In this special international episode of Decoding the Gurus, Chris and Matt jump on the hottest online topic and devote an hour to reviewing Richard Dawkins' influential work from the 1970s, The Selfish Gene. This book influenced Matt and Chris when they were teenage decoders, but how does it hold up now that they have evolved into (quasi)adult forms?Based on their rereading of the book they discuss its contribution to the public understanding of evolution, the academic and public controversies it sparked, and Dawkins' broader contributions to science communication and... the culture war. Consideration is given to the criticisms raised by figures like Stephen Jay Gould and Mary Midgley, the implications of seeing humans as meat machines constructed by genes, and what should be understood as the book's core message.So join Chris and Matt as they confront their true nature as gene propagators but also argue that it is possible to simultaneously recognise the importance of human cultural & social development and our genetic & biological legacies. LinksDawkins, R. (2016) The Selfish Gene (40th Anniversary edition)
And welcome to Decoding the Gurus with the cognitive anthropologist, me, Chris Kavanagh, the psychologist of unnamed subfield, Matthew Brown, over there.
And as it happens, this is an international broadcast, a dispatch episode.
Because usually, as you know, this is a transnational podcast that we pride ourselves on.
We have an Irishman.
Corresponding from Japan.
And we previously had an Australian in Australia in its native habitat where it should be kept.
But it's managed to break out of its boundaries and now it's foraging over in the United States.
Matt is joining us from San Francisco.
Hello, Matt.
Hello.
Hello.
Yeah, yeah.
I know all about this.
Introduce species.
That can be a big problem.
But I'm causing no troubles over here.
I'm landing.
Actually, we're not in San Francisco, Chris.
We have headed north and we're at Fort Bragg over the Golden Gate and investigated a beach.
There we go.
Okay, you managed to find a beach.
Australians are good at that.
And also, just to warn people that you might not be hearing Matt at his full audio fidelity that you're used to.
That's because he has brought His special podcasting microphone with him.
But he forgot that he can't plug it in without a dongle-y thing to the max.
So we will increase our audio quality.
But for today, it's a little bit lower down.
The upside of it is the chair is possibly less squeaky in this hotel.
So lower audio quality overall, but less squeaky chair.
So swings and roundabouts.
Let's see.
But Chris, Chris, do you want to hear my anthropological takes on Americans and Californians so far?
All right, yeah.
But remember, Matt, you're only allowed in these kind of episodes.
If it's not behind the supplemental material thing, you're restricted.
So you're in-depth insights.
Well, you know, you should save the best ones until you're able to roam freely.
Because we should mention...
Well, look, they are great.
They are great, Wayne.
So it's the Doricus.
They're extremely short.
Extremely short.
Oh, okay.
Well, all I was going to say is, before you say it, that this is a selfish gene episode.
We're going to get into that.
But just in case people are confused and they're worried, what is going on?
Is it something about the materialism of the coding?
We're doing a review of the selfish gene, Richard Dawkins' book, which we read, and all that kind of thing.
So we'll get to that.
But no, please, go ahead, Matt.
I'm just, what's that thing?
Flagging or...
No, flagging is when you put your body...
You're foreshadowing.
I'm foreshadowing.
I'm doing something like that.
I'm giving people orientations in the discourse space.
So yes, but please continue.
Okay, I'm interested in your professional opinion about this.
See whether you agree as an anthropologist.
In-N-Out Burger, five stars.
That's an extremely excellent takeaway shop by Australian standards.
This is all relative.
Okay, yes.
The other one is squirrels are good.
They're very cute.
I think they're underappreciated.
They're extremely cute.
They're like possums.
Yeah, but don't you have squirrels in Australia?
No, we don't have squirrels in Australia.
We have possums.
Not opossums.
Not the freaky ones they have in the United States.
These are cute ones.
They're like squirrels.
Do they pretend to die?
Which one's the ones that pretend to die?
Is that all possums?
Possums and opossums?
No, I think...
No, possums don't do that.
Is that squirrels?
Or is it opossums?
No, it's possums.
Possums are the ones that famously play dead.
Oh, okay.
Not Australian ones.
Not Australian possums.
No, okay.
Alright, so yeah, squirrels are great.
That's it?
That's it.
Okay, In-N-Out Burger is good.
Squirrels are cute.
And that's it for now.
Apart from that, I haven't noticed anything.
Are you noticing, well, one question I had, Matt, not to force you to provide more political commentary, but just, you know, it's election season.
It's not that long until the next presidential election in the US.
Are you noticing any of that?
Any unusual activity?
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of lawn signs, seeing a lot of posters in windows, not most of them, but occasionally, more than you'd see in Australia.
We don't really do that here, I think, so much.
No, it's good.
People wear their political opinions on their sleeve, and they're out there.
That's the nice thing about it.
Hey, I'm walking here.
I'm a Democrat.
I'm voting for government.
Come on.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, so that was good.
I feel like I could fit into...
San Francisco, I could live there and be accepted among them, but I think I'd have to become a little bit less scruffy.
They're very neat and tidy in San Francisco.
From what I've heard from the discourse, it's a hell sphere of, you know, like it's just roaming zombies basically in San Francisco.
It's all been taken over by...
Homeless people and law and order is booked down.
They don't prosecute thieves.
You can't walk down the street without being shanked.
So you're really quite lucky to get out of there with your skin.
There were some kids doing wheelies on their motorbikes down the main street.
I felt like the police should have stopped them, maybe.
Street performance.
It was art.
It's art.
Well.
That was good.
I did enjoy that.
And yeah, you did well, mate.
You know, we're constrained as we are by our audience's demands that banter be restricted, but not in supplemental materials.
That's where we can roam free.
That's where we can let our freak flag show.
But here, we're here to talk about our time rereading or listening to, in my case, because I listened to the audio version.
Of the Selfish Gene.
I think we both looked at the 40th anniversary edition, which has extensive footnotes and a couple of additional chapters and epilogues, but they were also added.
Some of them are from earlier versions as well.
But this is, I feel, the definitive Selfish Gene, where you have Dawkins' asides and his reflections on things that he previously said and that kind of thing.
Yeah, maybe first off, big thoughts.
Did you enjoy it?
Did you hear it?
Did it make you question your life?
How was it?
Well, there was a lot of stuff in it that wasn't in the original version that I read.
It must be almost twice as long now with all of the footnotes and endnotes and commentary and asides.
It's kind of cute.
A lot of the time he's updating it and correcting some antiquarian references.
