She interviews Richard Dawkins about his later book the memoirs an appetite for wonder. This program is about an hour. Host richard i cant help but notice and admire your tie which has paid went on it. Is there a significance to that a biological significance . Guest its handpainted by my wife as all of my ties are. She paints ties and this is a oneoff tie. Theres nothing else like it in the world. We went to antarctica last christmas on a cruise and we spent christmas on a boat together so this was my christmas present. We were seeing millions of penguins and this was a wonderful present from her. Host do you have a particular interest in penguins . Guest i love penguins. They are astonishing animals the way they fly underwater. They are so clumsy on land and then they get underwater and they are phenomenally fast. You wouldnt believe how quickly they can swim through the water. Streamlining is beautiful and so like dolphins they are astonishingly fast in the do the dolphin thing. They jump in the water and back out again. Host your first big success was the selfish gene a book called the selfish gene and then he wrote the god delusion which made you a rather controversial figure but also along with Christopher Hitchens and sam harris and Daniel Bennett really made the word atheist acceptable. I think before that people were ashamed to say they were an atheist or embarrassed and as you have pointed out before you cant run for office in this country if you are an atheist or if you say you are not a believer. But i know that your autobiography which this is part one of two parts, an appetite for wonder you hardly mention religion in that. Why is that . Guest i have given it a fairly good run for its money. Ive written 10 books between the selfish gene and the god delusion and all of them are about science but the science they are about implies atheism and its sort of in played in them. This book is about my early life in the childhood school Days University life and early career. So i suppose i just wanted to that tell the story of my life. There is a story of how i lost religious faith but it doesnt dominate nor should it. Host do you find i know wherever you go and there are crowds and q a and people always want to ask you questions about religion and the universe and why are we here in the meaning of life. Are you tired of that . Guest what i think we didnt do and people tell me in the book signings which are very gratifying they tell me that the god delusion gave them the courage to come out and in some cases it converted them but in rather more cases bear really where atheist and it gave them the courage to came out which suggests to me that theyre a hell of a lot more atheists in this country than anybody realizes and its the emperors new clothes effect but no one speaks out and says they are an atheist and yet if enough of them that they all would and they would be a Tipping Point effect. Host you are talking about members of congress and how out of all the 535 members of congress theres only one member who claims to not be a believer. Do you believe that . Guest statistically cant be true. Theres got to be at least 100, probably 200. If you just look statistically at the rest of the population especially the educated population which many of them are, so there have got to be many many congresspeople who are atheists but they just dont want to talk about it because they think it will lose them votes. Once again i wonder whether the emperors new clothing effect if some of them tried them they might be quite surprised and they wouldnt lose but they might even gain votes. Host you were on capitol hill yesterday with Steven Pinker and you met with a number of Senate Staffers and how staffers who came to listen to you talk about secularism. Why did they come in and what was that about . Guest i didnt ask them why they came but they did come in quite substantial numbers and they all asked interesting questions and they seemed in louisiana state. We both talked one after the other. It was a very good meeting. They had sort of a feel of a good atmosphere and an enthusiastic atmosphere. Were they the kind of questions you normally get on your tour or were they more pointed or were they political . Are they trying to figure out can we really do this . Yeskel i wish they were. I didnt get the feeling that they were exactly doing that but i think they were interested in issues that were raised. For example the question of creationism in this country. Its in this astonishing and shocking fact that more than 40 of the people in this country leave that the world is less than 10,000 years old which is not just wrong its print digitally wrong. Its 4. 6 billion years and 10,000 is a tiny fraction. As i said before its equivalent to believing that the width of north americas eight yards. That is the scale and yet 40 of American People believed it in textbooks in texas are tailored to cope with this extraordinary opinion of ignorant people. Host you know at the press club where you were speaking i sort of felt as though i were in the presence of the dalai lama or the pope of atheism. You do have this incredible following. People were getting up and almost weeping and saying you saved my life and i was going to become a nun until i read your book the god delusion. Guest yes, i was both moved and slightly embarrassed. I love that actually but anymore two of them in quick succession did that. It was sort of like a billy graham meeting where people would come forward. Host it was reminiscent because i have seen so many religious leaders where people will get up and say you saved my life and weeping and kissing of your penguin tie. Guest nevertheless it is moving and its a reaction which i get a little bit more subdued than that but the reaction i often get a majority