>> "an appetite for wonder" is the name of the book. the author dr. richard dawkins who has written god delusion as well as the selfish gene, bestseller. dr. dawkins why did you choose to write an autobiography at this point? >> i am getting on a bit and it felt like a good moment to do so. my mother is 96 and is a very useful resource to tap her memories and this being a wonderful experience in effect interviewing her to write the book. it seemed like the right time to do it. this is in fact the first half up to the age of 35 up to where i wrote the selfish genius. a watershed in my life i suppose then it didn't make sense to divided into two books. this is the first one taking it through childhood, school days, university early work as a scientist and after writing this selfish genius at the age of 35. >> why was the selfish gene a natural halfway halfway point for you in a sense? >> the selfish gene gene changed my life and before that i was the ordinary scientist. and then after the selfish gene and i stayed on the faculty at oxford and went on teaching and went on doing some research but i became i suppose more of a public figure writing books for large audiences. >> who were john and jean dawkins? >> john and gene were my parents. they were well my mother is still alive. my father was a biologist. he did -- at oxford so his career became similarly to mine. we went to the same school, rather expensive english schools and then he went to oxford where ice i've read zoology he did research and i did research and he would intuit which is colonial service which was a thing in those days and we don't anymore of course. i asked malawi it's central east africa and then he was called up to fight in the war in abyssinia i was worn around that time. my mother was an art student from a cornish family and they had a shared love of wild things, wildflowers and they both knew all the wildflowers so i was brought up in an atmosphere of scientific inquiry and love of nature. >> were you brought up in the anglican church? >> my parents had no interest in religion. i was brought up in anglican schools. that was the thing that only happened. it's quite hard to find a school that wasn't in some way churchy. >> and when did you lose that connection? >> i suppose finally at the age of about 16 when i was in school. but i had my doubts. i think i had my doubts around the age of about nine when my mother pointed out to me that there were lots of different religions than the one i was brought up in. >> so when you asked your parents about religion and about god and how did they respond? >> i think my mother told me to to -- christian stories as though she believed them which i believe she didn't. and then while i went to school i got it all from school. >> richard dawkins, how did the selfish gene, about as a poke? >> well, about 10 years before i wrote it in 1966, i was asked by my boss a nobel prize-winning scientist if i would stand in his lectures for him. he was on sabbatical leave and i wrote the course of lectures in animal behavior which pretty much foreshadowed the shellfish -- selfish gene, genes discarding this obsession of bodies and all that rhetoric in those lectures in 1966 and i need lee thought at some point it might read it all write it all down and they finally did so in 1976. when the selfish gene was published but you couldn't find in the selfish gene almost the same words as the lectures that i gave in 1966. so i don't know why i delayed it so long. i actually started to put not tend to piper but -- paper but typewriter to paper in 1973 when there was a strike in britain so there were frequent aristocrats than i could not do my research. i thought at the time i would start writing that look. >> because you didn't need electricity. >> he didn't need electricity in those days, a manual typewriter. >> in "an appetite for wonder" you talk about john maynard smith. who was he? >> he was a very wonderful man. he was a distinguished biologist a very wonderful character. students loved him. he was funny, irreverent, constantly talking to students about work. he didn't do anything things that professors did about fussing about where the next graph was coming from and things like that. he just got on with it. his tools of the trade were pretty much a pencil and paper as a theorist and he inspired students and he inspired me although i was never actually a student. many of his ideas are incorporated in the selfish gene. >> after the selfish gene was published ,-com,-com ma how did your life change as a as a professor corrects did you become a celebrity professor and a. >> not immediately. the book did sell very well and i think it's sold 1 million copies. it did cause a bit of a sensation. and i did find myself being invited to do lots of things which i hadn't been before i suppose, talking to people like you i suppose. that did start to happen then and i suppose it did change my life and set me on a new course of writing other books after that. >> here in the states you are quite well-known not only has as a scientist but also as an atheist. when did you start writing about that in earnest? >> the selfish gene has intimations of that and it doesn't feel that current. all of my books, i made the next book i wrote which was the benign watchmaker is all about the argument of design which is still i think the dominant reason why most people will believe in a supreme being. they will say look at the world of nature and the trees and the flowers. it's all too complicated to happen by chance and of course it is too complicated to come by chance. that's not what it's all about. it's about natural selection. the blind watchmaker was an attempt to explain that to people. and it was taken as an atheistic book by many people. i think the title in america was why evolution shows -- so the blind watchmaker was at least interpreted as an atheistic book and all my other books since then could be interpreted in the same way. the only book that is explicitly atheistic is the god delusion published in 2006 which is i think my biggest seller in fact. i sold 2 million copies in english. but apart from that i books haven't been devoted to atheism and the way the god delusion has. >> richard dawkins your hero you say and an appetite for wonder. >> indeed yes. charles darwin was a brilliant thinker. one of the things i find surprising is that darwin's idea which is so simple and anybody should be able to understand it came so late. it came 200 years after newton and really you might think what newton did was clever and more difficult and calculus working out objects