Richard Dawkins joins Joe Rogan to dissect Outgrowing God, his latest book debunking religious claims like the virgin birth and Joseph Smith’s fabricated texts, while citing evolution’s peppered moth case—where industrial pollution shifted moth colors over 100–200 years—as proof of science’s explanatory power. Dawkins clashes with figures like Ted Haggard (later exposed in scandals) and Rowan Williams, who still upholds biblical miracles despite evidence. He warns of childhood indoctrination but notes cultural ties to religion persist even among atheists, like Rogan’s Jewish friend Ari. The episode ends with Dawkins advocating science over tribalism, dismissing secular cult risks as trivial compared to religious misinformation’s global harm. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, I think that's probably because you've had some interviews in the past where you have talked to some fiercely religious people and you've had some cantankerous interactions with them.
I think maybe so they associate you with having this almost aggressively atheistic stance.
I actually participated in a reenactment of that play in Los Angeles back in the day, a comedy reenactment.
Bill Maher was in it, a bunch of other comedians were in it, and we read word for word the script, and we acted it out in front of a live audience so people would come through the hell house, this haunted house, but instead it was people knew it was all comedians reading it, and they're like, is this really the words that they said?
It was so preposterous that it actually, without being a parody, it actually played out like a comedy.
Well, when we filmed it, we filmed them doing the play, and then they filmed me interviewing the perpetrator, Michael somebody or other.
And I said to him, what's your target audience?
And he said, 12.
And I said, really?
Are you really serious that you like to.
And he said, hell is such a terrible place that anything I can do to persuade children not to sin and they must acknowledge Jesus and so on is worth it.
I thought that was a deeply immoral thing to say, but I think he was sincere.
There's a great documentary on it as well for someone who wants to see the thought process behind them creating this.
But one of the things that I really enjoyed about the God Delusion is that you kind of outlined every single possible argument against atheism and then had a counter to it in advance.
Like if you have a soft position, look at chapter one.
If you look at this, look at chapter two.
And you outlined that in the preface before you got into it.
Why is it that you think that there are so many religions and that basically every single civilization throughout human history has had some sort of deity, some sort of higher power?
It's amazing the way they split and diverge and diverge and diverge.
It's as though they somehow can't get along with each other.
And maybe new leaders arise who have a leadership complex or something and want to found their own sect.
Time and time again, you have breakaway religions, breakaway faiths.
I don't know what the psychological reason for it is, but what I have noticed is that they usually hate the religion which is the closest to their own more than they do more distant ones.
And that has a certain biological ring to it, too.
That kind of makes sense to a biologist looking at diverging species.
Well, it almost seems like if you were studying human beings, if you were something that was completely alien to our civilization, our culture, and you were looking at this strange tendency to believe in something that there's no proof of and devote a massive amount of energy into defending that,
put it into your songs and put it into your Pledge of Allegiance and all these different, which of course was not until the 1950s, but all the different things that people have done in so many different cultures in regards to religion.
It almost seems like a natural aspect of being a human being.
You're right, that they put an enormous amount of energy and effort and expense and time and cost in share.
I mean, some of the extreme sects which whip themselves with horrible weapons, actually bleed, scar their own backs.
It's very, very surprising to a biologist.
You think we would think that they would be more interested in surviving and reproducing, but no, there's something about religion that makes them go to extremes of costliness.
Do you think that it is in some way a counter to the sort of existential angst that comes from being a finite life form, from being a finite, a thinking, conscious, finite life form that's aware of its own demise, aware it's coming.
So it has to formulate some purpose and some meaning.
I can understand why people might want to believe a priest who comes along and tells them you don't have to worry about death because you're going to survive it.
I'm less understanding of people who make up stories to comfort either themselves or other people.
I mean, a made-up story should not be comforting.
I don't understand how a made-up story can be comforting.
Of course, if you make it up and persuade somebody else, then they could find it comforting.
On the other hand, is an afterlife really all that comforting?
When you think about half of them believe they're going to go to hell, so it's anything but comforting.
And also, even if you're not going to hell, if you're going to heaven, eternity in heaven, I mean, sitting in heaven for not just billions of years, but trillions of years.
I mean, these are time spans beyond our comprehension.
I enjoy life, but if I had to live my life over and over again, infinitely, if I had an infinite number of this exact lives, I don't know how I'd approach that.
I asked advice of a cousin of my father who's just recently died who was a major expert on psychedelics.