of the people in my book signing queues Say Something similar to that which is very gratifying. Host well i mean you can imagine does it go to your head . Guest no, it doesnt. Host when you started out you said there was very little you were talking about in religion in your book but can you tell me i think you said you actually were quite religious when you are about 13. He became confirmed and you got into religion and a big way and then when you are 17 or 18 you became militantly antireligion. Tell me about that. Was it the science that did it for you . Guest my parents actually warrants but nevertheless my schools were and i was confirmed and everybody at the school was confirmed. There was one boy who was from a Roman Catholic family and he wasnt. All the rest of us were automatically confirmed into the Anglican Church so it wasnt a big decision on my part. I just sort of went with the flow and then was pretty religious until the age of 15 and then gave it up when i found that the darwinian alternative which really works as an explanation for the apparent design of living things as a biologist i was impressed with the apparent design. The penguins are beautifully designed for swimming fast through the water. By Natural Selection they evolved than it took me until 16 to understand that properly and then i gave all gave up all semblance of religion. Host talking about being the dalai lama or the pope of atheism i get the sense when i see you around other people that they are coming to you hoping to find the answers and you know of course you have talked about how one of the things that guides you the most is the existence of humans and why are we here and what is the meaning of life . Do you ever feel somehow inadequate that you cant provide the answers theyre looking for because it does theres a certain messianic feeling about it. People will go to the dalai lama. I went to the dalai lama and i didnt understand a word he said the people were weeping and preying on their knees. I dont mean to make it sound like that but do you ever feel that somehow you should have the answers and you dont have the answers . Guest these are not my answers. Heaven forbid that i should be treated this way. These are the answers of science and i can try to express the answers but the questions we are talking about are the deeper questions. Why are we here waterbury for it when did life begin . These are the answers of standard science that i have tried to explain in all my books. I try to do that but im not a messianic leader or anything like that. Host one of my favorite bumper stickers i once saw was i dont know and you dont either. I thought in a way you know i guess you call yourself an atheist. What does that mean to you . Guest i dont know and you dont know either. I finally approve of that. The great fallacy is to say science does not know and therefore religion must be right and of course that is a total fallacy. There many things that science doesnt know but if science doesnt know something theres no reason to think that religion does know it. There is a religious default that we default to. Science is working on the answer. Science in some cases may never get the answer but theres absolutely no reason to think that therefore we default to the religious answer. Certainly not. Host you talk about various different labels. There are atheist and agnostic and pantheists and deists. How do you define the difference in those and what works for you . Guest deism is as you know the belief that no particular personal god but some kind of Creative Intelligence set the universe going and retired and did nothing more so does not forgive scents and has no interest in human affairs. Just started the law of physics. That is deism. Theism is belief in some kind of personal god such as the christian god or the muslim god, the gods about halle. Pantheism that characterized as a type of atheism. Its kind of what einstein believed. He did not believe in any kind of personal god that he had a kind of reference for that which we dont yet understand so kind of than i dont know its hard to characterize exactly what pantheists believe. Agnostics are people who dont know. That word was quite by Thomas Henry Huxley a colleague. Some people confuse agnosticism with a 50 50 tossup. There is really no reason to use 50 50. In essence we are all agnostic because we can never disprove leprechauns and pixies. We have to be agnostic about them but for all practical purposes we are a leprechauns and a pixies and in the same way atheists will technically admitting we cannot actually disprove the existence of any particular god. Host why when to call yourself an agnostic then . Guest i do sometimes call myself agnostic that im a bit wary of that because people sometimes think that means a total gone commitment. And i would rather say that i am an atheist in the same sense as i may host has your views changed of religion since you wrote the god delusion . Guest no. Host you seem at least when the book came out it seemed to me that you were much more militantly atheist than you are now. You seem to have pulled back a little bit. Guest actually if you really read the god delusion you might quite surprised actually. I think its a bit of a meth. Its been assiduously criticized and called strident and things like that. I think if you read it again you might think thats something. Ive had people to say that to me that the thought was a fairly militant book as they have read the critics of it and one woman told me that she thought she had better eventually get around to reading it because shes heard of such a militant and progressive vote. She couldnt believe is the same book because it was actually quite a gentle book. My next book an appetite for wonder is a gentle book too. This is not about religion. Host