the big open questions. it's something that happened a very long time ago for probably about 4 billion years ago, not long after the earth came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago. we know the kind of thing it had to be. it had to be the origin of the first cells replicating information, the first gene although it certainly would not have been dna. dna would have almost certainly come in later and usurped the role of the original replicator so most of the theorizing and i would say perhaps all the theorizing going on now is looking for the chemical event, some kind of a lucky random chemical event which gave rise to a molecule which was self replicating. as i say it would not have been dna. dna can do its job without protein and protein can do its job without dna so there's a catch-22 there. it could have been rna because rna is capable both of doing the job of protein which is being a capitalistic in some sort of an executive function in the cell and rna also can do what dna does. mainly the replication function although not as well as dna. so the current vogue theory is that the original self replicating molecule might have been rna. it did both jobs. both the enzyme job and later taken over by protein and the replication job later taken over by dna and rna remains is a very important mediator between them. >> excuse me we need to move on because there are so many people find you. thanks for the great question. >> thank you so much for your great answer. >> good evening. i read the selfish gene quite a while ago and i remember the altar is a a menu touch touch on the talking about kin selection but the other was reciprocal altar was reciprocal ultras him and i wonder is that considered currently viable and what struck me at the time and thinking about how that might work is that mike is a byproduct of that give a certain selection pressure to identify cheaters and if you identify cheaters do you also punish cheaters so i wonder if that makes sense and has that been examined in the biological world, punishment systems and the this sort of thing? >> very much so. there are two problems and explaining altruism. the individuals concerned don't have to be members of the same species and not even the same kingdom. there is reciprocal subtotal between flowers and bees the bees pollinating the flowers and the flowers feeding the bees with aviation fuel which is nectar. reciprocation works because a new game theory terms we have a nonzero-sum game. both parties benefit from the other one's presence. when it happens within a species that often concerns doing it turns feeding the other individual for example and the expectation that being said later. a beautiful example of this is the work of wilkinson on bats, vampire bats which as you know blood. wilkinson worked out as a blood donor scheme in these bats. they feed at night and day not a way at the heels of things like cows and can blood. and then they go back to their caves by day. at any one night, but that may strike lucky in which case it gets a surplus of blood or it may strike unlucky and get no blood at all. wilkinson showed that if he gets no blood at all it's in great danger of dying. these bats need food every single day whereas when they get a surplus they have more than they need so it's a perfect situation for reciprocal altruism and they do indeed feed each other. at bat that has a surplus of blood will be solicited by at bat that struck unlucky that night and the starving and the one with the surplus will regurgitate its surplus to the starving one so that's reciprocal altruism. it's part of the theory that this should only work if the bats know each other so that they can identify potential cheaters as you have said and identified those individual bats who do good turns. and what wilkinson did was to set up artificial combinations of bats in the lab and some of his artificial combinations of bats were from the same cave and therefore knew each other and others of his artificial conglomerates of bats didn't know each other and sure enough it turned out that the ones that knew each other practice reciprocal authorism, practiced the blood donor scheme where's the ones that did not know each other didn't do that. that's just one particular example that the theory would be that it's a very common phenomenon and things like guilt, cheating, consciousness of debt may be important in human evolution. our very ability to do arithmetic may come fr a potential, to alter us. your answering i wouldn't think how you would apply the bats altruistic principles to wall street. >> yes. >> before and during the emancipation was signed to the question arose by piles of negro, whether any grow is homo sapiens, or homo erectus. another question that came about was whether or not he can think systematically in a scientific way. today we label schizophrenia as a negro disease or a black man disease. sometimes based on statistics. my question is, with the rise of all these eugenics programs and research that are being founded, if any ethnic group here facing challenges like negroes faced in the past? that. >> whether they argue the result of this. >> this includes genetics research and we determined this human line of he was human and who is not human. of any challenges or questions. >> [inaudible] >> there are many things that we have going on with this, whether it is schizophrenia or sickle cell disease. there is no sort of categorization of a specific racial identification of those purely based upon the genetic principles order those that have suffered a mutation that has cost out. but the racial politics that have been completely deleted from credible scientific investigation. and so we can make some kind of consolation in the fact that that is part of this. >> that