welcome to two nights program. hosted by the commonwealth club of silicon valley. my name is mary ellen hannibal. it is my pleasure to introduce, richard dawkins. evolutionary biologist, founder of the richard dawkins foundation for reason and science and author most recently of science in the soul. selected writings of a passionate rationalist. he was voted prospect medleys number one world thinker and was on the daily telegraph 100 greatest living geniuses list. he earned his degree in zoology and a doctorate in animal behavior from oxford university and later returned to become the universities first professor for the public understanding of science. his best-selling books include the selfish gene, the blind watchmaker and dad delusion. they have sold more than 3 million copies and have been translated in more than 30 languages worldwide. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming, richard dawkins. [applause] >> okay, are we all -- can you hear me? that sounds pretty good, not bad! okay. so, we have a lot of heavy duty questions and things to ponder tonight. i thought maybe we would start with something a little later. [laughter] and more personal. there is a really wonderful, towards the beginning of this book science in the soul, i have -- which gives me complete ability to read all over the book. it is fascinating. i wonder, dr. richard dawkins you have this wonderful essay about the influence by doctor doolittle. [ how many of you have read the book, doctor doolittle or seen a film with rex harrison? you all know, you pretty much know. that is good. >> i do think there is some similarity between doctor doolittle and the young doorman. they are contemporary. doctor doolittle was always the great naturalist like charles darwin. and, they both love animals. and i think that i was generally influenced by doctor doolittle. i read all of the books i think. i've never seen any of the films, thank goodness. [laughter] >> there pretty good. >> are they? >> well, one of them. >> if you really love a book, -- i love doctor doolittle and i think he did influence me. i think he influenced me to value nonhuman animals in a way that i might not otherwise have done. he actually censored quite a lot of libraries but he is not allowed in public libraries because of racism. and that was just a symptom of the 1920s which is when he wrote the book. everyone in britain was racist at the time. but in a very gentle kind of way. i think doctor doolittle more than makes up for it by his anti-speciesism. >> doctor doolittle in the essay, he goes over and over again and -- he figures out what he needs and sort of forms webs of rescue for him. >> yes, he can talk to nonhuman animals and that is really the plot of all of the stories. everything turned on this one trick that he has. it's good science fiction we alter one thing and then everything else follows from that. >> so it struck me reading it. in the last couple of years we have had a number best-selling books and some of them very good. for example, about called beyond words by a wonderful marine biologist. called soul of the optimist by montgomery who was a wonderful science writer and they are focused on animal consciousness. and as carl says, no animals care about their own life. they want to increase their own life and the care about it further in their own life just the way you and i do. and of course, there is a check for this kind of a plea at the center of these books for us to understand that we can't just be wiping these creatures off the face of the earth. and what i liked about the doctor doolittle analogy or, connection, is that he is helped and aided by these animals. in ways that we are also aided by animals really without our understanding how we are connected to them quite consciously all the time. >> yes, i think it is quite a stretch to look that way it is a children's book and -- >> that's true. [laughter] >> all right! you are so right, actually! another of the early in the book concepts, i mean you are writing so accessible and is charming and easy to read. we have real concepts that make you sit down and think about them pretty hard. one of them -- i have just been really pondering a lot is your discussion of how humans and how this moment in time or organisms are adapted critically because of the process of natural selection. which is a lot like it has been selecting genes over eons to bring the next generation fourth. perfectly well adapted to the past but not to the present or to the future. and along with that, but we have these aggregates of lots of successful humans as we have now, we have these what you call, emergent. i do not want to know if we call them qualities or things that we create together. such a something like the internet. which then again, is a little bit beyond our own capacity to deal with perfectly well. we will always be a little bit misaligned with our own present. this idea of time, i think, and outplacement and is a very beautifully framed by the beginning opening of your book. i wonder if you would read from that. >> so this is the introduction which i wrote specially for this book. much of the rest of the book is previously published essays. and whether or not there previously published in this country. i am writing this two days after breathtaking visit to arizona's grand canyon. breathtaking still hasn't gone away although i fear it made. too many native american tribes, the grand canyon is a sacred place. a site of numerous origin mixed from the have a supine to the zuni. -- if i were forced to choose a religion that is the kind of religion i could go for. the grand canyon has a stature on a religion classing the petty smallness of the -- in the dark knight, i walked out along the south rim of the canyon. laid down on a low wall and gazed up at the milky way. i was looking back in time. witnessing a scene from 100,000 years ago. for that is when the light set out on its long request to dive through my pupils and spark my retinas. at dawn, following morning, i returned to the spot. chatted with vertigo as i realized where i had been lying in the dark. [laughter] i looked down towards the canyon floor. again, i was gazing into the past. 2 billion years in this case. back to the time when only