Hello, everybody, welcome to another edition of Point of Inquiry. My name is Jim Underdown. I’m your host today, coming to you from the Center for Inquiry West on Temple Street in Los Angeles. I’ve got to tell you, it’s been a heck of a few weeks. We just had our grand opening last night.
Richard Dawkins was there. Andrian was there. John De Lancie was there. My old pal Matt Walsh from Veep. Was there a lot of people showed up and were really excited to open this new facility. And even more exciting, at one point last night, Richard Dawkins was taking a nap on the couch in my office. You can’t really blame the guy, we’ve been running him ragged ever since he set foot on our shores. He’s been in Phenix and a number of other cities doing talks and a zillion interviews on various podcasts. He did. Joe Rogan the other day, not only is this man a great mind when it comes to communicating vital ideas about evolution and other aspects of science, but the writing is beautifully done. I have to say, I listen, I’m an English major. I have read some stiff scientific papers in my day. His prose is beautiful. It’s poetic.
It’s often littered with literary or philosophical references.
And it’s just it’s a pleasure to read in general just as a piece of writing. So look at his long list of books. You can read about the existence of God. You could read about human DNA and evolution and other aspects of science. But do give it a chance. And he’s a wit and he’s got a sense of humor. And I just think he’s one of the great communicators of science out there. And I was really thrilled.
I’ve read his books and I’ve learned a lot.
And I was really thrilled just to have him in my office here and had a chance to chat with him for a little while.
So without any further ado, here’s Professor Richard Dawkins.
Welcome, Richard. Thank you. It was a great pleasure to be here at the grand opening of CFI West yesterday.
Yeah, we had a great time. It was October 21st yesterday. And yeah, that marked the first real official event that we had here. I was so glad to see you. And Andrian was here and Matt Walsh from Veep and John De Lancie and all kinds of celebrities. It was it was a great, great fun. And we unveiled for the first time the Carl Sagan and Andrian Theater. Very well named. Yeah. Thank you. That the I told Ann last night the the backup name was the Gallileo Theater and she was pleased with that. Yeah. She’s in good company. The first thing I want to ask you, I actually want to tap into your evolutionary biology expertize for the last ten or twelve years I’ve been going to a Christian high school about forty five miles from here, twice a year, I, I teach the atheist, agnostic, secular humanist module of their comparative religion class. And I think about you in the car ride every single time I go down there because they love to talk about evolution. By the way, there are young Earth creationists. So they love to talk about it in a negative way. They think they have really solid arguments for evolution being wrong, outright wrong. And I always I hear your voice in my head as I’m driving over and I’m on to sort of make sure I’m saying some of the right things. So we do a couple of fact checks, Brooke, where fundamentalist Christians are hooked on the idea that the Bible is the pinnacle of morality and it is a good guiding source to morality. What’s your first reaction to that?
I devote two chapters of that in my new book, Outgrowing God, which is designed for young people, I guess about the same age as you. You’re talking about I think it is an appalling guide to morality. I mean, the Bible is a terrible guide to morality. You actually read the Bible is dreadful. And that that’s that’s one point the other point that they might be thinking of.
Well, I suspect this lies behind those people who think that you can’t elect a politician who doesn’t have some sort of belief in a higher power because they cannot be moral. I think that may be based upon the idea that if you don’t have a belief in a higher power, you have no nobody looking over your shoulder. You have nobody spying on you to see whether you are doing good or not. And I think there can be no doubt, unfortunately. Bad as it is, there can be no doubt that people are deterred from committing crimes by police and also by surveillance cameras. And if they think that God is a surveillance camera who not only watches that every deed, but reads that every thought, then I could imagine that they might believe that unless you have that you’re going to be a moral. That’s a terrible reason for being moral.
So God, the policeman, the policeman, God, God, the surveillance camera and the unfortunate. There’s some evidence for that. But that’s not praiseworthy. That doesn’t shed a good light on human nature. I would like to think that most of us are moral for other reasons.
And so that’s the obvious follow up question for those of us who certainly do not turn to the Bible for their moral guidance.
