53Speaker 01

  I forget. Uh, it's quite possible. Um, there are some people who say they were converted to religion by it.

• 36:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 36:02Speaker 01

  I'm not quite sure how they managed to get that. It doesn't say much for my rhetorical skills.

• 36:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is this your single biggest selling book, The God Delusion?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, just about, yes. Or as equal as a selfish gene maybe.

• 36:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, plus, you have, you, and I've, I've taken you to task on the very first day I met you. And it, I think is worth repeating here.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first day I ever knew you. Again, I, like I said, I'd read your books and yeah, I aspired. To have the vocabulary, the command of vocabulary that you, that spills off your plate. I took you to task in the front of a group, it was, it was one of the, uh, what's the name of that conference? A Beyond Belief Conference.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 36:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which gathered.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, that's right.

• 36:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which gathered scientists, biologists, theologians, philosophers. And it was to discuss, are we in an era beyond where belief matters?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does belief still matter?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it was quite the juxtaposition of points of view. You and I are up, up on front in a panel, two other people are there. And I heard you speak. I'd only ever read what you wrote, and I heard you speak. It was more articulate and more barbed than anything I'd ever read that you had written. And I said, oh my gosh, I'm glad we're on the same side because, because if you had spoke to me, I'd feel like a complete idiot. I would feel not worthy of life. And then I thought, you are so potent. Is this turning people off because they reject it?

• 37:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you are not investing in how they think. Everybody has little receptors for receiving information. And if you're just gonna say, I'm right, and I know I'm right, and you're all just wrong and you're idiots, maybe that's not as effective as you can be. So I challenged you to, to be a little more sensitive to people who are just trying to explore the world and that you could be more effective than you are. Do you remember your reply to me?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  I said, I gratefully accept the rebuke.

• 38:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, by the way, in that moment, there was like five seconds of silence. Cause I'm just some young whippersnapper and you're like storied, famous guy on stage. Nobody made a sound.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  They laughed.

• 38:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. Just in that moment of silence is, how is he gonna react? It was one of these, what's he gonna say? In that moment, it was total silence. And then you broke the silence with?

• 38:42Speaker 01

  I gratefully accept the rebuke.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then people, people got, were calmed after that. Yes, and you gave a worse example. What was it? Do you remember? The editor.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, the editor of New Scientist, who was asked. What is your policy at New Scientist magazine? And he said, "Our policy, New Scientist magazine, is: Science is interesting. If you don't agree, you can [bleep] off."

• 39:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that was... So that's so we can feel better about you.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Only a few more minutes here. Let's keep going. The greatest show on Earth, 2009, subtitled "The Evidence for Evolution." Was that motivated because around that time, there was the rise of what they called intelligent design?

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Well, that had come before. I mean, this was, in a way, the Blind Watchmaker was response to that.

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, of course.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  But this was really to set out the evidence for evolution, which I hadn't really done before. I just sort of assumed it, so...

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You assumed that everyone knew it?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  Well, not really. Well, yes, maybe. Yes, maybe.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a lot of misunderstanding I have found. People think that an organism adapts to its environment. And I say, "No, it either survives or dies."

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. I mean, and there's a great quote at the end of War of the Worlds, where, as you remember, H.G. Wells, at the end, there's a recitation. And he says, I'm paraphrasing. He says, "These creatures from another planet, they were doomed, undone, by the smallest creatures on Earth, where, to whom, to which we had developed immunity."

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "No man..." And it ends with a very poetic phrase.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "No man lives nor dies in vain." "That through the toll of a billion deaths, man has bought his birthright on this earth. And it is his against all comers. And it would have still been his had the Martians been 10 times as mighty as they are." Because no man lives nor dies in vain. And I thought that was potent. He was, of course, scientifically literate. And he... He's saying there are generations that die because they didn't have, they can't make it through this next stress to the environment.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  It's rather horrifying when you think that actually that's what happened to the native South Americans when the Spanish arrived. I mean, they were killed by epidemics of things like measles, which they had no immunity.

• 41:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  And in Europe, they built up immunity to these diseases.

• 41:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but the better analogy would have been had the South Americans wanted to invade Europe.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They would have then died by the European diseases. But that's not how

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  European colonialism works.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a colonist.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Yes, I know.

• 41:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't you invert that colony story on me. Just a couple more books here. I'm skipping over like a half a dozen with your permission. Uh, one that I delighted, because not only because I received a book, a copy of it in the mail from your publisher. It was just delightfully done, flights of fancy, Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. That was 2021. Beautiful book, illustrated, and who was the illustrator of that book?

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Yana Lentzova. She's a Slovak.

• 42:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. And just something that I think is underappreciated in this world, because we can't fly, so especially in the idea that we're at the top of the evolutionary scale and everything else is less than us. What does the condor say about that? Who flaps its wings once every 10 minutes because it coasts the rest of the time? So, it's just a celebration of flight in the, in evolution. I was delighted by that.

• 42:49Speaker 01

  Thank you. Well, that was sort of designed for young people. It started out as a children's.

• 42:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's why I liked it so much.

