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Jan. 5, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:47
586 Gods and Genes (originally 583, 3 Jan 06 8am)
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Good morning, everybody! Good morning, me mateys!
Hi! It's time for the PirateCast!
Hi! The whole show will be done today as a pirate!
Actually, it won't be. Just so I get to work and people say, Hey, why can't you speak anymore?
I hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's January the 3rd. 8.02 in the morning.
Just plugging my way towards work.
Looking for a break in the traffic.
Ooh! Do we go? Do we go?
Lunge! Let's move. It's Toronto.
You can't let a moment go by.
So I hope you're doing well. We're going to chat this morning and this is going to be my last YouTube video for a little while.
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So, this morning, we're going to talk about religion and genetics.
There is an argument which is often made in biological or scientific circles and sometimes in philosophical circles.
And the argument runs something like this.
Oh, you religious people!
You say that there's no ethics.
There's no such thing as ethics without a deity.
No such thing as ethics without a god.
Yet, Darwin and The theory of evolution say quite otherwise.
There are pretty much four central strategies that are used which would appear as altruistic or moral or at least mutually beneficial.
I would certainly agree that some definition of morality has to involve mutual beneficiality.
But it wouldn't be the final criteria for mine.
Of course, those who've plowed their way through the endless repetitions of the introduction to philosophy know at least how I construct a theory of morality without requiring a deity and without requiring an argument from a fact.
What I call an argument from a fact is, well, if we take on this moral system, everyone's going to be healthy, happy, and wise.
That's not something which I think can ever justify a moral system.
We didn't take on the scientific method because people said, well, if we have the scientific method, you see, then we'll get computers.
They couldn't see the long-term effects of the scientific method and such long-term effects of any particular theoretical system.
Capitalism, well, not so much Marxism.
That one was pretty much known from the beginning by any decently wise observer.
The effects of any particular moral system are arbitrary, can be debated.
There's always contrary evidence in the scattershot statistical distribution of things in the world.
There's always some damn deviation to the rule, and that rule is always put forward as an exception that is going to harbinger new things and better things to come.
So you just get lost in endless nonsense with that kind of stuff.
One second please. Thank you for all your patience.
A biologist or certain scientists, certain secularists will respond and say, well, but you don't understand genetics.
If you think that it's the individual that is selfish in the world of genetics, then you don't understand genetics.
You don't understand DNA. You don't understand what natural selection really means.
As I mentioned in the pod slash videocast on evolution, natural selection occurs at the genetic level.
It occurs at the level of DNA. It doesn't occur at the level of an organism.
And, as I mentioned, your little toe or your kneecap or your eyelid is really just using you as a vehicle through which to make more of itself.
And it's those genes which are reproducing.
Now, if you understand that there are, I don't know, millions upon millions of genetic, probably more, hundreds of millions of genetic components in your body and Well, I don't say mind, because mind is an effect of the body, but when you think of these hundreds of millions,
if not hundreds of billions, of DNA strands within your body, I think the important thing to understand is that At the organism level, looking at biology from the organism level, it sure looks like nature is in a constant state of civil war.
Everyone's eating everything else.
Plants are always growing up to try and get the sunlight of other plants.
Viruses are constantly attacking organisms.
Organisms are constantly killing off viruses with their immune system.
There's deception.
It looks like a pretty horrible and amoral, to use a moral term where it's not particularly appropriate, but it's sort of a horrible and amoral universe.
Everything eating everything else, the bats regurgitating blood into each other's bellies.
Everything that we look on as cute and fluffy ain't cute and fluffy to something else, right?
To a carrot, a bunny is not fluffy, but a big, vorpal, sky-searing eating machine that takes its young.
So, when you look at it at the...
At the organism level, nature looks pretty wretched, pretty violent, pretty oppressive, pretty nature red in tooth and claw, as Hobbes said.
But that, of course, is looking at it from a human, supercellular organism perspective.
I'm not going to use the word orgasm in this podcast, though I can feel it bubbling up.
Don't worry, I've got my other hand on the wheel.
But... The view from the human perspective, as we know from looking at, gee, is the world flat around, looks flat to me, and the sun moves around the earth, this is how it looks, and all these kinds of things, we get things wrong, right?
We don't see radiation, we don't see x-rays, doesn't mean that they don't exist.
So that's why we need science, because our perspective as human beings is obviously limited to our five senses and the spectrums and wavelengths and tactile surfaces we can have access to and so on.
But a biologist, or just if you sort of mull it over within your own mind, knows much better that nature is all about cooperation.
