Richard Dawkins on Science, Selfish Gene & Autobiography

[00:00:04][Music] okay so welcome to the royal institution this is uh you know pretty much the closest thing that people like us have to a church um needless to say uh our guest tonight richard dawkins needs no introduction but that would render my job obsolete so it is customary to do one so here is an introduction richard dawkins is of course our pre-eminent science communicator and one of the world's very best-known public intellectuals his works as you will all know are many classic science popular science books um the incredibly popular the selfish gene which is one of only a very small number of popular science books that have sold more than a million copies and um you may be aware of a after writing popular science books he also began writing books about religion the god delusion um came out in 2006 and also sold more than a million copies and caused absolutely no controversy whatsoever um and this week sees the publication of the first volume of richard dawkins's autobiography an appetite for wonder which we have here and as martin was saying is available um in the foyer after the talk uh in which he talks about his family and his upbringing and the motivations for becoming a scientist a point of note this first volume ends with the publication of the selfish gene uh we will be talking for three quarters of an hour or so in conversation and then we'll be opening it up to for you to ask um richard dawkins any questions that you like but perhaps it might be best to frame it around volume one which ends in 1976 and you can all come back in two years time and ask him the rest of the questions that you're thinking about anyway um without further ado i would like to welcome to the platform uh richard dawkins or should i call you clint oh come on okay so richard dawkins as it says on page one of your autobiography i'll have to read what you nobody will get the joke unless and listen well apparently you are called clinton dawkins in fact which is a bit of a surprise to me having read your work all of my life glad to know you clint the friendly passport controller was not to know that british people are sometimes given a family name first followed by the name their parents wanted them to use i was always to be richard just as my father was always john our first name of clinton was something we forgot about as our parents had intended to me it has been no more than a niggling irritation which i would have been happier without notwithstanding the serendipitous realization that it gives me the same initials as charles robert darwin but alas nobody anticipated the united states department of homeland security not content with scanning our shoes and rationing our toothpaste they decreed that anyone entering america must travel under his first name exactly as written in his passport so i had to forego my lifelong identity as richard and rebrand myself clinton r darkins when booking tickets to the states and of course when filling in those important forms the ones that require you explicitly to deny that you are entering the usa in order to overthrow the constitution by force of arms sole purpose of visit was the british broadcaster gilbert harding's response to that [Laughter] nowadays such liberty will see you banged up it really will please don't do that at all um so i imagine a sort of alternative reality where clint dawkins did a number of different things from from your career let me ask you about the motivation for writing uh an autobiography because in in our game writing about our families and people in general is generally what we try to avoid yeah i just feel pretty self-conscious about it i must say it's it's something that my publishers were keen that i should do and um i thought if i'm going to do it but it's a pity i didn't make it before my father died at the age of 95 it would have been nice to talk to him about my early life i did consult my mother who is still alive at the age of 96 and um that was very useful i thought finally it was rather useful to do it before as to do it as long as i was still around otherwise did you find the process different from writing writing uh non-fiction that is scientific yes of course it it it it is different and i did feel there's a sort of self-indulgence about it i sort of felt a little bit awkward about it there's quite a lot of science in the book actually as well especially in the second half i relied almost entirely on memory plus my mother's written diary and and memoirs which she wrote privately my working title was a patchwork of memories and so it isn't the sort of autobiography that's massively documented with with diaries and letters and things um somewhat to my relief because if i'd had lots of diaries it would have been manageable i think so um it is it is filtered through memory um i i found myself reading it and thinking that you know the temptation when someone's lived such a rich and interesting life and has such a public profile one that if you're me has had a profound influence on the work that they've done and and their career and that there is a temptation to do some sort of armchair psychology you know this this particular incident please don't well i think we should we shan't do do that here um but but as someone who studied evolution and someone who's studied genetics it's really hard not to look at a big family tree and the the family that you describe and think about nature and nurture and the things that you experience as a as a young boy in africa and where and how they shaped you yes i put the old family stories in just for a bit of fun really i mean there's some quite amusing stories too far back to have had much genetic con connection to me i mean you know my great great great great grandfather henry dawkins who eloped with the daughter of general clinton actually that's where the that's i mean the dawkins family rather cheekily stole the name from the the general who lost the american war of independence and eloped with his daughter augusta by stationing a handsome cab at each of the corners of the square where the general lived and he was in one of them and on a word of command all four of them galloped off in different directions um thereby um frustrating pursuit so stories like that would have nothing to do with me of course but nevertheless sort of i thought were quite funny well there are there are a lot of nuggets there are a lot of brilliant stories like that dotting throughout the book but but you mentioned that you have a there is a family tree in the first uh in in the frontis piece and uh you talk about a family which has a great history it is a big successful old family did you