• 42:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That accounted for its accessibility. I mean, it was just very fun to see the illustrations and the like. And And right now, there's a book coming out called The Genetic Book of the Dead.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A publisher actually let you use that title.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Why wouldn't they?

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's so, it's like, what? A book of the dead?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  That, that worries me.

• 43:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I don't know!

• 43:18Speaker 01

  I think it's rather an uplifting title.

• 43:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Genetic Book of the Dead?

• 43:22Speaker 01

  Yes, it doesn't mean human dead.

• 43:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the, what's, does this have a subtitle? What's the subtitle?

• 43:27Speaker 01

  Uh, yes, it does have a subtitle. A Darwinian reverie.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so tell me about this book. I haven't read it yet.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Okay, um, if you say, if you look at a, uh, a highly camouflaged animal, a desert lizard, it's one of the, I use. It's got pebbles and sand all over its back. It's just a dummy painting of a desert on its back, okay? So, um, that is a description of the world in which its ancestors lived. You can read that animal as a book describing the desert world in which its ancestors lived. And that's an easy example because it's got it painted on its back. But it must be true, right the way through every bit of the, every cell of the animal, every molecule of the animal, has got the same, uh, description written.

• 44:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And some of it is baggage. Baggage as in burdensome, rather than...

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yes, but...

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have an appendix that can burst.

• 44:26Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 44:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have a pinky toe. When was the last time you made good use of that?

• 44:29Speaker 01

  You'd be surprised.

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want to ask what your feet look like. They could look like full, full, uh, chimp feet, you know? Do you grab stuff with your feet at home?

• 44:39Speaker 01

  Things are much more useful than you think.

• 44:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't answer that question. Do you grab things with your feet out of, out of, uh, kinship with our primate relatives?

• 44:49Speaker 01

  I've known people play the piano with their toes.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Um, the, the, the point is that natural selection is very, very fussy, is very, very, um, intricate in its, in its choice, far more than we, we even know about. We are...

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Poor judges of what's important for survival. When you think that the genes that survive, going back to the selfish gene, the genes that survive have to survive through lots and lots of different individuals and through a huge amount of geological time. And so any statistical estimate that you and I make about the likelihood that your pinky will be of any use to you is a statistical mistake. Natural selection is a much better statistician than we are.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I'd need to think harder about my pinky toe?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Well, natural selection has millions of years in which to choose between successful toes and unsuccessful toes. J.B.S. Haldane did a calculation. J.B.S. Haldane, the great geneticist, did a calculation. He imagined a feature like a toe, something that seems trivial to you. And he said, "Let's allow that it's so trivial that for every thousand individuals who have it and survive, 999 die." So there's only a tiny, tiny margin of advantage.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  The point is that an actuarial calculation, a life insurance calculator

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Factors are in.

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Would say that's negligible. Forget it. It's not important. What really matters, whether you smoke, which is hugely important. But natural selection is a much better actuary than any human statistician. Because this feature, the toe, whatever it is, has been repeated thousands of times in lots of different individuals and through lots of different millions of years. And it's got to survive through all those times. I'm explaining this very badly. The main point is that we are very bad estimators of what's important. In natural selectionism, it's a much better estimator of that.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, how about male pattern boldness?

• 47:15Speaker 01

  Well.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got that one?

• 47:16Speaker 01

  Well, that's a variable. I mean, some people have it and some people don't.

• 47:23Speaker 01

  You might take another example, maybe fingerprints. Why do we have fingerprints? Well, the fact that they're different doesn't matter, but are they important for clinging on to the trees when we had arboreal ancestors, that kind of thing?

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I see. So even if they're not useful now, they were useful to get us to where we are now.

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Hence the Genetic Book of the Dead. I mean, we're talking about the past.

• 47:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, you're right. There it is. The Genetic Book of the Dead.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Enabling us to get to where we are at all.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  We are a description of the worlds in which our dead ancestors survived, until they died. Survived it long enough to reproduce.

• 48:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if we didn't survive, we'd be extinct and we wouldn't be here to talk about it in modern times.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  We are only here because our ancestors survived long enough to reproduce.

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  And they survived because of the highly detailed features that they had.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't think differently about my pinky toe. Because without the pinky toe, there might have been some dead ancestor that would have ended that branch of the tree of life and we would have never been here.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 48:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, that's gonna be a good book.

• 48:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you have hope for civilization as it's currently manifested in the world?

• 48:48Speaker 01

  I think we have to have hope

• 48:53Speaker 01

  to live our lives at all. Doesn't mean at an intellectual level I necessarily have.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  I live my life as though I have hope, yes.

• 49:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I've come, I've become...

• 49:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cynical is not the right word. I become a practical cynic. It's, there are people who think this way, or feel that way, or behave this other way. And I, I've stopped trying to change them. What I try to do is offer a way of looking at the world that maybe they'll take, maybe they won't. Maybe as an educator, it's my job to make this as tasty as possible. So, hey, that's a good idea. I never thought about it that way. But otherwise, um, you know, I just gave a presentation to a Christian school, K through 12. I talked about optics.

