Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

Nov. 4, 2019 - Making Sense - Sam Harris

48:35

#174 — Life & Mind

Sam Harris speaks with Richard Dawkins. They discuss the strangeness of the “gene’s-eye view" of the world, the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life, the concept of the extended phenotype, ideologies as meme complexes, whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon, psychedelics, meditation, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast.
	This is Sam Harris.
	Okay.
	Do I have housekeeping today?
	I don't think so.
	Today I'm speaking with Richard Dawkins.
	Richard really needs no introduction on this podcast, but please note that he has a new book out titled Outgrowing God, A Beginner's Guide.
	In this conversation we mostly take your questions and we start by discussing the strangeness of the gene's eye view of the world.
	We then move on to the limits of Darwinian thinking when applied to human life.
	We talk about his concept of the extended phenotype and memetics.
	We look at how ideologies act as meme complexes.
	We talk about whether consciousness might be an epiphenomenon.
	And therefore might not have been evolved under selective pressure.
	And then we talk about psychedelics and meditation.
	I actually lead Richard in a guided meditation.
	And the effects of that you can hear for yourself.
	And I'll have something more to say in my afterward.
	So now, without further delay, I bring you Richard Dawkins.
	Be you still, be you still, trembling heart, Remember the wisdom out of the old days.
	Him who trembles before the flame and the flood, And the winds that blow through the starry ways, Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood Cover over and hide, for he has no part With the lonely, majestical multitude.
	What poem is that?
	It's an early one.
	It's from The Wind Among the Reeds, I think.
	Well, that was a wonderful reading and the perfect sound check.
	I am here with Richard Dawkins.
	Richard, thanks for joining me again on the podcast.
	Thank you very much, and thank you for coming to the Biltmore Hotel rather than making me go to your studio, which I should have done.
	This is old school.
	I love it.
	So, you know, you and I have done a bunch of events together.
	Yes, I hope we haven't run out of things to talk about.
	I worry about that kind of thing.
	Yeah, you know, so in the interests of not running into that problem, I decided to go out on social media and ask for questions.
	And this is, you know, that's the perfect algorithm because I can, I know what kinds of questions we've hit in the past.
	And this simultaneously gets us what our respective audiences want to hear.
	And I have no fear that we're going to cover the same territory in the same way again.
	I hope one or two of them may have seen my new book.
	Maybe not.
	Maybe too recently out.
	I don't know.
	So let's just mention the new books just so that we've done that.
	The new book is Outgrowing God.
	Outgrowing God, yes.
	And this is for teenagers, right?
	Yes.
	Quite a lot of complaints have been that it's just like The God Delusion.
	It actually isn't just like The God Delusion.
	It's different.
	And it's sort of designed for teenagers, yes.
	And we can obviously spend as much time or as little time on these questions as we want and open any doors that they suggest to us.
	But the first frivolous question is, and this surprises me, this means nothing, but do you realize that the most prominent atheists are all Aries?
	Right, so you're an Aries, I'm an Aries, Hitch was an Aries, Dennett is an Aries, Matt Dillahunty is an Aries.
	The great film director Otto Preminger was once approached by a starlet on the set of one of his films.
	She said, Oh, gee, Mr. Preminger, what sign are you?
	And he said, I am a do not disturb sign.
	That's my attitude towards astrology.
	Well, I guess Aries don't believe in astrology.
	So the first question, which I think will set us on a nice path—it won't preempt everything else—but this is somebody who clearly is exasperated with the prospect that we might focus exclusively on atheism or bashing religion.
	And he says, for goodness sake, get him talking in detail about the gene's eye view of natural selection, the extended phenotype, the arguments surrounding group selection and punctuated equilibrium, the way memetics has rather ironically taken on a life of its own, and so on.
	Not just God, for God's sake.
	So this covers a lot of ground, and I do want to do those topics justice.
	I think people are so casually aware of the revolution that has been wrought in our thinking based on our understanding of Darwinism, and it was really crystallized in your book, The Selfish Gene, But it has kind of receded into the background of our thinking.
	And it is such a strange view of the mechanics of things and the logic of things.
	And so maybe let's just spend a little time talking about the nature of replication.
	I mean, I like to think if it has receded into the background, that's because it's simply accepted, which among professional biologists of the sort of field type, it has.
