Combatting Anti-Science with Richard Dawkins

How do we stop anti-science? In this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson sits down with evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins to talk about religion, the importance of science communication, and Dawkins’ new book, Books Do Furnish a Life.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to feature an exclusive interview with the one and only Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins has a new book called Books Do Furnish a Life, which we'll spend a lot of time talking about because it goes everywhere and that's where we want to go. Richard Dawkins professionally is an ethologist, an evolutionary biologist, an author,

• 0:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  popularizer of his field and science in general and rational thinking all around. And so much of what he does is what we celebrate here on StarTalk. So we've got him. Richard, welcome back to StarTalk. This is not your first rodeo with us.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  It's such a pleasure Neil, thank you very much.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was looking at your book. Oh my gosh, Richard, dare I say, dare I even suggest, that if anyone read only one book of yours, it should be this because this to me reads like a cross-section of everything you have cared about and expressed professionally and in the public with regard to what your life has been about. Is that a fair characterization of this?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Well, it's very interesting. I never thought of that before Neil, thank you. It does span much of my career, ever since I started reviewing books, I suppose, and writing forwards to books. So yes, it's a good slice of my increasingly alarmingly long career.

• 1:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alarmingly long.

• 1:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I, you know, so I worried because people who start sort of collecting their life's works, it's almost like they're ready to die. And I don't want you dying anytime soon. So just, that's why I was worried when, uh-oh, uh-oh, let me check his heart rate.

• 2:05Speaker 01

  Well, let me reassure you, Neil. I've got two books, two other books coming out. One in November and one, I'm not quite sure when. But anyway, the one in November, I'm looking forward to very much. And so I'm not checking out any time soon.

• 2:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, stay alive at least until your last book gets published.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also, I noted in the first section of the book called "Front Matter," there's a list of all of your previous books. And I went down the list, and forgive me, Richard, I haven't read all thirty of them, fifteen or so. No, but I've read like three and a half, okay? And I got the list. I've read "The Selfish Gene," I've read "The Blind Watchmaker," I've read "The God Delusion," and I've read parts of other books. And I can say that each one of the books is a jewel. It's a jewel of writing, it's a jewel of science communication, it's a jewel of intellect. So I will extrapolate and declare that every one of these books is a jewel, and it forms a crown of some kind, some kind of bejeweled crown

• 3:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that is a gift to civilization of how you think and how you would welcome others to think to make a better world.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  How kind. What can I say? I mean, I'd love to think that.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let's go straight into some of these topics. I very much embrace your organization of the book. There's sections, and each section sort of delves into an area of science as it relates and as it is received by the public. And I'm honored, actually, to be mentioned in your first section, where you recount an interview that we had in my office at the Hayden Planetarium. We talked about science communication, and we were sort of trading notes, as how I remember it, and to see, you know, what succeeded, what didn't. And what I want for you, if, can you tell me?

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Over your years, what have you learned to do differently?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Good question.

• 4:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Based on either the trial and error of your successes or failures? Or did you find one recipe and you sort of stuck with it all the way?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  I'd be interested to know what your answer to that question is, Neil, as well. I don't have much of a recipe. And if anybody ever invites me to give a talk on something like science communication, I don't really know what to say. I mean, I just do it. I suppose one of the things that I do is to put myself in the position of the reader. And that's an obvious thing. How could anyone not do that? And yet, many people don't actually. You have to imagine yourself in the position of the reader who would, or the listener, who would wonder, what's he getting at there? What's happening there? I don't get that point. Please elaborate on that point.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  So I tend to imagine an imaginary reader looking over my shoulder. And it can be a particular person. It could be a person that, oh, perhaps wrote me a letter that day. And so I've got him or her in my mind. And so I imagine, what would it be like for her reading this? What would it be like for him reading this? I don't know whether you do anything like that. I should guess you probably do.

• 5:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I do that, yeah, of course, all the time. But I add another aspect to it, I think, and again, with varying success. Most people don't read. So for me, I always ask myself, is there something I can add to this that will attract someone who doesn't have walls of books behind them? You know, in their bedroom or in their den? And so that involves some sensitivity to just people in the street. And so I'm wondering for you... Um, how, what is the difference to you between the written word and the spoken word?

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the written word and the conversation you're having someone who's just curious in the street? You, you, you can't just tell them, "Read my four hundred page book." That doesn't work.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And actually, you're reminding me, Neil, of, of, of one of our first encounters when you took me to task. I think it might have been in San Diego or, or maybe Seattle or something like that. Um, and you said that, maybe you said something like, "It's got to be an act of seduction, an act of persuasion." Um, as opposed to, "Here's my book, take it or leave it." And you've just, as it were, reiterated that point. It's a very good point.

