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Richard Dawkins Interview
My Short Interview with
Richard Dawkins
by Lanny Swerdlow
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Lanny Swerdlow:
Hi! With me today is Dr. Richard Dawkins, author of
The Selfish Gene,
the
revolutionary book (as far as I'm concerned)
The Blind Watchmaker,
and his newest book,
Climbing
-- er...
Richard Dawkins:
...Mount Improbable.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Climbing Mount Improbable.
I've got a couple of questions that, ever since
I've read the book, I've always wanted to ask you. They're kind of grand in their scope of
things, they're not particularly specific. In your book
The Blind Watchmaker,
I believe that you
made the argument that the principles of evolution apply everywhere in the universe. In other
words, the laws of thermodynamics apply on a planet a hundred-billion light years away from
the earth as well as they apply on the earth. So the principles of evolution apply on that planet
as much as they would on earth.
Richard Dawkins:
It's a less-strong claim than for the laws of thermodynamics. I think for the
laws of thermodynamics we more or less
know
that they apply everywhere in the universe. The
laws of Darwinian evolution: First off, we don't know if there's life anywhere else in the
universe; there may not be. It is actually seriously possible that we may be alone in the
universe. Assuming that there is other life in the universe (and I think
most
people think that
there is), then my conjecture is that how ever alien and different it may be in detail (the
creatures may be so different from us that we may hardly recognize them as living at all), if
they have the property of organized complexity and apparent design -- adaptive complexity --
then I believe that something equivalent to Darwinian natural selection -- gradual evolution by
Darwinian natural selection; that is, the non-random survival of randomly varying hereditary
elements -- will turn out to be applied. All life in the universe, my guess is, will have evolved by
some equivalent to Darwinism.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Also from reading your book
The Blind Watchmaker,
I kind of pick up the
idea that the mechanism of evolution not only apply to origin of species, or DNA survival, but in
a way, apply to everything in the universe, from quarks to galaxies.
Richard Dawkins:
I would prefer not to say that. I certainly haven't said that in any of my
books, and I would be reluctant to say that. I think that something very special happens in the
universe, when a self-replicating entity, which DNA is -- DNA is probably not the only one, but
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DNA is the self-replicating entity that we know. When that comes into existence, then there is a
whole new game that starts. Before that, you had just physics; you have molecules bumping
around, forming new molecules according to the ordinary laws of chemistry. Once, by those
ordinary laws of chemistry, a molecule springs into existence which is self-replicating, then
immediately you have the possibility for Darwinism, for natural selection to occur. Then you
have this extraordinary process, which we only know of on this planet, but may exist
elsewhere, whereby things start to get more complicated and start to appear as though they've
been really designed for a purpose. If you look carefully for what that purpose is, it turns out to
be to replicate, to pass on, to propagate that very same DNA, or whatever it might be.
Lanny Swerdlow:
People will sometimes look at the physical universe and say it looks like it
was designed.... Isn't the fact that a solar system survives based on [the fact that] it has
properties which will ensure its survival, versus another solar system that is unstable?
Richard Dawkins:
So you're kind of trying to make a Darwinian view of solar systems.... In a
way, but let me make a distinction, then, between what we call one-off or single-generation
selection, and cumulative, multi-generation selection. A solar system survives because -- let's
say, a planet orbiting a star will orbit the star at a particular distance, which is the right distance
for that planet and that star. That's the crucial distance. If it was orbiting faster, it would whiz off
into deep space; if it were orbiting slower, it would spiral into the star. So, there is a kind of
selection of planets to be orbiting at the right speed and at the right distance from their stars.
But that's not cumulative selection, that's one-off, single-generation selection. It's like one
generation of biological selection. It's like finches who have the wrong size of beak for a hard
winter. The ones with the wrong size of beak die, so in the next winter, the next generation
have all got the right size of beak. That's one generation.
What's really crucial about biological evolution is that that doesn't stop at one generation, it
goes on to the next and the next and the next, and it takes hundreds, it takes
thousands
of
generations to build up, cumulatively, the really impressive adaptive complexity that we get in
living things, like eyes and elbow joints. So, that's the reason why solar systems don't look very
impressively
designed, whereas living bodies look very,
very
impressively designed indeed.
They've been through many generations of cumulative selection.
Lanny Swerdlow:
I was listening to your previous interview and a question popped into my
mind that I wanted to ask; it's kind of a hot-button question. They asked you a question about
children being gullible and you explained that this is an adaptive mechanism, that they have a
lot to learn when they're young, so they'll take in a lot of information. Some of the information is
good, some of the information is bad, and the problem is that once they've taken in this
information they're pretty well set for the rest of their lives. Is this one of the reasons explaining
why religion and belief in supernatural forces is so ingrained in people because it's
indoctrinated into them when they're very young and very gullible? and even when they get
older and can start reasoning better, it's been so ingrained into them that they can't get out of
it?
Richard Dawkins:
Yes, I do think that. What would be consistent with that view is the fact that
(really, rather remarkably) of the people who are religious, the religion that they have is almost
always the same as that of their parents. Very occasionally, it isn't. This is an almost unique
feature about people's beliefs. We talk about a child as being a 4-year-old Muslim or a 4-year-
old Catholic. You would never dream about talking about a 4-year-old economic monitorist or a
4-year-old neo-isolationist, and yet, you can see the parallel.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Yes!
Richard Dawkins:
Children really ought not be spoken of as a Catholic child or a Muslim child.