this is an extremely gentle book i found anyway and its very cozy. Guest not too cozy. Guest not too cozy but it was very thoughtful and its sort of allies the impression that some people have that you are sort of this radical fundamentalist. Guest i dont shout. Host there is no shouting in here at all. When you talk about pantheism, could deism and all of that you have to look at science and you say okay well we can sort of trace it back to the big bang creation or whatever it is and then we dont know what happens after that. Guest before he believed anything at all. Host while exactly and then he talked about nothing is some. How can you put your mind around that . Dont you lie awake at night as you say you dont like not understanding things and obviously your whole life is about trying to understand things. Does that make you crazy sometimes that you dont understand that . Guest yes. I am not a physicist. Im a biologist so i know that the human brain was never evolves to understand the mysteries of for example. The human brain defaults to understand how to hunt antelope on the african plains and how to to find waterholes and shelter for the night and how to find a mate. These are all practical problems and we were to solve them. There varies surprisingly and wonderfully the human brain turns out to be capable of doing all sorts of other things like poetry and music and mathematics. Some theory. Very few of us can do it but there are physicists who cope with these profanities and difficulties of modern physics. It isnt easily compatible with common sense. Host what do you mean . Guest the big battle and the statement that physicists make that time and space began began there is no meaning to the word before. Host im not the number one anchor in the world then you are. Guest of pokemon. If you could do physics by common sense you wouldnt need physicists. There are difficulties which common sense cant cope with. They can do the mathematics and it works. Lawrence krause my colleague and i did a film together called the unbelievers and he has written a book called the universe from nothing and he produces physical theory mathematically worked out to show that you can get something from nothing. Nothing and nothing in some strange way cancels itself out to produce something. Quantum theory allows that to happen. I am humble enough to say i dont understand it and im not arrogant enough to say it a cause i dont understand it we can do physics by common sense we wouldnt be physicists. Host what is hard to understand is if there is this creation and there was a creator or something that was created then what created the creator and what they are saying is theres nothing. Guest theres no reason to talk about it at all. Its just too hard to understand the physical theory is fair. Not all physicists accepted and they have a different theory but i think we have to admit that we are not all capable of grasping everything that the human mind has the ability to grasp and im excited to be in the company of physicists who do understand it. It was always clear to me that the origin of all things have to be very simple because its a hell of a lot easier to get complexity from simplicity by evolutionists and that is what evolution does. I wasnt quite prepared to start with absolutely nothing but i imagine that things started with great simplicity. Not until mike physicist started with absolutely nothing mind you its exactly what you mean by nothing is up for dispute. Its. Host now i really cant deal with it. [laughter] obviously you live and work in an atmosphere of academia and so you know a lot of very smart people and some of them are religious. Guest not many. Host most scientists are not read i dont know what percentage. Maybe 10 , 5 . Guest if you take all scientists working in the United States 40 are religious and if you take the lead scientists in the United States or members of the National Academy of sciences or distinguished scientist and its about 10 religious. A scientist who claims to be religious and asked what they really believe its quite likely they will turn out to be pantheism. In some cases it really is the christian god or the jewish god but quite often it is actually a pantheistic einsteinian religion which is not really what i would call god belief at all. Host i know you have done a number of debates and when youre in a debate with somebody who is a believer and believes in god or believes that jesus is the son of god, can you respect somebody who believes that . Do you think they are stupid . Guest i always try to respect the individual people whether or not i respect their beliefs and in the case of people who are christian that has views of science than i can even respect them. I cant respect the beliefs of the creationists and i have to regard them as ignorant but i hope they treat them with politeness. Johan hari british journalists that are rather nice thing. He said i respect you as a person too much to respect your ridiculous beliefs. [laughter] host that was rather nicely. Because your hook is called an appetite for wonder and also wonder often is what people who are religious believers talk about the transcendent, is the wonder of the universe, the wonder of god and all that. Can you separate those out . Guest . Guest of course, yes. Any good scientist is filled with wonder. Einstein said great scientists are always filled with wonder. They rely on their imagination. Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. So wonder yes and i think scientists have more wonder than theologians. We are aware of the sheer wonder of the facts of the universe is gigantic and time is gigantic, that life was produced by explicable phenomena working over a very long time. Working on very simple beginnings. Chemistry and molecules reacting with each other and by an astonishing process called Natural Selection produced ever increasing complexity of living creatures including our cells come for including our brains which are so complex and so large that they finally become capable of understanding the process that gave rise to them and that is a wonderful thought. Who in who among theologians could possibly match that for a wonderful exhilarating thought . Host lets talk about the sneeze. Guest right. Host you say that hitlers father had sneezed at a certain time hitler may not have been conceived. Would you explain what you mean . Guest yes, i wanted to make the point that our existence every one of our existence is hangs by a thread of the astonishing luck. I chose hitler because if hitler would not have lived the whole history of the 20th century would be different. Hitlers father was sure could shekel huber. Of course i dont know when or if he sneeze but 20 years before hitler was born as sneeze would have been enough enough to change the circumstances such that host why the sneeze . Guest hitler came into it existence because of a reticular had happened to hit a particular egg at a particular time. It was expressed eloquently in his poem. A million all of them alive but one called noaa dare hope to survive. The one was made. Better for all of us if you cried he had died. All of us have that luck. Host what does the sneeze have to to do do with the . Guest nevermind the sneeze. Just a moment of conception of any one of us. A million. The exact timing of the act of that gave rise to each one of us would have totally changed 1 million hit the jackpot on that particular occasion. A sneeze immediately before conception could clearly have that effect or simply change the timing. A sneeze twentyyear sirleaf would change the timing of when when got on a bus to berlin or caught this bus rather than that is. Theres a whole series of effects which buy a secured as root would nevertheless have determined have changed which of many happened to work not just in hitlers own generation and of course in any generation that you can think of. You and me and her parents and grandparents and their greatgrandparents. None of us have the entitlement to be alive yet we are. With hindsight somebody had to be a life and it happened to be yes. Us. I expressed this in the opening sentences of another of my books we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. A some are never going to die because they have never been born. We are astonishingly lucky to have been born. I say in another way another part of the book the second dinosaur to the left is the third by the tall tree had happened to sneeze he would have caught the little animal at his feet which was destined to give rise to all the mammals and all the memos are descended from one creature that lived but say in the jurassic era and that one creature that we all descended from every single mammal dissented from this one creature said could so easily have been eats by dinosaur. Something as trivial as a sneeze by dinosaur save the life of that one mammal and therefore save the wife life and made possible the life of every mammal including ourselves. Host you have used the word lock several times in the last few minutes and luck sounds a little bit like fate. It doesnt sound very scientific guest the mistake is to use luck in a predictive way to Say Something like certain people are lucky. We say somebody is a very lucky person. If all you mean is that they have had a lot of luck thats fine but if you mean that they are prone to lock an extreme example of this i talked about is in a cricket match and the same in other matches as well who bets first is determined by the toss of a coin. In cricket it matters a lot. Some people actually believe in the two captains toss a coin and one of the captains calls heads or 12. Some believe that some individuals are born lucky or, getting the call of the toss. They may even choose a player as captain because they think he is more likely to win the toss. They believe that some people are lucky people. That is total nonsense. That is the sense in which is unscientific to talk about luck. Its not unscientific to say someone is very lucky because he had a whole series of good things happen by chance. Nor is it wrong to say we are all lucky to be alive because a sneeze at any time in the past with probably have meant we would not be alive. Host it still sounds like luck to me. Is there a lucky gene . Guest no, no. Im talking with hindsight. What you mustnt do is talk about luck with foresight or say i feel luck is with me tonight. I feel lucky tonight. Im going to las vegas because i feel lucky tonight or i have a lucky number. Or the roulette spin has come up red five times in a row so the luck suggests you could likely say its going to go on being read or its likely about to become black because its blacks turn. Host but look at you. You are an incredibly lucky person. You had a wonderful happy childhood and you had a great education and a fantastic career you know you have had an amazing life and then we look at some of the people who have just been gassed in syria or the people who are starving in africa or the people who are being stoned in for adulterous him wherever, a natural catastrophe. How do you explain that . This is from an atheist point of view. Obviously its one of the most obvious questions to ask a religious person how do you explain suffering if there is a loving god . From an atheist point of view how do you explain it . Uka to have such a fabulous life and someone else is not lucky to have been. Guest we are talking about luck with hindsight so you can see say that to someone who tosses a coin and it comes up heads or if someone is lucky and roulette that is luck with hindsight. It has nothing to