• 6:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me tell you, let me remind you what I, precisely what I took you to task about. And just to, to sharpen that memory, it was two thousand and six. It was a conference, one of, one of the early conferences that landed on YouTube. And so it received a lot of attention at the time. Today, it might get lost in sort of the noise of what's been posted. But two thousand and six, and they finally got all the talks together by two thousand and seven. So it was early clickable internet content. Um, and it had a, a mixture of scientists and a couple of theologians, if I remember correctly, skeptics. And it was just, it was called Beyond Belief. You know, what, where do we go if belief is not going to be the centerpiece here?

• 7:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All I told you at the table, which was the very first day I had met you, by the way. And I was very nervous because you're one of, you're one of my heroes of-

• 7:37Speaker 01

  I was nervous too.

• 7:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of science and communication. And what I, what I, I had seen you give a talk at this very same conference. Damn, this guy is sharp and the wit is just barbed. And it's like, and he knows he's right and he knows who, who he's talking to is wrong. And it was just, it was so precise and so there was no room to have a person just say, "Can you let me just..."

• 8:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, recover for a moment. And so I worried that your messaging was missing people because of how articulately barbed it was, that it might have actually turned people off. And then I, I said, perhaps you can go at this with a, with a more of a subtle art of persuasion, rather than just saying, I'm paraphrasing here, you all idiots, read my book, you'll be fine for it. See, so that would, that's what I came at.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  It's all coming back to me very vividly now. And, and, and I was, I was very, um, I was moved by it, actually. And what I said at the time, I think was, I gratefully accept the rebuke. Uh, and, and I did, um, I, I mean.

• 9:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you did. And you were very gracious about it. And, and by the way, no one back then knew me from Adam, but they all knew you. And when I said this, it was basically an attack. And it was this eerie silence in the room after I had spoken. And, and when you said, I gratefully accept your rebuke, it was like, oh. I think people wondered.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  It got a great laugh, not least from you. I mean, I, I, I recall, I can actually hear it again, your, your wonderful laugh as I said that. And I hope I've learned from that. I, I don't know whether I have. Uh, I wonder whether you agree with me that sometimes if you make a great effort to be clear, as we both do, it can come across as a bit aggressive. Sometimes people like to hear a bit of fladdling around, a bit of, a bit of woolly talk. And if you, if you make a real effort to talk clearly, they think it's somehow too in your face.

• 10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So that's, there is what you think it is, and there's how it's received, right? And as you can be an educator who faces the chalkboard and puts the notes on the board and not really paying attention, or you can try to meet the people, not just halfway, but maybe 90% of the way to their own space of thinking. And yeah, by the way, this, I will talk more about this a little later, but my primary, the primary value of social media to me, apart from what it is to wade through the cesspool that it is.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is I get to see how people are thinking. Based on what words I chose, what phrase I composed, what idea I put on the page. And I can say, oh, you're all wrong, or you misinterpreted me. No, this is a real, this is a real experiment in progress. If they misinterpreted you, if they didn't understand the word, how you used it, if, if that happened, that actually happened. It is real. So, so I, I've used social media as my source of awareness of how people think, what they think, and what I might want to do if I want to be more effective.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  That's interesting. And I, I find your, your tweets, which I look at from time to time, very interesting because you tend to be, I, I think you think of yourself as an educator, which you are, and, and you tend to give little snippets of interesting, fascinating science in a witty kind of way. And so you're, it seems to me that what you're doing is arousing people's excitement for science by what you tweet. And I wouldn't, I hadn't realized that you were actually looking out for how people respond to that. That's interesting.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in a way, it, think of it as a sort of a neurosynaptic snapshot of how people are thinking about what you're saying. So that next time you're in front of a large audience in an auditorium, let's say, you now have a, a portfolio of the, at least a statistical portfolio of how people are thinking and what they're thinking and why and what they're, and how they're reacting, more importantly. So that's, that's kind of how I, how I think about it. We've got to take a quick break, but when we return, more of my interview with Richard Dawkins, where we talk about religion in society. You knew we'd go there. We did.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. We're featuring my exclusive interview with Richard Dawkins. Let's jump right back into it. There are people in the world who have very strong belief systems. And for many, it's unresponsive to evidence. So there's that saying, I think it's 85% true. You can't use reason to argue someone out of a point that they didn't use reason to get into. So you need some other tactic. You've written so much and spoken so much about religion in the world, which almost by definition is faith-based rather than evidence-based. And so, how do you...