is right. the human species is extremely uniform and there are separation of different races and there is a very minor separation we are very close. >> good evening. touching back as there has been a string and then underlying question and i'm looking for different opinions like that of christopher hitchens and others, my question is that can any good or great good come from religion, good as and beneficial to humanity, or should we do away with it? >> i don't think any good can come of it. but i don't think that we should do away with the in this sense. i would like to think that it is simply something that will wither away. but i fear that that may take a long time. >> what do you mean in the first sense of good, that no good can come of it? >> i simply can't think of any good that comes of it. [inaudible conversations] >> i am told by our stage manager that we only have time for one more question. and there are two more questions. okay. >> hello, i am a big fan. i have always wondered about intelligence and the singularity of intelligence and i wanted to ask you in particular if there is any room in evolution or singularity of intelligence and a species or human race. >> what was the word before in singularity? >> tentacle. >> i can kind of see what he said singularity might mean come a sudden abrupt change. >> if you want the word, i can change it to perfection. >> yeah, well, okay. let's take this, which would sort of mean a sudden abrupt change. and i don't know that. i think it is arguable that the or in a language is the arguable the singularity. we don't know whether there was or whether there is a major change in this way. so that would probably be the best guess i could think of, which would be the origin. >> the idea of this would exist to so many different forms of intelligence. >> last question. i'm sorry we can't take anymore because of this time constraint. >> hello, i have a question about the role of religion in communities. i grew up in miami beach and there are half a million jews here. and i noticed something that they always seem to be well connected to each other and these are the friends i have, they are secular. do you think that religion has a role in establishing communities or all they are better ways to establish communities? because this seems to be very well-connected and i kind of wish there was a way that i could do this. >> that is right, and what is good about it is the idea of community and fellowship and friendship. that is what we should be working toward. you simply don't need religion to do that. you can set out with community and fellowship and that is what we ought to be doing rather than tying it to supernatural superstition. [applause] [applause] >> every weekend booktv brings you 48 hours of nonfiction authors and books on c-span2. keep watching for more television for serious readers. >> booktv continues its tour of the new public library. we are joined -- what you do your? >> i'm the curator of the berg collection of english american literature. >> how did you get that position? >> i worked in the new york public library in the past. i was in the rare book division, slater curator at southern methodist university. and downtown at the st. mark's library. data doctorate and all that led to my being here. >> how long have you been your? >> as a curator i've been there since september 2000. >> you've brought some things out to show us that you have in the collection. what are you going to shows? >> well, berg is an enormous collection. tens of thousands of printed items, but this is what i like to call the tip of the berg so speak. him have the only surviving manuscript of john downes holy sonnets satires and paradoxes that was done in his own lifetime. it's not in his hand but it's in the hands of the secretary and personal assistant. this has the highest authority deriving directly from his own manuscript. you can see changes, or differences between the text as represented here and in the space and transcriptions that were made in the first edition and they were perpetually throughout the centuries. for instance, in this sonnet more, tyrannies, all those who have been destroyed by this will be resurrected on the day of judgment. this word, birth, was transcribed and it was only when it was read correctly and cricket -- >> who was john that? >> john gannon was a great publicist, the best poets of the 17th century. who used wit, philosophical inquiry in order to create highly formal and complex sonnets and other forms of poetry. >> what else do you want to shows? >> we have a wonderful dickens collection, over 550 letters, all have his first editions. what's remarkable come with 13 of his performance copies. the copies he used in public readings. this is the first one he ever did. the first week of her cave was a public reading, 1853 and this is the performance copies for a christmas carol. he first read it in birmingham in 1853. this is not yet in existence and he set about creating a text that could be short enough that people could listen to for over a period of an hour, 10 minutes or so. so he had a binder, put them in these blank leaves and then he went through it over a period of a couple of years. that our editorial passages. you can see that he sometimes we wrote passages because if he would have deleted something when a character was mentioned or a scene was described and it was referred to later, he had to somehow introduce it freshly. so that's what you see here. you also find bits of? where pages where he wasn't going to read them at all. pc postage stamps which a broken off. he used these to turn pages quickly. here we have a photo of him taking in new york. this is the last group of photos from the last p

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