do with pure hindsight. When you Say Something is having a fortunate life that is not just with hindsight. Leave me out of it but people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth, people who have wealthy parents and have a good education and have good genes and get a good job because of their abilities and they make success of their life. I wouldnt use the word lock for that. I would say they were favored their genes their upbringing their parents and they are brought up in a homelike folks in the studio. You dont want to achieve it that to the chance or a set of circumstances. That is not mysterious. Host i find it mysterious. I find if you look at the division between rich and poor in the people who suffer and the people who dont its mysterious why he made . Why do i have a good life and somebody else loses all their children in a massacre. Guest this is because you feel somehow wrong that somebody should have bought this good fortune and others not. If it were not justice it would not have happened. Most do their best to redistribute the good fortune. Countries like scandinavian countries who have high tax rates take a lot from the rich and give to the poor. Things like obama is trying to do it in a small way. This is trying to achieve a certain amount of justice of redistribute to justice. You are protesting when you say some people have a charmed and good life and other people end up being gassed in syria. Some people are poor. Some are rich and some are poor. Your sense of justice rebels against that because you feel somehow its wrong but its the way things happen. You could do something about it. You could form a society in such a way that we do redistribute the good fortune a bit but theres no natural justice. The universe doesnt owe poor people the same living as rich people. Its just the way things happen to turn out. When people Say Something like somebody gets a terrible disease or a terrible painful cancer, why did this happen to make . I am a good person. Why make . Its a total fallacy to think because they are a good person that thing shouldnt happen to you or if you are a bad person and you have Perfect Health again there isnt any natural justice. Thats one of the points. Host you mentioned earlier that if you have good genes what does that mean to have good genes . Guest your genes affect all sorts of things like your health or mental and physical ability. That is what thats all about. The choice of good genes to survive and to help you to survive in the wild. All animals are subject to Natural Selection which means the genes that make them good at surviving that gives them good eyes and good ears good wings to fly with those represent good genes and its the good genes that survive to the next generation and the next in the next the genes are very important. An individual of any species with the ability to not just survive but to do other things and some people undoubtedly will be endowed with better genes than others. People are in doubt with genes that make them help them live a long and healthy life. Host one of the things you said in the book which fascinated me was the fact that people that essentially we all come from the same gene that we are all related on some level starting at a point and then but then you say if you go three or four generations along the person in the last generation probably wont have very much genetic sameness. Will you explain that . Guest yes. If you want to ask the question how long ago did we share a common ancestry the answer is probably not very far. We have each one of us has four grandparents and so on. Thats exponential increase just cant go on because it did did did if you cultivate how many people there would have had to have been say in the time of william the conqueror and 1866 just from my ancestors it would be more than the population of the world at the time and needless to say for yours and everybody elses. Obviously we all share ancestors. If you look at it the other way around you dont have to go back very far until you reach a point just on mathematical grounds. We dont divided into separate groups. Would only have to go back a few thousand years for everybody in the world to be descended from the same common ancestor. Host so we are related . Guest of course we are. We probably only have to go back a few hundred years. Guest have you had your dna tested . Guest i have in fact. Its a bit of a game so far because not a lot is known about what most of the genes are doing. The most interesting genes to look at are probably the mitochondrial genes because they are the ones that go down the female line. All males have them but we get them from our mothers of the mitochondrial dna the Little Things in the socalled mitochondria are so i got it from my mother from her mother my maternal grandmother my maternal maternal greatgrandmother of my maternal maternal maternal greatgrandmother so theres at trickling of jeans down one side of the family tree for fairer all possible ways that you could have gotten these genes. This makes mitochondrial genes very easy to trace. It doesnt recombine with other genes so we know when our most recent common ancestor in the female line lived and she lived in africa may be a couple hundred thousand years ago. She is called mitochondrial e. If might journalistic name given to her by people of european descent can trace their ancestry back to a much more recent female common ancestor. Remember the female female female is only one way of doing it. There are several different ways female, mail, female, mail. If you do it that way you and i will turn out to be you and i will turn out to have a common ancestor much more recently than mitochondrial e. s so we are all cousins and relatively close cousins. Going back a little further we are all cousins of