Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, The Greatest Show on Earth, and his latest Outgrowing God. He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including funny enough the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea. He is outspoken, bold, and often fearless in his defense of science and reason, and in this way, is one of the most influential thinkers of our time.

PS: There is some occasional noise in the audio, which I tried to clean up in the edit.

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EPISODE LINKS:
Richard's Website: https://www.richarddawkins.net/
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- The God Delusion: https://amzn.to/2JPrxlc
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- The Greatest Show on Earth: https://amzn.to/2Rp2j1h

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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
2:31 - Intelligent life in the universe
5:03 - Engineering intelligence (are there shortcuts?)
7:06 - Is the evolutionary process efficient?
10:39 - Human brain and AGI
15:31 - Memes
26:37 - Does society need religion?
33:10 - Conspiracy theories
39:10 - Where do morals come from in humans?
46:10 - AI began with the ancient wish to forge the gods
49:18 - Simulation
56:58 - Books that influenced you
1:02:53 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist and author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion, The Magic of Reality, and The Greatest Show of Earth and his latest, All-Growing God.

He is the originator and popularizer of a lot of fascinating ideas in evolutionary biology and science in general, including, funny enough, the introduction of the word meme in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, which in the context of a gene-centered view of evolution is an exceptionally powerful idea.

He's outspoken, bold, and often fearless in the defense of science and reason, and in this way is 1 of the most influential thinkers of our time.

This conversation was recorded before the outbreak of the pandemic.

For everyone feeling the medical, psychological, and financial burden of this crisis, I'm sending love your way.

Stay strong, we're in this together, we'll beat this thing.

This is the Artificial Intelligence Podcast.

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And now, here's my conversation with Richard Dawkins.

Do you think there's intelligent life out there in the universe?

there's intelligent life here and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean 10 to 22 stars has been estimated, it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life.

If you deny that, then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable.

I mean, ludicrously off the charts improbable.

Certainly the origin of life itself, there are really 2 steps, the origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable.

So the juxtaposition of those 2, you could say is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 improbable.

It's an interesting question, maybe you're coming on to it, how we would recognise intelligence from outer space if we encountered it.

The most likely way we would come across them would be by radio.

It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us.

But it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals and then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent.

People involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing to, and always an obvious way for them to broadcast, to say we are intelligent, we are here.

I suspect it probably would be obvious actually.

Well, it's interesting, prime numbers, so the mathematical patterns, it's an open question whether mathematics is the same for us as it would be for aliens.

I suppose we could assume that ultimately if we're governed by the same laws of physics, then we should be governed by the same laws of physics and we should be governed by the same laws of mathematics.

I suspect that they will have Pythagoras theorem, et cetera.

I mean, I don't think that their mathematics will be that different.

Do you think evolution would also be a force on the alien planets

I stuck my neck out and said that if we do, if ever that we do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of randomly generated codes.

It doesn't mean that the, it would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn't be actually.

But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.

Yes, in the general sense, it would be Darwinian.

So let me ask kind of an artificial intelligence engineering question.

So you've been an outspoken critic of, I guess what could be called intelligent design, which is an attempt to describe the creation of a human mind and body by some religious folks, religious folks used to describe.

So, broadly speaking, evolution is, as far as I know, again, you can correct me, is the only scientific theory we have for the development of intelligent life.

Like, there's no alternative theory, as far as I understand.

None has ever been suggested and I suspect it never will be.

Well, of course, whenever somebody says that a hundred years later.

But it would look, sorry, yes, it would probably look very similar, but it's almost like Einstein's general relativity versus Newtonian physics.

It'll be maybe an alteration of the theory or something like that, but it won't be fundamentally different.

But okay, so now for the past 70 years, even before the AI community has been trying to engineer intelligence, in a sense, to do what intelligent design says, was done here on Earth, What's your intuition?

Do you think it's possible to build intelligence, to

build computers that are intelligent, or do we need to do something like the evolutionary process?

I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains.

I think our brains work by the laws of physics.

And so it must in principle be possible to replicate that.

In practice though, it might be very difficult, and as you suggest, it may be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process.

I'd be surprised, I suspect that it will come, but it's certainly been slower in coming than some of the early

But in your sense, is the evolutionary process efficient?

So you can see it as exceptionally wasteful in 1 perspective, but at the same time, maybe that is the only path

I mean, on the 1 side, it is deplorably wasteful.

On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results.

I mean, the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle, is superb, an engineer would be proud to have done it.

On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up.

Some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don't look well designed.

My favorite example is the recurrent laryngeal nerve.

This is a nerve, it's 1 of the cranial nerves, which goes from the brain, and the end organ that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx.

But it doesn't go straight to the larynx, it goes right down into the chest, and then loops around an artery in the chest, and then comes straight back up again to the larynx.

And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck, which happened to have died in a zoo.

And we watched the, we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going, whizzing straight past the larynx, within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest, and then back up again, which is a detour of many feet.

The ancestors, our fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish, the most direct pathway of that, of the equivalent of that nerve, there wasn't a larynx in those days, but it innervated part of the gills, the most direct pathway was behind that artery.