Where do we secular people get our morality, things like the Golden Rule, which have been formalized it by moral philosophers into more elaborate versions of the golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. How would you like to live in a world where everybody stole and pillaged and raped and killed? And I’ve met people who actually say that if they didn’t believe in God, they would go out and kill somebody. And I said I tried to deny that, but I think it appealed to their better nature. And they really do really want to live in that kind of world in evolutionary terms.
Is there some sort of instinctual, fundamental basis for good behavior?
Sort of. But I wouldn’t want to rely on it. I mean, it’s it it’s the message of the selfish gene is sort of partly that selfish genes give rise to altruistic behavior, but also that they give rise to selfish behavior. And so altruistic behavior needs explaining. It doesn’t follow easily from Darwinian natural selection. A selfish behavior, immoral behavior is easier to explain on Darwinian grounds so that the Darwinian basis for morality, for decent values, is sort of hovering in the background. But it needs a massive overlay of cultural development, which it has and well-documented by Steven Pinker in The Better Angels of Our Nature, which is a book I would recommend where he shows that as the centuries go by, we have been getting nicer, getting better, getting more moral by the standards of today’s morality. The point I make a little bit different from his is that it’s palpably true that we’re getting better, as he says. And you can tell it by looking at. Things like. Our attitude to race, our attitude to sex begetting, less misogynistic rating, less racist and very, very striking examples which I put into outgrowing God. I’ve got a longish quote from Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and in his time in the mid 19th century was. In the forefront of decent, liberal, progressive opinion. But if you actually look at what he said. No question about that. Black people are inferior to white. No question. But that they should not. We should not. White people should not into intermarry with black people. They shouldn’t have the vote. Lincoln said all that around, about the same times he was feeding the slaves. And at the time, he was in the vanguard of progressive liberal opinion. And if he were reincarnated today, he would be in the vanguard and he would look back with horror on what he said in 1850.
I think it was. It makes you wonder if if any of us would be comfortable maybe with where our heads were at precisely two years ago. Well, one need only to look at societies in the last thousand years worldwide. And you have all these feudal societies. And I mean, conditions were horrible for the vast majority of people.
That’s for sure. And Pinker’s book documents that very convincingly. But let me just read that passage because I’m of the.
And it’s shocking. I mean, I hope you don’t mind if it’s shocking, but it is shocking. No, I love the shocking.
Well, just as just searching for it to lay out trick time.
OK, this is Lincoln in 1858. I will say then that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people. And I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, they must be the position of superior and inferior. And I am as much as any other man sorry and I as much as any other man I am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. So that was Abraham Lincoln in 1858. And what the context of the. It’s a speech. I’m not sure what the context is. I’m sorry about that.
And Thomas Henry Huxley, a friend of Darwin, called Darwin’s Bulldog, again, in the vanguard of progressive opinion in his time in 1871, wrote, No rational man cognizant of the facts believes that the average Negro is the equal, still less the superior of the white man.
And if this be true, it is simply incredible that what when all his disabilities are removed and our prognosis relative has a fair field and no favor as well as no pressure. He will be able to compete successfully with his bigger brained and smaller jawed rival in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bytes. The highest places in the hierarchy of civilization will assuredly not be within the reach of our dusky cousins.
Yeah, so, I mean, we look at that now and hopefully we can forgive them for their ignorance.
They will of that time and date, right? We have moved on since then. And this progressive moving on has been going on. I wouldn’t say inexorably because they’ve been reversals, but has been going on through history.
And so that we of the 21st century are.
Measurably different in our moral values from people 100 years ago, 200 years ago, even a few decades ago, as a matter of fact. We see that in in the change in attitudes to gay people, changing attitudes to women. Women only got the vote in United States and in Britain in the 1920s, I think. Right. And in France, not until the 1940s. In Switzerland, not until the nineteen seventies, 60s or 70s now. So we are moving on. We’re changing all the time. Whatever it is I call it in the book, it outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, doesn’t explain anything, but it kind of describes this conglomeration of different factors which together are causing this decade by decade change. We’re all part of it. It’s it’s so it’s everyday conversations. It’s journalism. It’s it’s parliamentary decisions. It’s judges decisions, juries decisions, newspaper articles, novels. All these things are steadily changing our culture. So whatever the Darwinian origins may have been of a sort of slight tendency to towards being. It’s been massively moved on as the centuries go by.