And I think he was the one who introduced Aldous Huxley to Met Mescaline, for example.
And he judiciously advised against, he said that the horrors of a bad trip are so awful that he wouldn't advise somebody to go into it.
My friend who was offering me this trip says it would be a relatively low dose and she would take another low dose so she could kind of accompany me and stop me jumping out a window or anything.
I mean, you could see the connection if you were a primitive person with no access to science and you found some mushroom growing under a tree and consumed it and had this unbelievable experience, you would assume that you've transcended this life and gone into this other realm where God exists.
And you're like, I could have gotten so much done with this.
If I tried this out when I was 30.
Yes, maybe you're right.
I don't, you know, I don't think anybody should do anything.
I mean, I used to.
I used to encourage people to do things all the time.
Now, my thought is do whatever compels you, whenever you feel like it.
But I would think that a person like yourself who has this sort of rigorous belief that the lights go out and then that's it, I would think that that would be attractive to just at least dip your toes in.
I've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me wonder what thoughts are and what consciousness is and whether or not there's some way that it transcends.
I mean, I've had very amicable debates with religious people, bishops, archbishops, and people like that, rabbi, the chief rabbi of Britain.
Very amicable.
And the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, is such a nice man and intelligent in the literal sense that he finishes your sentences for you.
And so he clearly understands exactly what you're trying to say and gets there before you finish the sentence.
but then for some weird reason doesn't agree with it.
They are interesting, but because they're so young that you can see how they grew up, people couldn't see the actual process.
Mormonism, I'm depressed by how successful it is, actually Scientology as well, but Mormonism, since, I mean, we know Joseph Smith was a charlatan, everything about him screams charlatan, and yet plenty of respectable people, including presidential candidates, men in suits, appear to believe it.
In the case of, I mean, I discuss it in Outgrowing God, in addition to the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith purported to translate another book called The Book of Abraham, which was in a different language, some ancient Egyptian language.
And he published his full translation of the Book of Abraham, which he said was all about Abraham's journey to Egypt and lots of detail about Egypt and Abraham in Egypt and things.
The original manuscripts were destroyed in a fire in Chicago, and so he was safe from anybody exposing his translation.
It was discovered that actually some of these manuscripts had survived, and they had not been destroyed.
And modern scholars who actually knew the language, including some Mormon scholars, translated it again.
A true translation, which has nothing whatever to do with Abraham or Egypt.
This is absolute cast-iron demonstration that Joseph Smith was a complete fake and charlatan.
This is fully documented.
And yet they go on believing that he was a prophet.
I'm also very interested in the perhaps even more recent things, like the cargo cults of the Pacific, where, again, these actually arose in living memory.
And the worship of John Frum in some of the islands in the Pacific, where you can see what happened.
And this gives you an insight into what must have happened with Jesus, where, you know, the Gospels weren't written down until decades after Jesus' death, if he ever lived, which he probably did.
And so having seen how easily the cargo cults arose, people who worship John Frum, worship Prince Philip, believed that cargo planes were sent by the ancestors and would build dummy airfields with dummy control towers and radar dishes and dummy planes on the airfield and things.
This is all within living memory.
And something like that, it's just so transparent that something like that went on in the early church.
Well, the Scientology story to me is the most bizarre because it was literally, I mean, if you wanted to have a crazy religion, like what would be the most ridiculous religion for people to believe in?
But if you're going to have the most ridiculous religion, you would say, well, get a fiction author, particularly a bad one, a bad science fiction author who walked around in a jacket with metals on that he gave himself, and have that guy create a religion, a guy who is really self-diagnosing his own psychological issues and trying to deal with them through this concept of Dianetics.
And it's so strange that to this day, people are clinging to it.
And it makes you wonder, like, what is it about these systems of belief that are so intrinsically attractive to people, so uniquely a part of being a person, these belief systems.
I think I get it when there's childhood indoctrination involved, but in the case of Scientology, some of the celebrities who joined it, that's not childhood indoctrination, that's just sheer rank stupidity.
Especially the celebrity thing, because I've met quite a few of them out here, especially in the early days, the 90s before the internet came along and sort of exposed a lot of this stuff, and South Park, before they came along and exposed it.
There was quite a few people that thought that there was a career advantage to being a part of Scientology.
There were so many successful actors that were a part of Scientology, and they seemed to be disciplined and focused, and they were avoiding drugs and all the pitfalls of Hollywood fame and stardom.
