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March 20, 2023 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:22
20230320_piers-morgan-uncensored-richard-dawkins-exclusive
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Fearless Thinker Richard Dawkins 00:02:38
Tonight our Piers Morgan Uncensored is one of the most fearless and fascinating thinkers on the planet.
Provocative polemicist, best-selling author, world-leading scientist.
Richard Dawkins, one-on-one.
From London, this is Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Good evening, from London.
Welcome to a special edition of Piers Morgan Uncensored.
I'll go head-to-head tonight with one of the most influential intellectuals there is.
He's one of the most controversial thinkers on the planet.
Biologist, controversialist, world-famous atheist.
Richard Dawkins inspired millions by popularizing evolutionary biology, but his work on religion and morality has become a lightning rod for controversy.
I despise people who believe something without evidence and then go out and take action which damages other people.
His 2006 blockbuster, The God Delusion, made him the global face of atheism.
What's wrong with, in your opinion, with believing in a god, regardless of who the god is?
I think it's false.
I think that it's a matter of belief without evidence.
While his combative style has created fervent admirers and ferocious enemies.
To his fans, he's the whip smart scientist who's waging war for facts over feelings.
Science is interesting, and if you don't agree, you can f ⁇ .
To his critics, he's incendiary, out of touch, and deliberately offensive.
Well, tonight, he's here, and he's uncensored.
And Richard Dawkins joins me now.
Richard Dawkins, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to appear on Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Pleasure.
I assume you will be uncensored.
Of course.
You've never been censored, have you?
No.
In fact, people have tried to censor you, and we're going to come to a bit of that later on.
This cancel culture has even come to your door.
What do you make of that?
People these days not wanting to hear opinions they don't like?
I think it's very sad.
I think, especially in universities where I've spent all my life, universities are places where you should be free to speak your mind and listen, even to something that you don't like.
And it's very tragic that universities seem to have bought into the idea that if you don't like what you think you're going to hear from someone, you should shut them up and refuse to let them speak.
Yeah, I mean, I find it completely baffling that at a place of education where the whole point is to test your own thought processes and to deliberately be exposed to other thoughts, we're now in a place where a lot of students feel they just don't want to hear it.
They only want to hear stuff that validates their own opinion.
Limits of the Human Brain 00:11:35
They use this word safe.
They want to feel safe.
And university is the one place where you should not feel safe.
Yes.
That should not be dangerous.
It's not physically safe.
Yes, exactly.
In terms of thinking.
You know, I just think you want to be constantly challenged and provoked about what you believe and what you think.
You ought to be physically safe, but intellectually, you should be challenged.
I'm going to come more to this because I think the whole cancelled culture woke kind of world we live in is a fascinatingly disturbing one and you've got strong views on it.
But I want to start because you're known as one of the world's big thinkers.
I want to start with some big theme stuff.
And I guess there's no bigger theme than evolution itself.
And I think I'd ask a question like this.
What do we know now about where we've come from?
And what don't we know?
Okay, we know once you've got a self-replicating entity, which nowadays is DNA, but it wasn't originally, once you've got life started, once natural selection, Darwinian natural selection has got going, then we pretty much understand the four billion year history of what's given rise to us and all other living creatures.
We don't know how it started.
And that's still a mystery.
And it may always be a mystery because it happened a very long time ago and we may never know exactly what did happen.
We know the kind of thing it had to be.
What kind of thing do you think it was?
It was the origin of a self-replicating molecule, a molecule that makes copies of itself.
DNA is such a molecule, but the original one was almost certainly not DNA because DNA is a, it's been called a high-tech replicator.
There had to be a precursor to DNA.
Something, the laws of chemistry, gave rise to a molecule which had this unusual property of making copies of itself, which mutated, changed in random ways, and that gave rise to competition between rival versions of it, and that gave rise to the whole panoply of life eventually.
Okay, so I'm a Catholic, I was raised a Catholic, so I'm a religious person, which I know is anathema to you, and we'll come to that.
But my arguments with atheists historically have always come down to one thing, and maybe you've got an answer which will persuade me of the folly of my ways, which is this.
What was there at the start?
We don't know.
But I don't know, and you don't know.
But no human brain, unless you want to correct me, can actually comprehend nothingness, right?
No, but it's a fallacy to think that because I don't understand how it happened, therefore God did it.
I mean, that's just weak.
Well, no, okay, but I'm prepared to have an open mind about this.
But somebody did.
And I just have never met a human brain that can explain to me what happened before, say, you go for the Big Bang argument.
What was there before?
What does nothing look like?
Physicists are debating this.
I'm not a physicist, but they're debating it.