	I mean, I'm thinking of the general public that has kind of lost sight of how strange it is.
	Yes, even perhaps the general public.
	Well, I suppose it is a bit strange, and it sort of is a turning on its head of what used to be the more orthodox view.
	Darwin saw natural selection at the level of the individual, so he thought of individuals as competing with each other within the species.
	It was always a within-species competition.
	And he was, of course, aware that survival is only a means to the end of reproduction.
	And his other great book, well, one of his other great books, The Descent of Man, is largely about sexual selection.
	So Darwin was thoroughly aware that success at reproduction was also vitally important and any hereditary tendency to be, for example, sexually attractive or good at competing with members of their own sex would also be be favoured.
	But Darwin didn't have gene language.
	He had no concept of the particulate gene, which Mendel introduced.
	And that particulate view of genetics was actually essential to natural selection, because as was pointed out in Darwin's own time, if genetics was blending, as everybody in the 19th century except Mendel thought, if we were all a kind of mixture of our father and our mother, then variation would disappear as the generations went by.
	Each generation would be more uniform than the previous one.
	In which case there would be no variation left for natural selection to work on.
	This was actually advanced as an argument against natural selection.
	Actually, of course, it's an argument against manifest facts, because we don't get more alike as the generations go by.
	Mendel solved that problem, but Darwin didn't realize it.
	I don't think Mendel realized it properly, and it wasn't until the Neo-Darwinian synthesis of the 1930s, that it was realised that actually a natural selection is all about genes changing their frequency.
	So some genes become more frequent in the population, others less frequent in the population.
	That's what it's all about.
	I suppose all that I did really was to take that Neo-Darwinian view and put it in a slightly more poetic way and say that that means that the individual It's just a vehicle for carrying genes around and passing them on, and it's temporary.
	I call it a throwaway survival machine.
	Right.
	That's the strange idea.
	You call it strange, and that is a bit strange, I suppose, that I call them a robot survival machine, an individual organism.
	is a device for passing on genes.
	The selfish gene is quite largely about not-selfishness.
	It's often misunderstood because of the title as being about selfishness or even an advocacy of selfishness.
	It's actually mostly about altruism.
	The selfish gene explains altruism at the individual level.
	Right.
	But if you take a gene's eye view of human life, many strange things happen.
	First, you see that there's a logic by which certain genes would have been selected for, and the behaviors they would encode would be grandfathered into the human condition.
	And yet, evolution can't see most of what we care about.
	The logic of evolution is anything that has allowed these specific replicators to perpetuate themselves has been selected for, right?
	So we are here to spawn and to ensure that our progeny successfully spawn.
	And I don't know, at what age do you think historically evolution ceases to care about us?
	I guess grandparents are still valuable.
	There's no sudden cut off.
	It's a gradual process.
	But the older an animal is, the more likely it is already to have reproduced.
	So we're all descended from ancestors, most of whom reproduced when they were relatively young.
	A few may have been reproduced when they were old.
	And this, of course, is why we age because we're We're descended from young ancestors.
	And very often, whatever it took to be successful when you were young, made you actually more likely to die.
	And this is especially true, of course, of sexual selection, where brilliantly coloured Male birds, say, are more likely to propagate genes for being brilliantly coloured, but then dying, because brilliant colours attract predators just as much as they attract females.
	And that's an extreme case, but that's the sort of model for the Darwinian theory of ageing.
	Right, right.
	So, but there's still something about the extended family that would have been selected.
	I mean, you would think grandparents are good for something.
	Oh yes, oh yes.
	That's right.
	And in those species where grandparents can, well, there may be a kind of changeover point.
	When you get to a certain age, you can do your genes more good by caring for grandchildren than you can by having more children.
	That again wouldn't be a sudden cut-off point, but that probably is true of humans and a number of other species perhaps.
	But if we're talking about running viable governments and societies into democracies, capitalism, pursuing scientific interests, building technology that doesn't destroy us, These are things that obviously are parasitic on cognitive traits that have been evolved, but evolution can't really see these details.
	No, that's right.
	I think that so much of our human life has gone beyond natural selection.
	Natural selection put us in the world in the way that we are, and our brains and our bodies are ...designed by natural selection to survive under wild conditions in Africa.
	And we've now moved beyond that.