• 13:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are your tactics there? And why do you even care? If we live in a free society, people ought to be able to think what they want. Like, why do you care? What, you know, if God created the universe in six days and this is deeply held by someone's feelings? Why does it matter to you? Don't you care? I mean... Well, no, okay. No, so, thanks, okay, okay. All right? You just hit my serve back to me on a tennis court. Okay? So, I care when the religious thinking... And there's so many religions in the world and gods that have been praised in the world.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I care when that attempts to influence law, policy, and the science classroom. Otherwise, if you go to mosque on the, you know, on the weekend, synagogue, church, I don't... Fine, I don't concern myself with that.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Okay, I think this is where we may slightly differ. I do care about that, but I also care about this.

• 15:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I care more that we live in a free society where people can do that.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Yes, okay, I obviously I'm more for freedom. However, I do care if people think they live in a very different kind of universe from the one that I think they live in. Now, you and I would agree that the universe came about with the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago and all that stuff. And a wonderful, a wonderful story of inflation and then the origin of life and evolution and so on. This is a thoroughly exciting, exhilarating, stimulating story. Now, if people believe that the universe was invented by a kind of superhuman being,

• 15:56Speaker 01

  that is a, not just a falsehood, it's a, it's a, it's a denigration of the wonder of the truth. And nobody's better than you at expressing the wonder of the truth. And I'm surprised you're not worried that there are people who perpetrate, promulgate this minimization of the, of the excitement of what's really true.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you can offer them the truth, but if they prefer their personal truths of their holy books, then that's a decision they made in a free society. Now, now, here's the key words you used, promulgate. Yeah, if they say, "I am Christian, I'm gonna..." Well, this happened historically, happens less so today. "I'm Christian, I'm gonna make you Christian at the point of a sword." Then, yeah, I, I object to that, right? I don't, I don't want people's, the coercion of people's belief systems being forced on, as, as an act of force on others, be it in the school system or, or, or anywhere else. But I walk in this, I live in a city, as, as do you.

• 17:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You walk down the street, you see people saying, "Oh, the Jesus is coming, the end is near," or they're talking out loud to no one and spouting Bible verses. And I think to myself, "Wow, they really believe this. This is their, and that's their world." And I don't try to, I have, maybe because I don't have the energy to do so. I don't, I can't explain it. I don't know.

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I'm sure it's not that.

• 17:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't want them running for office, making laws that then have to apply to other people who have different religions or no religion.

• 17:43Speaker 01

  We agree about that. And I too do not want to bludgeon people into believing what I believe. I want to persuade them. I want to show them, as you do, how wonderful the scientific worldview is. I'm just sad if they don't get it. I mean, I, it's, I, of course, they're free not, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't want to compel anybody. But they're missing so much. And you must agree with that. I mean, when you think of how wonderful the stories that you tell in the planetarium are,

• 18:13Speaker 01

  if they don't get it, then they're missing so much. And it's such a shame. That's, that would be my way of looking at it.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So why is it their problem and not your problem? So in other words, why isn't, while they're not getting it, I must be failing at my attempts to persuade them?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  I agree with that.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than, oh, there you go, they can.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Of course. I mean, and that's why I work so hard at it. I mean, I, I work so hard at writing these books because I want people to get it. I don't want to force them to get it. I want them, I want them to get it because it's so wonderful.

• 18:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is, is it true that of all of your books, the biggest selling among them is The God Delusion?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  I'm afraid it is, yes.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you mean you're afraid it is?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  Well.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It just is.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  It just is. I would like it to be one of the science books, but, but it is, yes.

• 18:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because people are interested in the subject of God.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  I guess so.

• 19:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, yeah, and not only that, your, I heard you say on, I think it was an interview, that some non-zero fraction of the sales of that book were from evangelical religious folks to try to sort of...

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clue themselves in on how the other side thinks. Do you have any data on that?

• 19:21Speaker 01

  I'm not sure about that. It's certainly true that there are about 22, I think, books from evangelical, or from Christians, anyway, replying with names like Deluded by Dawkins and The Dawkins Delusion and permutations on the title of The God Delusion. So that is true, but I don't have any actual statistics on it.

• 19:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty cool, Deluded by Dawkins. Got to give him credit. Give him credit for that.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  There are lots, there are lots like that.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so that meant somebody out there was reading your book, that from the, from the other camp, I guess.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me more about your, the goal of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. And I'm delighted to say, you don't have to say this, that if your books are successful enough and there's a, there's a supply of cash, you can create a foundation that can help causes around the world in the service of a mission statement. And, and then the foundation attracts donors who are of like mind, as any foundation would be. So could you just give me a few sentences about this foundation?