And a lot of the time, he's making rejointers against unfair criticisms, which definitely sound unfair as voiced by Richard Dawkins, and then he sort of demolishes them and explains why they're wrong.
So yeah, no, he's had fun.
Yeah, big thoughts.
Apart from that, it did...
Look, I know you think this too, but you'll agree with me that it was good, but it felt like...
If you're coming to evolutionary theory and stuff for the first time, then it's really good because he explains all these things in a basic way and takes it through every step.
But if you've heard of them before, then it can be a bit frustrating.
So, yeah.
Had to fast forward through some bits.
Well, maybe it's worth mentioning, I'll say as well, that the audiobook is read by him and by, I think it might be his now separated wife, but Lala Ward is the other person.
So there's...
Sections read by him, sections read by his wife.
Was that the version that you had, Matt, that had that for him?
Yeah, same one.
First of all, I just like that because it kind of broke things up a bit in terms of just the same delivery.
So I appreciated that, and they're both good at reading.
And obviously the footnotes were majority read by Dawkins because, like you say, he's responded.
So it occasionally felt after Lala Ward summarized one bit, and then he would say, footnote.
In response to unfair criticism.
But I did also appreciate that because he also used the opportunity to nuance some statements that he made and we'll talk about some of that.
But the overall big thing I wanted to say was The Selfish Gene was a very influential book for me when I initially read it because it helped to spur my interest in Evolutionary theory and science in general, the scientific approach.
And although the vast majority of the book is not focused specifically on humans, right?
It's much more focused on life on Earth and evolutionary processes.
And it does make reference to humans, especially in the later chapters.
It's not actually primarily fixated on linking all those things to humans.
But when I read it, there were obvious things where you can apply it to human life and just understanding about the way that humans evolved and evolutionary processes occur.
And it was very eye-opening.
And this time reading it, I remembered a lot of it and had the feeling that it's very well written.
Things are, like, explained really nicely in various parts.
But I did have the same experience you had, where there were parts that were dragged, because I already know, you know, what is being discussed, and it's describing things in, like, quite a lot of depth.
So, you know, I had the feeling like, yeah, yeah, I get this.
I mean, there's an entire chapter which describes, it comes towards the end, this is one of the additional chapters, that, like, goes through.
The Prisoner's Dilemma games and the strategies used there.
And I know that literature quite well, and certainly I understand the scenario.
So going through it all was kind of like, oh, okay, yes, well, that was...
But it's a very neat, like, potted description.
And the last big thought I have is that originally it was written in the 1970s.
And there are various indications that that is the case.
And I don't mean the political elements which people have focused on, I think, too much.
I mean more in discussions about like technology or, you know, which just now feel very dated.
And in the footnotes, he often points out that this is the case.
Or even, for example, in describing Game Theory as this upstart new approach, which people haven't really heard about.
And I was like, Game Theory?
That incredibly well-known and influential thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you mentioned how he...
Actually doesn't talk about humans very much.
All of his examples are drawn, or at least almost all of his examples are drawn from the animal world.
And, you know, he does, but he does occasionally make asides, you know, that can be, you know, interpreted.
Often get them in trouble.
Yeah, that's right.
And there's a few ones about the welfare state and overpopulation.
Oh, yeah.
But most of the time he's just talking sort of abstractly, like, you know, males and females.
You know, siblings and daughters and relatedness and so on.
So it really reminded me why people got a bit upset about it and why I think many people just instinctively don't like it, which is that your mind naturally goes to applying a lot of the behavioral evolutionary things to humans.
And did you notice this, Chris?
It's actually, like, even for someone like me, just, like, so totally on board with everything.
At a gut level, you kind of find it a little bit insulting as a human to talk about, oh, you know, you care about this child 50% as yourself, exactly 50% and all of this stuff.
He's obviously talking about the genetic influence on behavior and acknowledges that's reduced in humans.
But what the reader does is you kind of naturally take it as about us, they're humans, and it does feel like a little bit disrespectful.
Yeah, but I remember that hitting more.
Initially, like the first time I read it, because I'm now more like I've thought about that perspective a lot.
So like it, you know, whenever I think about maybe that's partly is also because I teach some of this in relating to like looking at human societies and culture and religion from the point of view of like social primates and like elements of human culture as like cultural tools that can be used to.
To solve group problems and this kind of thing.
So when talking about that, I remember when I read about Robin Dunbar and some other theorists discussing gossip, right?
And discussing how gossip is often denigrated as this waste of time, right?
That's something that people shouldn't be doing.
But actually, if you view it from an evolutionary perspective, keeping track of reputations of third-party individuals in your environment.
Would be very important because you would want to know who's a good partner and who's not.
When you start to analyze your own behavior through that lens, especially if it's linked to reproduction and mating and whatnot, it can be distasteful.
And I also think you can get evolutionary psychologists like Gad Saad.
They just naturally give you the ick anyway.
Yeah, but they're also applying it.
There is plenty of legitimate criticisms to be made of overly zealous applications of evolutionary psychology.
But I think the rejoinder has to be that there also is very powerful evidence that we are influenced by.
Evolution and evolutionary drives.
And if you don't appreciate that about humans, you're not really understanding human psychology or the history of human evolution in any great depth.
So, yeah.
Well, you know that I totally agree with you, Chris.
But it was good to be reminded of why I think many people do have instinctive dislike of it.
And I think maybe a lot of the critics sort of had...
Have that vibe.
And then they go looking for something wrong with it.
And we can talk about the various critics and the long-running disputes he's had with...
What were their names?
Gould and...
Yeah, Gould.
Yes, and also there was a philosopher called Miriam Midgley who wrote critically about the selfish gene.
And there were also, similarly, his later books around atheism.
And whatnot would attract a lot of detractors.
So yeah, he's had his fair share of critics and Stephen Gould takes issue with various perspectives that he takes.
So it's not like there's no disagreement around the topic or no room for it to be.
But I do think in some cases, I'm on Dawkins' side in that he's been misinterpreted and that people are assuming that the book...
The selfish gene is about the selfish person.
And as he argues in the new epilogue and whatnot, he's added that he would have been, in hindsight, he could have called it the cooperative gene because the selfish component was just a way to kind of emphasize that the gene is acting in its own interests and that that can be for or against individual Human interests,
usually aligned, usually aligned or not even human, for or against like an individual of any species that's carrying the genes and things.
But they don't, they're often aligned, but not always aligned.
And yeah, but he was pointing out by using the term selfish, it led a lot of debate to be around, well, people being perceived as profit maximizing.
Selfish carriers of genes.