feel as a youngster did you feel that being part of that of that pedigree was was part of your shaping i didn't know much about it actually i mean my more recent members of my family had all been colonial servants sort of um khaki shorts and solo topi um sun helmet types and so i was familiar with that i mean i i knew that my grandfather my paternal grandfather and my various other ancestors had all had that british empire history as as had my father and his three brothers tell us about your bringing in in africa which many people won't be well my father's job was as a colonial agricultural servant in what was then island now malawi and but it was at the during the war and he was called up to join the army and uh he joined the king's african rifles and so he was sent to kenya as it was called then and um that's where i was born i was i was conceived in naisa land just before my parents left um the when the um all the young men from nasa land were sent north to kenya um their wives were strictly told to stay behind they were not allowed to accompany my my mother disobeyed all orders and um they smuggled her in uh and they had a rather adventurous journey in a car which was a real old banger it hardly went it had to be pushed in order to get its start and it had a name as well didn't it um lucy lockett i think um i thought we were the only family who named their cars i was pleased to read that yes and they they kept a diary of this of this journey and it was obviously quite quite an adventure and they um so my my mother was the only one of these colonial wives who who got in and that's where i was born i was born in nairobi and spent my first two years there and my mother was pretty much sort of camp following my father was away in the abyssinian campaign the somali campaign and so she was sort of following the various places where he was where he was posted and my earliest memories are from there but i'd left when i was two so so and we went back to nina's land then and i've got much more memories from there of course you speak with great affection about your father and you've just mentioned that you'd wish you'd written this before he died and how how significant in terms of your personality your character do you think um well he he was about he read botany at oxford so he was a biologist too he was much more of a naturalist than i have been um and he knew the names of all the wildflowers and things and i think my grandfather his father was rather shocked when when he discovered that i couldn't name i think it was a a blue tit on the bird table and i thought it was a chaffinch and he was absolutely scandalized this that was equivalent to not having heard of shakespeare in the dawkins family um a little bit unfair because i only just arrived from africa and they don't have either chaplaincies or blue tits in in um in iceland um but i wasn't much of an of a naturalist and and my father was um but i did probably through his influence follow him into the biological stream at school and um didn't do very well at school but i but that did set me into the biological stream and then when i got to oxford then i became really enthusiastic about biology so when did when did the passion when did the appetite for wonder as a book is called when it all began not really until my second year at oxford and and i think it was the tutorial system which probably fired me up well let's let's come on to that in just a minute before we get out of africa um which is uh phrase really out of africa did you have any sense growing up in in kenya that you were in the cradle of humanity last no i mean i i had no idea um i don't think that was really known at the time was it because i don't think the leakages were out there yes i mean but the the south african fossils were earlier than that um like the town child yes yes um no i had absolutely no idea what about amongst amongst your family i mean your father was a biologist i don't think yes i don't think that that was ever talked about to my regret have you been back oh yes um i went back and uh lala my wife and i um went back one christmas um to stay with the leaky family with the richard leaky family um in their house a sort of beach house at lamu on the indian ocean coast and um had a wonderful time and uh me leaking richard's wife who's another distinguished paleontologist um took us to the nairobi museum and showed us these sacred relics i mean you know um dear boy and uh and the the the turkana boy um 1470 all these legendary fossils um we weren't allowed to touch the real thing we could we could pick up the the replicas that were stored beside the real thing but the real things that treated like um holy saints relics um and i must say um you do get a feeling a sort of when i was almost in tears um seeing these these these extraordinary fossils but not whilst you were growing up there no it's not just i'm afraid i'm unaware and in terms of this this you describe it as a dylic it does sound kind of kind of a delic growing up in in africa in the wild that now without going into the sort of armchair psychology of it being outside being in the natural environment having a biologist as a father was that contribution contributing was that a trigger for biology later or it's hard to say not in any obvious sense i mean i think as as i said i sort of drifted into the biology stream at school really not through any alas at that time not through any great inspiration or enthusiasm but just that's what my father had done and i sort of you know i quite liked biology but i but i i it wasn't a major passion until i got to oxford i regret to see there there are a couple of moments in the book where you're quite hard on your seven-year-old self and not being skeptical enough and there's also a couple of moments when you you sort of note that you were skeptical particularly about uh correctly identifying that santa claus was in fact some chap called sam yes i thought you were quite harsh on yourself and for children not in general not not being skeptical yeah it was kind of downhill all the way after the age of one when uh um i mean this this is this story's in my mother's memoir because i don't remember it myself but um there was a man called sam who dressed up as santa claus um for the for the children's party and the children were all thoroughly taken in and he was ho ho hoeing and and doing all the right sort of things and then finally he said well it's time for me to go and he got up and he said i was going to get my reindeer and left and all the children said bye bye santa and so on and i and i looked up and said sam's gone so that that was my the high spot of my skeptical career um and then adam i think you're