• 20:33Speaker 01

  I, I started it soon after The God Delusion was published. And I started it both in Britain and America, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. It's now mostly based in America. And in the last few years, it merged with the Center for Inquiry, CFI, which is a much larger organization. And so there's now a big organization behind it. Between these, these two, it's a sort of sub, sub-department of the Center for Inquiry.

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, the CFI has magazines and, and lists.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a whole machine in place, yes.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  There's a whole machine there and, and a big office. And it, it has a whole division which is concerned with non-religious nonsense like astrology and, and homeopathy and, and things like that. Being abducted by flying saucers and stuff. And that's been going for a very long time. And so also has the secular humanism going on for a long time. And so the Richard Dawkins Foundation fits in nicely with that, but it's become a sort of junior partner to the CFI.

• 21:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a quick question about the term secular humanism. Aren't there deeply religious people who would call themselves secular humanists? And if so, could you explain that to me?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yes, there are, and they believe in, well, certainly secular, which of course means just simply that you don't let your religion interfere with politics. So that...

• 22:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is separation of church and state as a principle?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  So that in that sense, the foundation of the United States is secular. Secular does sometimes mean to some people a more anti-religious stance. It's never meant that to me, but I think it does mean that to some people. Humanism tends to be a bit like a religion, but it's not a religion because it's godless. And it's an ethical system. So secular humanism would be an ethical system which is god-free, godless.

• 22:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it. So if you're purely secular, then there's no way for you to think about morality and other topics that have been historically in the domain of religions. So humanism is an attempt to wrestle from, I'm asking if you would agree, it's an attempt to wrestle from religious communities, the understandings and implementations of moral code. Would you say that characterizes it?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yes, religions should not have a monopoly on moral codes and on ethics. So secular moral philosophy is an important subject.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is how you can get religious people embracing secular humanism because, or at least certainly secularism, but they're perfectly happy with their religion, but they too don't want religion in the politics. I guess that's the...

• 23:32Speaker 01

  There are people like that, certainly. And in Britain, for example, they're called Humanist UK now, or used to be the British Humanist Association. They have a rabbi who is in charge, or was in charge, and I'm sure he still is, of the campaign against faith schools, against schools which indoctrinate. So yes, there are people like that. There are many people who are sort of, call themselves secular humanists and who say that they're religious, but who often are... Kind of spiritual rather than believing in some particular religion like Christianity or Islam.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, how then would you create a code of ethics based purely on sort of science and rational thought? Because I've heard passionate, impassioned religious folks who can't possibly embrace the notion that moral code is invented by humans, that it's, they're sure it's something writ in our hearts and in our souls by a divine, all-knowing, all, all good entity.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Well, before answering your question positively, I should say that the idea that people could get their morals from religion is a horrible one. And you think about where it would come from, you think about if you had read the Old Testament, for example, I mean, you would not get your morals from the Old Testament.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's quite a bloody place, yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, nor would you get your morals from being scared of God, which is the other thing.

• 25:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I have a quick story from the Old Testament, and it disturbed me, actually. So, we all have seen the cinematic epic, The Ten Commandments, we've all seen that with Charlton Heston. And we all remember, Charlton Heston as Moses, he comes down from the mountain with his, with the tablets. Sorry, I remember the Mel Brooks version of that, where he has fifteen commandments, there are three tablets, and Moses accidentally, one accidentally, "Lord Jehovah gives us fifteen", and then one breaks, "Ten, ten, ten commandments, one with the other five, I want to know."

• 25:53Speaker 01

  But Moses did drop them, break them.

• 25:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he did, right, but after they were already sort of released into the world. So, yeah, he dropped them on purpose, not by accident. So, he comes down the mountain, and of course, they're, they're the tribes, you know, they made a golden calf, and everyone, there's revelry, and there's bonfires, and, you know, what is, he raises his staff, he drops the thing, and then there's lightning and thunder, and the earth opens up, and all the bad people fall on the earth, and the good remain. And I said, wow, that, okay, sure, that could happen. I mean, if you're God and you're connected to God, that's how that would happen. Then I read what quote actually happened in Exodus.