Well, and our exposure to our fellow human beings is much greater now. Had Lincoln at that point ever sat down and had lunch with Frederick Douglass or someone of that level? Probably not. And you could he could more confidently make wrong assertions about the level of black people in that year. Yes. So. Well, what I’ve been telling these kids also in the in the in the evolutionary sense is that we are a group animals. And because we don’t have these long fangs or fast or anything else. Part of the Briseno for our success is cooperating with each others at a fair stage.
That is a fair statement to be a little bit careful because it can be misinterpreted to mean that natural selection chooses between groups. It is not like that. What is what is more like is that individuals who behave decently within a group have an advantage for reasons which we need to go into. And so because we are group animals and as we, as you say, not chop down animals, we do succeed better if we cooperate with each other.
One other thing about these kids that they envision the body and the human body and any animal body is as wonderful as wonderous complex result of evolution, which in their mind, because there are know intelligent designer advocates. They they think that it’s this fantastic creation. Sort of a perfect creation at the end of, you know, just out of God’s mind. And there are of course, these kids are 17 or 18 years. And I’m like, wait, wait. You’ll see that.
Yes. We’re not perfect. That was a very interesting talk at the recent Cyclone CFI conference in Las Vegas. And you had it. And then lent. Which was all about the flaws in the human body and that there are numerous flaws in vertebrates and mammals generally. I actually in most of my books, I’ve tended to emphasize the perfection, not because I want to reinforce the idea of intelligent design, but because I don’t want to downplay the the challenge which face Darwin is to explain the apparent perfection. Having having done that and shown how he explains the apparent the apparent perfection, we then go on to look at the imperfections, which indeed are very revealing.
Well, if God was so in favor of us special human beings, why don’t we have the squid eye? Why don’t we. Why can’t we run like a Jaguar?
Yes, we do. And we do have a better Eithne squid, but nobody except in one respect of the retina being backwards. Right. It is absurd from an intelligent design point of view that the vertebrate retina is backwards. It’s entirely explicable. If you look at history and embryology and because natural selection comes along afterwards and kind of tinkers with the imperfections that he is handed, we end up with a better idea than the squid. But we’d probably have an even better eye if we could go right back to the drawing board, which is one of the one thing natural selection cannot do. It cannot go back to the drawing board. It has to make do with what it’s got and try to do purrfect what it’s called, try to improve what it’s got and that that it’s done very successfully. So we do actually see better than than squids, but we will see even better if we had the retina the right way round. But that would have been out of the question for historic reasons.
Yeah. And so the so the our DNA is just piling on what’s already established and it has to sort of retro fit on top of what.
Yes. And one of the fascinating things that came out of Lents talk sitcom, which I hadn’t actually known, is is the sheer number of broken genes, what he called broken genes, which we have in our genome, in one of our imperfections, as you know, is that we cannot make vitamin C. So we have to eat. We have to eat vitamin C. If we don’t get it, we get. We get scurvy. Well, we actually do have the gene for making vitamin C, which of many other mammals have as well. But Oz is broken. It it mutated at some point in the origin of primates. But it didn’t matter then because those animals at the time was surrounded by a lot of fruit. That dog was almost entirely fruit. So we’re getting plenty of vitamin C in it. And so there was no selection pressure to fix the broken gene. Now we’ve still got they’ve got the broker gene. Now we have to go out of our way to get vitamin C either from oranges or from or from pills.
So all these broken genes that are in us. They don’t hurt us in any way.
