Race, Science, Religion & Evolution - Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, author, and emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford. I spoke to Richard on stage in Austin Texas as a part of his final ever live tour. The next day we got to sit down and discuss all the things we didn't have time to talk about the night before. Expect to learn what Richard thinks about the recent rise of cultural Christianity, whether religion was an influential factor on the evolution of humans, what Richard meant by “Race Is A Spectrum, Sex Is Pretty Damn Binary”, where people without a religious worldview should get their meaning from, Richard's explanation for evolution for those who don’t believe in it and much more... - 0:00 The Rise of Cultural Christianity 02:44 Dealing With a Shattered Worldview 05:13 Why Religion Arises in Every Culture 10:47 Biological Sex is an Obvious Binary 18:01 Race From an Evolutionary Perspective 25:43 Is Social Justice a Replacement for Religion? 28:04 Darwin’s Marriage Wish List 33:50 Richard’s Message to Evolution Sceptics 40:56 The Link Between Primates & Humans 45:49 Biology’s View of Consciousness 51:42 Why Behavioural Genetics is Still Controversial 54:16 The Ethics of Embryo Selection & Manipulation 1:04:37 What’s Next for Richard - Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

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

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of this recent rise of cultural Christianity, given that you were a big part of popularizing atheism over the last few decades? It seems like, have we already forgotten that? Is this sort of coming back around?

• 0:15Speaker 01

  Cultural Christianity means nothing. We're all cultural Christians if we were brought up in a Christian culture, and I was, and you probably were as well. And it doesn't mean anything at all. It doesn't mean we believe it. That's what's important, is whether you believe it or not. And I don't believe a word of it. But it is a simple matter of fact that I'm brought up in a Christian culture, so I'm a cultural Christian.

• 0:39Chris Williamson?

  It seems that there are gradations of belief now. I think people that you might not have expected to have used it so much, Jordan Petersons of the world, the Russell Brands of the world, the Andrew Tates of the world. I think, is it Latin Mass that is one of the quickest growing denominations, especially for young people? It's an entire ceremony that no one, unless you're educated in Latin, that nobody can understand. So beyond just the moniker of cultural Christianity, it seems like some kind of religious belief is increasing.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Of course, it's an advantage to be in Latin, that nobody can understand, because if you can understand it, you realise what nonsense it is.

• 1:26Chris Williamson?

  Some people would say that the reason that they like it is that it's got this sort of, like a pomp and ceremony, and it makes them feel connected to sort of the roots of what's going on.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  Yes, I get that. I'd imagine that.

• 1:44Chris Williamson?

  But it does seem, it's interesting to me that what was rebellious and sort of revolutionary and a bit kind of cutting edge was the atheism conversation, only not so long ago. And there has been some rebranding, whether it's men getting their passports and talking about wanting to convert to Islam, which I think would have been a very surprising thing to have heard, or Christianity too. It seems like that's the On trend de jour way to live your life.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  You follow trends in society. I'm not that interested in trends in society. I'm interested in what's true. And if there are trends this way, trends that way, that'll be different in a few years' time anyway.

• 2:32Chris Williamson?

  Uh huh.

• 2:34Chris Williamson?

  I do think that they are leading indicators of what we may see uh in future.

• 2:39Speaker 01

  That is possible, or the reverse.

• 2:42Chris Williamson?

  Also true as well. I think we spoke about this last night and obviously I do need to call it out. We had a great conversation on stage for sixty minutes and then another thirty, uh so some.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  I do rather wonder how we're going to cover something else.

• 2:57Chris Williamson?

  We covered a lot of ground last night. Um, one of the topics I really wanted to touch back on was much of people's beliefs and worldviews were pulled apart by typically where they would have got their worldview from being religion. If that is no longer as prevalent, if it's been disproven, if it's been criticized to the point where someone can't hold on to their belief anymore, that causes a vacuum, that causes them to not have something to believe in in the same way.

• 3:31Chris Williamson?

  What do you? What do you say to people that sort of miss have their life being imbued with meaning in a way where maybe they can't take it from rationality immediately like you do?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  I think it's rather demeaning to humanity to suggest they need anything like that. It's rather disrespectful, I think, of humanity to say you have to have some crutch to buoy you up in life. And if you haven't got Christianity, you turn to something else. Why assume, why denigrate humanity in that sort of way?

• 4:07Chris Williamson?

  I think the problem is, and I agree, and I very much appreciated your answer last night.

• 4:15Chris Williamson?

  The rational perspective on human psychology is to understand its irrationality a lot of the time. And that is sort of an odd circle to try and square. I think this is what is true, and this is what you should believe. But then there's this other branch, which is what we tend toward, stories and narrative and personification.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yes. I was very impressed with, both in Dallas and here in Austin, with the number of people who come up to me and say they thank me for helping them to get rid of their religious crotch. And I'm very heartened by that. I guess maybe they're the people who do come up to me.

• 4:57Chris Williamson?

  A little bit of a selection effect, perhaps.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  A selection effect. But it is very encouraging. And I do find that enormous numbers of people do seem to be turning against religion and not turning to some other kind of nonsense.

• 5:11Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. How, why do you think it is? We were talking about convergent evolution last night. Religion seems to be, would you call it a convergent memelution?

• 5:28Speaker 01

  You could. I mean, yes, you could say that. Oh, by the way, talking of convergent evolution, I looked up the crabs that you.

• 5:36Chris Williamson?

  Yes, brilliant. Okay. A little bit of a primer for everyone that wasn't there last night. I asked whether crabs are the pinnacle of evolutionary trajectory, because apparently lots of creatures go to it. What's true? Have I been psyopt? Is this?

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Okay, no. I looked it up. It's an article in Scientific American. And it simply is that there are a fair number of about half a dozen separate lineages of decapod crustaceans, which are converging on the crab way of doing things, which is to. As it were, lose the abdomen, make the abdomen very small and curl it up underneath the the big carapace. And it's just happened half a dozen times, which is convergent evolution, and that's very nice. I mean, that's a nice example, but talk about the pinnacle of evolution.