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I read this and it's, oh my gosh, what does Moses do? He says, are you with me or are you against me? Step on my side if you're with me and then took his sword and massacred with he and Aaron and others, took their sword and hacked to death everybody else. And I said, oh my gosh, this is, you know, that's, that's not even God, right? I can, I can handle it because God was doing all kinds of powerful things in the Old Testament. And if you're going to open up the earth, sure, had only the bad people fall in, sure. But Moses does it at his own hand. And I said, this is sad. This is, and so I couldn't, I couldn't reconcile the two.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what that meant was Hollywood wasn't going to go there. They were not going to turn Moses into a murderer. They were not going to do this or someone who just totally embraced killing. And so they cleansed even the Bible itself. And here we are thinking that the movie is some epic, um, slightly fictionalized storytelling of important books in the Bible. And they just took out something that I think would have been a, uh, like a scene out of the movie 300, whereas bloody, you know, heads cut off, disemboweled people, and that was not shown. That's all I'm saying.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  Well, I forget to it was said that the best advertisement for atheism would be to read the Bible. And anybody who actually reads the Bible from cover to cover is going to end up an atheist.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Well, apparently it doesn't work for, for everyone. We've got to take a quick break, but when we return, more of my interview with Richard Dawkins and we talk about the cost of pseudoscience in this world. Let's start talking.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Hey, it's time for a Patreon shout out to Tariq Shureh, David Matthews, and Jordana Sissini. Guys, thank you so much for your support of this show. Without you, we couldn't make our way across the cosmos. And for anybody else listening who would like their very own Patreon shout out, please go to patreon.com/stargtloradio and support us.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk, featuring my exclusive interview with the one and only Richard Dawkins. So, Richard, what is the future of religion in society? You know, it's been around for 10,000 years. Probably Neanderthal had some kind of religion, so it goes back even farther. So it seems to be a pretty fundamental part of the wiring of the human brain. So who are you to say, "Let's just unwire this"? It's almost evolutionary.

• 29:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it is. Of course, it's not totally, because lots and lots of people are actually not religious. And the number who are not religious is increasing. Statistics show that. I mean, I think even in America, which is the most religious country in the Western world, I think the number of people who no longer have allegiance to any religion is about 25%. It's about a quarter. It compares with any particular religion, that number.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In size, yeah, I see. Okay, so that's an interesting...

• 30:13Speaker 01

  In size.

• 30:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it could just settle there, right? And just stay...

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Well, it could do, but whatever the trend is, I'm hoping it'll continue. Except, unless, of course, what is replacing religion is something like woo-woo astrology, you know, the kind of nonsense which is not based on God, but which nevertheless is supernatural.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Um, and is just as bad, if not worse.

• 30:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Richard, I remember a study, but I haven't seen it duplicated. Uh, this is back going back now, I think to the nineteen eighties, where someone went across the country with a, with a, a survey and asked, um, do you believe in God or are you, do you belong to a church? This sort of thing. And in that same set of questions were questions like, do you follow astrology or crystal healing or spirit energies? This sort of thing. And so there was sort of the pseudoscience in mix among questions about religion. And what she found, this, this researcher, was that as you go across the country, you hit the Bible Belt, for example,

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the religiosity was high and the pseudoscience was low. And as you got to the Pacific Northwest and other sort of famously, uh, famous centers of pseudoscience, the pseudoscience rose and the religiosity dropped. And if you added those two fractions together, they were roughly constant across the country, which strongly indicated that, yeah, if you take away someone's religion, it's going to be replaced with something else. What do you think of that?

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Deeply depressing that, yes. I, I didn't know that. I did not know that study, but it does not surprise me. Uh, it, it discourages me, I must confess. Um, it's as though there's a kind of quotient of, of nonsense which needs to be filled. And if you, if religion doesn't fill it, uh, then, then other sorts of nonsense do. Um, I don't see why we can't fight against that. Um, it seems to me that that's pretty much what CFI is doing, both its wings, both the, both the anti-religion part and the anti, um, what you call it, um, other kinds of superstition part. Um, I don't see why we shouldn't win that battle. And the science, of course, is the way to win it.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  I mean, science is the antidote to both.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep. Well, what is your, what is, are there any evolutionary thinking about the value of superstition in the species? I read a study that ducks can be superstitious. Is that correct? They did some study where, and I forgot how, what the study was, but I read it's like, damn, the bird was superstitious. Cause there was something it did that we got the same result and then they changed it, but it kept doing it.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  I think, I'm thinking of pigeons.