My point is that they don't know, and I don't know, and you don't know, and it doesn't help to postulate a God that did it.
But you're certain it's not a God, and yet you admit you don't know.
No, I'm certain that it doesn't help to postulate something very complicated at the outset, because what we've got is primeval simplicity, and from that stems everything.
And what science does, it starts with simplicity, which is relatively easy to understand, and from that it develops into the whole of the universe and the whole of life.
It doesn't help to start with complexity, and a creator has to be complex.
The reason that I subscribe to the theory that there must be a more powerful being out there than anything the human race has created is because, like I say, a human brain can't comprehend nothingness or what may have come before nothingness.
We can't.
We're not able to extrapolate what that is, right?
I mean, no scientists can explain nothingness, can they?
Plausibly.
Well, maybe they can't.
You'd have to talk to a physicist.
Could you explain it?
No, I'm not a physicist.
But you're a very smart guy, and you're a very vehement atheist.
No, I'm not.
I'm not that vehement.
Well, you're pretty vehement.
I mean, you just think all belief in all gods is ludicrous, right?
I think that it doesn't help to introduce complexity at the outset.
That's my point.
No, no, I get that.
Well, I don't think you do get it.
Well, no, I do, because I, but you're asking me to consider that my own belief in a deity that may be above human thinking and understanding and brain power, that was there universally, that my theory is scientifically flawed.
Whereas I would throw back at you, okay, but I need to be given an alternative.
I need some scientist somewhere to explain to me, right, four billion years.
All right, but then what was there before that?
Well, scientists can't answer that.
And what they say is things like, it's like going north of the North Pole.
I'm sure I gather you recently introduced Stephen Hawking.
He probably said that to you.
Yeah, he did, actually.
But the point is this.
Science can explain things starting with simplicity and working up to complexity.
I get there, but where science can't explain something, i.e. in the case I just gave you, is it not possible that you're all wrong on the atheist side of the argument?
We could be all wrong.
But what you might get a shocking surprise one day when you're no longer with us.
You might.
And you discover we were right all along.
It's possible.
Do you concede it's possible?
It's highly unlikely.
You don't know, though, do you?
Of course I don't.
Scientists take a pride in admitting what they don't know.
And they don't know what happened before the Big Bang.
They don't even admit that the word before means anything with respect to the Big Bang.
Physicists will tell you.
But it has to.
I mean, it doesn't.
Well, it doesn't, because that's a naive statement.
Physicists will say that you do not have to say there was a...
Time began at the Big Bang, is what some physicists will say.
To which I immediately respond with my basic human brain.
Well, okay, if time began, when did it begin?
Well, quite.
But what was there before?
Quite.
Which is a fairly obvious question.
It is a very obvious question.
It's too obvious.
And physicists will tell you that you're being naive.
Yeah, but they don't know why I'm being naive, because they can't provide...
The human brain is not capable of grasping.
Right, that's my point.
So why is it not possible that there is a superior being, power, which many people believe in different ways?
It's possible there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, and all sorts of things are possible.
You can't deny that.
Well, except I've never seen fairies in the garden, have you?
No, you've never seen God either.
No, but you don't know for sure that either doesn't exist.
No, I don't know that fairies don't exist.
Fairies may well, there may be leprechauns, for all I know.
Do you accept, have you got milder about this as you've got older?
Yes.
Have you got more accepting that there may be, you may be wrong?
Less certain.
Well, yes, of course, a scientist may always be wrong.
And that's definitely a thing that a scientist has to say.
But I'm not vehement.
You're provoking me to be vehement because you're taking that tone with me.
Well, you've been provoked before.
Yes.
And you've been quite vehement in response.
I'm actually not trying to provoke you.
I'm genuinely curious.
Yes.
Because I don't have all the answers, but I'm always skeptical of people who think they do.
I don't think you think you do.
Absolutely not.
But your admission that you don't have all the answers to me is quite interesting because it lends the possibility you might be wrong.
Well, it's not interesting.
I mean, no scientist has all the answers.
But the one thing you shouldn't say is that because I don't know, therefore God did it.
That's what I'm saying.
What do you think happens when you die?
As Bertrand Russell said, I believe that when I die, I shall rot and nothing of my ego shall remain.
That's it.
Yes?
The end.
Nothing.
There's nothing else.
How could it be otherwise?
I mean, you have a brain, an evolved brain, which works by nerve impulses.
And when that decays, what could possibly be left?
So you don't believe in, for example, a spirit or a soul?
None of that is...
That's all conditional entirely on a link to an actual cerebral...
Yes, if by spirit or soul you mean something that outlasts the brain, then I do not believe in it, no.
Really?
Well, how could I?