monkeys and chan chimpanzees and jellyfish. Get. Host heavy overdone ancestry. Com . Have you ever traced her ancestry . Guest i dont think i have but you could do that. You could use a wide chromosome. Either y chromosome or mitochondrial dna to find your mitochondria and y home or some cause from. From. Doesnt say where the rest of your genes come from. There was a Television Program on British Television which rather foolishly i think took people and trace their mitochondria. They took actually descendents of slaves from jamaica and they had one woman who traced her mitochondria packed a particular tribe in west africa which was nice and quite an adjusting thing to do. They then took her to this tribe in west africa. Oh my people, my people. Its only the mitochondria and the rest of her james could have dashed genes could have come from absolutely anywhere. Probably came from russia and all sorts of places. Host so it doesnt make you weep e. Guest it shouldnt make you weep e. But its rather interesting. We are all cousins and fairly close cousins. We are closely related to each other. Host you invented the word meme which is now very much a part of the language and i think you said in some 30 books have been written with the word in it. What does meme mean and how did you come to conceive of that worth . Guest its a cultural inheritance and i think its the cultural and of a gene. It came at the end of my first book the selfish gene been in the rest of the book is all about dna and the Natural Selection. As i said a moment ago the genes that are successful and the ones that survive through the gene pools, sir the whole effort of the selfish gene was to emphasize the gene as the unit of selection that which benefits from an animals behavior for example. Survival of the genes is what what animal behaviors all that and i wanted to not leave the reader with the impression that genes are everything. I went to leave the reader realizing that Natural Selection could work on anything which is self copying anything where information is copied through something equivalent to generations. Dna is the most important example of something that is imitated from human brain to human brain a clothing fashion a way of speaking a tune. Host use the word in a sentence. Guest the reverse baseball cap is a meme that has spread from america in Youth Culture all over the world. Host you said it came from the french word guest its related to the french word that but i got it from a greek word and i subtracted the initial ni. I wanted something that ideally shouldve rhymed with gene but it doesnt quite rhyme with gene. Host sort of an imitation . Guest imitation is the key. Dna could set to be imitated when its self replicates. If i sing you a tune and you get the tune in your head its a catchy tune. You catch it and then you go out into the street and find yourself whistling it. You change it from boys to whistling. It doesnt matter. Someone else hears you whistling and they pick it up and they sing it then someone else hears it and they whistle it. It could potentially spread like an epidemic. A craze at school a craze for particular toy or a particular game spreads to the school like a measles epidemic. It has much the same epidemiological time course. It rises and it dies away. It may jump to another school because somebody knows a brother or sister in another school. That is a meme. Its like a virus, like a mind virus. Host if people started wearing pink one ties that would be a meme. Guest if someone saw my penguin tie on cspan and said i must have a penguin tie to match. Host wife would get rich. Guest you call it a meme if it spreads by imitation. It would have to be exactly the same penguin tie. So long as its recognized inherited from secrets of generations you could call it a meme. Host you have got two more years to go to finish part two of your memoirs. Why did you decide you are 72 now. Why did you decide suddenly to write your memoirs at this point . Why not another scientific look . Guest well i just missed missed my father died just before i started so i wasnt able to consult him about past memories. I was able to consult my mother who is 96 and that was very useful to me. It seemed like a good idea to do it while i was still around. [laughter] host counting down the days, are you . Guest that is is why its two volumes and it was be one volume. When i got halfway through i felt the need for a bit of a sense of achievement. It was a natural brake point. The publication of my first book was a sort of watershed event of my life because my life did rather change after that and i wrote a lot more books and did things Like Television and radio in journalism so its a pretty natural breaking point. Host when you finish your next book and obviously that will occupy your time for the next couple of years and then the endless book tour. Do you have a bucket list . Guest well there are parts of the world i havent yet seen and some parts of it would like to see again. Australia. I have seen little of south america. I havent seen china at all. I have seen antarctica. I havent seen the arctic. So yes i would mind doing that. I also have other books that i would like to write as well. Host any novels . Guest well i dont know. Ive never quite known how to do that. Host you just make things up. Its very different from what you do. Guest dialogue, is that hes a . Host i have written a couple of novels. Guest i know. Host well i talk a lot so i dont find it that hard. Guest i rather like satirical novels that are a close observation of the way people talk in the way people are. For some reason whenever im in an airport listening to people around me and i sort of feel i should write a novel and hearing the way people talk. Host do you read them . Guest i like modern satirical novels. I