in understanding gravity and the laws of mechanics and the laws of motion. these are all supreme achievements of the human mind. 200 years before darwin and you wonder why somebody like newton or indeed aristotle didn't think of darwin's simple and powerful idea. >> richard dawkins as someone who has written about science and written about ideas about ideas what was alike it like to write by yourself? >> quite difficult. there's an embarrassment factor writing about yourself and i was persuaded by british and american publishers that is worth doing and i should overcome such embarrassment factor. i hope it's a humorous book. i would like to think it's humorous and i would like to think there are plenty of laughs in it. finally have to say i enjoyed writing it. >> did you end up enjoying it? >> yes, i think i did. >> why? >> reliving memories. it's not exactly a systematic history of my life. it's more of a patchwork of memory that i had in mind when i started writing so that kind of rackmount -- random memory and i hope brandon memories of put together in such a way to encapsulate a light. >> it will be in the booksto of. is this a and american? >> that is the american cover. >> what does the english cover look like? >> the british cover is sideways on view. it's not smiling. i suppose you could say it's more poetic rather than cheerful. it has me holding up a little jar with an insect and gazing at it and inspecting this insect. >> why different covers? why would that sell -- >> i have no idea. publishers have their ways and i actually like both covers and i'm quite happy to have both of them on there. >> "an appetite for wonder" and the making of a scientist. richard dawkins is the author and it will be in bookstores in september of 2013. this is booktv on c-span2. >> honor next "washington journal" we will talk with duane matthews of alumina foundation for education about higher education. coming up next, "after words" features columbia professor dr. carl hart on his book, "high price" a neuroscientist's journey of self-discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society. the challenge is everything you know about drugs in society. he is interviewed by guest hosts for five a correspondent with the hill and a "fox news" correspondent. >> host: welcome to "after words." i am juan williams in their guest today carl hart up with his book "high price" a neuroscientist's journey of self-discovery that challenges everything you know about drugs and society. dr. hart is a member of the national advisory council on drug abuse and he is also an associate professor of psychology and psychiatry at columbia university. he is a board member of the college on problems of drug dependency and has conducted 22 years of research and psychopharmacology and the science of drug addiction. dr. hart welcome to "after words." >> guest: thanks for having me. >> host: this is a fascinating book and let me say up front it's your personal story as well as the work or the results of your work in science. but the heart and soul of that i would say and if i'm wrong i hope you will tell me i'm wrong is that you are saying you know what, i think there are 20 plus million americans who do illegal drugs. >> guest: the national government conducts a survey every year and this has been known for some time. there are 20 plus million americans who use drugs on them regular basis. >> host: then you also say that over the generations over time people have always use drugs. >> guest: people have always use drugs and people will always use drugs. that's a fact. i will have to use that one. i didn't know that one. >> host: when. >> host: okay but your point in writing this book as a scientist is that given these realities, the impact that drugs have on social policy, on race, on our culture is oftentimes distorted by a lack of evidence-based thinking that instead people rely on anecdotes or on fears rather than on the facts. so is that at the heart and soul of this book? >> guest: that's the heart and soul of this book. drugs have been used as scapegoats whenever there are social problems and so forth. we use drugs as a scapegoat. the problem for me is that people who look like me are often scapegoated more so than other folks and the scientists who knows the facts about drugs, that's very disturbing. >> host: okay. i would think is a black person it would be very disturbing. >> guest: that's exactly what i mean. >> host: let's stop for a second and try to understand something that is race related in this regard which you say is just an outrage which is the fact that when you look at something like the 1980s and the crack-cocaine, people identify this as a lack community problem but in fact more whites use crack them blacks and similarly more blacks went to jail, arrested for crack use than whites even though more whites were using the drug. how do you explain that? >> guest: i explain it by, it's kind of simple. the short answer is racism and this isn't new. when i say racism i mean that's what we do is we put our police resources and communities of color, primarily black communities and you can easily catch people doing something illegal. no matter why. i drive my car and is sometimes bypass the speed limit. if they want they can give me a ticket. that doesn't happen because the resources are not where i am at most of the time. i hang out on the upper west side but if you want to catch people doing crimes you put your police resources in those communities and that is what has happened. this isn't new. one of the things like the crack-cocaine thing, it's important to know in the early 1900s cocaine was used by a wide number of americans. it was in coca-cola for example and it was in a number of products. now there was concern when black people started to use cocaine. for example "the new york times" ran an article in 1914 about black folks being the new seven minutes but black cocaine being the new southern menace and the way that cocaine was talked about black people being under the influence of cocaine was talked about was that it caused them to be more murderous. it'us them to rape white women. it caused them to be unaffected by bullets. all of this nonsense. this was going on then and it's going on now although the language has been tempered. such easy scapegoats because most of the population don't use drugs. you can't say these things about alcohol. even though alcohol is pharmacologically act as and just like any other drug like cocaine and the rest that you can't say these crazy things about alcohol because many people drink alcohol and they know the