And then when the tetrapods, when the land vertebra started evolving and then the neck started to stretch, the marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great, or rather, was each step of the way was a very small cost, but the marginal, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large.

As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length of the detour a tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, each millimeter at a time, didn't make any difference.

And so, but finally, when you get to a giraffe, it's a huge detour and no doubt is very inefficient.

Any engineer would reject that piece of design.

And there are quite a number of examples, as you'd expect, it's not surprising that we find examples of that sort.

In a way, what's surprising is there aren't more of them.

In a way, what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good.

So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results, partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and as it were making the best of a bad job.

And it's a mystery from an engineering perspective that so many things are well-designed.

I suppose the thing we're forgetting is how many generations have to die for that.

Yes, that's the horrible wastefulness of it.

So yeah, we marvel at the final product, but yeah, the process is painful.

Elon Musk describes human beings as potentially the, what he calls the biological bootloader for artificial intelligence, or artificial general intelligence is used as the term.

Do you see superhuman level intelligence as potentially the next step in the evolutionary process?

Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial.

I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains, will go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution.

I think that's probably coming to an end.

It is the dominant trend, or 1 of the dominant trends, in our fossil history for the last 2 or 3000000 years.

So it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last 2 or 3000000 years.

The only way that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the biggest brains, and that's not happening anymore.

Right, so in general, in humans, the selection pressures are not, I mean, are they active in any form?

Well, in order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most intelligent, let's call it intelligence.

Not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let's talk about intelligence.

In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most, individuals have the most children.

It may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you have a successful career.

It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people, but it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have.

It doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation.

On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally is evolving by a non-genetic means, by leaps and bounds, of course.

And so what do you think, I don't know if you're familiar, there's a company called Neuralink, but there's a general effort of brain-computer interfaces, which is to try to build a connection between the computer and the brain, to send signals both directions.

And the long-term dream there is to do exactly that, which is expand, I guess expand the size of the brain, expand the capabilities of the brain.

Do you see this as a promising possible technology or is the interface between the computer and the brain, like the brain is this wet, messy thing that's just impossible to interface with?

Well, of course it's interesting, whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say.

What I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to a computer and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components, it is astonishing what it can do.

I mean, Imagine building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull.

And with the equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits, which work as slowly as neurons do, It's something mysterious about that.

Something must be going on that we don't understand.

So I've just talked to Roger Penrose, I'm not sure if you're familiar with his work.

He also describes this kind of mystery in the mind, in the brain that as we see is a materialist, so there's no sort of mystical thing going on, but there's so much about the material of the brain that we don't understand.

That might be quantum mechanical in nature and so on.

So they're the ideas about consciousness.

Do you have any, have you ever thought about, do you ever think about ideas of consciousness or a little bit more about the mystery of intelligence and consciousness that seems to pop up just like you're saying from our brain.

I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there.

I mean, he's 1 of the world's greatest physicists.

but nobody knows anything about consciousness.

And in fact, if we talk about religion and so on, the mystery of consciousness is so awe-inspiring and we know so little about it that the leap to sort of religious or mystical explanations is too easy to make?

I think that it's just an act of cowardice to leap to religious explanations, and Roger doesn't do that, of course.

But I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it.

So correct me if I'm wrong but in your book Selfish Gene, the gene-centered view of evolution allows us to think of the physical organisms as just the medium through which the software of our genetics and the ideas sort of propagate.

So maybe can we start just with the basics?

What in this context does the word meme mean?

It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture, in the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense.

And it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on.

Obviously culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on?

And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene, which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population.

It can replicate, well it clearly does replicate, there's no question about that.

The question is, does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion?

Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool?

Would you wish to say though that in the same way as an animal body is modified, adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes, is it also a machine for propagating memes?

Could you actually say that something about the way a human is, is modified, adapted for the function of meme propagation?

That's such a fascinating possibility, if that's true.

If that it's not just about the genes which seem somehow more comprehensible as like these things of biology.

The idea that culture or maybe ideas, you can really broadly define it, operates under these mechanisms.

Even morphology, even anatomy, does evolve by mimetic means.

I mean, things like hairstyles, styles of makeup, circumcision, these things are actual changes in the body form which are non-genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus

But the moment you start drifting away from the physical, it becomes interesting, because the space of ideas, ideologies, political systems.

Are memes a metaphor more, or are they really, is there something fundamental, almost physical presence of memes?

Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor and I think that, and I mentioned that physical bodily characteristics which are a bit trivial in a way, but when things like the propagation of religious ideas, both longitudinally down generations and transversely as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas, when a charismatic preacher converts people, that resembles viral transmission.

Whereas the longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent to child, et cetera, is more like conventional genetic transmission.

That's such a beautiful, especially in the modern day, idea.

Do you think about this implication in social networks where the propagation of ideas, the viral propagation of ideas, and hence the new use of the word meme to describe-

The internet, of course, provides extremely rapid method of transmission.

Before, when I first coined the word, the internet didn't exist.

And so I was thinking that in terms of books, newspapers, broad radio, television, that kind of thing.