then referred i thought it went downhill after that because i recounted how um up on zomba mountain in iceland at the age of about six um i was playing hide and seek with a very nice african man and i was looking everywhere for him and i looked in a particular hut and he definitely wasn't there he absolutely wasn't there so i went on searching and i came back to the same heart and he was there and he told me that he'd been there all along but had made himself invisible and i thought that was a more plausible explanation than that he was lying so i'm not i'm not very proud of that i don't see what's wrong with that at all um so that that was that was your african childhood i mean we've summarized it in uh just just 10 minutes um and then uh all of a sudden you're you migrate back to england and your dad gets a call and everything changes again yes um in 1946 while we were still in in africa uh my father inherited a a farm well a sort of minor a sort of junior estate um in oxfordshire uh at over norton which had been in the dawkins family since 1723 i think um so we sort of upstaged david cameron as members of the chipping norton set um but um it had been in the dawkins family and i i think my father barely knew of its existence but he suddenly was left it in the will of an extremely distant cousin um a third cousin called harrywood dawkins um and didn't really expect it to change his life very much because his career was in in africa he wasn't he was an agriculturalist but he was a tropical agriculturalist and the estate was led to a to a on a long long lease to a woman called mrs daley um but then when we came home to england on leave mrs daley suddenly died and so my parents were faced with the choice of whether to take over the farm or whether to go return to africa and or i mean their parents and family lawyers and everything advised them to go straight back to africa and have nothing to do with the farm nobody ever made any money farming and so on but they decided against old advice that they would stay in england so my father gave up his job in africa gave up his pension um and retrained as an english farmer um it hadn't really been run as a farm since 1723 it had been a sort of country estate sort of thing what was the crop um well yeah i mean he started a sort of arable plus plus dairy he got jersey cows and um eventually uh ran a cream business and made a success of it it was a it was a successful farm but it completely changed my life because underneath his because they were going to uh spend the rest of his career in africa and and instead we came back to england and so i had an english upbringing instead of an african one and then what is a pretty traditional old-fashioned uh public school upbringing so you're sent to boarding school aged well yes i mean i was first sent to boarding school at the age of seven which is which is much too young to go to boarding school by the way um and then again that that was in in africa that was in obviously in southern rhodesia and then sent to boarding school again in england at the age of eight and um was in boarding school all the time it was it was a bit later than the real the height of the cruelty of english public schools english english boarding schools was pretty tough but it wasn't it wasn't as bad as in previous generation john bechman's you know some many people may have read john bechman's wonderful verse autobiography where he describes the horrors of the boarding school experience but it was a time where you you experienced fagging and beating and fagging and beating um low-level pedophilia yes um uh so yeah i mean it was it it it wasn't pleasant and and it's that that kind of school still exists but it's now far a far more pleasant environment now i mean it's really i think rather nice it is interesting that you're there's there's a lot of matter of factness about some things which are a very anachronistic now so that you know beatings and faggings just seems like an alien world nowadays but you do write about them as these are things that happened they didn't appear to have any particular influence on your character um you write with great affection for some teachers and uh and some loathing for others well i i i wanted to be factual i mean i i didn't want to write a misery memoir um as i believe they're called yes um so i i wanted to state the the facts rather than kind of wallow in in misery and and what about so another thing that you've talked about previously but also in the book explicitly it's effectively a christian upbringing there's that very typical public school yes christian background yes chapel hymns yes it's very anglican um and so quite gentle in a way it it it wasn't thrust down my throat the way it might have been if it had been a different church than the anglican church but you're right with great affection for for hymns which i i i don't think is surprising and it's also my upbringing in a much more minor public school but but again anglican anglican yes yes and and you can there is an interesting generational thing which i've tried on audiences before in fact i think you were in the audience once where you simply have to say the words in front of a crowd possibly of atheists you simply have to say our father well and and they do nothing no but but having tried that on 16 year olds in london they look blank seriously absolutely no recognition of what of what what uh stimulus i don't know whether to be shocked or elated slightly shocked because it does suggest a lack of historical well yeah i think it was the introduction of some of a much more multicultural religious education in the in the 80s that meant that okay they weren't so you know because people people such as yourself and also me went to chapel three times a week yes and blurted forth these words that as you describe you have no real sense of what they mean if they mean anything and and yes and they become sort of nonsense yes i mean i do remember the the the general confession where you have to say sunday after sunday what miserable offenders miserable sinners you are and that it always struck me that because it was written down to be said not just today but next sunday and the sunday after you have the slightest intention of being anything other than a miserable offender for the rest of your life and they've been saying that since 1620s with no evolutionary progression whatsoever but but you did actually go through a religious period as soon paul said when i was a child i spake as a child i understood as a child but when i became a man i put away childish things so yes um i i went through a religious phase i was confirmed into the church of england at the age of probably 13.