And that wasn't his argument.
I got this very clearly, but I feel there were various points in it where he strongly bent over backwards to highlight he is not saying that.
He is not saying that we should act in the manner that genes might prescribe, right?
If they had their hands on the rim.
And actually strongly emphasizing we don't have to do that.
Like humans, perhaps unique.
Amongst animals have, due to our culture and the development of our cognitive capacities or whatnot, we now can do all sorts of things that go against genetic drives.
And we do all the time.
And actually, society is much the better for that.
And I thought that was very clear.
But I feel like a lot of his critics didn't feel that that was clear enough.
And some of his political sides, I also think, give him...
Fuel for the Fire, because there's one where he makes an aside about long-term planning or selfish impulses, and he highlights the working class as potentially.
But the footnote that he added was saying, look, I really regret this, because I sound like a Daily Mail reader, but this was written in the context of this political event in the 70s,
and he wanted...
He said he was thinking about that, but if he was doing it now, it would be just as easy and perhaps more appropriate to look for selfish behavior in the ruling elites and political class.
So he regrets how that came across.
And I was like, that's good.
That's actually nice to have that context.
But if you read the 1970 version, I think things like that would justly, perhaps, skew your...
Interpretation of what he's wanting to say and assuming there's like a political agenda attached to it.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I looked into some of the academic controversies because I remember when I read it originally, and I think I even read it twice, even the second time.
I think I liked the book.
And so I was a bit of a Dawkins fan.
So I was kind of on board with him, you know, raising these criticisms and then demolishing them.
At the time, I was just, oh, these silly criticisms.
Dawkins is definitely right.
But then I thought, well, you know, I should look into it again with a bit more of an open mind because I was just an ignorant fanboy first time around.
And where I got to, and I think he at some point hints at this sort of...
Thinking that the disputes he had with Gould were really much like a bunch of fuss about nothing, really.
Like, it was really just more a matter of emphasis and what kind of metaphors, I suppose, you're using to describe things.
I mean, even at the time, I thought, you know, so one of the things they raised was the punctuated equilibrium in terms of the rate at which species evolve and diversify as compared to the sort of gradualist kind of metaphor that, That sort of classical evolution has.
But, you know, when you think about it, that doesn't really mean much in terms of a criticism.
Like, they're both saying the same thing.
Like, a smooth curve looks jagged when you zoom out to, you know, a billion years, but it still looks smooth on a smaller timescale.
And, you know, there's nothing...
We know from all sort of optimisation, like non-linear optimisation problems, that the...
The error surface, which is a bit like the fitness function and evolution, is very, like there are flat basins and valleys and local minima, all that kind of thing.
And basically you always see this kind of adaption or learning happening in a punctuated kind of way, but it's still smooth.
So those sorts of disputes to me seemed like a bit of fuss about nothing.
The other ones too around like spandrels.
Do you remember the concept of spandrels, Chris?
Yeah, yeah.
You can explain now?
Yeah, I mean, I read a couple of different sort of explanations of them, but the idea, the general idea is just that there is not every phenotypic feature that you observe is going to be a direct adaption,
but rather that there are sort of structural and, I don't know, practical.
Limitations to things, including, I suppose, unexpected interactions and stuff of adaptive traits that lead to stuff you see, basically, in the bodies and the behavior of organisms that isn't a result of evolution.
Now, in rereading the book, I mean, Dawkins did mention that a few.
Similar points at a time, like cautioning around always assuming that everything you see has got to have an evolutionary just-so story attached to it, and also emphasizing the unexpected consequences of genes, because he emphasizes that genes don't just have a single effect,
but rather they're going to have a whole bunch of different effects, and those effects are occurring in combination with other genes, so it's pretty complicated.
And so it kind of implies that there would be these spandrels.
In other words, features that you see, which are not necessarily an adaption.
And I think just getting older, for instance, is a good example of one of these things, the genetic basis to it.
Basically, genes that have multiple effects, genes that maybe do something good for you, beneficial, that come into play when you're in your 20s, might have some negative effects that happen when you're 60 or 70, but when the vast majority of individuals have basically zero chance of having children after that age.
And are likely going to be dead by natural or unnatural causes before then anyway.
Those negative effects don't matter.
Yes.
Yeah, anyway.
So I think that concept is really good.
And I guess I softened a bit, a bit like Dawkins.
I think they raise really good points, actually, about that.
And it's kind of like a caution against the falling into that just-so story.
Trap of assuming there has to be an adaptive explanation for things.
Oftentimes there are features, there are behaviours that you see which can be biologically determined and even are a product and therefore a product of evolution and they don't always have a direct adaptive benefit.
Yeah, I did think that Dawkins acknowledged that.
Maybe like in the earlier editions it was less of an emphasis but I took him to be Highlighting that there were features and genes that could be inherited that were piggybacking in other things and that were harmful to the organism after it was past its reproductive age.
And also, I believe the concept about exaptation was covered or the possibility that something could be genetic drift or come along and then later come to have like a...
A functional purpose.
But yeah, I didn't take the perspective offered in The Selfish Gene to argue against that.
The central argument that I saw of the whole book is that you can look at evolution from the point of view of different levels, but the one which is most fundamental is the gene,
because that is the unit of...
Inheritance that is being selected for, right?
And that if you don't look at the gene, there are various puzzles which appear and which don't work at the level of the individual, including things like eusocial insects, right?
And so on.
But not to say that you should...
Like, I didn't take it to be saying apply a Weinsteinian hyperadaptive...
Framework where you take anything you see to be like a perfect attunement between the environment and the genetic features of a species.
Like, obviously not.
So, yeah, yeah, that just, that struck me.
And like one thing about looking at things in that regard, from the point of view of the gene, I feel like people are...
Mind that much less when it's applied to other animals beyond us.
But Dawkins and other people's argument wants to say, well, these things obviously still apply in humans.
But there is this issue that we have overtaken our biological legacy in a lot of ways because of culture.
And then at the end, when he gets into talking about other...
Evolutionary processes, right?
The spreading of ideas, memes, or talking about how there may be later discovered other evolutionary systems which are not, the unit of selection is not genes, right?
Because he wants to talk about evolution as a general process whereby you have selection and transmission of information across generations.
So he said this book It's about the genes, the replicators on Earth, the original ones, but there's nothing in principle that means that you need DNA and genes to get an evolutionary process occurring.
You just need selection and differential reproduction and inheritance.