• 33:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pigeons, okay.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  It's pigeons, yes. It's a, it's a classic study by Skinner, the inventor of the Skinner box. And you know, in a Skinner box, what happens is that the bird is, normally is rewarded for pecking at a key and gets food reward. Um, uh, but if you turn the mechanism off, such that it's used to the idea that it should be getting some reward, you give it rewards at random, regardless of what it does. Okay? And what happens is if you have, if you have half a dozen birds, all in separate boxes under this regime where they get food reward at random, they don't know why they're getting it.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  What happens is that each bird develops a different habit, superstitious habit, presumably quote, thinking that this is what gave it the reward. So you'll have one bird that preens its left wing, another bird that pecks its foot, another bird that looks over its left shoulder, another bird that waltzes round and round in circles. All these things Skinner observed. And that is a beautiful analogy to superstition where you, you sacrifice a goat and lo and behold, the rainy, the rainy season comes, which is what, what you want for your crops. And you think, ah, it must have been, you could be sacrificed a goat. And from then on, you don't dare not sacrifice the goat, um, for fear that next time the rains won't come.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  And so it is a beautiful demonstration of superstitious behavior in pigeons.

• 34:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know pigeons had shoulders. It looks over its left shoulder.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  They sort of do, don't they?

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess so. They're vertebrates, so they got some anatomical correspondence. Okay, so we want to believe we're in control of outcomes, whether or not that's a true fact.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  We're in a very complicated world where, um, in order to survive, we need to do some kind of intuitive statistics.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  Maybe Bayesian statistics, anyway, some kind of intuitive statistics. And we're not ideal, we're not very well versed in statistics unless we've learned it at school or university. And so we have to intuitively guess that something that we did might have had some beneficial effect or some bad effect. And it's pardonable in a way that we should be bad statisticians. It's entirely understandable that natural selection would have built into our nervous system a tendency to try to be a good statistician.

• 35:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's fascinating. So what you're saying is we are trying to be logical and rational in this world. And so that maybe gave us the capacity to be scientific at all. But when you don't have the methods and tools of science, it is rife with ways that this effort to be that fails. That's kind of what you're saying.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And add to that, add to that, that the world we live in is capricious and complicated. And so the weather is unpredictable, virtually unpredictable. The sudden appearance of predators, the sudden appearance of a spring in the ground, of finding a river, all these things are unpredictable. And so, I mean, they are statistically predictable, but they're not absolutely predictable. So we have to do statistics, we have to think probabilistically. And there's, I suppose, there's a trade off between what statisticians call a type one error and a type two error, false positive and false negative.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  If you make an error in the direction of, say, thinking it's a lion when it isn't a lion, then you waste, and you run scared from every little movement of the bushes, then you never get any eating done. On the other hand, if you're too blasé and you assume it's not a lion, then you get eaten.

• 37:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In some of the cases, yes, yes.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a difficult balance between being too risk averse and the opposite of being risk averse. And where the balance should be struck is difficult. And so when you get it wrong, it comes out as superstition.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you comment on the ethics of science? And who should be tasked with establishing any kind of ethical code? I mean, there's some out there, but it's I don't know that it's in any it's not some centralized document. Thou shalt not or thou shall. And so can you just reflect on that a bit?

• 37:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, in my field, thankfully, I don't have to think about the ethics of like studying black holes or the origin of the universe. There's no it doesn't touch human life in the ways that anthropology does that can influence legislation about how people treat each other or any kind of research into the genetics of what it is to be human or or different kinds of human. So I I'm I'm my field is largely untouched by that. The biggest trouble I ever got into was participating in the demotion of Pluto. Okay, that was I got raked over the cold. That was big trouble for me. Okay. I wasn't cold in front of Congress.

• 38:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the the closest we come to ethics is NASA has something called the Planetary Protection Division. So if we send a probe to a moon or a planet that might have life or might have ever had life on it, it goes through much higher levels of disinfecting or sterilization. Because we don't want, you know, someone might have sneezed in the lab and some rhinovirus lands on Mars and then in 10 years we discover the rhinovirus on Mars. So we don't want to contaminate our own research. But also, if we have sample returns coming back, there are protocols around how that gets handled. And that's been going on ever since the astronauts came back from the moon.

• 39:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were put in a little sort of airstream vessel until they were sort of investigated, decontaminated and the like. So that's that's the farthest we go. But your field, oh, my gosh. Um, you know, you go through some things like what your brethren were saying in the 19 In the 19th century, just about humans and about races and about and and how that worked its way into our society and into our culture. And right on through eugenics and and the Tuskegee experiment. So what do we do about science going forward?