microbes stirred sightless beneath the milky way. if cells receiving that majestic hush, rejoined by the rock bound ghosts of -- ammonites, even dinosaurs. was there some point in the mile-long devolution progression of the canyon data where they would call a soul, sprang into existence like a light suddenly switched on. what did the fellow creeps into the world that dim thousands of a soul and a pulsating, 1/10 of a soul in a camp, have a soul in -- than a typical human soul. eventually a soul on the scale of a beethoven or a mandela. or is it just silly to speak of souls at all? not silly, if you mean something like an overwhelming sense of subjective personal identity. each one of us knows the possessive even if as many modern thinkers, it is an illusion. an illusion constructed as some might speculate because a coherent agency of singular purpose. helps us to survive. [applause] i will tell you what i wrote in my book. upon reading those paragraphs. his richard dawkins getting spiritual on us? [laughter] >> that is part of the point! it is kind of meant to be a little bit provocative to put the word soul in the title. i said last night that i quoted one of my great heroes, peter -- a great medical scientist and biologist and nobel prize winner. he said, i hope i shall not be getting election.he said i hope i shall not be thought ungracious if i say at the outset that nothing on earth would have induced me to attend the kind of lecture you may think i'm about to give. [laughter] i then said, i hope i may not be thought, i hope i shall not be thought ungracious if i say at the outset. but if you have come pumping from the word soul, to enlist some kind of conversion, [laughter] you may be disappointed. there are two meanings of the word stolen. somewhere in the book i quote - to dictionary definitions. definitions from the oxford dictionary. one of which is the immortal soul. the religious soul, the supernatural soul, the one that survives your death. that is not what i'm talking about. the other is the sort of spirit to your emotional response, to science in the universe, life and deep space. that kind of thing that sets a soul in which i use in the title. >> i wonder if you could elaborate a little on this emergent concept? >> yes, well, he was saying earlier about how it is very interesting point you are making about how we are adapted to the past. all are adapted to the past. the genes that made us, our genes that have survived through countless generations. we look back on your ancestors and every single one of your ancestors, not a single one of your ancestors died before achieving at least one heterosexual compilation. [laughter] obvious, but it is very significant because very, very many of their contemporaries died without for died young were done without having and reproducing. so we contain the genes that helped our ancestors to survive in the past. i've got a phrase which appeared in the book and several other. the genetic book of the dead. the genetic book of the dead is the genes in a modern animal which any fence describe the past. the genes in an animal can be thought of as a kind of digital description of the world in which the ancestors of the past survived. not the present and not the future. and as maryellen has just pointed out, emergent properties. it means that the future is going to be different and in the case of human emergent properties, very very different. because we are changing environment and at breakneck pace. much much faster than i suppose than any other animal has ever done. in a way it is amazing that we do thrive so well and an environment which is radically different from the environment in which our genes survived in the past. we wear clothes, we live in huge cities. we get around and fast cars and fast airplanes and things like that. we do suffer from psychological problems. probably because the world in which we live now is a different from the one in which biology was naturally selected. and this is all coming onto the heading of the emergent properties. >> this very beautiful passage. the beginning that you have quoted here, where you frame the very long geological time frame and then the cosmic timeframe and then we have this person, you, observing both. and then you're talking about this past that we are very well attempted for but this emergent future which we are hurtling. and we are creating it as we hurtle. now, this rate of change, why has it increased? has increased? have we been increasing because of our increased numbers or transport what is causing this? >> i think we -- it is increasing. if you think about the -- well, if you go back to the stone age. the bronze age, iron age, it is huge spans of time in between each of those major advances. agriculture 10,000 years ago. 10,000 years or so. then the industrial revolution and the invention of printing. nowadays we have the computer. we have computers more, the exponential increase in the power of computers. the speed and economy and the speed, the cheapness of computers. we are living in an astonishingly fast changing world. it is showing no signs of slowing down. it is still accelerating. >> to questions related to that. it would seem that we are almost driven by our own invention of our own tools. the tools of perception in particular. and we are referencing galileo his telescope. and satellite technology, the microscope, the ability that we have to drill down and finally granulated discernment of what reality is. and then you know in this way that becomes very social. with the internet and facebook and twitter coming ways that we actually organize ourselves socially. it would seem that our toolmaking is actually driving our social behavior in many ways. and i wonder what you think about that? it is not like we decided that our arts, our culture, our understanding of history would be what determine us. but our toolmaking is really the thing it would seem. >> yes, and i think there is a kind of -- it is rather like what biologists call co-evolution. advances make way for the next advance. and in our case, i think we have in the world of confucius, we have software hardware co-evolution. when advances in hardware made possible, software that wouldn't have been possible before the hardware