	And so what we think of as successful in our society has really sort of pretty much left natural selection behind.
	Yes, not to put too fine a point on it, but this is an observation that several of us have made in various contexts.
	If you were going to take a rigorously gene's eye view of the human circumstance, certainly as a man, The thing you would want to do most, the thing that you would find most fulfilling in life, the thing to which you would purpose more or less every day, is to donate your sperm to a sperm bank.
	Yes!
	So that you could have tens of thousands of children for whom you have no financial or resource responsibility.
	The fact that sperm donors are actually paid is thoroughly un-Darwinian and is a wonderful example of how far we have actually advanced.
	It's not that surprising because natural selection cannot build into our brains a kind of cognitive awareness of what our genes, so to speak, would want.
	All it can do is build in rules of thumb, which would work under natural conditions.
	And so, a desire for sex makes perfect sense, because that, for the whole of history, the whole of, I mean, evolutionary history, has tended to lead to reproduction.
	But a desire to donate your sperm is something quite different.
	It's not… You cannot foresee that technology.
	Natural selection can't see that.
	Yeah.
	There have been a few notorious cases of doctors who've been substituting their own sperm for donors and things like that.
	But it is, to a naive Darwinian, it is a surprising fact that sperm donors have to be paid.
	A naive Darwinian would think that they would pay to donate their sperm.
	Right, yeah, and pay quite a lot.
	Yes.
	Okay, so let's just talk about what genes are for a moment.
	So genes are a kind of They're a kind of encoding of knowledge in the sense that, and stop me if you think at any point these analogies break down, but I'm hearing echoes of David Deutsch here, where it's knowledge as a kind of solution to a problem.
	It's a genetically inscribed solution to problems that our ancestors have successfully faced.
	Exactly.
	Yeah, exactly.
	I have a chapter in Unweaving the Rainbow called The Genetic Book of the Dead, which takes off from the, is it a Hindu classic?
	The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
	The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
	Sorry, Buddhist, yes.
	So, the Genetic Book of the Dead, I see the genome, well, let's say the genes of a species, as a coded document describing ancestral worlds in which ancestors survived.
	That's sort of true, because they are a filtered subset of genes which have helped ancestors to survive.
	In principle, it should be possible at some future date, when technology has advanced, for a knowledgeable geneticist to read the genome of an individual and actually read off a description of the worlds in which the ancestors of that animal lived.
	To a lesser extent, I think perhaps it's easier, you can read the body of the animal.
	I mean, I like to think that if you took a whole lot of water-dwelling animals Say mammals, so it would be otters, seals, whales, water shrews, marsupials, swimming animals and things.
	They'd all have webbed feet, say, for example, except whales.
	And so that's an obvious one.
	But if you actually made a list of characteristics of water-dwelling mammals and compared it with, say, desert-dwelling mammals, you'd find a whole lot of things that all the water-dwelling ones have in common.
	including probably some biochemical ones, some genetic ones.
	That's part of the description.
	The Genetic Book of the Dead describes water, or describes desert.
	One day, maybe I'll even write a book called The Genetic Book of the Dead, trying to flesh out this idea.
	Yeah, and of course it could also look forward, prospectively, to situations which we, now to take the human case, are not well adapted to figure out.
	That's right.
	The genetic book of the dead has always got to be a description of the past.
	And it helps the animal to survive to the extent that the future resembles the past, which on the whole it does.
	If the world were totally capricious, such that you could not predict the future on the basis of the past, then natural selection wouldn't work.
	But nature doesn't vary capriciously as the years go by.
	On the whole, tomorrow is pretty similar to yesterday.
	Actually, there was a specific question that touches on that point that someone asks, why do we need vaccinations or acquired immunity to diseases at all?
	Why can't the mother pass on her immunity to her offspring?
	Wouldn't that be an enormous evolutionary benefit?
	So we have acquired immunity because they're on the assumption that the environment does change enough that that's the best algorithm to run.
	Yes, I suppose the immune system is a kind of short-term, moment-to-moment substitute for natural selection.
	Natural selection works over generations and equips the animal to deal with circumstances that arise perennially, or at least over a long period.
	The immune system is all about equipping the animal, adapting the animal to insults that attack it during its own lifetime from moment to moment.
	There are always new epidemics, always new viruses cropping up.