And they also seemed to be helping each other.
That Hollywood directors who were also Scientologists would look towards hiring Scientologists, producers, and actors.
There's some strange thing that we are all very attractive, attracted to being a part of a tribe and being a part of, even if the belief system is ridiculous, if we are in a group that subscribes this belief system, it's very attractive to people.
And Jonathan Haidt also makes the same point about Republicans and Democrats.
There's a fierce tribalism going on.
And it accounts for so much of what people believe, as opposed to actually looking at the evidence.
The Center for Inquiry, which my foundation has just merged with, is of course all about trying to get people off that sort of thing, sort of irrationality, and to instead evaluate claims on the basis of evidence, critically evaluate it, scientific evidence.
But it's hard because people have other motives, like emotion, tribalism, things like that.
Well, people find great comfort in these belief systems.
It gives them sort of, I've often said that it gives them some sort of like a scaffolding for their just their structure of the world, their ethics, their morals.
They can use religion as some sort of a mechanism to help them get by, something that they can climb on to ease some of the confusion of the unknown.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't understand why anybody therefore thinks that therefore the religion is true.
Why would you think that because it provides you with a scaffold you can climb on, that makes it true?
I could understand you erecting a scaffold that was say gymnastics or a certain diet or something like that, but a belief about the universe, that's either got to be true or not.
And it doesn't make it true just because it's comforting or provides you with a scaffold to climb on.
Well, sometimes people doing things and knowing that they're doing things gives them this sort of feeling of momentum, of accomplishment, of progress.
And I think so many people are just so adrift and don't have focus that even just telling them, hey, you're going to be a part of this program, this program to treat X, Y, disease, whatever it is, and here's this thing, like just focusing on it.
I think the main reason why so many people believe in homeopathy, which not only doesn't work but cannot work, is the placebo effect.
That they, well, it's part of they're going to get better anyway, of course, but it's also the placebo effect, that a homeopathic, I won't say a doctor, a homeopathic practitioner, gives them a nonsensical piece of medicine.
And they believe it's going to work, and so it does.
And so the placebo effect is important.
The CFI Center for Inquiry has actually got a lawsuit going on at the moment against pharmaceutical shops selling homeopathic remedies alongside genuine ones.
We can't stop them actually selling homeopathic remedies.
What we can try and do is stop them putting them on the same shelf as though there's no difference between them.
But my colleague Nick Humphrey, who's a psychologist, a very insightful one, thinks you could actually even justify homeopathy on the grounds that homeopathic practitioners are allowed to prescribe placebos.
They call them homeopathic, but they are placebos.
Whereas real doctors are not allowed to prescribe.
They used to.
Real doctors used to prescribe placebos all the time.
But they're now no longer allowed to because it violates human rights.
But homeopaths are allowed to, bizarrely, because they don't call them placebos.
I can't wait to tell you the story of chiropractic medicine then.
It was created by a guy who is a magnetic healer who was murdered by his own son.
And his son took over the business and started saying that it can cure everything from leukemia to heart disease to everything, all by manipulating the spine.
It was done in the 1800s, and there's no science behind it at all.
But yet so many people have found pain relief.
And chiropractors today, it's weird to lump them all in together.
But many chiropractors today do do good work because they incorporate legitimate modalities in terms of like rehabilitation, like cold laser and all these different massage remedies and all these different things that actually physically work.
But the point I'm trying to make is that whereas it's an empirical question whether chiropractic works, in the case of homeopathy, it cannot work because the dilution is such that the problem is that they say it can work because water has a memory.
But if they could prove that water has a memory, they'd get the Nobel Prize for Physics.
But that really is a home run because this concept of, you know, me and my friends jokingly would always say praise Odin when anything would happen that was pretty good or cool.
There are lots of different religions and Hindus believe in hundreds of gods and Jews believe in one God and Muslims believe in one God and they don't believe in Jesus and just lay out all the different religions.
Of course, there are plenty of individuals who educate that to not believe in a higher power, but I think it's probably true to say that every I mean anthropologists might deny them and there might be some tribe that doesn't, but I suspect they all do.
When you look at human civilization and you go back to the origins of religion and you look towards the future, do you envision a time where humanity is free of what you would consider irrational belief systems or belief systems that are not based on facts?
I think we're moving in the right direction and the figures bear that out.