No, they just sitting there. It’s very much like the hard disk in your computer. You know, when you when you see the files in your computer, it looks very orderly and organized. And everything is is is right and everything has its name and so on. But actually, they’re all fragmented all over the place. And there are all kinds of broken files. There are all kinds of outdated versions of things you’ve been you’ve been writing. You never see them because they just sitting there, there’s no reason to remove them because they don’t do any harm sitting on the hard disk. It’s just that the. The filing system never, never goes there. And so you don’t need to go there when when it runs out of space, it needs to use the space, which is what it then what it then does. If you were to actually look at your hard disk at a machine code level, it would be filled with all kinds of what would look like rubbish. Just fragments of documents here. Paragraphs that. Sentences that pages. And that that’s what it looks like. That’s what the genome looks like as well. All kinds of outdated genes. Broken genes. Genes which once did something and no longer do. We’ve got a pretty good set of genes for smelling things. You know, on us, sense of smell is very inferior compared to that of most other mammals. Dogs, for example. We still have the genes for doing it. They’re just not turned on. We just don’t use them.
There hasn’t been the pressure to need that which we’ve switched division.
And that’s led to a not as it will using this gene. So they’ve they’ve sort of. Gone vestigial.
But one last question concerning the young Christians. So are we evolving now? Do we if this process has happened for millions of years, you’ll have to remember that it’s a very slow process.
And so and so you wouldn’t expect to see it anyway. And it may be that you come back in two million years, you’ll see some some changes. But when people are ice, the communist question I get. And when people ask that question, I kind of moras brush it off by saying you’re probably not thinking on the right timescale. We’re probably thinking on the terms of a historic timescale. You wouldn’t expect to see much evolutionary change in that times.
What sort of timescale are we talking about to see a noticeable, obvious difference?
Well, in humans, a very obvious difference in a million years week, which is not something we easily comprehend.
And. If you would imagine human beings in a million years, how would we look different based on the current trend of where we’re going?
Trends are not. I it’s tempting and ill-advised to think of trends as somehow having some kind of internal momentum.
So if you were to look back to me as well, three million years, what do you would notice is it is a strong trend towards bigger brains. You already were walking upright three million years ago. But we had a smaller brain than we have today. Lots more. And so is it the dominant trend of the last three million years? Is increased brain size. And it’s tempting to think and people have often thought Helfant Forum for the temptation. I’ve often thought there’s a sort of momentum, a driving force towards bigger brains. But that only is true if there’s natural selection in favor of bigger brains. That must have been natural selection in favor of bigger brains because we got them. But there’s no reason to think that’s still going on. In order for that to be true, it would be necessary that bigger brained individuals. Are more likely to reproduce more like have more children than smaller brained individuals, and that there’s no reason to think that that’s the case of that particular. Driving force reselected forces is no longer there. What you might find if you look today would be look around at the reasons why people die young. Remember, we’re talking about not reproducing or not passing on genes. So anything that in any genetic tendency not to have children would be removed, being removed from the population, any genetic tendency to have very large families. If there is such a genetic tendency, what well, don’t if there is, but if you were to, say, divide a population into those who have lots of children and those who have none and then say, can we discern any genetic difference between. This lot on that lot. If you if you could find such genetic difference, then by definition we’ve got a Darwinian pressure towards that. That. But in order to have an evolutionary consequence, that difference would have to be maintained for a large number of generations. Well, what might the difference be and might be that this lot are all Catholics in this lot or not or something like that. And there’s no reason to think that that’s that kind of thing has a genetic basis which is going to be preserved for.
Thousands of generations. Well, it as you’re saying, that it occurs to me because I think that the trends in the last century or so is that more educated people tend to have fewer children. So there may actually be a downward pressure on brain function.
When I’m asked the question before a public audience, I kind of paused to let that sink in. Usually gets a laugh.
If we were wiped out by a virus. It’s not necessarily the case that the next level, intelligent creatures are great apes or dolphins or whoever is high on the intelligence list would sort of evolve into our current.
No, it’s far from obvious. And if you think about it, this sort of level of intelligence we have and things like language is only happened once. And so, no, I mean, if if we were wiped out, then the most likely thing. It’s often been speculated that cockroaches or rats would would become dominant. There’s a man called Dougal Dixon who wrote a book called After Man, in which he speculates about what what what might happen in the next 50 million years after we go extinct. And he draws pictures. He’s an artist. He draws pictures of a great radiation evolution and radiation of creatures evolved from rats. So great big giant lion sized rats becoming behaving like lions. That, after all, is what happened after the dinosaurs went extinct, when the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. The mammals who up to that time had been small, whiskery, snotty things. Hiding, hiding. Yes, that very short. Very, very quickly. Radiated out and became a giant carnivorous giant herbivores, all sorts of creatures simply stepping into the shoes that the dinosaurs had left vacant. And so Dougal Dixon’s fancy is is rats stepping into all those shoes, stepping into line shows an elephant shoes and it puts shoes in whale shoes and so on.