They ought to be allowed to grow until they're old enough to decide for themselves what their
beliefs about the cosmos are. But ... the fact [is] that we
do
treat [children] that way, and ...
parents seem to be regarded as having a unique right to impose their
religious
beliefs on their
child; whereas, nobody thinks they're going to impose their beliefs about -- I don't know -- why
the dinosaurs went extinct, or something of that sort. But religion is different. And I do think that
you can explain an awful lot about religion if you assume that children start out gullible.
Anything that is told to them with sufficient force -- particularly if it's reinforced by some kind of
threat, like, "If you don't believe this, you'll go to hell when you die" -- then it is going to get
passed on to the next generation. Above all, "You must believe this, and when you grow up,
you must teach your children the same thing." That, of course, is precisely how religions get
promoted, how they do get passed on from generation to generation.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Almost sounds Darwinian! Last question, last night ... I saw ... the program,
and I read about you, and then they had a little squib, in the program, of somebody opposing
you. I was kind of taken aback by that.... Obviously, what you're talking about is very
controversial, because some people who are religious feel it's attacking their very basic
religious beliefs. I wonder if you might have a comment on -- here's a
science
group that, for
some reason, feels
so
pressured by religions (or something), that they'll do an extraordinary
thing by putting a religious argument in a Program; something they've never done before. How
do you react to that?
Richard Dawkins:
I think that you're overreacting to this particular thing. I think that when
somebody's trying to sell tickets, it's quite good to put in a -- er, some negative, um -- I don't
blame them for that at all. The particular extract that was put in was not by any known person.
It was just a letter to the editor of a journal in which I'd had an article published. The person
who wrote it is not somebody I've ever heard of; it was not a refereed article. It was just that if
you say anything in the press that
remotely
treads on people's religious toes, all hell breaks
loose. You always get a great mailbag full of stuff. Now, I just throw it straight in the bin!
Newspapers, obviously, have a duty to publish some random selection of the papers that they
get in, and I think that's what happened in this case.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Finally, ... do you see the concepts of evolution as sort of an atheistic
explanation of the origins of life? And, is that why the religions have so much problem with it,
because it undermines their basic foundations?
Richard Dawkins:
Well, evolution is different about this, because there are a large number of
evolutionists who are also religious. You cannot be both
sane
and
well educated
and
disbelieve in evolution. The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has
got
to
believe in evolution. Now there are plenty of sane, educated, religious people: there are
professors of theology, and there are bishops ... and so obviously they all believe in evolution
or they wouldn't have gotten where they have because they would be too stupid or too
ignorant. So, it is a fact that there are evolutionists who are religious and there are religious
people who are evolutionists.
My own personal feeling is that it is rather difficult. I find that the reason that I am no longer
religious is that the argument from design has been undermined by evolution. So if the basis
for your religion is the argument from design, if the reason why you are religious is that you
look at the world and you say, "Isn't it beautifully designed! Isn't it elegant! Isn't it complicated!"
then Darwinism really does pull the rug out from under that argument. If your reason for being
religious has nothing to do with that, if your reason for being religious is some still, small voice
inside you which utterly convinces you, then the argument from design, I suppose, has no
bearing on that. But what, I think, Darwinism has done is utterly to destroy the argument from
design which, I believe, is probably, historically, the dominant reason for believing in a
supernatural being.
Lanny Swerdlow:
Thank you very much! I sure appreciate your time.
Richard Dawkins:
Thank you.
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Graphic Rule
The Likelihood of God
-- by Richard Dawkins
(source of excerpt unknown)
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(Editorials)
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I suspect that most people have a residue of feeling that Darwinian evolution isn't quite big
enough to explain everything about life. All I can say as a biologist is that the feeling
disappears progressively the more you read about and study what is known about life and
evolution.
I want to add one thing more. The more you understand the significance of evolution, the more
you are pushed away from the agnostic position and towards atheism. Complex, statistically
improbable things are by their nature more difficult to explain than simple, statistically probable
things.
The great beauty of Darwin's theory of evolution is that it explains how complex, difficult to
understand things could have arisen step by plausible step, from simple, easy to understand
beginnings. We start our explanation from almost infinitely simple beginnings: pure hydrogen
and a huge amount of energy. Our scientific, Darwinian explanations carry us through a series
of well-understood gradual steps to all the spectacular beauty and complexity of life.
The alternative hypothesis, that it was all started by a supernatural creator, is not only
superfluous, it is also highly improbable. It falls foul of the very argument that was originally put
forward in its favour. This is because any God worthy of the name must have been a being of
colossal intelligence, a supermind, an entity of extremely low probability -- a very improbable
being indeed.
Even if the postulation of such an entity explained anything (and we don't need it to), it still
wouldn't help because it raises a bigger mystery than it solves.
Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the
easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply
postulates what we are trying to explain. It postulates the difficult to explain, and leaves it at
that. We cannot prove that there is no God, but we can safely conclude the He is very, very
improbable indeed.
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Graphic Rule
Richard Dawkins'
Evolution
by Ian Parker
Index:
Historical Writings
(Biography)
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(Editorials)
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Go to
The World of Zoologist Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins, arch-Darwinist, author of "The Selfish Gene", and Britain's village atheist,
has a reputation for intellectual austerity and single-mindedness: he is a professor who will not
stop professing. Because he knows the meaning of life (which is evolution by natural
selection), and because others do not know it, or only half know it, or try willfully to mess with
its simple, delicious truth, he promotes his subject in a way that -- if you wanted to drive him
crazy -- you could call evangelical. Besides writing his beautifully pellucid and best-selling
books on Darwinian themes, Dawkins, who is a zoologist by training, is forever finding other
opportunities to speak on behalf of evolution and on behalf of science. Now in his mid-fifties,
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