Yeah, and I thought that was quite well done, even though I do think some of the stuff around memes is not really thought out, but he himself says that He just intended that more as like an illustrative example that, you know, these processes could apply elsewhere and the mechanisms might be different,
but it could still be useful to think about this basic process.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
I mean, people like myself have played with genetic algorithms as a thing and you can simulate it in software and, yeah, you know, you get the same.
Evolved results because it follows almost mathematically, right?
I think he starts quite well where he says there's like an iron rule, which is like if something is going to be around for a long time, then you have to be very good at just keeping its shape, keeping its structure.
So many chemicals just immediately disassemble or vaporize or atoms jump away from each other.
Forms of chemicals are stable, right?
So the stable ones tend to be around in the universe today.
And he points out that evolution is just like another way of achieving like a kind of dynamic stability for a very specific kind of chemical, which for us happens to be in our DNA.
But it's just following this sort of rule of if you expect to see this thing around in a long, long time, then it's got to be pretty good.
At either just surviving for a really, really long time or doing this other tricky way of making copies of itself and being able to replicate.
Then all of the original ones might be gone, but you're still going to see a lot of it.
So, yeah, no, I mean, I think it's a really important perspective, but I think it is challenging for people, like you said.
Like, intellectually, everyone agrees that we are biological automata on some level.
And evolution affects not only...
You know, what we look like and how our bodies work, but also how we behave.
Like, if you want to choose to stop breathing, you just can't because evolution won't let you, right?
We don't have full control over ourselves.
Like I found out at In-N-Out Burger earlier today, Chris.
Yeah, yeah.
Your evolutionary drives driving you to maladaptive behavior.
I don't know, Burger.
Yeah, yeah.
So, you know, obviously sexual behaviour is another one, and also, you know, familial love, right?
And this is the kind of thing that makes us a bit upset, right, to have our personal relationships and our feelings, right, sort of reduced to a kind of mathematical equation of relatedness.
Even as you say, Chris, like, don't get me wrong, people and Dawkins and evolutionary fans like you and I, nobody's saying, like, this is the sum total of...
What we are and what we can be.
In fact, it's a pretty bad way to be.
Again, as Dawkins emphasizes, culture is great.
And, you know, we actually want to hijack these sort of totally amoral and rather horrible processes of evolution in many ways for our own devices.
But I guess I'm just saying I understand why probably many people just have a gut kind of like I don't.
I don't like this that much because it is kind of offensive because you can't help but think of reduce yourself to those animalistic terms.
Well, the interesting thing for me is there's a little bit of a parallel because like in some parts he talks about imagining and he's clear that he's talking, you know, in terms of like a metaphor, even though it is describing actual like biological processes,
but the notion that like genes build these meat.
Machines to carry them around and allow them to make copies, right?
And they build the instructions, but they don't have exact control, right?
And he talks about the analogy of somebody building a chess-playing software program where they give the instructions, but they're not commanding each thing, right?
And in the same way, James build up these biological entities, which they are Using to help them create copies in the next generation.
But the biological entities are what we would recognize as organisms.
And that perspective shifting around to people being essential puppets of genes at one step removed, I think could be offensive.
But I will say, I've seen people take much less offense whenever it's presented in philosophical terms from, say, a Buddhist analysis.
Where people look at humans as like aggregate forces of desire and like psychologically constituted elements of thought, right?
That are craving all these different things.
So that is just another way.
And like, you know, I know Buddhists in history, for example, some of them recommended that people hang out in graveyards and embrace corpses and start to see their body as like...
Meat sacks that are carrying around big bags of, like, gases and liquids to dissolve things.
And, you know, you'd see your eyes like pools of liquids, squidgy stuff.
And it is true.
Like, we talked about when we read Immune that the description about the human as, like, a giant tube.
Like a tube with a hole that goes in where various environmental stuff are taken and a hole on the other end where the stuff that can't be considered is put out.
And then there's other things, right?
But that also is a reductionist version, right?
But I think that there is, for some people, we're in that reduction.
It's insulting to the kind of uniqueness and the complexity of the human.
You know, spirit and like intellectual achievement and whatnot.
And but for a lot of people, it's more like, no, we recognize that that is all there, but also acknowledge like the fundamental biological reality.
And I but I feel for some people that is viewed as like one or the other must be in effect.
Right.
And more real.
And for me, it.
It's always been an interesting and, yes, a kind of challenging perspective, but it's never made me then go, well, it doesn't really matter that people care for their children or whatnot because there's biological propensities all through the animal kingdom to care for offspring.
So what's admirable about that?
You know, you're just like, no, it doesn't have to be that recognizing it means that stories of...
Heroic sacrifice for families or whatnot now become less significant or meaningful.
But I think for some people it does.
Especially, I would say, for those inclined towards spirituality and religion.
They see in this an alternative story, which, like we saw with Jordan Peterson, they feel is cold and diminishes human specialness.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
And I think, yeah, I mean, those two cultures, really, I think you can have the sort of point of view where you lean into all of this science stuff and you fully recognize that it forms like a scaffolding and a basis for what humans are.
And then you go, okay, so humans, we construct meaning, right?
So this sort of humanistic point of view.
And that sort of keeps them separate.
You know, like humanism is kind of soft and fluffy and values the human spirit.
You know, a lot of the things that spirituality and religion does, but it doesn't need to sort of own all of the territory.
It can quite happily let, I think, the biological substrate stuff sit there and say, hey, look, we're creating all of these ideas and culture and things that we find meaningful on top of that.
But, yeah, so I'm kind of on that side rather than the kind of people that see these things as.
As overlapping and conflicting, because that makes them want to resolve them in a way that actually is usually detrimental to your scientific understanding.
Yeah, and I did notice that somebody in the Patreon actually pointed out that in the first couple of pages of the book, Dawkins rather polemically states that any consideration of the human condition that developed before Darwinism is useless.
And I feel like that was...
I would have took it that he's talking in terms of understanding why does life on Earth exist?
The biological origins of life.
Not in terms of all of literature is useless because they didn't know about these underlying biological and genetic aspects.
I don't think that was what he was saying.
I think he was saying all previous origin stories.
About human life and where we came from were based on misunderstandings or not knowing because we didn't know the actual scientific information about genes and about evolutionary processes.
And after we get that, you can have versions where they're taking that into account.
But it is the kind of thing that if you tell philosophers everything you did...
Prior to biologists developing evolution was pointless.
That they will react.
Yeah, very true.
Very true.
Okay, what else did you like about it, Chris?
Or something that you especially didn't like?
Oh, yeah, I can say something I did like because I forgot that this was in there.