Even in America, which is off the scale of Western civilizations, even in America, the number of people who now subscribe to a religion is dropping dramatically.
And the number who say they have no religion is now about 25%.
That's a lot.
That is a great deal.
And that compares to any one particular Christian denomination.
And yet, politically, that group, the nuns, the no-beliefs, have no lobby.
They have no powerful pressure group.
So politicians will go out there and suck up to, I don't know, the Irish lobby, the Polish lobby, the Jewish lobby, the Catholic lobby, etc.
But the atheist lobby hasn't got its act together or is only just now beginning to get its act together.
Well, politically, I think people are terrified of the concept because it's such a long branch to go out on.
One of the things that you brought up in the God delusion was the willingness of people to vote for a gay candidate for president, a black candidate for president, a woman candidate for president, but then an atheist, which is, I believe, 40%.
They think that you've got to have a belief in some kind of higher power in order to be moral.
But the weird thing is that it doesn't have to be the same higher power as the one you believe in.
Anyone will do as long as there is one.
But if you don't believe in a higher power, you must be immoral.
And that is totally ridiculous when you think about the horrible immorality of, for example, both the Bible and the Quran, which are horrific in the sense that if you actually got your morals, if you got your moral values from the Old Testament or the Quran,
and they share that a great deal, of course, you would be stoning adulterers to death and stoning people to death for breaking the Sabbath and doing sacrifices, human sacrifices and animal sacrifices, all sorts of horrible things, which of course do go on now in Islamic countries, especially.
Gay people getting thrown off high buildings and women being beheaded for the crime of being seen with a man, not their husband, and that kind of thing.
So we can see what you get when you get your morality from an Abrahamic scripture.
And yet there are still people in this country who say you cannot be moral unless you believe in a higher power.
And you can demonstrate that by the fact that the moral values of any particular century are markedly different from those of other centuries, even decades.
So in the 21st century, we here now have moral values which are really significantly different from 100 years ago or 200 years ago or 300 years ago.
And within any one of those centuries, you could take people who are in the vanguard of moral progress.
For example, in the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley would have been on the liberal progressive end of the spectrum, and other people would have been on the opposite end.
But even Abraham Lincoln, for example, made a speech which I quoted in Outgrowing God, in which he said, of course, nobody would seriously think that black people are the equal of white people.
Nobody would seriously say that black people should be allowed to vote or should be allowed to marry white people.
This is Abraham Lincoln who freed the slaves and was, as I say, in the forefront of progressive thought.
Charles Darwin, again, was in favor of freeing the slaves.
He was passionately anti-slavery.
But he too thought that there was no question about black people being the equal of white people.
They obviously weren't.
And Huxley, Thomas Huxley, again, Darwin's bulldog, thought the same way.
Now, those people were at the forefront, as I say.
Today, they would still be in the forefront, and they would be horrified to look back on what they said in the 19th century.
Well, something is changing as the centuries go by.
In Outgrowing God, I call it something in the air, which of course doesn't explain anything.
But what I mean by that is that it's not literally hovering in the air, but it's a collection of conversations between people, dinner party conversations, parliamentary decisions, congressional debates, judicial decisions by judges, juries, newspaper articles, journalism.
All these things together conspire together to produce something in the air, something that defines a given century or maybe even a given decade with the moral values of that decade.
Then the knowledge base, which is just so superior today in terms of what the general public has access to, in terms of what we understand about human beings.
It's just different than it was back then.
And it continues to be different.
And now with the Internet, we have so much more access to these conversations.
And it's not just about being at a dinner table with the right people.
You can watch YouTube videos of yourself debating religious scholars or anything.
So that progress of something in the air will, as it were, take on an accelerated pace because of the internet.
And I think that's a very hopeful sign.
Of course, the internet also can be used for the opposite purpose.
But I think there's a kind of asymmetry there, because especially if you look at benighted areas of the world like Afghanistan and Pakistan, where until recently, the idea of being an atheist was simply inconceivable.
It was off the radar.
They didn't even consider it.
It wasn't something that they thought was possible.
Now they do, because they got the internet.
We've got a project in CFI of downloading free of charge as PDFs several of my books, including The God Delusion, and will be Outgrowing God as well.
And these are being downloaded by large numbers of people.
The first PDF download of the Arabic edition of The God Delusion was downloaded 13 million times, Arabic edition, 13 million times.
So now they are being exposed to the possibility of atheism, which wasn't a possibility.