	So that's what the immune system is about, and vaccination is preparing the immune system.
	But it would seem good to be immune to everything that your mother had encountered.
	It would.
	I suppose we tend to be immune to everything that most of our ancestors have encountered, but just our mother.
	We don't seem to have a mechanism for passing on the particular.
	If the mothers had chickenpox, we don't inherit an immunity to chickenpox.
	One thing that's framing this part of the conversation for me is I watched your somewhat stifling conversation with Brett Weinstein, who I greatly admire, who I've done many events with, but he had a kind of axe to grind with you around, if not group selection, something he was calling lineage selection, and more broadly speaking, a sense that evolutionary thinking should cover
	many of the details of human life, like, you know, war making, genocide, nationalism, to a degree that you were disinclined to extend it.
	And also just this notion that, you know, religion should certainly be considered an extended phenotype.
	Mimetics generally should be considered an extended phenotype.
	And I'm just wondering what the, I mean, I can't do a good impersonation of Brett for this, conversation, but I'm wondering just what are your concerns there, and what are the limitations in Darwinian thinking when we're talking about high-level human social phenomena and psychological phenomena?
	Well, first of all, I hugely admire Brett Weinstein's stand at ridiculous university that he used to be a member of.
	Evergreen, yeah.
	Evergreen, yes.
	I mean, he's a real hero for standing up against that nonsense.
	The extended phenotype, I think, is often misused.
	The idea of the extended phenotype is often misused.
	We should remind people what a phenotype is.
	Yes, we should.
	A phenotype is that which the genes engineer in a body, which in a Darwinian sense would help the genes to survive.
	Wings are part of the phenotype of genes that help the genes survive, and behavior patterns, and crests, and sharp talons, and sharp teeth, and things.
	So, we normally think of genes program bodies to develop phenotypes.
	Phenotypes help bodies to survive, and that helps the genes that built them survive.
	That's the normal way it happens, and genes do it by The processes of embryonic development causing the body to develop the necessary phenotypes.
	The extended phenotype is a phenotype which is outside the body in which the gene sits.
	My classic examples of this are animal artifacts, things like bird's nests, where the nest, especially a complicated nest like that of a weaver bird, Obviously an adaptation.
	I mean, it's just like an organ.
	It's beautifully shaped for a particular purpose.
	Beautifully shaped, for example, a long tubular nest to prevent snakes getting in.
	That is a perfectly good phenotype.
	Right.
	But it's not part of the body.
	Yes, the genes are producing that.
	The genes are producing that.
	And they're producing it.
	They're still doing it via embryology.
	But the embryology then, as it were, reaches outside the body in the form of behavior.
	In this case, nest building behavior.
	But that's only yet one more step in the embryonic chain of causation.
	The embryonic chain of causation begins with DNA influencing proteins, and that influences something else, which influences something else.
	Cell division, neuron production in the brain, which has the eventual consequence of causing the bird to build a nest of a particular shape.
	So there's just this chain of causation, starting with DNA protein and going through various complicated steps in embryology, and then the final steps are outside the body.
	That's why I call it the extended phenotype.
	Well, then the idea is generalized to I just want to pause here, at the risk of derailing you, I want to pause here to close the door to a certain species of doubt that evolution can explain the diversity of life that we see.
	So now I'm just closing the door to the creationists and the intelligent designers for the moment, because one of the concerns is that You take any example of phenotype, you take a bat's wing, for instance.
	Evolution could not have produced a bat's wing de novo, you know, a functional bat's wing.
	What you need is some incremental path from no wing at all to a bat's wing, and each increment has to survive the logic of evolution.
	It has to be useful and lead to differential success.
	So you have to imagine here, to explain any speciation and any path by which we have reached the diversity of life that we see, you have to explain how each increment, the first little bump that became the wing, how that in itself was useful.
	And many people just throw up their hands there and say, well, there's clearly no way you can do that, so there must be some other explanation.
	Yes, thank you for reminding people of that.
	I mean, that is, of course, very important.
	And of course, evolution has to take whatever is there and modify it.
	So, it's not like a little bump that appears in this case, it's already existing arm.
	In the case of insects, it probably was a little bump, because that's not using an existing limb.
	But yes, you're of course right about that.
	With a bat, it's literally the hand.