Well, people have gone through weird sort of out-of-body, near-death experiences where they've been pronounced dead for a few minutes.
They always talk about, almost all of them talk about this weird...
There's a tunnel, a tunnel of light at the end.
Yeah, so I mean, it could be, couldn't it?
Yes, well, read Susan Blackmore on that.
Would you like to be pleasantly surprised, or would you be appalled if you were wrong?
Well, I would be pleasantly surprised for a while.
I don't think I'd like to live for all eternity, would you, Edward?
I don't know, it depends what it's like.
Well, if eternity was watching, you know, cricket at Lourdes all day and watching Arsenal win every weekend.
Yes, give me that.
Really?
Well, if eternity is blissful and a wonderful experience, some people believe.
I think there is something actually rather frightening about eternity.
And I'd be quite glad to be spending it under a general anesthetic.
Do you fear, given the finality of what you think death to be, do you fear it as you get older?
I fear the process of dying, but when you're dead, you don't know anything.
It's just like before you were born.
I think it was Mark Twain said, I was dead for billions of years before I was born and never suffered the smallest inconvenience.
But when you have loved ones who've died, for example.
That's tragic.
As somebody who believes literally in the finality, the rotting of a body and that's it, it must be worse than for somebody like me where I genuinely believe there's something better to come.
It's worse, so what?
Not so what, just curious, that it must be for you awful each time, far worse than it is for people who have a belief.
Yes, it is.
A lot of people take great comfort from their belief in God that there is a different life out there.
Yes, they do.
You don't have that sucker at all.
No.
So is it incredibly painful?
More for you, perhaps, than somebody else who is a believer.
Let me put it to you this way.
If you really did believe it, wouldn't you say to the person on the deathbed, looking forward to seeing you in purgatory?
Well, a lot of people say, looking forward to seeing you in another life, yeah.
Yes.
A lot of people say that.
You don't really believe it, though.
Actually, I do.
Yeah, I do, actually.
Because I find it, when I think about it in big picture, which is your great thing, I think, how likely is it that we just got put on this planet, Earth, as human beings, as a one-off kind of entity that existed here, and then you die and that's it.
And it only lasted four billion years, and before that was absolutely nothing at all.
How likely is that to have been the case?
I don't think that's likely.
My human brain, which is limited, does not think that is likely.
I think it's very likely.
I agree.
That's exactly what happened.
Yes.
We are a tiny, tiny dot in the universe.
Exactly.
So you don't know what else is out there, really, other than what scientists have already established.
No, I think it's highly likely that there are other beings out there which are much cleverer than we are.
Superhuman, not supernatural, but superhuman.
And I would love to meet them.
I probably couldn't understand what they said.
We're going to take a short break.
I want to come back and I want to talk to you about where we are in the world right now, which I think we can reach points of agreement here about the cancelled culture, wokery, and what it's doing to us as human beings.
Social Media and Scientific Truth 00:10:16
About Richard Dawkins after the break.
What about me, Richard Dawkins?
So, Richard, recently, members of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Language Project, funded by scientists in the US and Canada, produced a list of 24 harmful terms.
These included male, female, man, woman, mother, and father.
They recommended using phrases like sperm-producing, egg-producing, X-Y, XX, individual.
And they should be used to avoid reinforcing societally imposed ideas of a sex binary.
To which your response was, the only possible response is contemptuous ridicule.
Yes.
Which I cheered, I have to say, because it was complete madness.
How have we come to this?
English is my native language, is your native language, and I propose to use it in the way that I have always used it.
And I'm not going to be censored by...
Have you looked at those people?
I mean, they look like teenagers.
Well, it's just, what's extraordinary to me is that they want to, what they call de-gender and neutralize language.
But they're doing it from a completely false pretext that you can somehow pretend biology doesn't exist, particularly when it comes to someone's sex.
I mean, it's incontrovertible.
There's no scientific doubt about this.
And yet a small group of people have been quite successful, actually, in reshaping vast swathes of the way society talks and is allowed to talk.
It's bullying.
And we've seen the way J.K. Rowling has been bullied, Kathleen Stock has been bullied.
They've stood up to it.
But it's very upsetting the way this tiny minority of people has managed to capture the discourse and to really talk errant nonsense.
What's the answer to it?
Science.
I mean, there are two sexes.
You can talk about gender if you wish, and that's a subjective...
I'm not interested in that.
When people say there are 100 genders, for example.
Yeah, I'm not interested in that.
As a biologist, there are two sexes.
And that's all there is to it.
You had a humanist award stripped in 2021 because of your comments about this kind of thing.
You had a tweet in April of that year.
In 2015, you tweeted.
Rachel Dolazal, a white chapter president in America, the NAACP, was vilified for identifying as black.
