Richard Dawkins

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“Will We Still Have A Liveable Planet 50 Years From Now?”

October 4, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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The great Margaret Atwood has dystopic vision, an eerie end to us all: We build an ever-growing, plugged-in societal machine reliant on cheap energy that eventually runs out. Collapse comes, and we’re swept away with it. It’s a chilling, if unlikely, scenario.

More realistic: We keep shoveling fossil fuels into the system until it’s the death of us, or we wisely adapt ASAP and develop solar energy and such to the point were we can sustain life for eons. 

In a Guardian piece that surveys science and sci-fi writers, Atwood, Richard Dawkins and others ponder the future of humanity, if we have one. The opening:

Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion
There’s a serious risk of climate catastrophe and it could be soon. Another alarmingly plausible possibility during the present century is that weapons of mass destruction, which are designed to deter, will be acquired by deluded people for whom deterrence has no meaning. Assuming we survive such manmade disasters, external peril may be averted by technology growing out of the brilliant feat of landing on a comet. The dinosaurs’ world ended when a comet or large meteorite unleashed titanic destructive forces. That will eventually happen again, and smaller but still dangerous strikes are a perennial danger in every century. Telescopes of the future will improve the range of detection, increase the warning time, and give engineers the notice they will need to intercept the bolide and nudge it into a harmless orbit.

In the world of science, DNA sequencing will become ever faster and cheaper and this will revolutionise medicine, taxonomy and my own field of evolution, not to mention forensic evidence in courts of law. Embryology and cell biology will advance mightily. Novel imaging techniques may enable palaeontologists and archeologists to see down into the ground without digging it up. The rendering of virtual reality will improve to the point where the distinction from external reality may become blurred. I expect unmanned space exploration to continue, albeit with economically imposed hiatuses. Out beyond 50 years, self-sustaining colonies may be established on Mars. Human travel to other star systems lies way beyond 50 years, but radio communication from extraterrestrial scientists is an ever-present possibility. However, the intervening light centuries will rule out conversation.

Margaret Atwood, author of Hag-Seed
Will we still have a liveable planet 50 years from now? Kill the oceans and it’s game over for oxygen-breathing mid-range mammals – the oceans make 60 to 80% of our oxygen. Superheating them and dumping them full of plastic may spell our doom. I hope that we’ll be smart enough to avoid this fate. From ideas proposed in my fiction, many are equally horrible, but it seems as if the use of the blood of young people to rejuvenate rich older people – as posited in The Heart Goes Last – is already in process. I do try to avoid predicting “the future” because there are so many variables; thus, so many possible futures. But here’s a safe bet: in 25 years I won’t be on the planet, unless of course I get my tentacles on some of that rejuvenating blood.•

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“Do You Think Religion Is Something That Humans Will Ever Be Able To Move On From?”

May 27, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Speaking of religion, Richard Dawkins, recovering from a stroke, just conducted an AMA at Reddit, in which he answered a few questions about science and politics but mostly talked faith. A few exchanges below.

Question:

What’s the biggest unsolved question in biology/evolution?

Richard Dawkins:

What is consciousness and why did it evolve?

Question:

What are your thoughts on the 2016 Presidential race?

Richard Dawkins:

Hillary will beat Trump. I’m sorry Bernie Sanders will not have the chance to do so.

Question:

Are you afraid of eternal non-existence?

“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for.” – Vladimir Nabokov

No matter in what words you describe death, I’m sure that it will always scare me in some way. How do you cope with it?

Richard Dawkins:

I love the Nabokov quote, which I hadn’t met before. Wish I’d said it myself. One additional thought. What is frightening about the abyss is the idea of eternity, and the best way to avoid it is with a general anaesthetic. Think of death as a general anaesthetic to spare you from eternity.

Question:

Did you ever think that there is 0.0001% that god is exist?

Richard Dawkins:

WHICH god are you talking about? Baal? Mithras? Zeus? Thor? There’s a small but finite chance that gossamer winged fairies exist.

Question:

Which one do you think is the most dangerous religion or belief of them all and why?

Richard Dawkins:

Anyone who believes that what is written in a holy book is true even if the evidence is against it is dangerous. Christianity used to be the most dangerous religion. Now Islam is. Of course that doesn’t mean more than a small minority of the world’s Muslims. But it only takes a few if their beliefs are sufficiently strong, fanatical and unshakeable.

Question:

Do you think religion is something that humans will ever be able to move on from? Is there a future, given our present path, that you believe sees a majority of the world being agnostic or atheist?

Richard Dawkins:

Religion is dying from decade to decade. It will take a while but the long arc of history is pointing in the right direction.