There's a, not super extended bit, but there's a part about consciousness, Matt.
And he essentially argues.
The same position that I've argued on here.
And he talks about some, I think, philosopher or whatnot that has referenced it or cognitive scientist.
He talks about Daniel Dennett as well.
But I like the fact that he gave like a potted argument for consciousness as potentially related to, you know, modeling the environment and that he was, I think, at the time talking about how computers.
If they become sufficiently developed, it may be that they end up developing something like consciousness because in modeling the environment and the social interactions that having an eye in that environment can eventually lead to a sense of self and identity.
And I just was like, oh, I forgot that was in there.
Maybe that is where I first came across the idea.
It might be or it might not be because I think I came across it elsewhere.
But I was just...
I agree with that point of view, but I think there's a good summary of it in this book.
And yeah, that was something I forgot was in there.
Yeah, that's good.
I like being reminded about a lot of those stuff around altruism and selfishness.
And it's a good reminder that you can explain an awful lot of cooperative behavior through...
Yeah, selfishness, essentially, at the genetic level.
So obviously, as the name implies, it's called the selfish gene, not the selfish organism.
And, you know, that's obviously the main theme, that it's actually the genes, like you said, that carry the information that is actually replicated.
So everything else is kind of temporary and epiphenomenal.
It's the genes that really matter and their interests, not the individual's interests.
So, you know, so that leads on to a whole bunch of logic around kin selection and how cooperative behavior and just, you know, having those behavioral heuristics, like, I don't know, be nice to other organisms of your species that you remember from when you were young or whatever,
right?
So, you know, that's the kind of heuristical behavior that a gene can code for, and that's what he was referring to.
Yeah.
And that is, I think, an interesting thing to point out is like in the terminology he's using, he is using the description of selfish, right?
Which, as we know, there's a lot of controversy.
But in his description, it's quite clear a selfish gene could create a highly cooperative and altruistic individual, right?
So like selfish genes created ants, right?
An older colony.
And they're super altruistic.
At least to all the members of their colony.
Exactly, not so much to the other ones.
It's all obviously perfectly explained by the fact that they're acting in the interests of the genes, not in terms of the interests of the little ant.
So that's a simple example, but it gets kind of nuanced and complicated when you've got levels of...
Certainty as to whether or not these really are your children or not.
And in terms of, you know, grandmothers and grandfathers.
And, you know, it does, you know, one thing, I remember somebody was criticizing evolution once and saying, like, it creates, like, it was not testable because it was all a just-so story.
That was the basic idea, right?
That it wasn't science, essentially.
Is this a creationist or someone?
No, it was sort of someone who sort of was...
Politically incorrect somehow, I forget.
Oh, okay.
Coming from the other angle.
But, you know, I was reminded with this, which is like how many predictions the theory makes, right?
Like the theory is extremely simple.
It's very elegant, as scientists and mathematicians like to say.
But it makes a lot of quite specific, testable predictions about what should happen.
You know, the vast majority of them are confirmed, but obviously some aren't because, again, like Dawkins emphasizes.
It's complicated, right?
And, you know, you don't necessarily know about all the individual, like the specific risk and reward ratios and so on for different species.
Yeah.
And there was some, like, the book is absolutely full of really fascinating examples from animals, right, about how...
These kind of genetic proclivities result in certain kinds of behaviors or certain kinds of social organizations and whatnot.
And I appreciate that there was one, I can't remember it was talking about bees or wasps.
It was some insect, right?
And talking about, so, oh yes, actually, it was in this section, which I think has led to other controversy where he is talking about, can a single gene influence code for something?
Like a single gene.
And I actually think he is very clear throughout the majority of the book that he's sometimes talking in shorthand, but he doesn't think there are single genes which code for something complex usually.
But he does give a caveat at one point where he was talking about how it could be the case where you had like a single gene that when activated led to like a cascade through other...
Genes, which resulted in a kind of behavior emerging.
And he was talking about hygienic wasps or hygienic bees, like that they remove larvae that haven't developed, right, or whatever from the little honeycomb things that they're in.
But they have to have two behaviors, like they're removing the top and removing the inside, right?
And some clever experiment did it where they showed that you could knock these out, right, in...
Different generations, depending on like the crossbreeding different populations.
Right.
And, but it was very clear in that two things.
One that it's, it's like very specific circumstances where that happens.
So he basically just wanted to say it is possible that there could be complex behaviors that are affected by small amount of like gene changes in gene frequencies, but most.
Most things are the product of very complex interactions of multiple genes.
So it's better not to talk like the gene 4 or this kind of thing because it can give the wrong opinion.
But even better than that, after he gave this really neat example around these hygienic wasps and described an experiment, the footnote mentioned that actually he had perhaps overemphasized how neat this experiment was because there was some complexity in which...
One of the behaviors was found in one of the hives where it wasn't anticipated to be.
And even though it was just like one field prediction, it's important because why it was there isn't clear, right?
And he regarded this like he should have made this more explicit and whatnot.
And maybe he got criticism for that part.
But I was like, well, that's neat because you're highlighting there was a prediction made.
Here's a way that they tried to test it.
And also...
There was more complexity than my pop science description allowed.
But yeah, so that to me is all very interesting, complicated problems.
And I can see why it would lead some people to interpret it that he's overemphasizing the role of individual genes.
But I do think if you take the book in its totality, it's very clear that it isn't making that argument like that there is.
Yeah, no, I didn't get that.
I didn't get that impression at all, really.
Yeah, like speaking of that, Chris, he is pretty careful.
I mean, just stepping back a bit, let's put him back through the guru lens just a little bit.
And yeah, just briefly, he does do pretty well, just objectively speaking, like compared to some of these popular books that we see from Yuval Noah Harari or...
Gadsad.
Some of these other ones.
Gadsad or somewhere in between.
There are other names there too.
But, you know, it's the sort of thing we've complained about where they'll find a little study that it's a little example they can use to decorate their thing.
And they don't care how strong it is, whether it means anything, whether it's been supported by the other literature.
Now, what you just described with Dawkins is the exact opposite.
Right.
He's citing something that, you know, it's a pretty important, substantive example to these precise things that he's talking about.
And he doesn't rely on weak information.
And when he, a couple of times I remember, he did mention some weak information because it was interesting.
And my goodness, he took like half a page emphasizing how tentative this was and how they didn't draw strong conclusions and neither should they.
So yeah, he's pretty good.
Well, that was one thing that constantly struck me as well.
Like when you compare what Dawkins is doing in this book to Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein or any of the other gurus, he's constantly clear.