She was white.
Some men choose to identify as women, some women choose to identify as men.
You'll be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as.
Discuss.
And all hell broke loose and you had your award stripped because you were effectively doing what J.K. Rowling and others have said.
You were just espousing a biological fact.
I wasn't even doing that.
I was asking people to discuss.
Discuss.
That's what I've done all my life in universities.
Why have we lost that ability to actually have an open and frank debate?
There are people for whom the word discuss doesn't mean discuss.
It means you've taken a position, which I hadn't.
But anyway, I thought it was a reasonable thing to discuss.
This was on the one hand.
I actually wrote a couple of follow-up articles to this.
Race is actually a much more fluid concept than sex.
For one thing, many people are of mixed race, so they really can be.
I had my DNA done, for example, properly tested.
It came back.
I had zero English DNA.
Zero.
I actually have 6% Middle Eastern.
For example.
So that was a shock to me.
I had no idea.
A lot of Celt, a lot of Irish and Scottish and Welsh.
Yes.
But no English whatsoever.
Yes.
Well, we're all mixed, and therefore it actually is a perfectly reasonable thing for somebody to identify as some particular race if they want to.
But sex is not like that.
Sex really is binary.
And therefore, it's something it's certainly worth discussing that odd anomaly which I pointed out in that tweet.
I mean, we now have this situation where in women's sport, for example, transgender athletes are destroying women's records and beating women in women's sport by immeasurable distances.
We don't disagree about this.
There's no.
I mean, it seems to me complete madness, just scientific madness that we're allowing this to happen.
It is.
One of the problems that scientists have, and we saw this in the COVID pandemic, is that scientists, by definition, they evolve positions according to changing facts.
And we saw in the pandemic that originally the perceived scientific wisdom was that masks, for example, would be ineffective in preventing the spread of COVID.
Then they changed their mind about that.
We were told that the vaccines would stop passing on the virus, and it turned out that wasn't true.
We were told, there's been a whole debate, as you know, about where the virus may have started.
The belief was from a wet market.
Maybe it was from this lab in Wuhan and so on.
Those who are anti-science, they leap on these things and they say, well, there you go.
There you go.
Why should we believe or follow the science when they do such dramatic U-turns in a health crisis, for example?
What do you say to that?
Well, it's true.
I mean, science actually does change its mind because when, I mean, I think it was John Maynard Keynes said, when the facts change, I change my mind.
What do you do, sir?
Yes.
And so this all happened in such a hurry.
It was all a great rush to produce advice.
And there wasn't time to take the normal, balanced look at the evidence.
And so naturally, they changed their mind.
And it's a virtue of science, actually, that they can change their mind.
Scientists can change their mind.
What is not a virtue is that social media allows large groups of people to whip each other up into a sort of lather of self-righteous certainty about positions, which can actually, in a pandemic, for example, be deadly to people.
I quite agree.
I mean, if the wrong types of people who are most vulnerable to, say, a COVID virus, if they believe this stuff and don't, for example, get what was pretty extensively seen to be a pretty safe vaccine in most cases, could kill them.
Yes.
What do you think about that new phenomenon in society?
Social media creating these kind of wrong.
It interests me a lot, actually, because there was a time when you could express your opinion by writing a letter to the newspaper and chances are it would be not accepted by the education.
But that was it.
That was the only way you could communicate.
Now anybody can do it.
And so it is actually possible for the sort of people who write graffiti on walls to reach the world if they get the...
Do you like social media?
No, I don't on the whole.
I use them, but I don't like them.
Why?
Because there's a culture of nastiness, there's a culture of hostility, a culture of outright rudeness, which you can...
And has that always been there?
And we're just seeing it manifest itself now because of social media.
Or do you think the very nature of social media whips people up into be something that they're not normally?
I think you wouldn't normally actually yell insults to somebody's face if you met them in the street.
And that's in effect what's going on.
It's partly fostered by anonymity.
Many people don't use their own name on social media.
So they call themselves Tinky Winky or something.
And therefore they feel they can yell abuse at people without it rebounding on them.
Is it more important than ever that leaders, particularly political leaders of countries, that they pride themselves on veracity of their public statements?
And is it really dangerous when you have social media and this kind of tribal nature of the following, that if you have people who literally don't tell the truth, but have huge positions of influence, that can be, for a society, very fracturing and dangerous.
Yes, I think so.
And I think you're perfectly right to focus on tribalism.
It's been actually demonstrated that many of us believe what our tribe, what's good for our tribe, whether it's the left-wing tribe or the right-wing tribe, rather than looking at the evidence.
And I think we need to train ourselves to get out of the tribal mindset and to look at the evidence as it is.