Nature, fundamentally, living organisms and the struggle for survival, is all about cooperation.
So if you think of one gene that makes your little toenail, The little toenail gene, the LTG. Let us look at the LTG. Well, how did it survive within the framework of your body?
Well, we can assume that given the prevalence of infection in a sort of pre-penicillin age, which is 100,000 years of humanity or more, That those who were born without little toenails would stub their toes because we didn't have nice Prada or Manalo Blahnik shoes.
Hey, not a bad pronunciation for a white guy.
Straight white guy. But that they would stub their toes, they would get an infection, and they would die.
This didn't have to happen very often in order for it to be something which would be unselected from the gene pool, whereas those who were born with a little toenail would do slightly better.
There would be, I don't know, a 3% fewer chance of infections and death, or a 2% or a 1% doesn't really matter, as long as it's some statistically relevant number.
So yes, the little toe gene has survived within the ecosystem of the human body, Which it wants to do in a sort of, quote, selfish manner, to just replicate itself.
That's why there are those genes, because they've replicated themselves successfully.
They don't want to do anything, it's just that's why they exist.
So the only reason that a little toad gene has survived within the framework of the human body is because it provides value, it provides some protection.
Think of all your white blood cells hovering around in your bloodstream waiting to attack invaders.
And probably when you're 90, finally figuring out how many cold viruses there are and preventing you from getting a cold just before you die of pneumonia.
But those genes which produce those white blood cells and manage the immune system are only there because they provide protective value to the organism as a whole.
So yes, they draw resources from the system, and all the genes draw resources from the system.
Even to build and maintain your little toe nail takes energy, and to keep your immune system going takes energy.
So they're drawing energy from the system, but they have provided benefits to the organism greater than The drawbacks that they provide.
So you could imagine, I guess, that some freak human being was once born, or you can imagine that it could have been.
They're born with some exoskeleton that would prevent any germs from getting through.
The only problem being complete immobility and a rather great difficulty outgrowing it because you couldn't shed it like a snake sheds its skin.
Well, there you have complete immunity from illnesses, but unfortunately the resource usage and the drawbacks and the hampering of movement are greater, and so that gets selected out.
So you have to provide, and it's worth thinking about this if you know anything about economics in a free market context, that yes, if I want to sell you my car for $10,000 and you agree to buy it, And it's sort of very clear that you want the car.
I mean, I'm drawing 10 grand out of your resources, but you want the car, if you're willing to do it voluntarily, you want my car more than you want my 10 grand.
It's like, well, sure, you want my car without having to give me the 10 grand, but that's not going to work, because I'm not going to just hand you my car.
Because then I'd have to take the bus, and frankly, it would be rather odd, podcasting in a bus.
Though maybe it would be the first live audience we'd see.
Other than the Sunday shows, we actually do have a call-in show for those who are interested in chatting one-on-one with other listeners and myself.
We do have a call-in show on Skype, SKYPE, at Sundays, 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. So...
You have to provide a benefit.
You want my car more than you want the $10,000, and I want the $10,000 more than I want my car.
So that's why we both draw on each other's resources, but it is mutually beneficial, and that's really how nature works.
So if you think about, I don't know, a lion taking down an antelope, Then it's pretty clear that there are hundreds of billions of DNA strands in the lion all working together.
All working together to get that meat.
The cooperation is extraordinary.
And the deer, you've got hundreds of billions of DNA strands all working in tandem.
Run! Run! Run through the forest!
Run! I'd kill myself.
Anyway, there's an enormous amount of cooperation, and yes, there is one less antelope perhaps at the end of the chase, and one full tiger, or one full lion, but that's what we see at the visible level.
But what's going on at the level of the DNA is hundreds of billions of levels or aspects of cooperation versus A small amount of top-down competition.
So if you look at it from the cellular level up, you can see that nature is really all about cooperation.
And by the by, I mean exactly the same thing is true of capitalism.
Everyone says that capitalism is competitive, and of course it is.
There's no question that it's not.
But if you look at the cooperation, That goes on.
Let's say that I need a pencil to write down a competitive bid on a piece of paper.
Well, the pencil and the paper which I have bought is an enormous amount, of course, thousands and thousands of people.
There's a famous, at least semi-famous, Free market screed or tract called iPencil, which talks about how nobody knows how to make a pencil, but it requires the cooperation of literally thousands of people to make a single pencil, which you can get for, you know, 20 cents.