[00:23:36]um and um saw the light a couple of years later it's interesting the way you write about your parents reaction to that which was incredibly sort of a gallic shrug is how it read to me that you know that it sounded like your mom just assumed oh well you'll grow out of it this is the school's responsibility i i did have having a conversation with her at the age of about nine where where we sort of worked out that because there were lots of different religions they couldn't all be right and and i i got it at that age that there was something arbitrary about the one that i just by sheer accident happened to have been brought up in um but then i had i had a relapse at the age of about 13 and got confirmed um and became really intensely religious at that time and and um i used to sort of fantasize that if i went down in the middle of the night into the chapel and prayed hard enough i might see a vision or an angel might appear or something like that no luck so i well i didn't try to be fair that's very good christian practice there well let's move on from from that and so you've mentioned how then you uh go up to oxfords and and this was a the forming of you this these these were the years that really turned you into the adult that you are now to tell us what what happened bailey well yes i'm i think um it took me a while i think probably the whole of my first year as it were thought i was still at school um which it's a very different way of going about learning it it's textbook based and so you you have textbooks in which the knowledge that you're supposed to be absorbing is and your teachers know what what you're supposed to know and you have to sort of satisfy them that you know it in exams that's school and i didn't tumble to the difference between school and university until my second year where they were throwaway textbooks no textbooks um you got sent into the library every week with a reading list of original research literature and an assignment to write an essay on a probably quite narrow subject but to prepare for writing that essay you read the most recent research papers on the topic and at the end of a week if you do it properly at the end of a week of doing this you have become the world authority on that subject because nobody else has read it up so recently as you have certainly not your tutor and that that to me was a wonderful experience because although i was sort of aware that the subjects in which i became for that one week a world authority was a very narrow subject the experience of being an authority that has most recently read up on the subject the most recent research brown and mcallister 19 whatever it is you know and they're disagreeing with with smith and jones what is you get an idea of controversy you get an idea that it's not just a set of facts that you have to learn you get an idea that this is active scholarship and that really inspired me when i when i finally when i got that in my second year i didn't get it until my second year and then my essays they weren't i don't think they were any good but they were um they were acts of creation rather than acts of regurgitation give us some some um biographical information here so um what what year did you get to oxford oh i went up in the autumn of 1959 and um and uh yes i mean 1959 to 60. that was to bailly old which many of your family members had yes there was a sort of family tradition of going to this particular college baleal and um i think it would have broken my grandfather's heart if i hadn't got into paleo and there's a quite interesting description of what the 18 year old richard dawkins was like in terms of in fact what all university students were like at oxford at that time oh well yes i found quite surprised um you mean about sort of well moustaches and yeah that's right pipes i think we i think we tried to appear older than we were and so um we tried to look like adults and so um well i didn't grow moustache but many of my friends did and they smoked a pipe and they wore i don't know jackets with leather patches and and it was very different from today actually um i mean i don't want to characterize what today's students look like but um i don't get the impression that today's students are struggling to look older than they are um i think that's true and i took minor issue with that section of the book because what you described was sounded a little bit like bride's head so these these um public school boys going yeah going up and then adopting what as a sort of affectation of a gentleman and then becoming gentleman i suppose but i think that students they may not dress like that now but the first years that i teach god they think they're adults aren't there any in the audience yes i mean the bright head comparison's paradoxical because on the one hand yes that they would have dressed in the way that i said but on the other hand there was sebastian flights teddy bear the teddy yes of course yeah did you have it you didn't have a teddy so so no um so he's trying to be younger than he would than than he was um it's a fabulous book by the way when you're at oxford now when you see undergraduates now do you see at bailly oldies you know are they is it a different species of undergraduate you see i i think that there is this i don't i hope i'm not going to be too unpopular for things i don't i don't think that that they're trying to look older than they are which should they i mean why not be the eighth be the age you actually are um i mean in in the book i'd i described the contrast between what you see on the notice board uh on the first day of a new term a new a new a new year um freshers welcome and it says something like um freshers um feeling lonely missing mum um do drop in for coffee we love you um that would have been inconceivable when i was a freshman um it's quite kind