was invented. and so, each one paves the way as it were opens the door to the next advance. and that is getting faster. >> i have to say, it would seem that one thing we are dispensing with willy-nilly oswego is biology. the biological reality of other species. one of the things, seems a couple of thresholds that we have passed. without really fully grasping what we have done. one is that the aggregate number of human beings on this earth has become a bio geophysical force.discernible in the fossil record. the american society for geophysicists or the american -- never get it right but they want to know call it the -- to reflect this profound impact of humans on life on earth.one of the things that we are doing, we are reducing biodiversity of other species. the way that some scientists but is that we are using up too much photosynthesis. actually depriving other species of photosynthesis. that we are taking with her habitat because we are putting so many more human bodies on the earth that we are converting their habitat to human buildings for people to live in and agriculture to feed people. but we are doing something very scary to me. very dangerous and kind of tragic. which is reducing diversity itself. and i wonder if you could tell us about diversity in a very, you know, going back to the very profound and simple mechanism of natural selection. and how it depends on diversity. however life has depended on diversity. and what are some of the, how do you see the horizon as we take it out? >> i think it is more subjective than mine, actually, mary. i -- [laughter] i mourn as you do the loss as diversity. i mourn the extinction of species. i think there have been mass extinctions before. and sometimes people say, well, the mass extinction, humans are now causing this, it is no worse than the previous ones. no worse than the one that wiped out the dinosaur. maybe not. but it is tragic. and i -- i responded to it in an emotional way. i mourn the loss of the dodo and the passenger pigeon. but we are talking about something bigger than that. the catastrophic loss of species and ecologists tell us that this is more than just the loss. actually species are necessary for the continuation of the balance of the ecosystem. >> you know, i think intersects pretty strongly with your expertise because you know, you're talking about the genes that are this genetic book of life. but when i first started writing about evolution myself, and i was taught by evolutionary biologists.that some species like an octopus has conserved genes in it that are so ancient because octopus eventually, way back in time, evolve from ammonites. from different species that some cases, no longer exist. but that does conserved genes that have persisted through the eons are very likely to be genes that are the most hearty and most adaptable to future scenarios. so it's very important actually to conserve especially species that have the ancient lineages because the conserved genes are perhaps more important than recent genes. >> that is interesting, i did not know that. it is interesting. it is fascinating how some animals, to have conserved things, a very very long time. it is an enormous variance in the shared age of genes. yes. >> to go back to your own words, because it really is more important to stay in your world. although i think they over intersect quite much. right in the introduction you have a sentence that says it is not an unreasonable speculation that consciousness mirrors several progression over time -- to connect that with another essay they have somewhat later. which is a fascinating essay about the internet. in which, you wonder if here is a sentence from it. the check is called net game. talk about how the internet may be changing the way we think. this year sentence for the unplanned worldwide unification that the web is achieving mirrors evolution of the nervous system and multicellular animals. and then a little bit later you say the cloud is a superhuman interstellar traveler. his nervous system consists of units that communicate with each other by radio. what is of magnitude faster than our puttering nerve impulses. but in what sense is the cloud to be seen as a single individual rather than a society? >> i should interject here that this cloud, that you are talking about, is from science fiction. it is science fiction book by fred -- he was a great astronomer. and he brought a lot of science fiction. not much of a very good! but the first science fiction book is extremely good. it is called the black cloud. it is with a modern obnoxious hero they cannot help wondering if -- [laughter] the same obnoxious here it keeps turning up under different names. supposedly a different character but equally horrible. [laughter] the black cloud is a superhuman mega superhuman organism that appears and come towards the sun to be on the energy of the sun. and eventually the human scientist on earth getting and managing to communicate with it and learn about it. and it -- different parts of the cloud communicate with each other by radio and the scientists raise a very interesting question. in what sense are you the cloud, a single individual? and the cloud replies, well, the question doesn't mean very much when the rate of communication, the speed of communication between the different communicators is very, very fast. might as well stop talking about them as different individuals altogether. and if all of us could communicate telepathically with each other instead of having to go through the slow bottleneck of speech, if we could all -- communicate our thoughts directly by at the speed of light, the speed of radio waves then, we would be one individual. it would mean anything to us to talk about ourselves as being separate individuals. and i think the point you're getting it at is the internet may be moving towards a certain science fiction future where it becomes a single being. a single living organism of some kind. and i think also, in the passage that you read, made an analogy with it is being suggested that the consciousness of an individual child, forms itself as a kind of melding of separate entities. not in a single agent at all. but becomes a single agent through the same sort of molding as we have just been talking