like michael frain, that kind kind david lodge. That sort of perceptive witty contemporary life. I like science fiction. Host one of the things that i loved in your book was he said when you are are much younger one of your favorite books was gone with the wind and you read it a number of times. Guest its terribly racist. I didnt realize it when i was young. Host but the story itself. What was it about gone with the wind . I must have read it 10 times. Guest im not sure i would like it now. Elected as a child. It carries you along. Host is taking lsd may be on your bucket list . Guest on my bucket list . Host you mentioned in your book that someone had offered to take you on a trip but you turned them down. Why did you turn them down . Guest theres a chapter in my book about my time in berkeley. Host did you ever do marijuana . Guest no, never. Host never did any drugs at all . Guest later, marijuana but never hallucinogen like lsd. Recently a friend offered to mentor me through an lsd trip and she said she would take a half a dose so she could be empathizing but still capable of making sure i didnt jump out of the window or thinking i could fly or Something Like that. I couldnt decide whether to do it. I have a cousin my fathers first cousin who is mentioned in the book who is an expert on such drugs as a pharmacologist and a psychiatrist. He it was i think who influenced August Huxley to do than his famous experiment. Taking mescaline. So i wrote and asked him whether he would advise him and he gave a very balanced opinion. He said on the whole not. There is a danger of a bad trip but i dont know. Maybe you can guard against that and take a lower dose or something. Host but it did intrigue you the idea that . Guest definitely intrigues me because im reading descriptions of various other descriptions. Yes, i mean i would be very curious to try. Host you said he is a psychiatrist. Have you ever been to a psychiatrist . Guest no, i havent. Host how do you feel about psychiatry or therapy . Guest its a very important thing for some people. I feel perhaps very fortunate that i dont think i need it. Host im interested in this sort of confluence between religion and psychiatry that so many people well the psychiatrist often plays the role that priests play we have talked before about the idea of good and evil and good genes and evil genes and what makes a person good and what makes them an amoral person. I think sometimes when you see a psychiatrist or you talk to a priest or whatever you are trying to bring out the best of yourself. Guest there is a lovely part in crocodile dundee where crocodile dundee is told everybody in new york goes to a psychiatrist and he says do they have any maids . Guest i didnt remember that. There is some similarity there and i think most people if you ask them what say that they want to be good and moral and as i said we have talked about this before but how do you define morality and d. You think that often people will say you cant be immoral if you are not religious and you dont believe in god. Where do we get morality and if we have a moral gene . Guest there are people who say you cant define i think we do define it. Its clearly cruel that any particular time in history a particular society for example modern western society and american western society in the 21st century is a very distinctive 21st century morality which we all share whether we are religious or not. Its a kind of consensus that we accept. Its somewhat based on the golden rule. Treat others as you would wish them to treat you. Host do you go by the golden broke . Guest yes, i mean we all to a greater or lesser extent subscribe to this sort of thing that we kind of together trying to commit to and they want to live in a society where people dont steal and where they dont kill and they dont rape and they dont commit grievous bodily harm. They pay taxes. We take care of the poor and the sick and the elderly. We live in a society which cares for each other, which cares for other human beings. And we can sort of work out for ourselves is this the kind of society in which we wish to live . Die without any religious belief would not wish to live in the kind of society for people cheat and dont pay their taxes in the rape and steal and kill. I suppose you could say its a kind of redirected selfishness because you dont want that to happen to you. You want a well ordered society where youre protected from that. What actually counts as a relatively good society varies from century to century. In the 19th century british and the American Society was rather sexist. Women couldnt vote until the 1920s or in britain or western europe so we have moved on and we have moved on as a whole society collectively. Some kind of collect it society has moved on. We have abandoned that kind of sexism to say that women arent capable of voting because they cant think. The bothersome thing is we would say if they get in the 19th century Thomas Henry Huxley Charles Darwin abraham lincoln, these men were all enlightens for their time but they would be regarded as extremely backward for our time. So there is a shifting which clearly has nothing to do with religion. What it has to do with is complicatcomplicat ed but it moves on. Host do you think at some point in our lives we will not be a religious society . Guest yes, i do think that. It may take a while. We are moving in the right direction certainly in europe and i think also in america in the number of people who profess no religion in america succeeded 20 . Its quite a large percentage. Specifically since it hasnt been recognized politically but its there. In europe its much higher. Not poland but britain and scandinavia. Host a lot of that may have been because of your book the god delusion. Thank you. Guest thank you very much