effects of alcohol. fewer people use cocaine so you can tell these incredible stories about cocaine. >> host: you think that is still the case today that you could credibly, on c-span or anywhere else and say oh yeah people who use cocaine gain superhuman strength or as that "new york times" article said if you shoot me and my leg i won't feel it if i use cocaine? they think everyone would say you are crazy. >> guest: let's go back a couple of years ago. there was an incident in miami where this guy,, i think they called it the zombie incident where he chewed off the face of another guy. do you recall that? originally it said, the report was that the person was on bath salts, new drugs that whenever there is a new drug or a new form of drug you can say these incredible stories about the drug and be believed and certainly it was believed that bath salts caused this guy guy to choose this guys face off. now when the toxicology when we checked to see what was in this person's system there was no bath salts. the only thing that was in the person system was marijuana and not that marijuana was even in the system or not that he had recently smoked marijuana. we just know that marijuana was in his system. now so with crack-cocaine, the things that we said about crack-cocaine in the 1980s, we said that it caused this incredible amount of violence. now we couldn't say that about powdered cocaine. week couldn't have said that about powdered cocaine because the number of americans were using powder cocaine is particularly americans who are middle-class. so we had to have a new route, smoking it, not powder cocaine but the crack-cocaine cause these incredible effects and we believed it as a country in part because we thought it was something new. in fact they were the same drug. >> host: you are saying something new oftentimes leads to this hysteric reaction? >> guest: that's right that there aren't any real new drugs on the scene. that's just the myth for the most part. many of these drugs have been with us forever. >> host: wait a second. i hear about club drugs and i don't know all the names but the drugs that people take and there are more chemical compounds than marijuana. >> guest: let's just think about it. let's think about methamphetamine. that has been around since the early 1900s. when we think about ecstasy one of the club drugs in the early 2000 people discovered that. they thought this was something new. it wasn't. it's been with us since 1912. so many of these compounds have been with us. it's just that they get a new group of users and when that new group of users is a group that we despise that is a recipe for the hysteria that we see. >> host: let's go back to i think the central point of the book which is lots of americans use illegal drugs and your argument is not for drug legalization. by the way among the american -- who use illegal drugs president obama, president bush, george h.w. bush and also bill clinton and you say these are people who acknowledge drug use and of common to do great things and you point out is he just suggested that they weren't caught up in a network of police arrests that can oftentimes derail success in america. now when you look at the use of illegal drugs, your point and not for legalization per se but for education. and you talk about the idea that people should know what is in a psychoactive drug before they get involved. and one of your arguments that i found fascinating is most people who use illegal drugs are not addicts. by your definition it doesn't interfere with parenting with work or with relationships. i think most americans if they heard this they would say but doc or hart you are taking away all of the hype and fear that we want our our children to hear and it might be better to say to children don't do drugs. even if your argument is true there are people who do illegal drugs and don't suffer the consequences. why is that better with what you said about the police in network of crime, why wouldn't you say it's better to say to kids don't do drugs? >> guest: well for one i'm a professor so one of the things they think is more important is to teach people how to think. when you say don't do drugs or just say no there is no sort of thinking in that. if you have a curious kid in which you hope you would have, your kid will be curious to find out for themselves. my issue is that why not give the kid the proper education, so if they choose to indulge and many will not but if they do choose to indulge, they will be safe. that's number one. so i have children myself. i have a 12-year-old and an 18 euros and a 30-year-old but my 12 and 18-year-olds are in that age group are you worried. my kids, i worry far more about the environment in which we have created surrounding drugs, the hysteria because that environment allows police officers to look at my kids like they fit the description of a drug user. so i fear that interaction, my kid's interaction with the police a hell of a lot more than i fear the introduction of my kid with drugs because i can teach them about drugs. ii know that the drug effexor predictable but this interaction with black boys and police is not. >> host: both could be avoided by avoiding drug use. >> guest: my kids might avoided but the point is there are kids who want and so if they do not avoid it, at least you were keeping them safe i having them have the education, giving them the correct information. not only that, you are not only teaching them about drugs but teaching them to think critically and how to evaluate information. that is what i value as a professor. you talked about legalization and one of the things i want to make clear is that yeah i am not encouraging legalization. i am ford decriminalization said decriminalization looks like this. what you do is drugs are still illegal but when people are caught instead of having a criminal record, they receive a civil fine just like they would if they had a driving violation. that way you get rid of this notion or this impact on their futures. if they get caught they don't have a criminal record and they can go on and get a job. they can maybe become president but as long as we have these things illegal, that is less likely. >> host: so, in this book you talk about your own experiences and you talk about smoking marijuana and doing cocaine and look at you. you have become extraordinarily successful by any measure. and you say again that most drug users are not going to be involved in crime although you say addiction and crime are related. you say that most drugs users are not going to get involved with criminal acti