So when I'm taking my pencil and my pad of paper to write down a competitive bid and slide it across the table in some hyperdramatic scene that never really works, I think, in real world, but I live in Canada where things are much more repressed.
But... I mean, there's competition, yes, it's me and another vendor who are both trying to get this job or this contract.
One of us is going to win, one of us is going to lose, but we're all, I mean, the people who made our suits, the people who made our cars, even the people who made the roads, if you don't mind that it's statist, everyone has thousands and tens of thousands of people who've cooperated to get us in that room with clothing and shaved and with a haircut and, you know, hopefully showered.
Tens of thousands of people who have all cooperated to get us into that room where we compete.
So, what's outweighing what?
Well, the competition is vastly outweighed by the cooperation.
Capitalism is all about cooperation.
Capitalism cannot survive without 99.9999% cooperation and 1% Now, it certainly is true that the results of those competitions are the reasons for the cooperation in very many ways.
Because if I get the contract, then I can order X, Y, and Z, which is going to cause more capital goods and labor to be aligned towards what I'm doing.
Like if I'm going to build a bridge and the other guy's not, then I've got to order the bridge.
So the competition is definitely the tail that wags the dog, so to speak.
It makes everything else move, but it is very, very minor.
In terms of human effort and human energy compared to the cooperation that goes on.
And that's very true of evolution as well.
Of course, capitalism, I don't chase down competitors and eat them.
There is a phrase when you're on 100% commission, it's called you eat what you kill, which basically means that you don't get any salary, but it's feast or famine.
But there's a metaphor, right?
It's like dog-eat-dog capitalism, as they say.
Dogs don't even eat dogs in nature.
It's the worst metaphor in the world.
It's just what it does. It's more around associating the pejorative dog with capitalism rather than anything biologically even remotely accurate.
So the cooperation that occurs within capitalism is far vaster than the competition, which is true in nature as well.
The difference being that in capitalism, people don't eat each other.
People don't kill each other. That's the job of the government, of the army, and the police.
Anyway, I'm not going to go into...
I'm resisting the gravity well of a temptation to talk about capitalism, which is available on my podcasts.
But we will instead return with great willpower to the central topic of evolution and religion, which will probably be a two-parter, I think.
So maybe I'll do one more Orange Head nighttime YouTube broadcast tonight.
But... The reality is that competition at a genetic level does occur, of course, but it occurs with a very small minority, just as competition occurs at a biological organism level, but in a very small minority of cases.
So, let's say that there's some, and I'm oversimplifying and I apologize for all of that, but hey, I'm in a car, man, cut me some slack!
Give the big cheddar forehead a prick.
But if there was a gene for a retractable toenail, and maybe that would provide some advantage, although I could imagine hangnails and abscesses would be horrible, but let's just say it provided some genetic advantage, then that gene for a retractable toenail Would not be competing with an eyeball.
Sorry to get disgusting, and I know that this is an aggregate, and they're all hundreds of millions of genes deep themselves, but let's just simplify it if you don't mind.
The body may be better served by a retractable toenail, but it's not going to be better served by putting a retractable toenail where an eyeball is.
Or a liver. Sorry, the images are just too strong for me.
Penis eye! I see that you're erect.
Anyway, of course I'm a guy.
That's where I'm going to go. So the retractable toenail gene is only competing with the toenail gene.
It's not competing with anything else in the body.
It's not going to replace your calf muscle or your little finger.
Maybe it would replace your little fingernail.
I don't know. But the degree of competition, and of course you know that this is all at a very macro level, and really down at the individual level you have individual genes competing with individual genes.
Not with clusters of other genes or the body as a whole or anything like that.
So genes only compete at their own level.
And we all know this from those of us who maybe didn't have the most attractive teenage years, that when the girl showed up at the Dungeons& Dragons party...
The guys who were competing, the guys who were at the Dungeons and Dragons party, you know, these are just things that I've read about, gosh knows what about that.
The guys who were at the Dungeons and Dragons party are competing for that girl, right?
They're not competing for the head cheerleader.
I mean, I hate to be so based biological, maybe it's different where you are, but it certainly was the case where I am.
That, you know, to be brutal, right?
The fat kids compete with each other for the girls, for the overweight girls or the ugly girls or whatever.
But the alphas all compete for the alphas and there's not a lot of competition between.
When it comes to operating systems, I'm not going to compete with Microsoft.
Linux and...
I'll leave that to Linux and, I don't know...
The Mac operating system, OSX, or whatever it is.
There is only competition at the localized level.