though very kind i mean it's lovely but um when when i was a freshman it was the notice board said things like um would the quote gentleman who removed my umbrella from the so-and-so was that totally different kind of atmosphere and and what about in your um spare time when you weren't studying what cultural things were you interested in there's a lot of poetry in this book you've got a deep affect yes i love i love poetry um and i wasn't really studying it i i learned to love poetry from my father really um i think it's rather touching um he there's an anthology which my mother still has of poetry written out by him in handwriting of his favorite great and quite a thick a thick binder of his favorite poems which i read and have they've become many of them have become my favorite poems i learned recently that they were all written by him one one at a time in as accompanying letters to my mother when they were engaged and my father was temporarily at cambridge doing a postgraduate degree in tropical agriculture and every week he would write to his fiancee my mother and enclose a handwritten poem and she kept them and bound them into this volume which which um which we still have and which quite substantially colored my own taste in poetry the the transition from undergraduate to research scientist i think is always really formative for people who who embark on science as a as a life what what was the process for you when you undergraduate yes well i i am i sort of thought i wanted just to do to do research to do a research degree and i was pretty uncertain what i wanted to do and my college tutor the wonderful peter brunet um offered me uh a project in sort of biochemical end of zoology which was his field and i accepted his suggestion and started to read up about it but i was never really fired up by it and i happened in my last but one term to have tutorials with nico tinbergen who later won the nobel prize um and he was the lecturer in animal behavior and that really inspired me and so i really really wanted to work with him and um he seemed to like my his tutorials with me and so when i went to ask him if i could do research with him he said yes and i was over the moon about that um and so i joined the animal behavior group at oxford under tin bergen and um that was a major turning point in my life and what was the actual research that you began i mean was it lab based yes it was it was lab based it was it was really nothing to do with the books that i was later to write it in a way had more in common with experimental psychology um it was a sort of i don't know how much you want me to go into i mean well i mean i mean we actually you know we we don't have that long and i think that i think the most interesting work comes comes aft after yes but this but this this we're working with tim burton set you up as a as a critical thinker as a scientist learning the scientific method learning how to how to ask scientific questions yes i mean the tin bergen group had wonderful uh seminar meetings every friday evening where i think we all learned about critical argument in in science they lasted two hours and the time just flashed by and the reason it flashed by was that it wasn't just somebody giving a lecture and then questions at the end it was constant give and take nico tinberger himself really wouldn't let the speaker get half a sentence out uh before into interrupting with what you mean by um yaya but what do you mean by and we all caught that habit and so it was a constant argument going on and that's why the time went by so quickly it was a wonderful atmosphere the the one thing you write which i absolutely agree with which is that uh not what is the point of lectures as an undergraduate but the difference between actually learning in a close proximity to a tutor in small groups or as individuals is so much more affecting than sitting in a in a lecture theater and being told things yes especially if especially if you take notes you the the one thing i always tell students is don't take notes in lectures and they all do and i did um i took notes all the time through all lectures and i don't think i ever once looked my notes ever again there was just one lecture where i forgot to bring a pen and i was extremely shy and gauche and i was much too shy to ask the young woman sitting next to me if i could borrow a pen and so i had nothing to take notes with and that lecture wasn't a particularly good lecture but i really took it in it's because i wasn't taking notes all the time and if only i'd had the sense to throw away my pen for all subsequent lectures it would have got a lot more out of them i do do you feel that this university system has changed uh to the to the extent that one-to-one tutorials or small small group tutorials have are waning yes i suppose that's true and and um i i think that is a pity but of course it's a very extravagant way of of teaching nevertheless um my own experience of the tutorial system which i think was i mean it i i thought it was wonderful um but i i don't think i actually learned from my tutors very much i did some somewhat but it was rather more the discipline of having to go into the library read up the research literature and write an essay um the function of the tutor was just to make sure you did that um i don't think i i don't think i imbibed much wisdom or knowledge from it from from my tutors but what about what about learning how to argue learning how to construct uh an intelligent elegance yes i i think the practice of writing essays is good for that and as for lectures um a lecturer who doesn't drone but um talks or grasps ideas out of the air and and thinks you couldn't it thinks uh um you but for the audience to watch a lecture thinking it out and finally finding the word or it's a it's a it's a wonderful way of learning how to be a scholar