• 6:26Chris Williamson?

  Doesn't mean that humans in a few thousand years are going to become, okay, well, that's a that's a shame. Religion as a independently arising system that humans seem to have used culturally.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  It does seem to arise all over the world, everywhere in the world. Anthropologists tell us that people converge upon some kind of supernatural belief. That's very understandable psychologically, I think. But it does seem to be a convergent thing, and I can well believe it, I can understand it. People hunger for explanation, and when they didn't have science, they would naturally turn to, oh, the spirit of the river and the spirit of the mountain and the spirit of the waterfall and all that kind of thing. And then that graduated into gods like Thor and Wotan and Zeus and Apollo, and then graduated

• 7:21Speaker 01

  into the monotheistic religions. But there's no reason to believe any of them.

• 7:27Chris Williamson?

  Is that tendency towards supernatural explanations, when we don't have one that we can grasp onto firmly, a byproduct of the fact that most of our lives are lived through story and personification and death and battle and so on and so forth?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. And also the desire, the hunger for agency. We want there to be agents that are responsible for things. So rather than just say, the weather is due to the laws of nature, earthquakes are due to the laws of nature, you actually want it to be an agent, you actually want it to be some kind of conscious being. And that sort of does make sense, because when you live a perilous existence, as our ancestors did, then any kind of

• 8:17Speaker 01

  Random change in the environment could be danger. And the specific kind of danger that they would have feared would have been predators, would have been enemies. So rather than say, oh, it's a fact of nature that there's an earthquake or a volcano or a hurricane, it had to be a deliberate agency of some kind.

• 8:43Chris Williamson?

  There's an idea called compensatory control, which is interesting in psychology. So if somebody is given uncertain news, like uncertain medical diagnosis in a lab setting, they're more likely to see patterns in meaningless, random, static. And what it appears to be that when we don't feel like, when we feel like the world is chaotic and outside of our control, we begin to personify and create stories around it. I think this very much, even before the lab leak hypothesis had maybe been given more of the research and the grounding that it perhaps now has, a lot of people turn to

• 9:21Chris Williamson?

  that because I think it's oddly more comforting to believe that a global pandemic is caused by a malign scientist than just chance mutation of a silly little microbe.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yes, I think that's another aspect of what I was just saying. I think that's right.

• 9:41Chris Williamson?

  Is there such a thing as a, a kind of belief structure, a story that you tell yourself about the world, which doesn't involve the historical inaccuracies that you criticize, but that does sort of add comfort? Is there a way to view the world? Is there a halfway house between rationality and religion in your view?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  I can't think what it would be if there is. Can you think of what it might be?

• 10:12Chris Williamson?

  People talking about energy, the sort of more yogic side of things, even if it's not energy between people, but you know, channeling senses of themselves, better versions of themselves, you know, imbuing them. You know, you could look at it maybe from the lens of positive psychology, if you wanted to actually do this thing, that they may be projecting a version of themselves into the future, that they're using the expectation effect, as David Robson would call it. What about that?

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Energy rather makes me reach for my revolver.

• 10:42Chris Williamson?

  Perilously close to woo.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 10:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  What was that article that you wrote recently in Quillette? You said, race is a spectrum, sex is pretty damn binary.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  Okay, yes, that was republished from somewhere else, but it's just come out in Quillette as well. Everywhere you look in life and human life in biology, you see continuum.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Tall and short, there's a continuum between them, fat and thin, there's a continuum between them, black and white continuum between them. The one place where there is no continuum is sex. Sex really is a binary, just about the only binary we've got in human biology.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Male versus female really is an either or. It's extremely rare to come across some creature, some human certainly, which is neither a male nor female.

• 11:39Chris Williamson?

  Does that exist?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Depends how you define it. I mean, there are people with ambiguous genitalia. There are people who don't fit quite neatly into the diagnostic features which a doctor might use, like X, X, X, Y chromosomes, for example. There are people with X, X, Y or X naught. And they usually come out pretty clearly one or the other. I mean, X, X, Y comes out as male, X naught comes out as female.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  And the point I would make, the most important point I think I would make is that, never mind about X and Y chromosomes, never mind, because that's just, that applies to mammals and a few other things as well. Birds have the X, X, X, Y system, but it's back to front. In birds, it's the female sex that is XY or the equivalent of XY, and the male sex, which is equivalent of XX. So that's not a universal. What is universal is gamete size. There really is a disjunct between large gametes, which we call eggs, and small gametes, sperms. And right the way through the animal and plant kingdoms, you have this divide between male gametes and female gametes.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  There are hermaphrodites like earthworms and snails who do both. So they have both male. Gonads and female gonads. Uh, but the, the origin, it's, it's called anisogamy, the, the unequal gametes.

• 13:15Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And it's very interesting mathematical models which I, which I could talk about because I think it is interesting. Um, there is a system called isogamy, which is, which is found in certain algae. Where the gametes are equal sized, so you just have um, medium sized gametes which fuse together. Now economically speaking, you need two isogametes to make a full, a full sized zygote. Um, and uh, mathematical modeling has shown that isogamy is unstable in evolution. If an individual produces slightly smaller than average isogametes.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Then they need to pair with a, with a slightly larger one in order to produce a fully equipped zygote with all the necessary economic, we're talking economics now, the economic resources to make a, to make a zygote. So you have a tendency for a runaway selection, runaway evolution towards half the isogametes getting smaller and smaller and the other half getting larger and larger. And this has been shown mathematically, it's a plausible mathematical model. And the end product of this runaway process is eggs and sperms, eggs being the large ones and sperms being the small ones.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  So um, although isogamy does exist in algae and some fungi. Um, it's unstable and in the vast majority of animals and plants, you have anisogamy, meaning large gametes and, and small gametes. And that's the fundamental difference between the sexes. That's the one you can always rely upon anywhere in the animal kingdom. Sex really is binary.