And there may be competition only if there's over-specialization.
So I competed successfully against a number of very large companies like IBM in the past, but only because they only dipped their foot into the pool that I swam in deeply in the realm of the software that I was producing, which isn't too relevant here.
So it can happen if there's over-specialization, but the competition...
It really occurs in only two relatively minor areas.
I mean, I'm not saying it's relatively minor to the antelope that ends up in the snake's belly for a couple of weeks.
Sorry, I don't know why I'm picking on the antelope today.
It occurs at the organism macro level and it also occurs at the genetic level at the level of individual DNA. But similarly, if you look at who is competing with the fox, and here I'm going to show the limits of my biological knowledge, so I apologize. I'm probably going to mix in a whole bunch of continents.
But things that I think compete with the fox in terms of eating a rabbit or eating some other mouse or whatever foxes eat, I don't know, there's hyenas, there's jackals.
There's microorganisms such as a virus, like if the virus kills the rabbit, it's not likely that the fox is going to want to eat it.
So there's this which occurs.
And there's other, I don't know, cougars, lynxes, ocelots, I don't know, things that I think compete with foxes.
So, you know, maybe there's a dozen or at most two dozen species and then a whole bunch of microorganisms that compete with foxes.
But, you know, there's 300,000 beetles that are specifically not competing with foxes.
Just to name the beetles, right?
If there is a god, as some biologist said, he is inordinately fond of beetles.
But the amount of competition that goes on in the animal kingdom is tiny.
Tiny, tiny, tiny compared to the total number of species.
And each species is really only competing with its parallel species at its parallel level of development and size.
The herbivores aren't competing with the carnivores and so on.
There's lots of, and of course if you look at the plants, yes, plants are all straining to get more sunlight than their brethren, but of course there's even an ecosystem balance in that because if the trees get rid of all the undergrowth, then they have a more difficult time getting nutrients from the soil.
So the trees benefit from cooperating with the undergrowth and allowing some of them to live or whatever, right?
But even the trees, even the plants, are only competing for sunlight with the plants that are really close to them, right?
With the plants that are right next to them.
Not with all the other plants on the planet.
So, anyway, I think I've got...
I'm going to labor the point too much, shockingly.
But... The competition is really tiny, really tiny.
I mean, it is the driving force behind just about everything, but the competition is really tiny.
Because, of course, there's adapting to environment, which isn't specifically competitive, although there are competitive ways of doing it.
And so, anyway, I just sort of want to point that out.
Cooperation is the basic principle of evolution.
Cooperation is the basic principle of evolution.
Any multicellular organism, and even the single-celled organisms, is going to have massive amounts of cooperation occurring in its makeup and its processes and what it does.
And yeah, the competition is going to drive the cooperation in the same way that competition in the free market drives the allocation of people and capital, resources and money.
But it's really minor compared to...
But because it's so obvious and so visible and it's what drives everything else, we tend to give it too much emphasis.
But the competition is only possible because of the enormously greater cooperation that's occurring in the realm of both biology and economics.
So when we understand that, we can understand that cooperation is an essential aspect of biological success.
And this is just some of the arguments that are made to justify ethics without a God.
I don't think that they're particularly persuasive at a logical level, but they're certainly indisputable at a biological level.
So let's just leave the discussion sort of where it is and not worry about the philosophical implications just yet.
So, there are, as Richard Dawkins points out in a book that you probably want to have a look at, called The God Delusion, which I find, like all of Richard Dawkins' stuff that's not purely biological, both satisfying and enormously unsatisfying, which doesn't mean anything other than it's my emotional reaction.
I won't go into the argument just now.
But he points out that there is a certain kind of bird that likes honey, and it will find...
The honey, by flying around, find the bee's nest.
Beehive! There we go.
Sorry, thinking of the hairdo. It will find the beehive, and then it will do this elaborate dance, and it will lead a beaver, I think it is, or some bear or something like that, to go and to get the...
The honey to break open the beehive and get the honey and then it will eat some of the honey that is left over.
So the bear can't find the beehive or the beaver can't find the beehive because it can't fly around to find it, but the bird cannot Open the beehive on its own.
So this is an example of cooperation.
There are tons of these examples.
The fish that clean the scales of other fish in return for not getting eaten.
The remora that swing under the jaws of the shark.
There's lots of cooperations of these kinds in nature.
I mean, a fundamental one, of course, is that flowers need pollination.
But they can't fly, so what they do is they rent the bees' wings in return for nectar, and they provide, they pay nectar to the bees and rent their wings in order to achieve pollination.