• 49:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And at the end, it was open Q and A, and they were 11th graders. And they started grilling me on science versus the Bible. And I said, "I'm not here to stop you from being religious at all." Okay, we live in a country that protects your freedom to be religious. And you're in a private school. So the government is not going to come after you and say you have to get this out of the public coffers. So I made that clear, but I didn't have the urge to try to convert them. And I get the sense that you've had this urge your entire life to convert people

• 50:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  with no less zeal than a religious person, a religious, um, evangelical, a religious person would have trying to convert people who are not that.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Insofar as their religious belief conflicts with science, I think we would agree.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, yes.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Um, in my field, perhaps the conflict is more... alarming because I mean

• 51:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  did I tell you I didn't tell you this we have a big bang theater here and back when we first opened here at the Hayden planetarium um there's a separate theater space where we just talked about the big bang someone came out of the big bang saw me and says how come you didn't mention God in there and then I realized okay what am I gonna do I say how about this why don't you go to our hall of human evolution and then come back here when I tell them to do that they never come back because that's way more offensive to them having no monkeys and humans hold hands in the dioramas than anything we could ever say in the big bang

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I thought they'd rather like the big bang I mean the big bang sounds pretty much like Genesis

• 51:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's creation event yeah that's why they thought we should have mentioned God and didn't but I I just I don't I don't even have the conversation I just send them over to your part of the museum

• 51:53Speaker 01

  but I think you're being too puzananimous you shouldn't duck this question

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  well I don't duck it so much as sometimes I don't have the energy

• 52:03Speaker 01

  oh that's different I get that too

• 52:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you feel that

• 52:06Speaker 01

  I understand that um but but in the in my field that really is an absolute opposition

• 52:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  yes

• 52:14Speaker 01

  it's not something you can

• 52:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  complete although the Catholic Church they've met you in the middle

• 52:18Speaker 01

  yeah yeah they have

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  they said we have this branch of primates and then God breathed the soul into them and their humans allowing evolution all up to that point that's you gotta give give him something you gotta

• 52:31Speaker 01

  no not a not a step not a

• 52:37Speaker 01

  it's a total cop out

• 52:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  no but it's it's but but the world is not that binary it's not that binary I don't see it that way there are religious people who are who were Jesus is their savior but they're perfectly fine with a four and a half billion year old earth

• 52:54Speaker 01

  yes they are

• 52:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  okay they're not at the extreme

• 52:57Speaker 01

  they don't they don't see the contradiction but but yes

• 53:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so maybe the plurality of the world is a virtue rather than a than a

• 53:09Speaker 01

  It's so-

• 53:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not a virtue, I shouldn't use that word. Maybe the plurality of the world is a feature rather than a bug of the programming of what it is to be human.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  But the truth is so much more grand and so much more elegant and so much more poetic and so much more beautiful. Why drag Jesus in?

• 53:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I would still claim you could get more of that across if people didn't feel stupid talking to you.

• 53:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. I accept that.

• 53:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just saying.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're a professor at Oxford? Are you retired yet?

• 53:40Speaker 01

  I am retired.

• 53:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're retired, okay. And you were professor of?

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Public understanding of science.

• 53:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, I remembered that.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was a post created by-

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Charles Simone.

• 53:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To Charles Simone, yes.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he created multiples of those around the world. That wasn't the only one.

• 53:59Speaker 01

  No, he won't. It won't at the Princeton Advanced-

• 54:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the Institute for Advanced Study, maybe?

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right, yes.

• 54:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  I think that was in a different field. I think that was-

• 54:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay, okay. But it's interesting-

• 54:12Speaker 01

  He's a very generous-

• 54:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if you're wealthy and you want to make a change in the world, that's a way to sort of keep that going.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Absolutely, yes.

• 54:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. And there's another professorship somewhere in the UK, a professorship of the public understanding of risk.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Oh, that's good.

• 54:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is a, that's a professorship.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And forgive me, I don't remember where, but I know that exists.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Yes, that's good.

• 54:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And people have no way to judge or to think about that. It's a challenge in their lives. So-

• 54:38Speaker 01

  That is a fascinating subject. People get so wrong.

• 54:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes. Even smart people get that wrong.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People who would otherwise think should be smart-

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -don't get it. Well, Richard, it's been a delight to-

• 54:50Speaker 01

  As always, thank you so much.

• 54:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To have you here. Let me just end this with some brief reflections.

• 54:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's, those among us who are educated-

• 55:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On a level where you can't just hold it in, you have to sort of share the knowledge, wisdom, insights one gleaned from having committed your life to studying a subject and its related components. And Richard Dawkins is an example of that. Carl Sagan used to say, "When you're in love, you want to tell the world." And where there are two dozen books on this list that I just read, this is Professor Dawkins can't contain his love.

• 55:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got to share it for all those who seek a deeper understanding of life. Not only their own lives, but the lives of everyone around them, and the lives of all that came before us, and the lives of all those yet to be born. But in there are messages of protecting our civilization, because without it, there will be no future lives to be born. And then what of our branch in the tree of life? We can't let the roaches and the rats take over after us. Help us. That is a cosmic perspective.

• 56:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. As always, I bid you to keep looking up.