Now an idea can just leap around the world in all directions instantly.

And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes.

Isn't it fascinating that sort of ideas, it's like you have Galapagos Islands or something, it's the 70s, and the internet allowed all these species to just like globalize.

And in a matter of seconds, you could spread a message to millions of people.

And these ideas, these memes can breed, can evolve, can mutate, and there's a selection, and there's like different, I guess, groups that have all, like there's a dynamics that's fascinating here.

Basically, Do you think your work in this direction, while fundamentally was focused on life on earth, do you think it should continue?

Well, yes, I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing.

We conventionally think of the transmission of ideas in evolutionary context as being limited to, in our ancestors, people living in villages, living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring village occasionally and maybe even to a neighboring continent eventually.

I mean, you have people, it's been called echo chambers, where people are in a sort of internet village, where the other members of the village may be geographically distributed all over the world, but they just happen to be interested in the same things, use the same terminology, the same jargon, have the same enthusiasm.

So people like the Flat Earth Society, they don't all live in 1 place, they find each other and they talk the same language to each other, they talk the same nonsense to each other.

And they, but so this is a kind of distributed version of the primitive idea of people living in villages and propagating their ideas in a local way.

So is there evolutionary purpose of villages, or is that just a...

I wouldn't use a word like evolutionary purpose in that case, but villages will be something that just emerged, that's the way people happen to live.

And in just the same kind of way, the Flat Earth Society, societies of ideas emerge in the same kind of way in this digital space.

Is there something interesting to say about the, I guess, from a perspective of Darwin, could we fully interpret the dynamics of social interaction in these social networks?

Or is there, or some much more complicated thing need to be developed.

Well, a Darwinian selection idea would involve investigating which ideas spread and which don't.

So, in some ideas don't have the ability to spread.

I mean, flat earthism is, there are a few people believe in it, but it's not gonna spread because it's obvious nonsense.

But other ideas, even if they are wrong, can spread because they are attractive in some sense.

So the spreading and the selection in the Darwinian context, it just has to be attractive in some sense.

Like we don't have to define, like it doesn't have to be attractive in the way that animals attract each other.

It could be attractive in some other way.

Yes, all that matters is all that's needed is that it should spread.

And it doesn't have to be true to spread.

In truth is 1 criterion which might help an idea to spread.

But there are other criteria which might help it to spread.

As you say, attraction in animals is not necessarily valuable for survival.

The famous peacock's tail doesn't help the peacock to survive, it helps it to pass on its genes.

Similarly, an idea which is actually rubbish, but which people don't know is rubbish and think is very attractive will spread in the same way as a peacock's gene spread.

I remember reading somewhere, I think recently, that in some species of birds, sort of the idea that beauty may have its own purpose and the idea that some birds, I'm being ineloquent here, but there's some aspects of their feathers and so on that serve no evolutionary purpose whatsoever.

There's somebody making an argument that there are some things about beauty that animals do that may be its own purpose.

Darwin, when he coined the phrase sexual selection, didn't feel the need to suggest that what was attractive to females, usually is males attracting females, that what females found attractive had to be useful.

It was enough that females found it attractive.

And so it could be completely useless, probably was completely useless in the conventional sense, but was not at all useless in the sense of passing on John Darwin didn't call them genes, but in the sense of reproducing.

Others, starting with Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, didn't like that idea and they wanted sexually selected characteristics like peacock's tails to be in some sense useful.

It's a bit of a stretch to think of a peacock's tail as being useful, in the sense of survival, but others have run with that idea and have brought it up to date.

And so there's a kind of, there are 2 schools of thought on sexual selection, which are still active and about equally supported now.

Those who follow Darwin in thinking that it's just enough to say it's attractive and those who follow Wallace and say that it has to be in some sense useful.

Do you fall into 1 category or the other?

I think they both could be correct in different cases.

I mean, they've both been made sophisticated in a mathematical sense, more so than when Darwin and Wallace first started talking about it.

I'm Russian, I romanticize things, so I prefer the former.

Where the beauty in itself is a powerful, so attraction is a powerful force in evolution.

On religion, do you think there will ever be a time in our future where almost nobody believes in God or God is not a part of the moral fabric of our society?

I think it may happen after a very long time.

I think it may take a long time for that to happen.

So do you think ultimately for everybody on earth, religion, other forms of doctrines, ideas, could do better job than what religion does.

It's a difficult idea now with truth and the internet, right?

I suppose when you say reason, you mean the very basic sort of inarguable conclusions of science versus which political system is better?

I mean truth about the real world, which is ascertainable by, not just by the more rigorous methods of science, but by just ordinary sensory observation.

So do you think there'll ever be a time when we move past it?

Like, I guess another way to ask it, are we hopelessly, fundamentally tied to religion in the way our society functions?

Well, clearly all individuals are not hopelessly tied to it because many individuals don't believe.

You could mean something like society needs religion in order to function properly, something like that.

Well, I've read books on it and they're persuasive.

I don't think they're that persuasive though.

I mean, some people suggested that society needs a sort of figurehead, which can be a non-existent figurehead in order to function properly.

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Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes | Lex Fridman Podcast #87