• 15:06Chris Williamson?

  There's no such thing as a human that would produce both large and small gametes. That would be impossible.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that is true, but even if it wasn't true, it would be a very insignificant minor fact. It would be a kind of freak fact.

• 15:23Chris Williamson?

  Would that not, well, I mean, binary would assume that there is never any crossover between.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I suppose it would, but, but if you think about it as a frequency distribution, think of it as a frequency histogram. And you, and you class, and you set up a histogram with unambiguous males, unambiguous females. Um, I think I calculated once that the, um, that if the, that you couldn't possibly plot that histogram on paper, because the, the number of intermediates, if there are any, would be so rare. I, I represented it as, um, the New York, the, the Twin Towers, um, at the World Trade Center. If one of them is male and the other one is female, then the intermediates, if there are any, which is itself dubious, would be the size of a molehill.

• 16:09Chris Williamson?

  Compared with the Twin Towers?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Compared with, with the Twin Towers, yeah.

• 16:13Chris Williamson?

  Wow, yeah. It is interesting. Um, I guess we, we get into sort of lexical jujitsu a little bit, where what you actually mean by binary, and if you can find edge cases, if there are any like that, uh, does that outlier disprove the fact that you've rolled the dice so many times and it ends up always falling the same way?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Let's make a distinction, I mean, bimodal and, and binary. Um, but bimodal would be a, where you have a distribution like, like that, sort of twin, two mountains with a sort of valley in between. Um, and, um, there are plenty of examples of that, but, uh, binary would be that the, the intermediates, it is virtually non-existent or, or non-existent. So it's not, not, not a sort of. Gentle undulating curve like that, but a huge

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  Two twin towers.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:04Chris Williamson?

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• 17:48Chris Williamson?

  and that 90 day money back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to drinkag1.com/mordenwisdom. That's drinkag1.com/mordenwisdom. What was that Fleming article that troubled Darwin?

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Ah, Fleming Jenkin, yes. He was a Scottish engineer and he pointed out wrongly, because in those days, everybody believed in blending inheritance. They believed that when male mated with female, you got an intermediate. You got, say, if black mated with white, you got red with blue, you get purple. It's a blending, which is how they thought heredity worked. And it doesn't work like that. Mendel showed that, Gregor Mendel showed that.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  But in the time when, in Victorian times, when people thought heredity was blending, Fleming Jenkin argued that.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  Natural selection couldn't work because as the generations go by, variation would disappear. Everything would disappear into a kind of smear of grey.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  And therefore, there'd be no variation to to work on. Well, that's obviously not true, because as the generations go by, you don't get a smear of grey. Variation is, as a matter of fact, maintained. And the what Fleming Jenkins got wrong, and everybody got wrong, was thinking that heredity was blending. It's not blending. Genes are either there or not there. Every every single one of your genes, you got from either your father or your mother. And every single one of your genes, you will either pass on to any particular child, or you won't. They don't blend, they don't mix, they don't fuse. And because of that, the entire argument, Fleming Jenkins' entire argument disappears.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Hardy and Weinberg. Did that trouble Darwin, though? It did trouble Darwin, yes, and if only Darwin had read Mendel, he would have got the answer. But what's interesting is that although Darwin hadn't read Mendel, he came very close to discovering Mendel's laws himself, to discovering that actually, they didn't call them genes in those days.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  The particles of heredity really are particles, they really don't blend. Darwin actually did experiments on peas, which is what Mendel did as well. Edible peas? Yes, well, actually, sweet peas. Right, okay. No, I think edible peas too. And he found that the progeny were either or. They they were not, they didn't, they didn't blend, which is which is Mendel's Mendel's laws. And then he said something very significant. He said, but I do not consider this any more remarkable than the fact that when you get a when a male mates with a female, you get either male or female offspring. See, that is pure mendelism.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  And all that anybody had to do, all that Mendel had to do, all that Darwin had to do, all that Fleming Jenkins had to do was to say, what goes for sex goes for everything. Um, cause when you get, when a male mates with a female, you do not get an intermediate hermaphrodite. You get either a male or a female offspring. That's just Mendel's principle writ large. And, and all that Mendel did was to show that the same thing applies to everything, not just sex.

• 21:28Chris Williamson?

  What has this got to do with race in the discussion?

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Oh, well, ra- race is, is interesting because race really does appear to be blending. If, if a black person mates with a white person, you tend to get an intermediate. Um, and you, and that's why so-called African Americans are a complete spectrum from, from white to black. Uh, and what's, that was going on there is, is polygenes. That's to say, lots and lots of small genes having, each one having a little additive effect. So although each one of those genes is Mendelian, is either there or not there, is a particulate, either there or not there, does, it doesn't blend. The effect of having lots of genes sumating their effects is to ma- is to look as though it's blending.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  So rather than thinking of mixing black paint and white paint and you get gray, what you're doing is mixing black beads, black balls with white balls and, and you get, and you get a, what, what, there's, they are still black and white in the, in the bag that you're mixing them, but the e- effect from a distance looks gray.

• 22:33Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 22:36Speaker 01

  And that's polygenes.

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  So I don't know, but I'm going to guess that being transracial or identifying, uh, u- u- using how you feel to say that you're a different race. I, some people seem to have done this and then other people said that they couldn't do this. I don't know how prevalent that is, but I'm going to guess that there would be significantly more pushback against that than there would be about identifying yourself as transsexual.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 23:03Chris Williamson?

  Despite the fact that, based on

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:06Chris Williamson?

  your position, the evidence actually allows somebody to be,

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Yes, yes.

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  I am both

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  Korean and Uruguayan.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yes, it's an extraordinary paradox that, that, that if you, if you attempted to be transracial, as a woman called Rachel Dot Dollazell did, um, you get

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Brick bats hurled at you from all directions. I mean, you're disgraced. You're put in the stocks and have metaphorical tomatoes thrown at you. Whereas if you decide that you're a different sex from the one that you actually are, then you're lauded to the skies. It's exactly the wrong way around because race really is a spectrum when sex isn't.