	Yeah, and there's a membrane stretched between the fingers, which is not difficult to engineer embryologically, because in the embryo, There already is a membrane between the fingers and actually it's carved away, there's a kind of sculpture process whereby the membrane is removed.
	All that needed to happen in bats is that sculpting process didn't happen, the membrane stayed.
	And of course the fingers get hugely long.
	Yeah.
	Pterosaurs do it differently.
	They just have one big finger, and they stretch that between the legs.
	And birds do it differently again.
	But in every case, it makes use of what's already there and modifies what's already there, rather than starting de novo, which is what a human engineer would do.
	We start with a clean design on the drawing board.
	Yeah.
	But I was saying about the extended phenotype.
	Actually, before we get there, so what is the argument that some non-functional precursor wing would nevertheless have been useful enough.
	Yes, I mean, this is a favorite problem.
	What's the use of half a wing?
	There are a large number of animals that don't exactly fly, but slightly increase their, for example, arboreal animals, squirrels, say, who leap from branch to branch.
	And it's a dangerous process, leaping from branch to branch.
	And so any slight increase in flight surfaces, not really flight surfaces, but any slight increase in the surface area that's presented to the air, will increase the distance that a squirrel can leap.
	The tail, the fluffy tail of a squirrel.
	acts as a sort of rudimentary aerofoil that increases the distance that a squirrel can jump to.
	Well, now flying squirrels, they're just squirrels, but they have a membrane between the forelimb and the hindlimb, which started out, no doubt, as just a bit of membrane in the armpit, which just slightly increased the, you know, it could just leap one foot further because of that.
	And then when that was there, then Next generation, perhaps the next 10 generations, could leap 10 feet further.
	So, you have a steady gradient of improvement.
	Are there orthogonal gradients that could explain some of these intermediate forms, like heat regulation or something?
	Well, that's been suggested for insects, yes.
	It's been suggested that in the insect, they really did start by just bumps growing out of the thorax.
	rather than modifying existing limbs.
	It has been suggested that originally these were thermoregulatory or were solar panels.
	Then when they got out to a certain size for their thermoregulatory function, they then happened to act as aerofoils.
	And so they then became wings.
	And insect wings are moved not by limbs, as I said, but by movements of the thorax.
	So there are muscles in the thorax that contract in various ways, which cause these flaps to to go up and down.
	Interestingly, some insects flap their wings up and down with a separate neural command from the central nervous system saying up, down, up, down.
	But other insects Have a kind of motor, sort of oscillating motor, where all the central nervous system says is switch on or switch off.
	Right.
	And the motor itself does a rhythmic up-down, up-down, up-down, up-down.
	And the frequency of the Oscillation is determined not by the central nervous system, but just by the harmonic properties of the motor system.
	Okay, so back to the extended phenotype.
	Yeah, well the next step after the idea of artifacts, after the idea of birds' nests, There are many cases where parasites manipulate their hosts to increase the chance that they will be propagated to the next stage of the parasitic cycle.
	So flukes, for example, usually have an intermediate host, which might be a snail or it might be an ant, and they need to get into their definitive host, which might be a sheep or a cow.
	And so in the case of the so-called brain worm in the ant, for example, The worm in the ant burrows into the brain of the ant and changes the behavior of the ant to make the ant more likely to be eaten by a sheep.
	It crawls up to the top of stems in the heat of the day rather than going down into the ground.
	So the parasite is a kind of puppet master.
	Which is manipulating the ant to get… Well now, that to me is an extended phenotype, because genes in the worm… have their phenotypic effect in ant behavior.
	Yeah, isn't there some evidence that Toxoplasmosis and some other organisms operate in mammals like ourselves and very likely in people in similar ways?
	To make us more likely to pass it on.
	Yeah, modifying behavior.
	I mean, rabies is the classic example.
	The rabies virus actually makes rabid dog, for example, more likely to bite and froth at the mouth and pass on the virus when it bites.
	It also makes the animal more likely to roam and wander far and wide rather than stick around at home, which then spreads the virus more widely.
	So that's extended phenotype of a parasite.
	And then you can say, well, parasites don't always live inside their hosts.
	Cuckoos manipulate their hosts.
	A cuckoo nestling.
	Terrible bird.
	Yeah, terrible bird.
	Manipulates the host with beautiful adaptations.