about. >> it is all pretty fascinating. it is charles dickens said the best of times and the worst of times. i mean, looking at both ways it seems exciting. >> that is the way that i feel. >> and then it is terrifying at the same time. speaking of which, just reading, i was rereading the selfish gene which i read many years ago and i was reading a very contemporary book called the gene which in the last year was very good.and i was remarking to myself how timeless your book, science in -- the selfish gene. it has not changed much in the decades since it is published. >> thank you for that! [laughter] >> in my opinion. but a couple of things have changed and one of them is our ability to mess with the gene. ... >> you are separated i read this entire book between london and new york. reading the entire book is more than donald trump has done. [laughter] b-17 genetic manipulation changing of genes has not been able to do until recently. one main way was to transplanted gene from one organism into another. but a new technique that was one of the main pioneers of i do recommend it it is called cracking creation it is autobiographical about her career and it explains all about the technique and the misgivings she has and the power that it might have. it is a very powerful technique actually programming genes in organisms, any organism you like. it comes from bacteria that have their own immune system against viruses. they are very heavily afflicted by viruses. it is called, what is it called? thank you. the technique the bacteria used to recognize a virus is a technique that humans can now exploit to edit genes of any organism that you need. it is an immensely powerful new technique giving life to great possibilities and also great misgivings we have controlled evolution by manipulating the selection part of the darwinian equation. we control that to produce dogs that are being chased and poodles and bulldogs. and like cale and cole robbie or cauliflower and broccoli. and with that wild cabbage. but now to change the mutation of the darwinian equation. but people are worried about it. >> this may be an oversimplified question but is somebody messes with aging in humans to create a human from science fiction is it possible something could be released? >> i suppose. with that ethical discussion i did have a stroke year and a half ago that phil beyers the distinction is my voice. it is already being used with rather little objection to remove genetic disorders like hemophilia or muscular dystrophy or huntington's disease. some people even object on the ethical grounds to meddle with nature or play god. he people object to healthy manipulation to change the gene so they become better at music or mathematics a lot of people have objections to that. like it smells of hitler with the blind blue-eyed aryan long -- lawn to make a distinction between that draconian dictatorial government imposed genetic changing like hitler was doing. you can still object to the people saying i want my child to be a brilliant musician please give her the right genes which may be possible. but not yet. >> it seems inevitable. >> but people do object to that. don't worry about those that are ambitious but for the child to sit at the pno three hours a day. is it all that much different or with those nightmare visions but as you said in the best of times and the worst of times the future can look pretty scary sometimes and again we do have some fantastic questions and on this technical topic there has been many reasons events in the area of potential rna components and metabolism. >> so with the beginnings of life doesn't have to happen. it is one of the faces that doesn't face biology. 4billion years ago and the kinds of things that must have been. the origin of the first self replicating entity. and that is the selection. then the whole story can take off. and once that started then we kind of understand what happened. darwinism took off. how does the first step happened? it is a huge mystery. because dna was called a high tech replicator it is very efficient but it needs a complicated infrastructure of proteins to do replication. you can have that complicated infrastructure with dna so it is a catch 22. the origin of life. rna is a related molecule to dna. it is a replicator and always has the capacity to be an enzyme like protein. so rna could have done both jobs. if you have rna it will do that job also with protein -- protein. so this is a current most fashionable theory at the moment then it was taken over by dna and the enzyme function by protein. >> i will aggregate a free one -- if you question with machine learning and artificial intelligence is there a point that we must unplug? so looking at artificial intelligence so you en masse about the threat from artificial intelligence? yes. you must listen to elon musk. [laughter] he is a genius no doubt about it. even he worries about it as well. we are committed to the view nothing in her brain or bodies that did not fit it. so we are committed to the view can be assimilated or done by machines. and machines will do everything they can do that do it better. some people are worried to not be necessary anymore or to be taken over by robots. and to be dispensed of altogether if they get to that point to make new robots. so we get steamed and the creations take over. >> i don't know why we are so worried about that. it is aesthetic. but i would be sorry if shakespeare and mozart and michelangelo were forgotten and nobody knew about them. and also to appreciate him. and what humans could do. the best of times and worst of times. >> there is a number of different questions about religion. [laughter] what would be the one question to shape belief? and then to understand religious behavior. we will understand religious behavior only after we have renamed it. once we understand what it is good for we don't have to call it religion. we can just understand that it served a purpose. >> yes. i think what you are talking about there is the evolutionary advantages with the darwinian survival value of religion. but religion is extremely widespread and ubiquitous. >> but to be human universal that need some type of explanation. but what i said was we could rename the question before we could