This is just a metaphor, right?
This is, or when he's talking in metaphors, he's explaining, now this is a useful metaphor, but you have to remember that like, I've been, so, I mean, throughout it, he keeps saying, I'm weeping.
I'm using the language of intentionality.
I'm talking about strategies that genes are employing that with wants and desires, but of course they don't have them, right?
They don't have them.
This is just like a useful way to talk about it, but you have to always remember that it is not implying that they have human emotions and desires and wants, right?
And he is very, to me, I heard that reiterated multiple times.
I even heard like he just interrupted.
Where he wants to make that point.
But a lot of his critics, I feel, still take him to task for that, saying that he didn't, you know, he fell prey of what he's warning against.
But I didn't read that.
Like, on the occasions where that happened or was at risk at happening, there was usually...
Shortly after, I think, saying, now, that story I just told, it is a way to illustrate a thing, but we have to remember that we're actually talking about things that don't have any will and don't have any, you know, self-consciousness and whatnot.
So, yeah, that was just something that struck me that I thought he was very clear about, but a lot of people critical of his work don't think he was clear about.
Now, in terms of guru things, though, Matt, one thing is, I did notice this.
That is, little footnotes, apart from the grievance margarine, which I think sometimes was justified because he's sometimes like, "Hi, this idiot interpreted me as saying this when I have this exact sentence here."
He certainly does take the opportunity to respond to critics.
But the other bit was there was a lot of him saying, "He met this person."
And he had this idea and he told them about it and they went on to explore it or, you know, I introduced such and such to this person and they produced this fruitful collaboration out of it.
And most of it sounded legitimate, but it also struck me as like strangely petty or whatever.
There was like a thing where he mentioned E.O. Wilson and him made the same error.
In attributing some name to a theory or a theorist or whatever.
And this led people to say that he had taken the idea from E.O. Wilson.
And he was like, actually, I found a notebook that showed that I had made this mistake in advance.
And it was a case of independent errors.
And he did link it to the point he wanted to make about that you can't always infer.
Inheritance from, you know, there can be cases where there was independent parallel evolutionary developments.
But I was like, was this a big thing?
Was there like a big concern that you stole a word from E.O. Wilson?
And like, yeah, so there...
Well, I hear you.
But I mean, on the other side of the equation there, I remember like...
Having read that, I was thinking, you could come away from it thinking that really Richard Dawkins hasn't contributed anything to what he was explaining in the book.
And rather, because he cites all of these people and he really emphasises how this person really made it clear.
And what I've done here is I'm rehashing what so-and-so has said.
Pretty good at citing his sources, I thought.
And doesn't really sort of say, here's my, you know, he's obviously reverential towards evolutionary theory.
But I never really heard him sort of saying, here's my grand idea.
No, that's true.
And I also, in reading the book, I did note that, like, the whole section about, like, memes, right?
And I think that is one of the weaker parts of the book, the chapter.
On meme and meme complexes.
On the other hand, for the time and, you know, the influence that the concept of memes and whatnot went on to have, I thought it was quite impressive.
Yeah, well, he came up with the idea and it's, you know, memes are popular, right?
I mean, it's clearly an important contribution.
I agree.
So the section around memes, I like the whole bit about thinking about it in terms of, like, it is interesting to think about another alternative evolutionary process where things could be happening.
I'm thinking about brains as, or human bodies even, if you want to extend it beyond brains, but like repositories of ideas.
And that there actually are limited resources and that it might be A useful way to look at things as kind of like competing in an idea space.
And it reminded me of the epidemiology of representations by Dan Sperber, which, you know, or any number of all their theories that have taken similar approaches.
And I do think it's an interesting, like, approach to take and that you can...
Looking at cultural evolution and whatnot, it is an interesting perspective to take and one that I'm sympathetic to.
But I just think there were elements of it that were not really fleshed out.
But he said that.
He was like, this isn't a developed theory of memes.
It's just more a bit of a thought experiment around that.
But it went on to be, I think, quite influential.
Although, memetics as an area, I think.
You know, spread into other topics that have, like, kind of escaped Dawkins' version of it.
But, yeah, I mean, that's influential, I think, in a way.
And that's nothing to do with suffocates.
No, I think, like, it preempted the internet.
And, you know, we talk about tweets going viral and so on.
And people have this, there's a limited attention span for people.
And clearly, all of the retweets and the reposts and so on, it's, yeah.
I don't know if you got it or remember, but the section where he talks about viruses and hackers, and he kind of reprimands them, saying, think about what you're doing with your life.
Because he's very upset about hackers.
And this was, like you say, in the earlier era of internet and connectivity.
So he was even speculating about maybe there will be jobs in the future where there are like...
Computer doctors who come around to inoculate you and he did a thing like talking directly to hackers saying, you know, unlike viruses, which can do no other.
You, humans, are writing nefarious code.
And for what reason?
Other than your own malevolent enjoyment.
That's the little pot of honey side to his personality.
I had a little pot of honey.
I thought it was kind of cute, I have to admit.
I'd say this as well.
Dawkins in the culture war era, I feel like this side of him is lost.
And this is the best side of him.
This is why he is a figure in the discourse.
Maybe it is partly because of the honeypot tweets or the things about dogs and the signs that he saw in America.
I fully acknowledge that Dawkins, when it comes to culture war stuff, It's like not really that good on it.
I mean, like he was promoting James Lindsay because he read Cynical Theories after Lindsay had went mental, right?
And he just doesn't seem to baller much about, you know, looking into things.
But the fact is that there still is so much more substantial to him than there is to a Jordan Peterson or Brett Weinstein.
Command of evolutionary stuff is just so much better.
And he was a very good science populizer.
Like, he belongs more to me in the realm of, like, the kind of Carl Sagan group than, you know, the latter-day culture warriors.
So, yeah, but just to say, like, I don't blame people for Because that's what his output has often been recently is culture war stuff or the new atheist era.
But I feel that this is why a lot of people respect Dawkins more than a Brett Weinstein.
And it's justified because he is a better thinker and he did and does have expertise and a skill for communicating science about evolution.
So I feel like people...
Would be well served to compartmentalize culture war Dawkins from the popular science writer Dawkins.
And it's not like the two are completely separate characters, right?
They're intertwined.
But I just, I don't see loads of culture war stuff slipping into his popular science writing.
No, and I don't see it being a motivating force in any.
So yeah, I mean, look, nobody needs to idolize or put anyone up on a pedestal, right?