I mean, we've seen it with Brexit, we've seen it with Donald Trump, we've seen it with COVID, we've seen it just recently in the UK with Gary Lineker and this huge row about him where his supporters, and I've been one of them, even though I didn't agree with what he said, his supporters have said this is about free speech.
Those on the right, in the sort of conservative tribes, have all immediately said it's all about free speech.
He should be fired for what he said.
And yet you know that they would all be saying the opposite if it suited their tribe.
And we saw that with, say, Jeremy Clarkson, where all the people baying for Lineker's blood defended Clarkson against demands for him to be fired.
And similarly, all those defending Gary Lineke, who's on the left and is considered a woke darling, they all wanted Clarkson fired.
So I looked at these two stories and I thought, well, actually, I want them both to have the right to say what they want to say and be judged accordingly.
But they shouldn't lose their jobs for honestly held opinions, however crass and offensive they may be.
I agree.
Yes.
Do you think that's right?
I do.
Yes.
I do.
I think that we too readily fall into the tribal mindset of right versus left.
The Danger of Artificial Intelligence 00:08:37
And I'd rather admire Christopher Hitchens, late Christopher Hitchens, who was of the left and of the right as well, and you couldn't place him.
I was editor of the Daily Mirror when we opposed the Iraq War, for example.
Yes.
And we opposed it very aggressively for several years.
But I employed Christopher Hitchens in that period because he supported the Iraq War.
And that was a surprising position for many people who supported Christopher Hitchens.
Why is he doing this?
And actually, he argued his case with great verve and intellectual rigor as you'd expect.
I didn't agree with him, but he argued it well.
I once said, if you're invited to debate against Christopher Hitchens' decline.
Let's take another short break.
Professor Stephen Hawking told me shortly before he died that the biggest threat to mankind was artificial intelligence learning how to self-design.
I'll play you that clip after the break and get your reaction.
Still more from Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins is still with me.
So Richard, I had the great honor of doing one of the last interviews with Professor Stephen Hawking before he died up at his office in Cambridge.
And I asked him what I think is a pretty important question.
Let's take a look.
Is artificial intelligence going to be the end of us?
And if it's not, how do we best work with it?
Ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution, there have been fears of mass unemployment as machines replaced humans.
There is a greater danger from artificial intelligence.
If we allow it to become self-designing, then it can improve itself rapidly and we may lose control.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that mass unemployment is one of the problems, but I think that in a way they might do a better job than we do.
I mean, if a couple of robots imagine, yes, I could imagine in a thousand years' time, perhaps there'd be nothing but robots who would look back on a kind of dawn age when there were...
That means no humans.
Yes.
Why would you look forward to that?
Well, I suppose you don't care because you won't be here and you don't necessarily look forward to it.
I think it's an interesting possibility that the future of humanity might lie in its artificial creations.
Really?
Not saying I'm well.
It's stuff of a horror film, isn't it?
Yes.
I think it's interesting.
I don't really look forward to it.
Isn't it terrifying that that could happen?
Yes, it is rather.
Yes.
You think it's a possibility?
I think we've got a long way to go.
I mean, he talked about self-reproducing robots, and that's a key.
I think it was either von Neumann or Morgenstern, I forget which, who postulated this idea, I think it was von Neumann, of a self-reproducing machine that could actually evolve.
Well, I think we probably are on the threshold of a major breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
I'm not that impressed, by the way, with the one everybody's talking about now called Chat.
The Chat GPT.
I had a go on that and superficially impressive, but then I happened to mention Helen Sperway, who was the wife of J.B.S. Haldane, the great biologist.
And it said, later, Helen Sperway married Richard Dawkins.
Which she didn't, presumably.
She did not.
So it's inaccurate.
Yes, and many, many major factual errors of that sort.
But this early days reminds me a little bit of when they used computers to play chess against the Grand Masters, and the Grand Masters sent the computer packing.
But then the computer got better and better and better.
And now there's no human being who can beat the best computers in chess.
That's right.
Or even come close.
So you have to assume that this chat thing, AI chat, is going to get progressively better, right?
I think the problem is playing chess is one thing because it's a limited domain.
And there have been other AIs that have worked on coloured bricks on this table, you know, put the blue one on top of the red one and then knock it over.
It can do that.
But a versatile AI would be a very good idea.
What about a sentient?
I mean, a sentient AI is really what I think Hawking was talking about.
It's important to know whether it really is sentient.
But Turing proposed, the mathematician Alan Turing proposed a test whether you could actually be fooled by it.
And you probably will be fooled by it.
I suppose I'm committed to the view that sentience must be...
I know that we have it, I know that I have it, I presume you have it.