	I mean, a supernormal gape and things like that.
	This is, again, manipulating the host behavior.
	The change in the host behavior is an extended phenotype of cuckoo genes.
	Genes that change host behavior are more likely to survive.
	Again, it works via cuckoo embryology, but the final stage in that chain of events in cuckoo embryology is to produce behavior which seduces The host, the Reed Warbler, whatever it is, or the Robin, whatever it is.
	And so that again is extended phenotype.
	And then the next final stage, in my argument, would be all bird song, all animal communication, where one animal manipulates another.
	You can think of as extended phenotype, so a gene that changes in one animal.
	has an extended phenotypic effect on another animal via a call, a song, a crest, a flash, a conspicuous signal.
	So my whole vision of animal signaling is a great network of extended phenotypes.
	Right.
	Okay, so before we talk about the prospect of something like religion or any other doctrine or institution being an extended phenotype for humankind, let's briefly talk about this other species of replicator, the meme, which is a term of your coinage, which has an importantly different connotation now that we've all spent our lives on social media.
	It's actually a decent analogy to Yes, I wanted to make the point that what matters is replication, and genes are consummate replicators, and they achieve their replication success by manipulating bodies via the processes of embryology.
	But I wanted to make the point that any replicator could do that.
	It doesn't have to be DNA, and of course on other planets it almost certainly isn't DNA, if there is life on other planets, which there probably is.
	But then I said, well, maybe we don't have to go to other planets, because maybe memes, maybe cultural replicators, could be the basis of Darwinian selection.
	There certainly are cultural replicators, no doubt about that.
	Does it matter that they don't randomly vary?
	I don't think that matters, no.
	It incidentally happens to be true that genetic mutation is random.
	But even that is only random in the sense that it's not guided towards improvement.
	But mutation is not random in other senses.
	Mutations are induced by cosmic rays, for example.
	That's non-random.
	But mutation is random in the sense that it's not... What do you mean it's non-random if it comes from cosmic ray bombardment?
	Well, it has a cause.
	It's predictable that if you subject yourself to... But the specific base pair that's being targeted is random, presumably.
	That's true.
	Yes, that's true.
	But what's more important is that it's random with respect to improvement, so there's no tendency for mutation to be, as it were, anticipating what's necessary for survival.
	It is random in that sense, and the great majority of mutations are actually deleterious.
	Okay, so when we talk about memes, right, so now a meme is Almost any cultural product and idea.
	That is replicated.
	That's replicated.
	So it could be a clothes fashion or something like that or a speech mannerism.
	Right.
	Awesome.
	Awesome, yes.
	Which I use with disconcerting frequency.
	Do you?
	I never use it.
	I've given up.
	I mean, it's such a wonderful word to mean what it really does mean.
	Right.
	It's a good case because language does evolve and so we have to accept that.
	Yes.
	Well, language evolves.
	But I am an American.
	This would be predictable.
	I mean, it's a good case because language does evolve, and so we have to accept that.
	Yeah.
	And I think there probably is some randomness and not to say cosmic ray bombardment that accounts for the changes in speech patterns.
	But most memes, it seems to me, the changes in them are engineered at least with some forward thought.
	That doesn't matter actually.
	It doesn't really matter.
	I mean natural selection would still work even if mutation, genetic mutation was engineered.
	And of course it can be.
	We are now in the position to do that.
	Right.
	That's what genetic engineering is.
	Which we'll talk about.
	So the fact that the basis for the change, directed or not, you still have an environment where things are competing and there's differential success, and so the environment is providing a kind of selection mechanism.
	Exactly, yes.
	So memes, ideas, ways of doing things, really all of human culture and ideology.
	This is being continually produced and spread and going in and out of fashion.
	And so this is this domain of memetics.
	And there literally are what are now called, you know, memes on the internet, you know, graphics paired with text that spread on social media, that spread various ideas.
	I don't know, how do you feel about that appropriation?
	Well, I'm not particularly keen on that appropriation, because they are a very specific example of a meme.
	I would rather think about whether natural selection of a sort actually guides the spread of memes.
	And I like the idea of a meme complex, or memeplex, where something like a religion, like Roman Catholicism, could be regarded as a meme complex.
	And individual memes might be the idea of life after death, or the idea that you have to confess your sins, or something like that.