Question:

Is there a question that has given you pause from debaters, referring to god?

Richard Dawkins:

No.•

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“Could We Recreate Lucy?”

June 24, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a 2012 Playboy Interview, Richard Dawkins addressed whether a fuller understanding of genetics would allow us to create something akin to extinct life forms, even prehistoric ones. The passage:

Playboy:

Do we know which came first—bigger brains or bipedalism?

Richard Dawkins:

Bipedalism came first.

Playboy:

How do we know that?

Richard Dawkins:

Fossils. That’s one place the fossils are extremely clear. Three million years ago Australopithecus afarensis were bipedal, but their brains were no bigger than a chimpanzee’s. The best example we have is Lucy [a partial skeleton found in 1974 in Ethiopia]. In a way, she was an upright-walking chimpanzee.

Playboy:

You like Lucy.

Richard Dawkins:

Yes. [smiles]

Playboy:

You’ve said you expect mankind will have a genetic book of the dead by 2050. How would that be helpful?

Richard Dawkins:

Because we contain within us the genes that have survived through generations, you could theoretically read off a creature’s evolutionary history. “Ah, yes, this animal lived in the sea. This is the time when it lived in deserts. This bit shows it must have lived up mountains. And this shows it used to burrow.”

Playboy:

Could that help us bring back a dinosaur? You have suggested crossing a bird and a crocodile and maybe putting it in an ostrich egg.

Richard Dawkins:

It would have to be more sophisticated than a cross. It’d have to be a merging.

Playboy:

Could we recreate Lucy?

Richard Dawkins:

We already know the human genome and the chimpanzee genome, so you could make a sophisticated guess as to what the genome of the common ancestor might have been like. From that you might be able to grow an animal that was close to the common ancestor. And from that you might split the difference between that ancestral animal you re-created and a modern human and get Lucy.•

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“It Produces Machines Which Can Run, And Walk, And Fly, And Dig, And Swing Through The Trees, And Think”

May 1, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even someone as lacking in religion as myself can be perplexed by Richard Dawkins’ midlife anti-theology mission to irk people of faith on chat shows and the like. In his proselytizing–and that’s what it is–he has the fervor of a particularly devout and curmudgeonly priest. It’s true that many a horrid act has been committed in the name of the father, but so have many others been by those who believe (like Dawkins and I do) that we’re orphans. I don’t want to deny someone on an operating table (or the one doing the operating) from believing in a little in magic at that delicate moment, even if it is rot. Trust in science, and say a prayer if you like. 

But I wouldn’t let his noisily running a chariot over the gods make me deny his wonderful intellect and contributions to knowledge, from genes to memes. At Edge, the site’s founder and longtime NYC avant-gardist, John Brockman, has an engrossing talk with the evolutionary biologist about his “vision of life.” The transcript makes for wonderful reading.

Dawkins believes if life exists elsewhere in the universe (and his educated guess is that it does), it’s of the Darwinian, evolutionary kind, that no other biological system besides the one we know would work under the laws of physics. He also notes that we contribute in our own way to the amazing progress of life, even if our time on the playing field can be brutal and brief. As Dawkins puts it, “we are temporary survival machines” coded to be hellbent on seeing our genes persevere, even though life will eventually evolve in ways presently unimaginable to us. It will still be life, and that’s our gift to it. No matter what we personally feel is the main purpose of our existence, it’s actually that.

The opening:

Natural selection is about the differential survival of coded information which has power to influence its probability of being replicated, which pretty much means genes. Coded information, which has the power to make copies of itself—“replicator”—whenever that comes into existence in the universe, it potentially could be the basis for some kind of Darwinian selection. And when that happens, you then have the opportunity for this extraordinary phenomenon which we call “life.”

My conjecture is that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, it will be Darwinian life. I think there’s only one way for this hyper complex phenomenon which we call “life” to arise from the laws of physics. The laws of physics—if you throw a stone up in the air, it describes a parabola, and that’s it. But biology, without ever violating the laws of physics, does the most extraordinary things; it produces machines which can run, and walk, and fly, and dig, and swing through the trees, and think, and produce the whole of human technology, human art, human music. This all comes about because at some point in history, about 4 billion years ago, a replicating entity arose, not a gene as we would now see it, but something functionally equivalent to a gene, which because it had the power to replicate and the power to influence its own probability of replicating, and replicated with slight errors, gave rise to the whole of life. 