Of course, the internet is also exposing them to Islamic propaganda, but they've had that all along from Imams, Mullahs, and their madrasa schools.
But now they've got it coming the other way as well.
And I have great hope that the Internet will mark a turning point.
The worry is that once someone gets into a position of being the person who gets to speak, the alpha, the one who's on the stage addressing the people and giving them the doctrine, that he becomes far too attractive for his own good.
But I think when they get together and they talk about all the values that Jesus proposed, if Jesus is the higher power, it gives them this sort of, again, moral scaffolding to live their life.
Most of the scholars I've talked to say he probably was.
The evidence is not great, of course, but I think I don't think it's that big a deal, actually, because he, I mean, a wandering preacher called Yeshua or Yahoshua, would it not be surprising?
I mean, it's a common name, and there are plenty of wandering preachers.
What would be very surprising would be if he raised Lazarus from the dead and walked on water and turned water into wine.
It's just when I like when people can, and she, I've had her on the podcast.
She's such a unique woman, and she's so kind, and she's so thoughtful and intelligent, it's hard to believe that she's only been out of this cult for a few years.
Well, as I was saying, the downloads of my books have been encouraging.
We have this thing called, CFI has a thing called the Translation Project, which is specifically in order to do that, in order to take my books, and we hope other people's books as well, and put them into PDFs and then have them available for free download.
And I hear evidence from Iran, from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, from individuals who say, yes, there's now quite a substantial groundswell of anti-religious, anti-Islamic opinion.
And I think it's going to increase, and I'm really encouraged by that.
One of the things about being Muslim, in my eyes, is very similar to being Jewish, is that Jewish people, there are many Jewish people that are not religious, but they are Jewish.
Like I have a very good friend, my friend Ari, he is Jewish, but he is an atheist.
And he identifies with being a Jewish person.
He has Jewish relatives.
His father is a Holocaust survivor.
But he looks at it like a thing that he's a part of, like a great long tradition that he's a part of.
I think especially for people of Jewish heritage who have relatives killed in the Holocaust, I think it would be a matter of kind of loyalty to their murdered relatives.
I could easily get that.
And I think that there are probably cultural Muslims who probably not for the same degree of loyalty, but probably think of themselves as Muslims.
I suppose I'm a cultural Anglican in a way.
I mean, I sort of, you know, I can sing the hymns and my family observes Christmas in a desires sort of way.
I never did say bless you, actually, but I don't know.
Kazundheit?
I don't say anything, but I have no objection to saying gazuntide, or gazuntide, of course, religious, not religious, but my colleague at Oxford had a fellow who was a famous philosopher, a famous atheist, A.J. Eyre.
And he, when he was senior fellow, he used to say grace at dinner.
And when he was asked why, he said, I will not utter falsehoods, but I have no objection to uttering meaningless statements.
It begins with what we were talking about earlier, the share number of different gods, and then moves on to the Bible and how unreliable a source of information it is.
And both the Old Testament and the New Testament, they get a chapter each.
And then there's a couple of chapters on morality and why you don't need, well, not only do you not need religion to be moral, you better not have religion if you want to be moral.
And then the second half of the book is about science.
Because I think that one of the possibly the major reason people still cling to religion is a belief that the world is so complicated, especially the living world is so complicated that it cannot be explained by purely scientific means.
And so I've set out to disabuse them of that and to show how even the most radically complicated and beautiful and elegant pieces of animal design can be and are explained by science.
It's kind of understandable until you thought about it for a bit, because complicated things don't just happen.
Complicated things like these cameras and this computer and things like that, we all know they had to have an engineer design them and factories to build them.
And they're very, very improbable things, statistically improbable.
The components of a computer or a camera, if you jumble them up at random, they wouldn't work, obviously.
So it's kind of pardonable that people should think there must have been a designer.
But then you think a bit further and you realize that the designer himself would need just the same kind of explanation.
And therefore the designer is not an explanation that flies.
And philosophers before Darwin, philosophers like Hume realized that, but didn't have anything to put in its place.
Darwin came along and gave them that which you would need to put in its place.
And Hume would have loved Darwin if only he'd lived long enough to meet him, to meet his ideas.
So I think we have to have sympathy for people who think that complexity must mean design.
But nowadays we know better, and that's what the second half of Outgrowing God is about.