• 23:44Chris Williamson?

  What do you make of the primaring of race and the sort of focus on it over the last few years? Why do you think that's happening?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Well, I think it's a very American phenomenon and there's an American obsession with race. And I mean, a lot of it is white guilt because of slavery, which is of course understandable. I mean, never mind about slavery itself, that's bad enough, but the conditions of the slave ships,

• 24:13Speaker 01

  absolutely appalling.

• 24:14Chris Williamson?

  What like? I'm not familiar with.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Oh, God. There are pictures. You can see pictures. Google it. There are pictures of slave ships in which you have rows and rows of people chained up, lying like sardines in a tin for the whole of a voyage across the Atlantic from Africa to America.

• 24:35Chris Williamson?

  How were they fed? How did they go to the bathroom?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  It doesn't bear thinking about. It just doesn't bear thinking about. It's among the most cruel things I can, that's ever been perpetrated by humanity. So there is ample reason for guilt.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  But there's no particular reason why white people should feel the guilt of their ancestors just because they're white. I mean, everybody is, we're all human and we should feel utter disgust at what was done by the slave owners and the slave shippers.

• 25:13Chris Williamson?

  Who were also of varying races, the people who were selling people into slavery.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Well, in Africa, of course, African chieftains were selling people into slavery all the time.

• 25:23Chris Williamson?

  Even if they weren't the captains of the boats?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Exactly. So, but, but all I'm saying now is that, is that the, the behavior was absolutely appalling, but there's no particular reason why, because you happen to be the same color as somebody who perpetrated these awful things, that you should feel guilt.

• 25:43Chris Williamson?

  Can you or can we draw a line between an increased focus on identity politics and a decline in religiosity? Is this people grasping at something, trying to find their meaning elsewhere?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Well, that's often said, and I think you brought it up earlier, that those of us who opposed Christianity and attempted to dissuade people from being Christian are to blame for-

• 26:08Chris Williamson?

  Not quite. I may be asked whether the vacuum-

• 26:10Speaker 01

  Some people have said that. Some people have said that. We're to blame for opening the door to a new kind of nonsense.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  And what do you think about that?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Well, it's ridiculous. I mean, I'm an all-purpose enemy of irrationality wherever you find it.

• 26:32Chris Williamson?

  Do you think that there could be a compulsion, disposition, predisposition that humans have to look for those kinds of answers and with that religion dropping away, that they would find it somewhere? Social justice activism, so on and so forth?

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Well, so they tell me. I mean, enough people have said that, that there may be something in it. It doesn't ring plausible to me, but still.

• 27:01Chris Williamson?

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• 27:46Chris Williamson?

  $350 off the brand new Pod4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight- Sleep dot com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's E I G H T sleep dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout. Speaking of Darwin, did you ever see, read the list of reasons that Darwin wrote down when he was deciding whether or not to become married? I wanted to read this out. It's one of my favorite.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  Oh, better than a dog anyway.

• 28:17Chris Williamson?

  Phenomenal. So Darwin, he got married a little bit later in life because he'd been away on voyages and stuff. And he's in Victorian England. So people, he did people, the expectations. And I think he nearly sort of had a pen pal relationship, maybe a couple of times, maybe a cousin, something like that. And then that didn't happen. And then finally he needs to make the decision. He's going to make the call. Document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry. And above them circled are the words, this is the question on the pro marriage side of the equation. Were children, if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age, who will feel interested in one? Object to be beloved and played with after reflection of an unknown length.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  He modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow. He continued home and someone to take care of house charms of music and female chit chat. These things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time without warning. Darwin had from the pro marriage column swerved uncontrollably into major anti marriage factors. So major that he underlined it, this issue, the infringement of marriage on his time, especially his work time was addressed at great length in the appropriate not marry column. Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it. Conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time.

• 29:44Chris Williamson?

  Cannot read in the evening fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books. And if many children forced to gain one's bread. Such, so fascinating.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Immense selfishness. Um, yes, well, times change, don't they?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Yes, the shifting moral zeitgeist I.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was actually asked to read that at somebody's wedding.

• 30:13Chris Williamson?

  Oh, fantastic. What a morbid way to begin a marriage.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:18Chris Williamson?

  Did you accept or no?

• 30:19Speaker 01

  Well, I did, but I I I think got a few laughs anyway.

• 30:23Chris Williamson?

  So good. What, you know, we're going through a

• 30:29Chris Williamson?

  population decline, fewer people being bothered about getting into relationships, lowest rates of marriage that we've seen ever on record, childlessness, so on and so forth. What do you

• 30:42Chris Williamson?

  what do you make of that? What do you think about the?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yes, you read this last night. I was not aware of it and I haven't had time to look it up. So so I'm I'm not can't say anything more than I did last night. Nothing.

• 30:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, true. Well, the population thing, like I say, is an interesting question. The marriage thing, you know, just the companionship. So you can see there's this degree of responsibility, bringing another life into the world, especially if you were during your formative years during COVID and under socialized and the risk averse and helicopter parenting and screens and social media and all that stuff. Like, you know, I can kind of see it. I would like to think that the own one of the only two things we need to do survive and reproduce. I like to think that the reproduce thing was sufficiently powerful to kind of overcome that. So it's kind of impressive in a way that it's not. But when it comes to the marriage side, and even pulling back from that in survey data, there's a lot of

• 31:36Chris Williamson?

  young people that say they're just not fussed with dating. They're sort of working on themselves or they're not ready to meet somebody or whatever it might be. And given that there's very little financial responsibility, at least in a relationship that's not married. It's very surprising. I I kind of feel like, I don't know, I feel like there's something else going on that I, even though I've spent a lot of time thinking about it, I still feel like there's something that I'm not seeing.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Yes, I have nothing to say about that, really. I I don't. I'm not a sociologist and I don't quite understand why it is that there are certain trends that that seem to to go through society like that.