	The virgin birth.
	The virgin birth.
	And just like gene complexes are ...sets of genes which flourish in each other's presence.
	Right.
	And that, I think, is an extremely important idea in genetic evolution.
	So there might be something similar in meme complexes.
	Yeah, so there's a common fate to these various genes and various memes.
	Yes.
	They're all hitched together, yeah.
	That's right.
	And so I like to think of, say, the gene complex of a carnivore species like leopards, where you have carnivorous teeth, carnivorous eyes, carnivorous brains, carnivorous limbs, they all go together.
	And on the other hand, you have Antelope, I mean the herbivore prey, eyes, noses, limbs, etc., which go together.
	If you suddenly plonked an antelope gene into a leopard gene pool, it probably wouldn't work.
	It wouldn't cooperate well with the other genes of the leopard gene complex.
	It would be a very skittish leopard.
	Yes.
	The cowardly leopard.
	Cowardly leopard.
	And so a species is a collection of mutually compatible genes which go well together, as opposed to another species which is a complex of different genes.
	Well, I believe you might do the same kind of thing with meme complexes, but the theory hasn't been really sort of worked out, but I think it might be.
	OK, so we have meme complexes, something like Roman Catholicism, and what was being urged upon you in your conversation with Brett, and I've seen this come up many times before, is that something like Roman Catholicism should be, or religion in general, should be considered part of the extended phenotype of human beings.
	Yes.
	I've never liked that.
	I've never liked… I think that's… Taking the idea of the extended phenotype beyond where it should be.
	And I think it detracts from people's ability to comprehend the idea of the extended phenotype.
	Extended phenotype is supposed to be a genetic effect.
	which manifests itself outside the body in the same kind of way as genetic effect manifests itself inside the body.
	I don't think Brett does this, but people have sometimes said to me, isn't a building like the building we're in at the moment an extended phenotype?
	And I think that would only be true if, say, there were genes that caused architects to design a different kind of building.
	And there aren't.
	I mean, there's no gene that makes an architect more likely to make Gothic arches rather than Romanesque arches.
	So our mere survival dependence on buildings is not enough?
	No, I don't think so, because variation in buildings is not under genetic control.
	And I doubt very much that variation in religious habits is under genetic control.
	If it was, then you might make some sort of a case for talking about extended fingertips, but it's not like that.
	And so I think that it's possible to push an idea too far, and I think that's what's going on here.
	So what about the prospect that having religions led to differential success of various groups of human beings?
	Well, that's quite a different idea, and that's worth considering in its own right.
	And also, what's worth considering in its own right is the idea that individuals having religions might survive better.
	That's been suggested and might be true.
	This opens the door to what's been called group selection.
	Yes.
	I've never been a fan of group selection.
	Darwin himself wasn't called group selection then.
	Darwin almost always was talking about individuals surviving better within a species, but Darwin did, again in The Descent of Man, In one passage, talk about a kind of group selection where he suggested that groups of humans who had some kind of social cohesion, who behaved well towards each other, had altruism toward each other, cooperation, would be more likely to survive than groups that didn't.
	So that would be a form of group selection, I suppose.
	In some ways I prefer to compare that not to group selection, but to species competition.
	A bit like when the gray squirrel was introduced from America into Britain as a sort of frivolous exercise.
	We did that to you?
	Was that a good idea or a bad idea?
	Terrible idea.
	And it drove the red squirrel extinct.
	And so I think that would be a better analogy for A group that, say, has a...
	has a warlike aggressive God like Yahweh or like some of the Norse gods.
	You could make a case that having a militaristic God, maybe one who rewards martyrs in a martyr's heaven, that kind of religion might spread as a kind of group effect, as a kind of species effect, an ecological competition effect.
	But I would call that ecological competition rather than group selection, I think.
	Let's just create an example.
	Let's say that Hitler won the Second World War, and we are now living under the Thousand Year Reich, and everyone who's not a Nazi is now dead.
	So Nazism would have triumphed over all competing political ideologies.
	So that we, on some level you can say, well, this is a, a selective effect, right?
	This is, there were various competitors for political ways of thinking, and one has finally dominated and canceled all others.
	But that doesn't seem to suggest an analogy to the replication model.
	I don't think it does.
	No, I don't think it does.