He's definitely, I think, as a man from a different time, at his age, he's like a babe in the woods when it comes to the internet, the culture wars, and just modern life.
For instance, there's no way he should have been sharing a stage with Brett Weinstein, right?
He just shouldn't have been, right?
But he doesn't.
It doesn't check or it doesn't know or it doesn't...
I don't know.
I disagreed with him.
But it's almost worth reading The Selfish Dream just so you can then go and listen to him listening to Brad Weinstein talking about lineage selection and then having some kind of teleology and so on.
And only then can you truly understand the aghast look on Richard Dawkins' face because it is so the opposite.
Of everything that is being explained there.
So look, I mean, read his books on evolution.
I read a couple of his books about religion, but I didn't really care about that, and I didn't really enjoy them.
I think they were fine, though.
I think he's bad as a modern-day character on the internet.
You shouldn't tweet.
Anymore?
I mean, I feel like in most of them, they might have something...
Like, one thing that I noticed in this, which made sense to me, is, like, he focuses a lot on this, on sexual reproduction and its role in, like, the mixing up of genes, right?
And philosophizing about, you know, why does that exist if the goal is to make copies?
There's a more high-fidelity version of copying, right?
But his argument is you can't take sex for granted.
Just because it's there in lots of animals.
Why is it there?
Why is it the dominant feature that we see in animals?
And then that did make me think that he's waded into the culture war and debates around trans stuff.
And I don't think he does a very nuanced job of it.
But I think he, as far as that influences his perspective on it, he is trying to focus on the biological aspect.
But he doesn't do any of the other requisite stuff, like look into the cultural things.
So it's kind of like he approaches these topics as if, well, I'm just talking as a biologist, but he's talking about humans and culture and politics and all of these things.
And it doesn't mean that the underlying biology...
That we should deny it.
That it isn't important to think about sexual reproduction and the role it plays in human evolution or animal evolution or the function of sex and genetics and all these kind of things.
It's fine to do that.
But you have to also, as a human, realize that there is a social environment and there are people pushing forward certain perspectives and whatnot.
And just his willingness, I think, is one of his next things is Peter Bergossian.
Introducing him, right?
And, like, the amount of research that he'll have done into Peter Bogossian's arguments and views or whatever will be next to none in general.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
He should have retired, I reckon.
How long?
20 years ago?
15?
Well, I mean, I think he has retired, but he's still tweeting.
Retire and shut up.
I dare you, Matt.
I dare you.
Sorry.
Yeah, but I mean, so taking this book in isolation, I still, I would fully recommend this book, especially for somebody who isn't familiar with evolutionary biology or evolutionary theory.
It's a really good introduction.
It's well-written.
It covers a lot of topics, a lot of big ideas.
And I think it is still kind of mind-blowing if you haven't approached that perspective.
And with the updated version, there's more nuance than in some of the earlier ones.
So, yeah, I really liked it, even though I recognize various limitations and I have my issues with the kind of later chapters in their extension.
But I would hardly set for my students, for example, the chapter on the Prisoner Dilemma because it does a really neat job of covering a fairly complex topic.
Yeah, I was glad to revisit it, Matt, and I still enjoyed it, but it was less mind-blowing now than it was 20 or 30 years ago when I read it.
Yeah, that's right.
You can't have your mind blown twice.
You can't watch The Sixth Sense twice.
These things could only happen once.
Yeah, no, I'd recommend it too.
How well do you remember the extended phenotype?
Because I remember it being good.
Would you say it's his...
Like a good second read after this one?
I don't think I've read The Extended Phenotype because I got the argument.
I read some articles.
No, Chris, there's more.
There's more nuances.
There's more aspects.
I think I did start reading that and then got bored.
But I remember The Ancestors Teal bored me when I read it because of the format of it, even though it was interesting.
But The Extended Phenotype, there's a chapter that's been added to this.
Which basically provides like a potted summary of it.
And yeah, maybe I should actually read that.
But it is talking about the fact that there are products of genes that do not necessarily manifest in the body that can come from the behaviors, right?
Like spiders' webs or beaver dams or insects forging shells to carry about in their back or whatnot.
And we have to consider these as the gene interacting with the environment.
Yeah.
Implications beyond the organism.
Yeah, that's right.
And I think that's the best thing about books like this.
And it doesn't have to be about biology or evolution.
It could be about physics or something.
Or the immune system, like you and I found, where we mentioned you have this weird feeling where you suddenly realize that your body is more like a rainforest than anything else.
And it's just a queasy feeling.
And it's true.
And it just encourages you to look at something familiar.
With fresh eyes.
And the nice thing about the selfish gene is it encourages you to think about all of this stuff from a gene's point of view, these little atoms of information for whom we are the vehicles that they build around themselves.
And like you said, with the extended phenotype, we build other things and change the environment.
But to the genes, the actual bits of information that are actually being copied with some propensity potentially infinitely into the future.
These are all environmental things that they can interact with, but only passively, right?
Because they're as dumb as a rock.
They're ultimately just bits of molecules floating through space and time.
So it's just cool to have that kind of step back, big picture view.
Yeah, and the fact, you know, like in reductionism in general, I mean, I feel this is why some of it falls a bit flat to me when someone...
Like a Sam Harris or whatever is like, think about your thought and I break it down and like, you know, where did that thought come from?
Where did it start?
Isn't it like ultimately not really there?
And like, if you continue down that, you can be like, well, what was that?
Wasn't that just the firing of a neuron in a biological organism, some process happening?
And if you break that down, there's molecules and atoms and like, where is the special unit right at the end of that?
But like...
So in the same way, you can look at all the complex life in the world, all the bird songs, all the beautiful environments and human social relationships and everything and say, well, it's all from these little molecules that are replicating units, right?
And it's true.
It is true, just in the same way people are made from atoms and all those kind of things.
But I think there is an issue that the higher levels...
Matter, right?
And especially matter once you get to the point with like humans, whereby people are doing things where they're actually working against the, you know, what mechanisms the kind of genes would have if we had societies organized around them.
And just, I mean, it's reiterated the point we've said it multiple times, but like Dawkins' final message of the first edition and the message throughout is we uniquely amongst organisms now no longer We are slaves to our genes.
We can do things that they wouldn't choose us to do.
We do it all the time with birth control and with other things.
And we don't tie our value in life, unless you're Elon Musk, to the amount of genetic material that you put into the next generation.
And yeah, that struck me as a humanistic message.