• 32:20Chris Williamson?

  There's definitely one.

• 32:23Chris Williamson?

  This wouldn't necessarily explain the casual relationship thing, but it would explain at least part of the marriage thing, that if in order to be able to have sex, you need to first become married, there is quite a high.

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Well, in past centuries, that would have been the case, yes.

• 32:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and now that that's no longer the tradition.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:47Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps people are having their cake without having to eat it, or eating their cake without having to have it.

• 32:51Speaker 01

  That's a better way around, actually. The conventional way is have your cake and eat it, but actually, that doesn't make any sense. Of course, you've got to have it before you can eat it, but eat your cake and have it, it obviously is the necessary wording of the paradox.

• 33:05Chris Williamson?

  So I don't know how much truth this is, but apparently, the way that the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, was caught was his brother was reading the manifestos that were being posted in the newspaper and noticed certain, like, literary artifacts, linguistic artifacts, and one of them was, eat your cake and have it too, as opposed to the more.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Although the Unabomber was actually using the more sensible wording.

• 33:36Chris Williamson?

  Correct. Yeah, exactly. But unfortunately, the one that was a lexical fingerprint that allowed him to be identified.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  I never knew that.

• 33:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, it's cool. I've noticed this recently, over the last few years, I've talked about evolutionary psychology, biology on the channel a lot, and in the last five, I've seen an increasing number of evolution skeptical comments. I don't know whether that's the part of an underlying trend that's going on.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  That is disturbing. Where do you see these comments?

• 34:14Chris Williamson?

  On YouTube, also in discussions that happen on something like Twitter.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  Are they religiously motivated?

• 34:21Chris Williamson?

  It's hard to tell. I would guess, at least in part, but then there'll be a small

• 34:29Chris Williamson?

  Perhaps non insignificant portion of people that are sort of largely skeptical about lots of things, it's skeptical about whether Australia exists or Antarctica exists, or the earth is flat. You know, you mentioned yesterday about belief structures clumping together in reliably predictable ways. But I kind of wanted to, you're the guy, if anyone's the guy, you're the guy. If people have a skepticism about the accuracy of evolution, what explanation or evidence do you tend to take people through when you're wanting to do?

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Okay, I was gonna say, before getting on to that, it's hard to see what you could, what you could possibly put in its place. I mean, if, I don't see how you could be anything but religious, if you object. I mean, you've got to have some explanation for the extraordinary complexity of life and the apparent design of life, which is just phenomenal. Some people are not even aware of it, but if you, if you actually are aware of the prodigious complexity of living things, down to the very cellular level, biochemical level, then you cannot be sane and, and not seek for some kind of explanation for that. And if it's not evolution,

• 35:50Speaker 01

  it's got to be, presumably, it's got to be-

• 35:52Chris Williamson?

  Some story.

• 35:54Speaker 01

  God.

• 35:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  So, so I think if anybody calls himself an atheist and a non-evolutionist, he's probably not really thought it through very hard. Okay, but you were asking me about how to convince people.

• 36:10Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're, you're explaining to somebody the, the evidence of evolution. What's your favorite way to-

• 36:16Speaker 01

  Of course, there's an enormous amount of convincing evidence. I think that the evidence of geographical distribution is one that doesn't first spring to mind, but is an important one. Why are-

• 36:34Speaker 01

  All the mammals, all the native mammals in Australia, except bats, marsupial. When Noah's Ark came to rest on Mount Ararat, why would all the marsupials march in a column to Australia and not leave any relics or fossils behind on the way? I mean, that would be a very simple elementary thing. But perhaps a more serious piece of evidence would be molecular genetics. If you actually look at the data of DNA sequencing

• 37:19Speaker 01

  in different animals, it forms a perfect hierarchy. And what could that hierarchy be? I mean, a branching hierarchy, what could that be but a family tree? So you find that if you take, say, shrew and mole, and you looked at their molecular sequences, they would be very, very close. They're very, very close cousins on the evolutionary interpretation. And all the different molecules agree. So it's not that half the molecules make them close cousins and the other half make them distant cousins.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  They all agree with very few exceptions, which are interesting in themselves. For example, if you looked at those genes specifically involved in hearing, you would find an apparent cousinship between bats and toothed whales because they both use echoes. So that's a sort of exception that proves the rule. But mostly, the tree of cousinship is an obvious signature of a pedigree.

• 38:38Speaker 01

  Those are two, I mean, you can do the same thing, not with molecules, but with bones and anatomy generally, which is what Darwin had available to him, of course, because Darwin didn't have access to molecular information. What Darwin had access to was comparing things like the limbs of vertebrates, the hand of a human, the flipper of a turtle, the leg of a horse and so on. And nowadays, we can do the same thing with enormously more data, using, looking at either protein sequences or DNA sequences.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  So those, I think, I mean, those are fascinating pieces of evidence. The fossil record is very nice evidence as well, because you get sequences. There are not fossils in the wrong place. When J B S Haldane was asked for what could be convincing, falsifying evidence of evolution, he promptly said fossil rabbits in the Precambrian. They don't happen. There are no fossils that are out of place, out of the sequence.

• 39:52Chris Williamson?

  In other news, this episode is brought to you by Shopify. Look, you're not going into business to learn about how to code, or build a website, or do backend inventory management. Shopify takes all of that off your hands and allows you to focus on the job that you came here to do, which is designing and selling a cool product. Businesses that sell more sell on Shopify, and that is why they are the global force behind Jim Shark and Skims and ALO and Neutonic. When it comes to converting browsers into buyers, they are best in class. Their checkout is 36% better on average compared to other leading commerce platforms. And with Shop Pay, you can also boost conversions by up to 50%. Best of all, their award-winning support is there to help you every step of the way.

• 40:35Chris Williamson?