I think I'm committed to the view as a materialist that it must be in principle possible for a machine to be sentient.
And I'm not sure.
Hawking was of the view at the moment.
Robbery Hawking was of the view once that happens, it's all over for the human race.
Yes.
I don't see that it's all over for the human race.
It could be, especially if it was self-reproducing.
You yourself compared Trump to Hitler.
These components...
Oh, did I?
I would hesitate to compare anybody to Hitler.
Well, I think you said it in a way.
You said national pride has evil consequences.
Prefer pride in humanity.
German pride gave us Hitler.
American pride gave us Trump.
British pride gave us Brexit.
If you must have pride, be proud that Homer sapiens could produce a Darwin, Shakespeare, Mandela, Einstein, Beethoven.
So the implication was that pride leads into dark ways.
But that's different from...
I agree with that.
I stand by that, but I don't stand by comparing Trump to Hitler.
I mean, they're both liars.
Is it always a mistake to evoke Hitler and the Nazis?
Unless literally you're talking about people who've pretty nearly, yes.
I mean, Hitler was such an outlier that I would hesitate to compare anybody to him in a full sense.
I mean, you can compare him in one sense, like Trump and Hitler are both mega-liars.
That's true enough.
But I wouldn't go much further.
What are the other dangers do you think facing mankind?
Oh, well, nationalism, national pride.
Of the kind that we saw with the Nazis, where they literally want to take over the world.
Yes, and in a smaller way, we're seeing it with Putin.
Obviously, climate change is one we have to worry about.
Artificial intelligence is perhaps another one.
You've said before that Islam or fundamentalist Islam is one of the great things.
I think fundamentalist faith, where you believe absolutely that you're right without any evidence, is a major danger because that licenses you to do anything.
Really, really sincerely believe that you've got right on your side because God told you, then really I could sort of understand how the Inquisition mind worked and how the modern Islamist mind.
But you've been accused of being an Islamophobe.
Are you?
Or would you be taking the same view of the Christians back in the 16th century?
I'm not an Islamophobe.
What I'm a phobic about is clitoridectomy of throwing gay people off buildings, banning dancing and music and having fun generally.
I'm a phobic about all those sorts of things, but that's different from being Islamophobe.
Muslims are the biggest victim of Islamism.
Yes, they are.
There's been a big debate about this ISIS bride, Shamima Begum, whether she should be allowed to come back to this country.
Do you have a view about that?
I'd rather not say.
You'd rather not say?
I haven't studied it enough.
Well, she was married to an ISIS fighter.
Yeah, I know what.
She was a young, but she was 15 when she went out there.
The debate really is: was she groomed to be part of this terror group in Syria?
And as such, should we show mercy and allow her back to this country?
Yes, I'm not going to say about that.
Are you worried about me?
Did you get threats because of the positions you've taken on some of these things?
When you saw what happened to Salman Rushdie, didn't send a shudder through you?
Are you saying no, you don't want to talk about it?
Yes.
Controversial Views on ISIS Bride 00:04:57
Right.
I mean, that's interesting in itself.
Because there are areas which you would prefer not to discuss.
Yes.
I should have said that before we started.
Yeah.
No, but listen.
I think it's sad that you can't.
I don't think anything should be off-limits in interviews for people like you.
The whole point of the world's smartest thinkers is we ought to be able to have free and open debate, but I don't think we do because people use murderous retribution.
It's free speech, really, is what it amounts to, right?
Well, I'm passionately in favour of free speech.
Should there ever be limits to free speech?
Yes, I mean incitement to violence.
That's the normal answer, and I think it's a good idea.
But outside of that, people should be free to...
I think so, yes.
Have you noticed at Oxford a change in the mentality of the way they operate?
I don't think really at Oxford, no.
I hope not.
I don't think so.
Who's the smartest thinker you've met in your life?
Oh, gosh.
Have you ever had a moment where you sat there and gone, my God, this guy is, or this woman is.
Oh, made it many times, yes.
You forced me to mention someone, I would say Peter Medawa, a Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist.
And what was it about his mind that you found so beguiling?
Well, he was a brilliant scientist, but also a wonderful wit, a wonderful writer, a wonderful, immensely knowledgeable, hugely well-read.
What do you hope to achieve?
You're 82 now, you're showing no sign of slowing down.
You have a new book, Flights of Fancy, Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution.
All about flying.
You've written 17 books, I think, you told me in one of the breaks, so it's a lot.
Do you hope to keep writing books, discussing things?
I do.
Do you have any great unfulfilled ambition?
Well, I'm writing a book at the moment.
What's it about?
It's called The Genetic Book of the Dead.
And it's, you want to know what it's about?