	I mean, slightly closer would be if, say, within any country, Individuals who espouse Nazi beliefs were more likely to survive than individuals who didn't.
	So there would be an individual differential survival effect, which probably would also have been the case.
	That would be a closer analogy to Darwinian selection, and we might do a kind of memetic analysis of that.
	Nazi memes survived better than anti-Nazi memes, for example.
	That would be a case of memetics.
	Yeah, I think that might actually be the environment we're currently in on social media.
	Sorry, I guess one final question here.
	So are there...
	Outstanding questions in what is now called the neo-Darwinian picture that are significant challenges to the model.
	I mean, there are many people—and Brett, you know, frankly, is one of these people—there are many people speaking as though neo-Darwinism, and perhaps you should actually define that term, is basically flawed in a way that should be troubling to Yes, I don't think that.
	Any flourishing science will change, of course.
	Steve Gould was fond of saying that the modern synthesis is effectively dead, and I thought that was a rather irritating Well, okay.
	almost self-publicity.
	- Well, he was irritating in many ways, as it turns out.
	- Well, okay, yes. - But what is your, so first define Neo-Darwinism.
	- Well, okay, Neo-Darwinism is the, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis was a joint effort in the 1930s, really, of, I think, above all, Fisher, J.B.S.
	Haldane, Sewall Wright, Ernst Mayr, Theodosius Dobzhansky, G.G.
	Simpson, and others.
	And it was seeing Darwinian evolution as changes in gene frequency in populations.
	That was the population genetic part of it.
	The palaeontological part of it would be seeing major macro-evolutionary change as micro-evolution writ large.
	So the geneticists were showing how from generation to generation you could get slight changes in gene frequency.
	And the paleontologists like Simpson were showing that such micro-evolutionary changes, extrapolated over millions of years, tens, hundreds of millions of years, could produce changes from fish to mammal.
	So this movement of the 1930s and 40s, we're still in it, It hasn't really changed much.
	I suppose W.D.
	Hamilton, with his analysis of altruism, kin-selected altruism, is one major advance of the 1960s and 70s.
	But we're still in the neo-Darwinian era.
	And you don't think there are gaping holes in the theory that should keep people up at night?
	No, I don't.
	I mean, there are questions that remain to be answered.
	One of the big riddles is the evolution of sex.
	What sex is good for?
	And lots of the most distinguished neo-Darwinian theorists have grappled with that problem.
	The origin of the Darwinian process is still a bit of a mystery.
	How did the first replicator arise?
	It almost certainly wasn't DNA, actually.
	The first replicator would have been something else.
	Would have been RNA?
	Maybe.
	That's a good possibility, and that's one of the more fashionable ideas, but that is still in the realm of theory.
	It may never become settled, because it happened a long time ago, and maybe impossible to repeat exactly what happened.
	We know the kind of thing it must have been.
	It was the origin of something self-replicating, possibly RNA.
	So what about epigenetics and the way in which this feature of our biology seems to suggest almost a quasi-Lamarckian kind of inheritance?
	Yes, it's a strange word, epigenetics, because actually Originally, it was just another word for the way we see embryology.
	I mean, every cell in the mitotically, every mitotically reproducing cell in the body has the same genes.
	Right.
	So your liver cell has all the genes that your brain cells have.
	That's right, yes.
	And different genes get turned on.
	And so the epigenetic environment of a gene in a brain cell is different from that in a liver cell.
	And so that's epigenetics.
	The word has been hijacked, fashionably, recently, by people with, as you say, a kind of neo-Lamarckian bent, to suggest that some of that epigenetic cytoplasmic environment in which some genes are turned on and others are not, can get inherited to the next generation.
	And that does seem to happen in some cases.
	The stress experienced by the mother with the infant in utero, the change in hormonal environment there can actually create some durable effect on the expression of genes in the baby.
	Yes, there are a few rare cases like that.
	I don't think it's worth the attention that it's been given.
	I prefer to reserve the word epigenetics for the ordinary process of embryology and say just occasionally there may be epigenetic effects which do pass on to the next generation, maybe even to the grandchild generation, but it's not one of these things that goes on forever like true genetic mutation.
	So what is the current frontier of evolutionary biology?
	If you'd like to continue listening to this podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org.
	You'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense Podcast and to other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app.

▲