The humanistic message which I got from him, and I can't remember whether it was from this book or from a different one of his that I read, which was to think of ourselves, our conscious selves, our human culture, whatever you want to call it, everything that isn't purely biologically genetically driven.
All of that is like a virus that's invaded.
The vehicles that the genes built for themselves.
And it really encourages you to summon up this image, right?
So of these genes building better and better vehicles, better and better survival machines, purely for themselves, for their own benefit, in scare quotes.
And then realizing that if I build a vehicle, because like we said, genes can only influence behavior through very broad heuristics, which are not very flexible, can't change quickly, even in.
So, by building in bigger brains and getting more flexibility in terms of those repertoires and allowing learning and stuff to happen in species like humans, they were building themselves better and better survival machines that would take better and better...
But they flew too close to the sun, Chris.
They built such a sophisticated machine in the case of humans that we realized what was going on and now we get to do with our bodies what we like.
I like those little metaphorical allegories you can build off what really happened with evolution and human consciousness.
Thing that I think is interesting and is the kind of thing that you would want to look into the literature of, right?
But I'm aware of some of the literature about human cognition and the early developing attentional preference towards predators.
A predator-shaped thing is more attention-grabbing to us than other alternatives, right?
And there are also potentially particular species like snakes and spiders that...
We pick out more readily than other less significant evolutionary threats throughout history.
And that, to me, is interesting to think about because, of course, if you think about humans as a social primate, that we would have mechanisms just like all other primates that are honed towards detecting certain silhouettes or collection of shapes as potential dangers.
And that we are oriented more towards this.
Makes perfect sense.
But it is the kind of thing that I think requires a little bit of recognizing that, you know, that we have the legacy of evolutionary processes inside us.
And this can also have, like, implications whereby humans might be more concerned about stuff which grabs our attention over things which are much more likely to kill us, high cholesterol diets or cars, right?
I think I hear what you're saying, which is that by actually leaning into those lessons from evolution, like, for instance, our predisposition towards threat detection, which obviously makes us react to certain kinds of media and engage with certain kinds of media more than others,
right?
These are useful...
Lessons for blind spots or Achilles heels in our tendencies.
Obvious ones are around eating too much or various types of social behavior that we don't find very admirable.
For instance, setting up a picking order and trying to accrue social capital so you can put others down below you.
Now, I feel certain there's humans like pretty much every other species.
That live at least some degree in social groups has a predisposition towards it.
But by recognising that we do have a species-typical predisposition actually allows us to have some self-awareness and do something about it.
And, you know, so I think it's the wrong thing to do to sort of adopt that denialist kind of point of view.
We see on the internet, obviously, with these silly bros with their alpha male thing and these weird evolutionary kind of high-quality mates and things like that.
You see the exact opposite of that, don't you?
So you see the two ways to go wrong.
One is to take these kind of evolutionary lessons as a guidebook or some kind of hack to win at life.
Or you could be in complete denial about them and pretend that we are these sort of pure beings of spirituality and individuality, purely culturally constructed, and these meatbags we're in has no effect whatsoever.
I think the mature path is the middle road, which is, yeah, what you were saying, really.
Well, in my own field, for example, ritual is a very complex topic, but there's all sorts of different rituals, right?
But one recurrent pattern of ritual that you see is cleansing.
Washing or symbolically washing, right?
Like when people go to a shrine in Japan, they pour water over their hands, right?
Usually when people go into Christian churches, sometimes they touch the holy water, right?
And do the sign of the cross.
Or there's so many examples of like rituals, which are either symbolically cleansing, you know, somebody passes a like kind of burning incense over you or Legitimately cleansing, like you're being washed by water or oil or whatever the case might be.
But you can view those and you can, for legitimate reasons, look at the cultural origins of all these different behaviors, right?
And you can trace back in antiquity or across cultures where certain rituals are transmitted and so on.
But I also think that research looking at how that might be connected to hazard avoidance psychology and how...
Engaging and cleansing actions, even when they're actually removed from the practice, could bring psychological relief, right?
And that could, in some ways, be a spandrel over the behavior that feeling dirty and unpleasant and wanting to become clean could have things to avoid pathogens, right?
That feeling.
But I think that's interesting, right?
And it doesn't mean that there's no value.
To looking at cleansing rituals in modern Rome and how they spread related to, like, the Greek religions and whatnot.
Like, that's still a valid way to look at it.
But you can also look at it from the point of view of, like, you know, our cognitive inheritance and concerns about pathogen avoidance.
And I think as long as you're doing research that tests that, do rituals.
Does that involve cleansing lead to anxiety reduction in individuals?
And, you know, can you do a nice study to test that?
And people have tried to and generally have found evidence in support of that.
But it's the kind of thing where I'm very open to that being a way to approach things that is valid as much as at the higher level looking at the cultural diffusion or the history of it, not from a cognitive evolutionary perspective.
So I don't think You only need to do one.
Yeah.
No, no, of course.
You're completely right.
There's no inherent contradiction between looking at things at those two levels.
You know, only stupid biologists would say that culture has no impact on humans and only...
A stupid anthropologist would say that there is no biological underpinning to humans, right?
They don't contradict.
Just like you've got a lot of diversity in a gene pool, you've got a lot of diversity in individuals, in a species, and a lot of diversity in species as well.
It shouldn't be surprising that when you've got this extra cultural and cognitive flexibility layered on top of whatever evolution is setting up as the scaffolding, you're going to see a heap of diversity across individuals and groups.
The ratio to which something can be species-typical for humans versus being highly variable is itself really interesting, and it informs both the evo-psych-type stuff and also the anthropological stuff.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, see, it's led to us developing our own speculative little accounts and descriptions here.
So I just, yeah, it's an interesting book.
We would be interested to hear.
All those opinions on it.
But those are ours.
And it is also long.
I'll just point out that in audiobook format, I think it's like 16 or 17 hours.
So that is a sizable, chunky little book.
But yeah, good job, Dawkins.
You did all right.
And for this book alone, I can say I still see value to it.
I wish this was what you spent more.
Time doing the comedy on Twitter, but I guess The Genetic Book of the Dead.
I haven't read that, but this has kind of made me think, oh, maybe it'd be interesting to read that and see, you know, where his thinking is in 2024.
Yeah, I might check that out too.
Yep.
Yeah, good.
Thanks, Chris.
I enjoyed talking about that book.
Enjoyed reading it again too.
So, yeah, good job.
Onwards and upwards next time.
We'll get you a good ethnography next month.
I don't even know what that is, but yeah.
Okay.
All right.
Well, enjoy your American sojourn as it continues.