If you ask me what my ambition would be, it would be that everybody would understand what an extraordinary, remarkable thing it is that they exist, in a world which would otherwise just be plain physics. The key to the process is self-replication. The key to the process is that … let’s call them “genes” because nowadays they pretty much all are genes. Genes have different probabilities of surviving. The ones that survive, because they have such high fidelity replication, are the ones which we see in the world, the ones which dominate gene pools in the world. So for me, the replicator, the gene, DNA, is absolutely key to the whole process of Darwinian natural selection. So when you ask the question, what about group selection, what about higher levels of selection, what about different levels of selection, everything comes down to gene selection. Gene selection is fundamentally what is really going on. 

Originally these replicating entities would have been floating free and just replicating in the primeval soup, whatever that was. But they “discovered” a technique of ganging together into huge robot vehicles, which we call individual organisms.•

 

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“Even Man Is A Gene Machine, A Robot Vehicle Blindly Programmed To Preserve Its Selfish Genes”

March 8, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Unless the People magazine archives are lying to me, the first mention of the word “computer” in the publication occurred in the April 4, 1977 edition. It was used in reference to Richard Dawkins’ publication of The Selfish Gene. An excerpt:

It looks like a scene in a mad-scientist movie, but Oxford’s Dr. Richard Dawkins is studying the response of female crickets to the computer-simulated mating calls of the male. Dawkins is a sociobiologist, one of a new breed of scientists who specialize in the biological causes of animal behavior. “I love to solve the intellectual problems of my specialty,” he says. “It’s the kind of game people like me play.”

Based on his studies, Dawkins, 36, has developed a theory about the survival of species. It is described in his book The Selfish Gene, which recently was published in the U.S. He says the seemingly “altruistic” acts of many species are the result of genes trying to perpetuate themselves. “Even man,” says Dawkins, “is a gene machine, a robot vehicle blindly programmed to preserve its selfish genes. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism. Let us understand what our selfish genes are up to because we may then have the chance to upset their designs—something no other species has ever aspired to.”•

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“Superstitious And Supernatural Beliefs Become More And More Dangerous As Advanced Technology Becomes Available”

July 9, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a new Ask Me Anything at Reddit, Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss, subjects of the new documentary The Unbelievers, hold forth, as one might expect, on science and religion. One comment on Krauss’ remarks about Islam: While fundamentalism in a technological world is a challenge, I wonder how much violence the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims are responsible for and how much comes from those who follow other faiths, including secular “gods” (e.g., money)? And that question comes from someone like myself who’s seriously irreligious. A few exchanges from the AMA follow.

__________________________

Question:

Do you guys believe the current state of the USA, theologically, is at a dangerous crossroads? I as a UK resident am seriously scared of America politically

Lawrence Krauss:

I’m not as worried. In spite of the fact that fundamentalists are the loudest, all polls continue to suggest that the number of unbelievers continues to grow in the US.

Richard Dawkins:

Superstitious and supernatural beliefs become more and more dangerous as advanced technology becomes available to ideologically or faith-driven fanatics. The distinguished astronomer Martin Rees gives humanity a 50% chance of surviving through the 21st century.

__________________________

Question:

You (and Sam Harris and others) have often spoken about the unique threats of Islam compared to the other world religions. Most liberals are silent on Islam – or keep repeating that all religions are the same, with “fundamentalism” being the problem. 

Why do you think this is? How do you see the challenge in tackling Islam shaping up at the moment?

Lawrence Krauss:

There is no doubt that Islamic fundamentalism is a huge problem in the current world.

In many ways it’s not that different from other fundamental religions, it’s just 500 years behind Christianity.

In that regard, unfortunately the current world is one in which global communication is possible and dangerous new technologies exist. And that is the key problem.

Ultimately, I suspect that what’s driving Islamic fundamentalism are economic inequities. And, as happens in the first world, once people’s standard of living improves they find wonderful replacements for fundamentalism.

Of course, all of that is nice to say in principle… but in practice it is going to take a long time and a lot of pain before the problem of Islamic fundamentalism can really be addressed.

__________________________

Question:

What is one discovery or innovation that you hope that humanity will achieve in your lifetime?

Lawrence Krauss:

Discovery: to know whether our universe is unique or not.

Innovation: to act globally to solve global problems [like climate change and ridding the world of nuclear weapons].

Richard Dawkins:

Explain consciousness and its evolution. Another one that I think has a realistic chance of being solved, is the origin of life

Lawrence Krauss:

I echo Richard. I actually think the origin of life will be solved in our lifetime, probably in the next decade.•

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“Science is wonderful, science is beautiful. Religion is not wonderful, religion is not beautiful.”

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“What Do You Feel Is The Strangest Creature On Earth?”