answer it. maybe it is the wrong question. maybe it is the right question of the survival value. under the right stances. it is no longer a question of a survival value but a psychological predisposition? and to be scared of dying. that psychological predispositions to manifest themselves as religion rather than ask the question of the survival value. >> so rather than skepticism how do we get rid of this dangerous emerging trend? what about the situation of religion and government with artificial intelligence? if you are going to puncture a believers believe how would you do that? >> i will take the puncture first. read the bible. [laughter] [applause] >> are liberals afraid of islam? >> but to abandon their principles with homo foamy or misogyny hate misogyny but when it comes to islam who will forget all about that. my next muslim terrorist has a new foundation and call that regretted left for the tendency as it were to give his long -- is mom free principles about feminism and things like that. i think it is the regressive left from the terror thinking they are racist. it is not a race. [laughter] you laugh but it is very widespread. if you can pop in and out it is not a race. it is a tendency to identify with victims of oppression. but they identified the wrong victims and muslims are victims of oppression from the west actually oppression from his mom especially muslim women and gays that is the real problem. and now trying to reform islam. who is the victim here? >> we do here a an idea to reform religion that are oppressive to people's human rights. it only taxed to people who agree we should not be oppressing other people's human rights. do we need to replace with a code? and to aggregate those communities around values to criticize your physician because science does not explain everything. two generations of history and literature was the finest expressions of humanity i -- creativity. science cannot explain everything. [laughter] point taken. >> but art and music but science cannot tell you what is right or wrong. probably although sam harris may disagree but science certainly can help you enormously with those logical inconsistencies and for more philosophical reasoning and like you mentioned art and music with many works of art are inspired by religion. but nothing in the sort. it is entirely natural they should be inspired by religion because that is where the money was and sponsored by which benefactors. michelangelo was employee to paint the sistine chapel. but religion does provide genuine inspiration with jesus is passion and crucifixion not surprisingly inspired and we shall never know that evolution. [laughter] what do we replace religion by? there are also different purposes and i suggest that science and reality could provide inspiration or to give inspiration or community, religion has provided community in different ways. >> what do you think is going on here? why do we have donald trump as our president? [laughter] >> probably because you have this adobe electoral college system. [applause] which by the way is quite not so difficult to get rid of as people think. on paper it is very difficult because you need to third's majority in both houses and that and then to be ratified by the state largest mom -- legislators. it is a very difficult thing to do but the constitution does allow each to change the way it chooses it delegates because of the electoral college. so maine and nebraska do that in the pro rat away but they are small and doesn't make difference but if california suddenly did that but what you could do is for those individual states to decide to follow the constitution to send all of the delegate and the way the entire country goes. and this will be done on a state-by-state basis it isn't a sudden change my going over to the nebraska system. but there is a movement afoot as you know waiting for several other states to agree to do it. because individual states can do it and it doesn't make much difference to begin with but it would get rid of that anomaly you have at present. as it was started was a good idea. a true electoral college as they were pledged to vote for a particular candidate. and who would make the best president. >> read their references or read their books. [laughter] so that is the electoral college. i recommend the michael moore analysis. he was one of the few people that got the prediction right. and he is talking about the rust belt healing they are left behind in their word -- their world is disappearing and leaving them behind. >> so to so this could wrap it up well. if the catastrophic events not off all human life how long would it take for them to revolve again? . . . . is in the opposite happening we are becoming so much into each other? >> for humans to specie eight if a colony was set up on mars. so answers that question. so what would you like to tell us? the things that feel very separate or the past or the comprehension of points in the universe so we think that evidence to believe that anything is true. [applause] but emotions are fine and we all have them. but they should not guide important decisions like who they vote for for any reason to believe any of it. that is how believing things is concerned. so that needs to be intelligently designed don't base your morality or ethics on the holy books or tradition or revelation or authority. from the society you want to live in. that's it. [applause] i hope you enjoyed this evening's program. with the selective writings of a passionate rationalist. and now this meeting is adjourned. [inaudible conversations] b-17. >> richard will be signing books but because of the number of people here tonight no personalization just the autograph and no selfies. [inaudible conversations] - as a judge of 45 years going from the active life of making decisions and to make a case was that a difficult transition for you? >> it wasn't difficult. but i have known people who became judges and so disliked the decision-making process. but i found a decision-making process although different, enormously challenging and enormously satisfying. because the opportunity to resolve disputes and to be a public significance and that is a very satisfying role.

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