And some of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, they already have done that.
Here’s a question that I think.
Affects all of us who work at sea, a fire, and these organizations that try to promote science and and critical thinking and all these things. And it’s it’s sort of mind blowing to me because I think this is at the crux of a lot of issues in the world today. So we have this African savannah brain is at the time when our brain starts really flourishing. Yes. So we have this brain that is particularly suited for that environment, were suited for seeing large animals move. We’re making snap decisions that make us safer or just get us through to the next day. It’s not about deep thought. It’s about hanging in there until morning. That’s what our brain sort of physically is best suited for. And then on the other hand, of course, we know there’s Einstein’s brain and Darwin’s brain and all these magnificent brains that are capable of abstract thought and tremendous achievements. So here we are, like jumping back and forth between the brain that causes all these misconceptions about the world, including religion, including paranormal belief, all the things that we deal with. Mistake after mistake after mistake, coexisting with higher level thought. Doesn’t that just blow your mind? Very much so, yes.
I mean, I’m I’m astonished and actually rather gratified by the fact that we do produce the occasional Einstein, the occasional Max Planck, the occasional Hyson, but the occasional Richard Feynman, who, although they are equipped with brains for surviving on the African savannah, can indeed do the kind of mathematics, the kind of thinking which.
Always all of us cannot understand, and we just as always, none of us can understand. I mean, the. The requirements that quantum physics makes upon the human brain to believe in things just look impossible to us. Just don’t make any sense at all. And yet the predictions that are derived from these things that then make any sense are correct to whatever it is, the ninth decimal place. Which means is equivalent to as it as has been said, equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one human has breadth in. That’s the level of accuracy of the predictions that you can derive from assumptions that make no intuitive sense at all. And some physicists are quite happy to say, well, no wonder they don’t make any sense. Our brains are there to help us survive on the African savannah weather. All we had to do was was was Kinchela Wildebeest and find a waterhole and wildebeest in waterholes don’t don’t behave like like like electrons to neutrinos or nice too. And you could speculate. If only our bodies and our prey and our predators were neutrinos size, then everything in quantum physics would make intuitive sense. Well, I half a me has to accept that the other half irex of the visible, a vigorous protest against that cannot really be true that the weatherup. A particle goes through one slate for another slip depends upon whether the observer is looking or not. I mean, that kind of thing just offends my African savannah brain. But I got to accept it, I suppose.
Yeah, we had a funny moment the other night at the Alex Theater, you read some of the hate mail that you got.
I was surprised to hear what percentage of it is from the UK and it guess I haven’t measured it.
There was sort of I didn’t announce that. But there were indications when there was a message, there was a mention of the National Health Service. Yeah. Right. Well, presumably must have come from from the UK. That’s right. Yes. I think it’s a habit of it must do. I didn’t get it directly. It goes to Richard Dawkins dot net, I think, and they filter it into the good, the bad and the ugly. The ugly is pretty ugly.
Yeah. And kind of funny, too, because it’s very funny. The grammar and misspellings are rife. I just I was a little surprised because I just naturally assumed that because of America’s fundamentalist nature and religion, that level of religiosity, that they would have more of a problem with you.
They probably do. But still, it does affect that from from other places as well, I suppose. Yeah, well, good. There’s equal opportunity, hatred across Syria’s enemies.
You mentioned in your talk in Las Vegas, you were talking about the courage of scientists to break trends.
And this is the theme of the final chapter of outgrowing God during the first half of the book is is really about atheists in the second half is most about evolution, that the final chapter is about the courage that really. Taking courage from Darwin is what I called it, because. I think that the problem that Darwin solved, the problem of explaining the elegance and perfection, despite the imperfections, as you mentioned, and the complexity of life, that was a massive problem. And I think that was why it wasn’t solved until the middle of the 19th century, long after what were on the face of it seem much more difficult problems like the Alexandrian Greeks working out that the that the world was round and even how big it was. And the fact it was tilted up. And that’s was a tremendous achievement.