It actually came over from the Richard Dawkins Foundation when we merged, called TIES, the Teacher Institute for Evolutionary Science, which is teaching teachers how to teach evolution.
Because middle school teachers in this country, apparently, are not, don't have science degrees, and they don't really know how to counter, how to combat the pushback that they get from children and parents and school boards and things, specifically against evolution.
And so we are teaching teachers how to teach evolution.
I mean, we run workshops.
We've now run one in every state of the Union.
And that, I think, is one of the projects of CFI, which is closest to my heart.
Yes, I mean, I'm worried about childhood indoctrination and the fact that people who are religious almost certainly adopt the religion of their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents.
And so we've got a kind of pseudo-genetic inheritance going on.
And I really hate that.
I mean, that's wicked.
That's indoctrination of children.
So I've always wanted to try to break that chain going down the generations.
So I've always wanted to write a book for young people.
And of course, it's highly necessary when you see the enormous and pernicious influence of fundamentalist religion, especially in this country, actually.
Now, the science aspect of it, this is, I mean, obviously when you're talking about the science of evolutionary biology and natural selection and random mutations and all these different things that lead to a thing becoming a human being over the course of billions of years, it's such a complex idea for people to grasp.
How is it, how do you condense it and sort of simplify the path and introduce them to the works of these great scientists that have sort of established these ideas for them?
It's actually a very simple idea, but it plays out in very complex ways.
And I think the main problem from a didactic point of view is that the results are so complex that it's hard to believe that anything so simple as natural selection, non-random selection of randomly varying genes, could really be responsible for producing something as complicated as a human body.
And so it's a matter of getting around, beating that barrier of incredulity.
If the idea was more complex, in a way it might be easier.
That's the fact that the idea is so simple.
I think that may be why it took so long for a Darwin to come on the scene.
When you think about it, the middle of the 19th century is rather late, 200 years after Newton did, on the face of it, much cleverer things.
And yet it was another 200 years after Newton before Darwin came along.
I think the reason for that is that the idea is just too simple.
It's almost ridiculously simple to be big enough to achieve the feat of explaining the complexity of any part of an animal, really, but let alone a whole animal.
Yes, I mean, Darwin himself made great play of domestication, which is very fast and which has occurred in historical time.
So we can see how wolves have been changed into pekineses and poodles and labradors and spaniels.
And that's a very, very major change to have occurred in only a couple of thousand, a few thousand years.
And we see the same with cabbages and with roses and with horses and all sorts of other things.
That's artificial selection, not natural selection.
Everybody knew about artificial selection, of course.
Farmers and gardeners and pigeon fanciers all knew about it.
Darwin's great insight was to say you don't need a human selector.
You don't need a human breeder to do the transformation from wolf to Pomeranian.
Nature does it for you.
Non-random survival is the equivalent of a human breeder doing the breeding.
So that's what Darwin did.
And as for examples of natural selection, we do have some.
The famous peppered moths in Britain is one of them.
Mosquitoes, I think, in the U.S. Can you explain the peppered moths and people?
Yes, peppered moths is, this is a moth called Biston betulleria, which lives on tree bark.
It sits on tree bark, and it's perfectly camouflaged.
It looks like tree bark.
So it's light-coloured.
And then the Industrial Revolution in Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries caused the woods around industrial areas like Manchester and Birmingham to become blackened.
And so the moths stood out.
They became conspicuous and they were picked off by birds.
But mutant moths were black.
And the mutant black moths were not picked off by birds.
And so what happened was that the percentage of black moths in the populations around industrial centers like Birmingham and Manchester, they became much more numerous.
And the light-coloured ones became almost extinct in those areas.
But at the same time, the light-coloured moths in rural areas, far from industrial pollution, like Devon and Somerset, stayed with their original colour.
And this was worked out beautifully by a man at Oxford, actually, called Bernard Kettlewell.
And he showed, he actually went and sampled in these different areas and also did experiments showing birds actually picking off light-coloured moths in dark areas and vice versa.
But it's just when you're living in the present and you're thinking of yourself and you're thinking of biological life, it's hard for a person to see things on those scales, which is one of the reasons why I think for many people that aren't educated in these sort of subjects to buy into this concept of some sort of intelligent design.
Yes, well, time scales are, we have no concept of millions of years.
We can just about cope with, I mean, even thousands of years, even going back to the ancient Egyptians, we get a kind of frisson of awe at wondering what it was like, what the epic of Gilgamesh, what was it like then?