November 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, atheist-in-chief, coiner of the term “meme,” and maker of perplexing comments about church sex scandals, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

As an expert on evolution, what do you feel is the strangest creature on Earth, or the one that just doesn’t seem to make sense from an evolutionary standpoint yet continues to survive? (Besides people)

Richard Dawkins:

Nautilus (because of its pinhole camera eye). But that’s just off the top of my head. I’d probably think of a better answer given more time (that is so often true!)

__________________________

Question:

Richard, what would you say to Muslims who point out (correctly) that during Islam’s Golden Age, science and education flourished in the Caliphate as Muslim scientists either started new fields, or built on past work by Greek and Indian scholars.

Richard Dawkins:

Great job in the Middle Ages, guys. What went wrong?

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Question:

How do you feel about South Park’s depiction of you and their take on the argument?

Richard Dawkins:

Satire is supposed to satirise. Depicting somebody as having a predilection for buggering a bald transvestite is not satire and not witty. The futuristic projection of wars between atheist factions is genuine satire and quite witty. I think it’s important understand the difference. I preferred the experience of going on The Simpsons.

__________________________

Question:

How do you feel now that memes, first discussed in your book The Selfish Gene, have become ubiquitous in internet culture?

Richard Dawkins:

I’m pleased that the concept of meme has become widely understood, but the true meaning is a bit broader than the common understanding. Anything transmitted with high fidelity from brain to brain by imitation is a meme.

__________________________

Question:

Would you like to take a moment to chat about our lord and savior Jesus Christ?

Richard Dawkins:

No thank you.•

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“The Internet Was Barely In Its Infancy When Richard Dawkins, A British Evolutionary Biologist, Coined The Term ‘Meme'”

July 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of an excellent piece by Christopher Mims at Quartz which explains the science of measuring the life spans of memes:

“More and more of the things that set the internet on fire are of that species of charmingly moronic pairing of text and image that allows even the post-literate to feel like they have partaken of a shared cultural moment. And now, scientists are beginning to understand how the curiously addictive visual tropes known as ‘memes’ are born, why they die, and whether or not it’s possible to predict which will ‘go viral’ and be harvested by the night-soil merchants up at meme warehouses like Cheezburger.

Treating memes like genes tells us which are likely to spread

The internet, of course, was barely in its infancy when Richard Dawkins, a British evolutionary biologist, coined the term ‘meme’ back in 1976. And he meant it as a much more nuanced concept, encompassing pretty much any idea that is good at propagating from one human brain to another—whether it is dialectical materialism or the tune to Happy Birthday.

But Dawkins was deliberate in his comparison of memes to genes. Like the molecular units of inheritance, memes ‘reproduce’ by leaping from one mind to another, ‘mutate’ as they are re-interpreted by new humans, and can spread through a population. The internet has radically accelerated the spread of memes of all kinds; but it has also led to the rise of a specific kind of meme, the kind encapsulated by a phrase or a picture. And importantly for scientists, the life of a such a meme is highly measurable.”

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“All Life, At Its Core, Is A Process Of Digital-Information Transfer”

October 23, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Even though the word “meme” seems to have been invented during the Internet Age, Richard Dawkins actually coined the term–a truncated version of the ancient Greek word “mimeme,” which means “something repeated”–back in 1976. An excerpt from a 1995 Wired article by Michael Schrage about Dawkins:

“But even without futuristic morphing, Dawkins’s head holds more provocative ideas than most. Two decades ago, Dawkins presented a radical evolutionary perspective in a small book called The Selfish Gene, a disturbingly persuasive essay arguing that living things are little more than corporal vessels impelled to heed the primal dictates of selfish genes hellbent on their own replication and propagation. Much as the English philosopher and novelist Samuel Butler observed a century ago that a chicken is just a way an egg makes another egg, Dawkins proposed that we are nothing but expressions of our selfish genes in the process of making more selfish genes. Taking that idea even further, Dawkins proposed that genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own reproductive end. He extended these notions into culture and described ideas as competing, self-replicating entities he called memes. Dawkins’s most recent book, River Out of Eden, extends his life’s work into a unified evolutionary theory arguing that all life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer.”

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Dawkins in 2000 with semi-convincing male impersonator Rosie Charles:

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Evolutionary Science At Its Finest: Dawkins, Gould, Weiner, Etc.

December 27, 2010 in Books, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Queens-born paleontologist, who died in 2002, lived in Soho for many years. (Image by Kathy Chapman)

The American Scientist list of  “100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science” includes the following 20th-century volumes about evolutionary science:

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