And then Galileo and Newton Newton, two hundred years before Darwin, discovering calculus, discovering about laws of gravity.
Much, much more difficult. You might think then what Darwin did, which is in Darwin’s idea of natural selection, is breathtaking, is simple compared to the solution to the problem that it solves, which is the whole of life with diversity. And I think the reason it took so long is that the. That which needed to be explained, the complexity of life was so obviously had to be designed. Just sort of you you couldn’t think of anything else. And so great intellects like those of Newton and Hume and even Aristotle didn’t even occur to them that you could explain it by by natural means. And so. Whether Darwin had personal Doug Darwin’s personal courage wasn’t that great. I mean, he’d be put off publishing for 15 years, but nevertheless, the achievement of Darwin and Wallace should give us courage, could give inspire us with courage in the power of science to solve problems which might otherwise seem. To mindblowing. Well, I think in of things like the origin of the universe, the origin of the laws of physics, of the physical constants. What happened before the Big Bang? Why is there something rather than nothing? These are the remaining gaps in which God is hiding. The biggest gap. Which God used to hide. Was life and Darwin blew that out of the water. So the courage that we should have now comes from Darwin. Inspired by Darwin to solve the remaining problems, which in historical context were actually smaller problems. Now now that there are the problems that remain. But but. We should have courage that they are soluble and we get that courage from Darwin. That’s the message of the final chapter.
About doing God’s will and especially in Darwin’s case, the the. There were there he knew there were obvious implications. We’re talking about a natural process that could explain at least the development of life. And that those implications were seen immediately by the religious community were by not all of them.
I mean something. And in some cases, they were they applauded Darwin. But but reasons we don’t fully understand. Darwin postponed publishing his idea. He wrote it down rather fully. In an unpublished manuscript which he and he left and with instructions to his wife to publish it in the event of his death. But he didn’t publish it to the world until more is pushed into it by Wallace independently coming up with the same idea in eighteen fifty eight. And as you probably know, Darwin was.
In a gentlemanly way, was reluctant. Take the credit he wanted to give Wallace the credit, but he was persuaded by.
Hooka and Lyle, that they should talk her now should put on in the and society in London a joint reading of of a paper of Darwin’s and paper, one two papers of Darwin’s and a paper Wallace. But that fell flat. It was. It was although it was these papers were read to the relevant society, London, the land and society. They didn’t really get it. They didn’t really see how important it was. And it wasn’t until a year later when Darwin published the book that book length The Origin of Species, that people finally got it and then all hell broke loose.
Do you think we’ll live to see the origin of life?
So, yeah, I think so. I mean, it’s not something that we can ever know for certain. So it will never be of the form to dig up a fossil or something that shows what how life began. It wouldn’t be like that. It’s more likely to be that somebody comes up with a hypothesis which is so brilliantly clever and shattering. They obviously must be true. I think if we ever get it, it will be like that.
I suspect, boy, religion is going to hate that one. Yes.
When they get that Beatles or Rolling Stones, it’s not my subject, but Beatles. Beatles. OK. I just wanted to throw that out there and see what your reaction would be. You also mentioned a couple times in the last week that you thought there should be a Nobel Prize for literature or science writing.
Well, the thing about that is that science is such a wonderful vehicle for beautiful writing. And I’ve suggested that Carl Sagan. He’s dead. Resay can’t get it. But but he should have got the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s not clear to me what I mean. It’s fine for novels to get the novelist to get Nobel Prize for literature. A lot of the time, but not all the time. In Bertrand Russell got it as a philosopher, Winston Churchill got it.
As a historian, I think there’d be no proper scientists who’ve ever won the Nobel Prize for literature. It’s about time they did.
Well, speaking for all the people who have written your stuff and yes, I will speak for every single one of them. You write beautifully yourself, and I do appreciate the poetry and spending some time with the prose so that and Sagan was fantastic at this as well, that you can inject the wonder and the beauty and the and some emotion into these facts and infuse the facts with you.