  So upgrade your business today and get the exact same checkout that we use at Neutonic on Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at the link in the description below or Shopify.com/ModernWisdom, all lowercase. That's Shopify.com/ModernWisdom to upgrade your selling today. What's the current status of the missing link from primate to human evolution? I remember. This is old stuff and it's not something that I've looked into very much, but that the lineage, maybe fossil record, I'm going to guess, there's certain chunks that seem to have large blocks missing. Is there such a thing?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  No.

• 41:20Chris Williamson?

  No?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Not, not missing anymore.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  What was the status? Was that when you began your studies?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  No, no, no.

• 41:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh, is this a long time ago?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  No, long before that. In Victorian times, in Darwin's own time, there were, there were no fossils to speak of. Now we have lots of fossils in Africa, as Darwin predicted. Darwin guessed that Africa was the place to look.

• 41:46Chris Williamson?

  Why? Why did he choose Africa?

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Because of resemblances between humans and chimpanzees and gorillas, which are the African apes, as opposed to orangutans and gibbons, which are the Asian apes. And so anyway, that's what, that has proved to be the case, both in, in East Africa and South Africa. Very rich fossil record now of ancestral humans, not of ancestral chimpanzees, but, but there are of ancestral humans.

• 42:15Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a particular favorite or ancestor of ours that you're fascinated with, some other branch of the?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  Not really, no.

• 42:28Chris Williamson?

  I was reading a really great book about Australopithecus.

• 42:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  I thought that was really cool. That seems like a, you know, if you're going to be one of the, being us isn't bad, Homo sapiens is pretty cool, but Australopithecus seems like a cool.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yes, they, they were, they were upright walking, but they had brains not much bigger than a chimpanzee. So, so it was like they were sort of upright walking chimpanzees. And yeah, they're pretty charismatic. I mean, Mrs. Pleas, and they've got names like Mrs. Pleas, Dear Boy, Lucy.

• 43:08Chris Williamson?

  I remember reading as well about, I think it was only, when was the last other Homo branch still alive? It was only 12,000 years ago or so, is that right?

• 43:21Speaker 01

  It depends how you define it. The preceding Homo species is often thought to be Homo erectus, but then there are various other ones which are dubiously assigned specific status like Homo redesiensis, Homo hydablegensis. These are, as you would expect, they're all intermediates. I mean, why wouldn't there be, be worrying if there weren't intermediates? But the widespread one is Homo erectus, which originally was meant by, was went by the names like Oh, Peking Man and Java Man. But they existed all over, all over Asia and Africa.

• 44:03Chris Williamson?

  Was there a

• 44:07Chris Williamson?

  shorter, smaller version of us? Was that over?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Oh, you're thinking of Homo floresiensis.

• 44:14Chris Williamson?

  That's it, yes. Indonesia?

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Well, yes, there's, there's one island, Flores, in, in, in the Indonesian archipelago where these little midgyty creatures lived. And it's a bit controversial. Some people think that they were, they were not a different species at all, but just, just freak examples of, of Homo sapiens. But

• 44:40Speaker 01

  some people think that they were a, an island version of Homo erectus. It's fairly common for island mammals to be either giants or dwarfs. And

• 44:54Speaker 01

  for example, on the Mediterranean islands like Cyprus and Crete, there were dwarf elephants, which must have been very sweet.

• 45:06Chris Williamson?

  Am I right in thinking, at least the story that I'd heard about Homo floresiensis was that because of resource limitation, the smaller versions of everything are better able to survive because they need less, fewer calories?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  That's one, that's one account, that's one, one theory for why you get island dwarfism, yes.

• 45:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, but I think those miniature elephants may also have been on that island in Indonesia too, which would mean, if that was true, that you would have had these tiny versions of humans chasing these tiny versions of elephants, presumably with tiny sticks.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:43Chris Williamson?

  Which, yeah, it's a shame that we, yeah, that we didn't have that. What's your latest thinking around the hard problem of consciousness? Where are you at with that?

• 45:54Speaker 01

  You're asking the wrong person. I'm a humble biologist and I don't aspire to the philosophical heights. I rather doubt whether philosophers actually succeed in that either, but, but I think it's, it's called the hard problem for a good reason. And I don't have anything to contribute.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  Even from a, what does biology have to say about consciousness? Does it have anything to say?

• 46:28Speaker 01

  It ought to, I mean, one day it will, because it is obviously a biological problem.

• 46:34Chris Williamson?

  Why have the philosophers taken over?

• 46:36Speaker 01

  I suppose it's just very difficult to see what, to see what evidence you could bring to bear on it. And it clearly has something to do with brain activity. It clearly has something to do with the immense complexity of the brain, the huge numbers of neurons, the even huger number of, of connections between neurons in the brain. And I don't even know what a theory of consciousness would look like. I, I can sort of see in the case of the other great baffling thing of the moment, which is the origin of life, I can see the kind of answer that, that would have to be. Well, we don't know what the answer is, but I, I know the sort of answer I would expect.

• 47:19Speaker 01

  But in the case of consciousness, I'm not even sure what it would look like.

• 47:23Chris Williamson?

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• 48:08Chris Williamson?

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• 48:25Chris Williamson?

  modern wisdom. From an adaptive explanation, what use is consciousness to humans?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Well, even that's controversial because there have been people who've argued quite reasonably that you could have a robot which was unconscious, which could behave in all ways necessary to survive and reproduce and yet didn't have self-awareness. And so

• 48:59Speaker 01

  I think it must have a use. I think consciousness must have a use. But not everybody thinks so. And there are people who think that, well, I mean, the rather prodigious feats of that ChatGPT and other artificial intelligences that we have now.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  If they were controlling the behavior of a robot animal, it could very well survive, do a very competent job.

• 49:36Chris Williamson?

  Effective P-zombie.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  And we could, yes. And so I

• 49:43Speaker 01

  I mean, people have worried about what consciousness is for for a long time.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  My favorite, I mean, this is total bro-science from me as the least educated person out of two people that don't specialize in consciousness. But um, my favorite explanation is it seems like a human brain size is at least partly driven, maybe largely driven by our requirement to be able to track the size of the social groups that we were in, the complexity of that. And that, to me, seems like a fundamental driver of what humans needed to do was related to our social environment. Therefore, our ability to have a phenomenological experience, a sense of being us,

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  allows us to have a sense of what it's like to be somebody else.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:39Chris Williamson?