Yes.
Okay.
Well, if you look at a camouflaged animal, like a lizard in the desert, it's got its environment painted on its back.
It's got stones and sand and things.
Actually, it's the ancestral environment that's painted on its back because it's natural selection of its ancestors that did that.
And my point is that that is not just skin deep.
The whole of the animal, every single little tiny detail of the animal in its interior of every cell, will be as precisely a record of ancestral environment as the skin is.
So the animal is a description of the worlds in which its ancestors lived.
Fascinating.
I want to come back and ask you one simple question.
What is the question that you, Richard Dorking, would like to have answered before you die?
Answer up, hold your answer after the break.
Welcome back to Paz Organiser.
So I left Richard Dawking on a cliffhanger, which is, right, what is the question you would most like to get answered?
I think it is, is there extraterrestrial intelligence?
I think I would like to be visited by, well, I will never be visited by actual bodies, I think, but visited by radio waves from another star system.
Do you believe it exists?
Yes.
I'm not totally confident, but if I, well, Carl Sagan once said he didn't know, and so he was pressed to say, well, what's your gut feeling?
And he said, well, I try not to think with my gut.
But yes, I think statistically the odds must be that there is.
It might be quite rare, let's say maybe only a billion instances in the universe, and that's very rare indeed because the number of possible planets is something like 10 to the 22.
So a billion would be very rare, so rare we might never encounter it.
What else would you love to know?
Origin of life, the origin of the universe, consciousness.
If I were a physicist, I'd want to know how to unify quantum theory and gravity, but I'm not a physicist, so don't ask me about it.
When you saw Professor Stephen Hawking with his black hole discovery and so on, are you slightly envious when you see them pull off things like that?
I suppose so, yes.
I mean, there's a thing called physics envy.
Yes.
And I sympathise with that.
Yes, but I don't have the intellect for that.
I don't have the mathematics to do that.
See, what's interesting to me, having spent some time with you, never met you before, you don't seem that provocative or...
Bingo, you got it.
Logical Thinking and Rape Debate 00:09:16
I'm not.
Right.
Where has this reputation come from?
I don't know, but I've seen some of the clips from earlier of you in your more firebrand early.
I get provoked and people goad me like a bullfighter with a red rag, but I'm you don't actually come over that one.
No, I'm a very mild.
Do you feel you get a bad rap?
Yes.
But what's the real Richard Dawkins like then?
Well, I suppose I'm polite and interested and interesting and I like to talk to people and hear what they have to say.
Are you just incurably logical?
Are you basically like a human spock from Star Trek?
Someone might say that.
No, I'm quite emotional as well.
I mean, I love poetry and music.
Are you a romantic person?
I suppose I am, yes.
Can you be logical and romantic?
Spock always found that really difficult.
I think so, yes.
You can, because isn't it illogical, romance, really?
Yes, it is.
But I can be moved to tears by music or poetry.
Do you have a political allegiance to a party?
Well, I've voted Lib Dem most of my life.
Some would say that's a weird religion.
Well, I don't feel very strongly about it.
I mean, I don't, I'm not a zealot.
Just some of your sort of logical thinking, and this may be one of the reasons you get a controversial rap.
I was looking into what you said, for example, there's outraged feminists over the years.
And it's quite interesting because you've said, for example, date rape is bad, stranger rape at knife point is worse, mild pedophilia is bad, violent pedophilia is worse.
If you think that's an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.
Pure logic.
Right.
I understand the logical thinking.
Yes.
But I also understand why a feminist would think, what the hell are you talking about?
Rape is rape.
It doesn't matter whether it's date rape or knife point rape.
Yeah, I think that's so illogical because what it means is that, I mean, I had a friend who was actually raped in Africa.
Three men pounced on her in a dark alley and two of them held her down while they took turns to rape her.
Now, that seems to me to be a different order of magnitude to a boyfriend who gets drunk and goes too far.
And it seems to me that it's absolute nonsense to say that there's just rape is rape is rape.
Of course there are.
It's like saying a pickpocket who steals a quid from your pocket is like a bank robber who, you know, there are clearly degrees of...
Well, in a way, but I would counter and say, I could see your logical mind thinking that.
But actually, if you steal a pound or a million pounds, you're a thief.
If you kill someone, you're a murderer.
It doesn't matter how you kill them.
And if you're a rapist, you are a rapist.
And I can understand why feminists would say, well, hang on, who are you to decide which is more invasive to a woman on a scale of violence?
I actually went on, my next tweet was, stranger rape is bad, date rape is worse.
If you think that's an endorsement of stranger rape, go away and learn how to think.
The point was, go away and learn how to think if you think that talking about one thing being milder than the other is an endorsement of the mild one.