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yes, well, I suppose we want to make a distinction between technology and science. And you're talking about science, not technology. In technology, of course, there are ethical problems. And in a way, your thing about disinfecting is more on that on that end of it. That also, I suppose, also the economics of space exploration. I mean, inevitably, no such thing as a free lunch. What's spent on space exploration cannot be spent on other things, on on human welfare. And so there is there's that angle to it as well. But you're asking me about my own field of biology, where we do have to face things like

• 40:28Speaker 01

  the status of humanity, the the status of humanity versus other species, for example, the kind of things that the philosopher Peter Singer has alerted us to. Cruelty to to to non-human.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sentient beings, yeah.

• 40:43Speaker 01

  What's what's the definition of human? When does a fetus become human? End of life, you know, euthanasia. All these all these problems arise in in medicine, abortion. You mention race and and the controversies over over discrimination and and and racial prejudice, all these things that they're terrible. Things that, as you said, in previous centuries. I mean, things are getting better, you have to say that.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, they are. It's it's people don't want people don't want to admit it. And particularly if you're only born in the present, you think of only bad things in the moment. But I had full record of what was going on from my parents and my grandparents, which I would span the last 120 years, I would say, where whatever stories I had, they had far worse stories. And so I I I had good anchoring in terms of, as we say, the arc of progress in our civilization.

• 41:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Richard, what happens if we both fail at the central mission statements that we've carried into our professional lives? We're trying to infuse the world with a bit of rational thought, decision-making. What happens?

• 42:10Speaker 01

  The obvious answer, which people might expect us to give, I suppose, would be that we would handle the COVID pandemic even worse than we did if science had been ignored completely. And so, science is obviously important for everyday life, all aspects of everyday life, not just pandemics, but everything. So there is that. So if science communication fails and people come to mistrust science totally, then it would be a very bad thing. But for me, that is not the only thing.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  For me, and I'm sure for you as well, people, I said before, people will be missing so much. I mean, science, both your science and mine, are great aesthetic experiences. I mean, it's like missing out on great art or great music. If you can't appreciate the universe in which you live, the life of which you're a part, the selves of which you're made, these are so important and so beautiful, so elegant, and wonderful, that I think that, for me, would be the worst aspect of if we fail.

• 43:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Richard, there's actually a theological version of what you just said, and it was uttered by Giordano Bruno, which got him burned at the stake. It was thinking that the stars in the sky themselves are other suns that could be orbited by planets. This, or he imagined that...

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  God was bigger than the God as described in the Bible. And so one of his famous statements is, "Your God is too small." There's a bigger God out there, of the larger universe where there are civilizations everywhere, uh, from here to the edge of space.

• 44:10Speaker 01

  You, you, you must know the Carl Sagan quote, he says something very similar like, "They say, 'No, no, no, our God is a little God, and we want him to stay that way.'" They can't bear the fact that science is making things so much bigger than their puny imaginations could ever conceive.

• 44:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so we're not the only ones who are aware of this. I remember one of the Microsoft billionaires, I think it was Charles Simone, endowed a professorship, I think it was at Oxford, for the public understanding of science. And wasn't that a chair that you occupied for a while?

• 44:44Speaker 01

  Yes, um, I was the first holder of the Charles Simone professorship of public understanding of science.

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I can't overstate how important that is because here are universities, which to some is just an ivory tower with eggheads and they just talk to themselves and they don't do anything relevant. Somebody comes along and says, "Bring some of that outside of your ivory-covered gates and share it with the public." And I wouldn't imagine a more fitting person than you for that. But since then, there's a, there's now a professorship for the public understanding of mathematics and another one, a professor for the public understanding of risk. Did you, have you heard about that one?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  I did not, that's very good.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh, yes, risk, risk. Can you spend a moment just reflecting on how people think about and make decisions in their lives regarding risk?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  It's a fascinating subject. I mean, it's not, I'm not very much of an authority on it, but yes, I mean, there are extraordinary things people get utterly obsessed with what actually amount to a tiny little risk and they ignore something far greater. You get very unpopular if you point this out because it seems callous. I mean, some of my friends have got unpopular of pointing out that, oh, maybe I better not even say, but something like... The death toll from nine eleven was was dwarfed by the death toll from motor accidents, that kind of thing.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  You can't say that sort of thing. People object because they say you're being callous to all the people who died in nine eleven. But the fact is that risk is very, very widely misunderstood. And obviously, you feel the same.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I do. And you're absolutely right. I think risk management, should we call it that, the management of people's thinking about risk needs to have a psychological component. All right. So you can be coldly mathematical and say, don't do this because it has a higher risk than you doing that. And you can tell people this, but it doesn't land the same way with them emotionally. So, Richard, here's an example of this sort of mismatched risk taking that people are doing. It's a story, it's surely apocryphal, but we can all picture it, where there's a child being brought to the mall, and the child is not strapped