And this gives us the beauty of plants.
And of course there are some losers in these interactions as well, not so much with the bees, but a little bit more with the beehive and the bird and the beaver.
I'm pretty sure it's not a beaver, but I think that's what he said, so I'm sorry if I got that totally wrong.
But this kind of cooperation, symbiosis, mutual dependence, this stuff goes on all the time in nature, and it far outshadows the competition that occurs for eating and dying and stuff like that.
Hummingbirds have those long beaks, and they can only get into those flowers that are very suggestively shaped that show up in Pink Floyd films.
So... Cooperation is really the key.
But there is savage competition, if savage is the right word, savage competition at the equivalent genetic level.
Now, there's a couple of other things which I just briefly mentioned.
You can have a look at Dawkins' book if you want more information about them.
He also talks about There is kinship preference to those who are genetically closer to you.
We have hormonal highs and emotional pluses that generally occur when those who are genetically the closest to us are threatened.
There is this mutual cooperation, and there are strategies, survival strategies.
The most positive survival strategy that's been discovered in the realm of game theory, mathematics, and in biology is the following.
Treat people the best that you can the first time you meet them, and after that, treat them as they treat you.
So treat people kindly the first time you meet them, and after that...
If they are kind to you, then you should be kind to them.
And if they attack you, then you should retaliate.
That's the most positive strategy that's been figured out in game theory.
There are other more complicated ones, which we don't have to get into here.
But that kind of approach is sort of...
And that would be sort of an approach of optimism and justice, I guess you could sort of put it together in that context.
But when we start thinking about religion, religion, of course, dismisses all of these things.
And, of course, religion is primitive superstition, no matter how sophisticated it is, no matter how many lovely hymns Brahms writes for it.
Religion is primitive superstition, and therefore it is going to hold a mindset that is much more primitive than science.
It's a pre-scientific mindset that is the foundation of religion.
And so it's not going to understand all of these subtleties about cooperation, the biological basis for mutual aid and benefit and justice.
It's going to just yell out commandments like an eye for an eye or do unto others as you would have them do unto you or whatever, right?
Which doesn't solve the problem of sadism and masochism, to just name one, that it doesn't solve.
But all of these kinds of subtleties and deeper understandings of what goes on in the world, they're all missed by religion completely.
Now, religions, of course, believers are a zero-sum game.
I mean, you lose them to agnosticism or atheism or some other religion if you're a religion.
So, religions generally are a concept, a sort of superstitious fantasy, that preys on the young.
It's a mind virus that preys on the young because by the time you get your wits about you, In the sort of early teenage years when your brain development has advanced to the point where you can reason from first principles and you can deal with evidence and so on, very few people who have never been exposed to religion before that phase become religious afterwards.
And if they are religious afterwards, it's because they've been exposed to some other horrible thing, such as child abuse and so on.
So... It is a mental virus that preys on the young and the carriers, of course, are the parents and the community and the priests.
And that's why most religions these days will choose, if you look at Islam, choose to expand through breeding rather than through conversion.
But because this is a mental virus that is competing with other mental viruses for the same prey, for the same victims, for the children, It is savage, right?
I mean, the competition is savage at an equal genetic level.
And in the realm of religion, for religion as a mental virus that attacks people and steals their time and resources, it is most savage when it is competing for the same mindshare with other people.
So if you have ever debated with a religious person and you have found them to be incomprehensibly Offended, upset, angry, manipulative, whatever.
Well, this is the answer.
The answer is that you are directly competing with a mental virus in a zero-sum game.
In fact, it's a big loss for the religious person.
One of the things that occurs as well is that people don't like to think that they've wasted their life.
So if somebody spent their whole life giving money to religion and going to church, if it turns out that that's been a complete waste, that's pretty better.
We certainly do have, within our own minds, So, there is a direct hostility that you are going to receive from...
Zero-sum gains, right?
So, in capitalism, competition and the efficient allocation of resources, you know, the rising tide lifts all boats, everybody does better.
Again, not in our current system, which is more like mercantilist fascism, but in a real free market system.
But, and in the same way, life gets more complex the more the natural selection is allowed to sort of play its, well, not that you could really stop it, I guess, to play its hands.
Not to play the cards in the way that makes sense.
But when you start talking about mindshare with people, when you start talking about socialism and capitalism and governments and republicans and democrats and religions and so on, you're going to end up with an enormous hostility because that's direct competition for equivalent resources.
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