  And that theory of mind predicting, I know Richard, I know Richard's demeanor, but Richard's not friends with Derek, but Derek's friends with John and John's friends with Richard. So and actually, but John's a little bit more friends with Richard than he is with Derek. And that, to me, just seems like, okay. And then the sense and the ability to do math and consider the universe and all the rest of it is maybe a bit spandrly and it just sort of.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  A bit just emergent properties. Yes, I like that sort of theory. I associate it with Nick Humphrey or Robin Dunbar. The, I think Nick Humphrey's version is, is in order to second guess what your social rivals or friends are going to do. You have to look inside yourself and.

• 51:25Chris Williamson?

  To first guess.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  And yes, yes.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Yes, I mean, I like that.

• 51:35Chris Williamson?

  Good, good. Well, I'm glad that I've got a speculative seal of approval with regards to that. And one other area, we touched on this a little bit last night. Behavioral genetics were about, were, I think, on the cusp of gene embryo selection, then probably getting into just outright manipulation of genes for humans.

• 52:01Chris Williamson?

  Where would you get people to start? If I do think that behavioral genetics and properly understanding that, or at least having a baseline understanding of that in the way that most people do or many people do about evolution is important. Behavioral genetics seems to be something that I don't think has had necessarily a Richard Dawkins yet.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Oh, well, but are you talking now about genetic manipulation?

• 52:26Chris Williamson?

  No, in terms of the fact that we have heritable traits from a behavioral perspective.

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a fairly flourishing field.

• 52:33Chris Williamson?

  Blomman and so on.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I don't think I had, I don't have a problem with it. Do you have a problem?

• 52:42Chris Williamson?

  Not at all. I just, for some reason, it doesn't, there seems to be a lot of pushback against it. Maybe it's just that the work is more recent. Maybe it's that people seem, for some reason, to think that it gets perilously close to eugenics.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Oh, I think that's probably the reason. Yes, I think it's politically scary to some people. They don't like the idea of, I mean, there are still people who hanker after a blank slate and hanker after the idea that the human mind is sort of open and you can pour anything into it and.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  Does that make you want to sort of face palm yourself into eternity?

• 53:26Speaker 01

  A bit, rather, yes, a bit. And I, I, I, I don't understand the hostility, for example, to evolutionary psychology, which, which, as you know, flourishes here in Austin.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  I, I mean,

• 53:45Speaker 01

  every other species has a perfectly good behavioral genetics. No reason why humans shouldn't.

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I guess the, many of the same people that would have a problem with. Heritable, heritability explanations for behavior also have a hypoallergenic cockapoo for a dog.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yes, quite, yes.

• 54:08Chris Williamson?

  What do we think this is? Like, what's that?

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Exactly, yes, exactly.

• 54:11Chris Williamson?

  If it's not

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:13Chris Williamson?

  the same over here, which is, yeah, oddly interesting. What's your sense around the ethics of gene embryo selection for humans? And then if we were to take it one step further to the outright manipulation getting into the hardware?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  I don't see any problem with, and I don't think anybody else should see any problem with attempting to remove dysgenic effects like hemophilia, where you can do it with, without

• 54:46Speaker 01

  draconian measures, you can do it with in vitro fertilization, where the, the current procedure is to

• 54:57Speaker 01

  have the woman super ovulation, and then you have a dozen or so

• 55:05Speaker 01

  embryos, zygotes, in a petri dish, and you choose one at random and implant it back into the woman. Well, why choose at random? Why not choose non-randomly? In those cases where there is a danger of an hereditary disease like hemophilia,

• 55:28Speaker 01

  you can examine the genes of these very early embryos. And instead of choosing at random, choose one of the, say, 50% that don't have the deleterious gene in question. And if only that could have been done for the Zarevich, who, Alexei.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And similar, I mean, other other members of the European royal families would have been a wonderful thing to do.

• 56:02Chris Williamson?

  Iceland has, I think, completely eradicated Down syndrome in the country. Obviously not through IVF with screening.

• 56:13Chris Williamson?

  I don't think that that's the way that every woman's getting pregnant.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  No, well, Down syndrome actually is not hereditary.

• 56:19Chris Williamson?

  What is it that, oh, so this is.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Well, no, I mean, it it it's it's an effect of of of

• 56:30Speaker 01

  an embryological defect, but it's not, there's no hereditary tendency to to get Down syndrome.

• 56:37Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And so it would not be a eugenic, in the strict sense, it would not be eugenics.

• 56:44Chris Williamson?

  Do you know if two Down syndrome parents are more likely to have a Down syndrome child?

• 56:51Speaker 01

  I think not, but I don't know.

• 56:54Chris Williamson?

  That's fascinating.

• 56:56Speaker 01

  Well, you don't, don't be too.

• 57:00Chris Williamson?

  If it's true.

• 57:01Speaker 01

  Yes, okay.

• 57:02Chris Williamson?

  If it's true, I haven't pinned your colors to the flag of that particular claim, don't worry.

• 57:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think this is, I've had a number of conversations with guys who are philosophers in this space, who are geneticists in this space, a couple of them that are spinning up companies as well to do this, to bring this service to the general public, not cheap. But I think this is probably going to be one of the big frontiers. I think gene embryo selection and large language models and whatever they end up growing into will be two huge forks. But who is talking about sort of gene embryo selection that much in Harrison?

• 57:46Speaker 01

  I was talking about getting rid of dysgenic effects like hemophilia. It becomes more controversial when you're talking about.

• 57:54Chris Williamson?

  Taller, stronger, smarter.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  That, yes, and musical genius and that that sort of thing.

• 58:01Chris Williamson?

  What's your feelings around that?