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in the car seat. Okay. And they're just sort of bouncing around the backseat. And the parent takes them into the mall, and says, make sure you you hold my hand. I don't want you wandering away. Someone might steal you. Okay. So here's someone who is very hell bent on not losing her child in the mall to some, you know, criminal who steals in each children, but took no effort to strap them into the car seat. And and you can just look at the statistics of stolen children versus children who died in car accidents by being improperly restrained. And that should have just that should have just had a very different situation. Unfortunately,

• 47:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  in each case, the child did not die in that example. But that's you'd think it would be a simple case, but people don't do it. There's a psychological dimension to this.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  It really is. I can't top that. I mean, that's a that's a very, very, very nice example. I suppose another one might be the very tiny risk from vaccination, where list of not COVID necessarily, but but any any vaccination where it's where it that there are figures published where whereby a very, very small percentage of vaccinations have an adverse result.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  And people are scared of that. And they they don't titrate that against the hugely greater risk from the disease that's being vaccinated against.

• 48:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could it be that we are all at some level still deeply religious in the following way? If a doctor gives me injection, an injection, and I die from it, the doctor killed me. If nobody gives me an injection and then I catch a disease just out of the air, then that is the natural course.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In order of the universe.

• 49:05Speaker 01

  It's not just the doctor who killed, it's your decision to give the child the vac- you you made the choice to ask the doctor to give the child that vaccination. So you killed the child.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And and that's the asymmetry there, perhaps, is what you're suggesting.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, exactly. So I'm just wondering, whereas if it happened by natural causes, there is no one to blame, and you're not going to blame yourself, of course, but you can then sort of credit God in God's infinite wisdom, and God works in mysterious ways. You've got it out in that direction without carrying anger and ire for the rest of your life.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  You don't have to mean God in the literal, it could be just act of God in the insurance company sense.

• 49:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Insurance.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Just just simply, at least it's not, you were not responsible for it.

• 49:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were not responsible. So that's another psychological dimension if we're gonna think about risk.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  You were responsible because you had the option of giving the vaccination. And refraining from vaccinating actually is what killed the child.

• 50:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but nobody thinks, we're not, we don't think that.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  Exactly, because it's not an.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're being rational again, Richard.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 50:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we had kids, I I found some document published by the government that rate, that ranked causes of death at different ages. It's a fascinating, you know, when you're eight year old, what is the most likely way you will die, if you die at all? And this changes as you get older, right? So what I did was, as our kids went through the ages, we'd go around the house and and adjust what they had access to in response to the statistics on what was killing children at that age. And this, that was, so that we totally did not approach that emotionally. We did it completely rationally. But what it means is, you're absolutely right, our brain is not wired for statistics. And I was.

• 50:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astonished to learn the first person to take an average of numbers. Okay, that's like the simplest statistic you could possibly construct. It was something like the late seventeen hundreds or early eight.

• 51:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 51:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was not.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 51:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was not a thousand years ago. It was not. It was it's very late mathematics. And so that had to mean that we're just not wired to think probabilistically at all. If we could think statistically, that would change so many laws that are on the books about what is controlling our behavior and what isn't. That's what I would think. So Richard, this this last entry is you said you want it read over your casket. And no, no, no, that would mean this is your last book and I won't accept that. You do say very important, deep things in it, things that have affected my life. I have communicated it to others. And could you just summarize it briefly?

• 51:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't read it because I want people to read it when they have the chance. Just tell me in a few sentences what the gist of it is.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  I'm tempted to say over my dead body, but.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Okay, it's really reflecting on how lucky we are to be alive. And my particular way of putting that is to is to point out that the the number of different combinations of DNA that could have been here in my place is mega hyper astronomical. And so we are incredibly lucky to be here. We're incredibly lucky to be on to come to life on the planet that we have, which is which is well, obviously it has to be well suited to be for our life or we wouldn't be here. But nevertheless, we are very lucky to be around and we should make the most of our life. We should.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Not fear death necessarily, but try to make the best of our life as long as we have life, because it's the only life we get and we are very, very privileged and lucky to have it at all.

• 53:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to be alive means we die, which means we're the lucky ones because we even get to die.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  We're the lucky ones, we get to die. Most people have never even got to be born.

• 53:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ladies and gentlemen, that's Richard Dawkins and his latest book, just published by Bantam, A Division of Penguin Random House. Richard, thanks for being on StarTalk.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  Thank you very much. It's been a real pleasure, Neil. Thank you.

• 53:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This has been StarTalk. Thanks for listening. Some of you are even watching. I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astro physicist, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.