Yes. Another another author who is not so well known in America, I think is in Britain as Jacob Aronofsky. I don’t know whether you know him, but he he was commissioned by David Attenborough when David Attenborough was head of BBC to Jacob Aronofsky was a polymath, a scientist and a poet and a story in all sorts of things. And he was commissioned to produce a 13 part documentary called The Ascent of Man, which is a magnificent piece of television literature and a book. Kate came came off it as well. So he would have been another. I think if that it’s a bit dated now, but even so, it’s terrific television. You couldn’t get a 13 part episode on that subject commission. I suspect now, but I’m looking at it. We’re looking at it now on video. And it’s really. Nobel Prize for literature worthy stuff.
I do remember seeing that it was on PBS in the U.S., was it? Yes. Years ago. Yes. Perhaps Cosmos is the closest to Tomcats.
Indeed. And that’s it. That’s another point.
Yes, quite. Your career arc started with the explanations of evolution and more and more science as you’ve gone along.
Your latest book is Outgrowing God, which is for young people. I’ve long wanted to write an atheist book for young people. I don’t want to indoctrinate. I want to encourage them to think for themselves. I feel passionately about the very fact that those people in the world who are religious almost always have the same religion as their parents and grandparents. So this is a cycle that needs to be broken. It cannot be. They ought to realize that that since it’s true that there are so many different religions and the only reason they have the religion they do is that their parents had it. That alone should be enough to arouse mistrust. And that’s the subject of the first chapter about going God is also the motivation for writing the book, because I want to break the intergenerational cycle of being from generation to generation to generation. If only we could break that chain, that pseudo hereditary chain, then we could get rid of religion once and draw. And wouldn’t that make the world a better place?
I think so. What do you what’s what’s next for you? Where do you turn your attention to after this book?
I’ve got a book which is a collection of essays. I had a collection of essays a few years ago called Science in the SO and that grew too big. And so the editor Gillian Summers scales and I decided to split it in two hive off those ones, which are book related book reviews and forwards to other people’s books. And so that is now I’m getting ready for publication under the title books to finish and life just kind of play on Anthony House novels, that cycle of novels. What one of them is called books to furnish a room. The books to furnish a life will be coming out at some stage property in 2020, I suspect.
And then Yana Lence overnight working on a book on flight called Flights of Fancy, which is flight in animals, obviously birds, that’s pterosaurs and insects, but also flight humans. The technology of flight and the history of attempts to fly. People like Leonardo would try to design things they called only sculptures, flying machines and flights of fancy, slightly more and more metaphorically as well. I mean, going off on on flights of fancy, which are stimulated by thinking about flight, we look forward to all those thoughts and words.
Richard Dawkins, thanks for all you do. Please continue your great work. Thank you very much indeed.
That was great fun talking to Richard Dawkins, but before we end here, I want to make two quick announcements. First of all, the Center for Inquiry West at twenty five thirty five, West Temple Street in Los Angeles is officially open. If you want information about what’s happening at the Center for Inquiry West, go to our main Web site at Center for Inquiry dot org and look for Center for Inquiry w events in the Calenders or on our CFI w web page. The other thing I wanted to officially announce is that the Center for Inquiry Investigations Group, the S.F. I g has officially raised our prize money for the paranormal challenge to a quarter million dollars. You can now win two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars if you can prove paranormal ability under scientific testing conditions. So that means you’re going to have to pony up. You work with us to create a protocol and a test. And if you pass the test, you actually have to pass to test a preliminary test and the test for the money. But if you pass, you’ll win a quarter million dollars. And for anyone else listening. We also have a five thousand dollar finder’s fee for the person who brings in the winning contestant. So we now have the largest active prize in the world for proving paranormal ability. And we are the most active processors of applicants for that money. The James Randi Prize has been dormant for several years now. We’ve tested more people than anyone else in the world. If you can move things with your mind, if you can see into the future. If you can read other people’s thoughts, go to CFI iji dot org. Thanks for listening. I’m Jim Underdown. This has been another episode of Point of Inquiry.