• 58:03Speaker 01

  Well, I don't understand why people are quite so hostile to it because at very least, people don't show the same hostility hostility towards parents who are ambitious to have a musical child and force the wretched child to have to practice scales all day long. So you you you might say it's somewhat less draconian to to do an IVF selection in the first place.

• 58:30Chris Williamson?

  And to force your child to sit on the seat and play piano for however long.

• 58:34Speaker 01

  Um, so it it there's a certain amount of self contradiction, I think, inconsistency going on there. But nevertheless, positive eugenics of that of that sort does have a bad rap.

• 58:49Chris Williamson?

  Poor branding.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Well, I suppose

• 58:54Speaker 01

  because of Hitler and and but that that was a government dictatorial eugenics and similarly in this country, in in America as well.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  Whereas as what you're talking about and with with rich people in in America, that this is voluntary. This is this is not this is not government dictated. The impossible objection there is they precisely they are rich and and

• 59:21Chris Williamson?

  Unfair advantage.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  These advantages are not available to poor people.

• 59:26Chris Williamson?

  As with most technologies, though, the rich people begin to use them, which increases the supply and then drives the car. I think the original iPhone

• 59:37Chris Williamson?

  adjusted for inflation was like $10,000. The very first iPhone that came out.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:44Chris Williamson?

  And it's still now prohibitively expensive to many people.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:48Chris Williamson?

  Uh, but significantly lesser.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  Uh, so, yeah, it's it that's a very odd circle to square, I think, that the initial advantages that are given to rich people that can afford things before everybody else can are this odd kind of capitalist philanthropy type trickle down effect, which then allows everybody later on to be able to do it. It's one of those things that maybe doesn't doesn't immediately make sense. Yeah, it'll be um, it'll be very interesting to see, I think, where that worlds.

• 1:00:22Chris Williamson?

  Ends up, and then we get into, I think, the real sort of final frontier, which is if and when we can get in and really tinker with the code of, of Yes. You know, whether it's from IVG.

• 1:00:38Chris Williamson?

  Are you familiar with this? Yeah. Okay, so IVG, as far as I'm aware, allows you to take any human cell or a much broader range of human cells, turn them into pluripotent stem cells, and from there you can turn them. Okay. So as opposed to your, what's a normal IVF egg harvest 10, maybe something like that? Yes. 10, 12.

• 1:01:03Chris Williamson?

  Pick your number. Yes. You have such a higher volume that you can pick from, which allows you to spread the range, which then gives you more, more options. And so that, but then on top of that, when you can actually get in and we can start to manipulate individual traits through Yeah. polymorphic expression or whatever it is. Yeah.

• 1:01:28Chris Williamson?

  I think for me, that's one that as yet I haven't managed to get myself sort of across the line with. If there's just something, I don't know whether it's a weird naturalistic fallacy, despite the fact that I've never seen genetics at work, like I've never seen the mechanism of it happening. There's just something about it that I'm not, I just don't know, I don't know where I stand on getting in and tinkering with our source code quite yet. You're squeamish about that. Yeah, a little. Yes. I don't really know why. Yes, yeah.

• 1:01:58Chris Williamson?

  I was looking, I was actually listening on the, on the way in about some of the ways in which the sperm is selected for naturally. So what we're talking about here, when we're talking about embryo selection, I think you're going in and you've got some dashboard on the backend of a website and you say, oh, this, based on the, the data, it looks like this is going to be that, a particular preferable child to have.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  We're talking about sperm donors now?

• 1:02:29Chris Williamson?

  No, this is still about your fertilized embryos that you can have a look at. But I had a look, I was listening on the way in to a podcast that was talking about how even before you get to sperm fertilizing eggs naturally, that much of the female reproductive system is actually hostile to weaker sperm. I didn't know this, that it's slightly acidic, which means that weak sperm don't make it through. And there's sort of all manner of different ways that sperm are selected for as well. I was fascinated. I've never really looked at the nuts and bolts of reproduction like that.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  I think I'm right in saying that the haploid genotype of a sperm doesn't influence its phenotype. Therefore, the selection of weaker, the selection against weaker sperm would not manifest itself in the form of.

• 1:03:23Chris Williamson?

  Stronger children.

• 1:03:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:03:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow. So this was the exact question I had while I was listening to it in the car, which is, does the strength of the sperm indicate the strength of the strength?

• 1:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the answer is no, because I think that the the phenotypic characteristics of a sperm are those of the diploid.

• 1:03:42Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Father, the genotype of the father, rather than of the particular individual sperm. I mean, each sperm has a unique haploid genotype, which is what determines the the hereditary aspects of the children. But that haploid genotype, I think, does not affect things like the swimming speed of the sperm. I think that that's under the control of the diploid genotype of the father, I believe.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Yeah, there is this, I guess we just look at survival and reproduction as, well, if we make things harder, the tougher ones that get through very effective. But there can be areas like when it comes to sperm swimming speed where that isn't necessarily indicative.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  I believe that, once again, I'm not totally certain. I believe that's the case.

• 1:04:35Chris Williamson?

  That's fun. Richard Dawkins, ladies and gentlemen. Richard, I've had so much fun. Yesterday was fantastic. Today's been really great as well. We've got a new book as well.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yes, good.

• 1:04:46Chris Williamson?

  That'll be available. What, once you've got your tour out of the way, which I'm aware you've still got quite a few dates and a few continents to get through, what are you interested in working on next? Have you got anything in your mind?

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm working on another book.

• 1:05:04Chris Williamson?

  Not like you.

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  Tales from Heckel. Ernst Heckel was a German biologist and artist. He was sometimes known as the German Darwin. He was Darwin's greatest disciple in Germany. And he was also a very good artist. And so I've got, I'm using his pictures and basing each chapter around one of his, each chapters are based upon a different one of his animal pictures.

• 1:05:37Chris Williamson?

  Richard, I really appreciate you. Thank you for having me last night and for being here today.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Thank you very much indeed, Chris.