Of course it's not.
No, I don't think it's that, but it's more like you're drawing a kind of comparative scale for something where a woman would say, many women would say, that actually rape is rape.
It doesn't actually matter how it manifests.
I know they would.
Let's go back to the stealing a quid from robbing a bank.
You're surely not saying that they should have the same jail sentence because theft is theft is theft.
No, but they're all.
Why not?
But they're all thieves.
Yes, but so what if they're all thieves?
Well, you wouldn't get the same jail sentence for varying degrees of sexual assault.
Good.
That's all I'm saying.
Right, but a woman might say that they can be equally as invasive and terrible for someone's life.
I believe that, yes.
That's possible.
Yes, it's possible.
Your logical mind would allow that thought process.
Yes, and all I said was, if you think that's an endorsement of the mild one, go away and learn how to think.
Have we lost the ability to think logically and critically about things?
Well, some people may have.
But you sense we have.
That everyone's quick to pounce on these kind of things and say, I'm outraged.
I think so.
But they haven't really thought through what they're outraging.
Let me take one of the other ones you mentioned, mild pedophilia.
I got hell for that.
I was the victim of mild paedophilia at school.
I expect you were.
Many people were.
I wasn't, no.
Well, I'm glad to hear it.
You were?
Yes.
Now, suppose I had said, this has ruined my life.
It's a total catastrophe.
Then somebody who really was raped by a priest, say, or by an uncle or something, night after night after night, he would say, how dare you compare your 15 minutes of embarrassment to what I went through night after night after night.
That's what I was saying.
You get it?
I get your argument.
I'm not entirely sure I completely concur with it because I think what you're, again, you're trying to do is individuals are individuals.
They all react to things in different ways.
I could imagine there'll be some people who've been through what you went through who would be scarred for life by it if a different type of personality.
You clearly say you're not.
Okay.
I mean, many of my most of my friends at that school were.
Really?
And we just joked about it.
Because you were at Amplethorpe, right?
No, God knows.
Oh, that's a Catholic school.
Which one were you at?
Well, that's not relevant because I don't want to mention it.
Right.
Have you talked about this before?
Well, I think so, yes.
It's no secret, only it's not a big deal.
It's in my autobiography.
Not a big deal, but I mean...
It's in my autobiography.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I can have really conversations like this with people all day long, and I wouldn't be outraged by stuff I hear.
I'd want to argue and challenge and get to the bottom of what you're really thinking.
But we don't live in that kind of world anymore.
People live in soundbite alleys.
Yeah, they do.
They just want to pick out a line and then be incensed by it.
Yes.
And we've also got a culture of just general victimhood, I think, in society.
People want to be a victim.
They want to play a victim.
They want to play that victimhood card because they think it's something that now gets celebrated and can be rewarding, actually, for some people.
I think that's true.
That's different to how society used to be.
I think that's true.
Yes.
Are we going the wrong way?
Well, if you're right, yes.
Do you think I'm right?
I think you probably are.
You know who Dr. Spock is, right?
Yes, I do.
He was mystological.
Yeah, I know, yes, I know.
Do you not think you're the human manifestation of him?
No.
What's the one thing you'd like to achieve now in the rest of your life?
Well, I think I'd like to be known for science and for helping people to understand science, for understanding science myself, and not known for being vehement and an atheist, which is only two of my books.
You finally, you've got a chance to write your own headstone.
Here lies Richard Dawkins.
He...
I think I'd maybe copy Jacques Mono, the great biologist.
He said, je cherche à comprnd.
I seek to understand.
Well, I sort to understand, and I think I understand you a lot better after meeting you.
Richard Dawkins, thank you very much indeed.
Thank you.
Enjoyed it very much.
That's it from me, whatever you're up to.
Keep it uncensored.
And like Richard Dawkins, keep asking questions.
That's it.
Good night.
Winning 59 Grand Slams and smashing every barrier in her way.
Now she's facing the battle of her life.
Have you ever been through anything like this?
No.
It's the toughest thing you've had.
It's definitely the toughest thing I've ever done.
Who has two cancers at the same time?
I was never an underachiever, but this is getting ridiculous.
Martina Navratilova opens up on her devastating double cancer diagnosis.
Giving up, giving in, stopping, that's just not an option for me.
So yeah, you get on with it.
I think growing up in a communist country, you're tough.
You have to be.
And you're kind of stoic because you can't feel sorry for yourself because you would just be crying all the time because you don't have any freedom.
So, you know, I grabbed that chance when I got it and I was never going to look back.
So no regrets.
The only regret I have is that I had to do it.
But I really...
Quitting is just not in my DNA.
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