i think is to watch but many people may remember do people remember ajp taylor's lectures on television uh where he had no notes and and he would this was history and whether it was whether he practiced in front of the mirror for hours beforehand i don't know but he gave the impression that he was thinking aloud in front of the audience uh so that he wasn't just um spouting fluently he was thinking aloud and you and and people i'm sure his students felt the same way you you're watching a scholar in action uh and that is a very uh it's a it's it's a riveting experience to to watch a lecture of thinking aloud in front of you quite rare though and you sure he didn't have an auto cue no joker yeah well um it it's it's you need courage to do it but you also have to have the space to be able the space and the intellect to construct an argument on the fly yes as you're going along which yes you do which is hard work i've seen videos of you being stitched up by wicked creationists where you're doing exactly that and then they've run the whole thing oh i mean yeah i know the one you're thinking of which which is yeah oh i mean but that was a very particular case where where what i was thinking i wasn't thinking of what of of the next bit of science to say i was thinking shall i throw this person out um well you made the wrong decision okay so so that's that that's got us up to you being a research scientist and then you're still in oxford but then then there is the transition to um san francisco i i went yes i i became a very young assistant professor at the university of california in uh in berkeley in the san francisco bay area um and this was a big change it's a wonderful university it it was a time of great political unrest and uh my first wife marion and i did become very involved in the politics in the demonstrations against the vietnam war uh so this is in 60 60 968 yes um 67 to 69.

[00:39:18]um so it was the the same time as other things going on and students in the paris of 68 and uh and and similar things happening here in britain um so berkeley was a bit of an epicenter for that kind of thing and there was tear gas and police with truncheons and guns and things um so it was an interesting experience one that about which i have mixed feelings and and we left after only two years and came back to oxford i mean san francisco was legend has it the you know the epicenter of hypidum yes and and you were there at the time that it was supposedly happening it didn't take any substances at all and i don't know why not because i it never seemed to be offered i was think of all places to be in that time and of all times to be there was it i sometimes quiz my dad on this um how much have we romanticized that that period being an academic in california in san francisco in the mid 60s sounds like the stuff of uh of legend well yes um there was a there was a lot of it about and the and the the um the students were meant many of them were dressed rather oddly and um it's no different from now i was i was in the berkeley library what what once and um uh in the in the biology section and a young man came in dressed like a sort of um um king charles the first sort of dandy with a huge great hat with a great big feather and doublet and hoes and and things and he had an enormous old leather-bound french tome beautiful illustrations um beautiful hand-painted illustration it was a book of it was a book on mushrooms and he approached me in the library bearing this huge dusty volume with it with these beautiful pictures and he said um can you read french so i said well well yes a bit that's it can you translate it for me i got the spores i got the spores he wanted to know how to grow the spores of this magic mushroom which so he got very close to the drugs but still didn't take anything yeah what were you what were you studying at this point what what was what was the research in canada it was it was that what i described as sort of experimental psychology it was sort of very very briefly it was using behavior to try to work out what was going on inside the animal skull so whereas neurobiologists cut the skull open and look at the brain and stick probes into it and stick electrodes into it another approach is to treat the animal as a black box this is pure porperian science now you treat the animal as a black box you come up with a hypothesis a model of what might be going on inside inside the animal do some algebra to deduce predictions behavioral predictions and then test the predictions and what i was interested in is that the predictions should be mathematically precise it's not good enough to predict that a quantity x should be greater than a quantity y any fool can do that i wanted to predict that a quantity x had to be exactly some function of why um and because that gives a much more convincing um evidence that for them for the model and i won't say what the model was but it was but it but the predictions were i have to say myself remarkably successful i mean they they were very very precise um and um so i see it not so much as telling us anything really interesting about what's going on inside a baby chick's head but rather as an exercise in how it's possible to do um black box modeling tested by doing algebra and then and then doing it doing experimental tests of the predictions now so i i'm very interested in we've talked about how families and as geneticists and evolutionary biologists how families may or may not influence the interaction between nature and nurture i i'm really interested as a sort of lay science historian in the genesis of where people's scientific interest comes from and it's um around about the same time the publication by bill hamilton is i think is the seed of what then becomes the defining period of your yes of your life yeah but tell us about that tell us about how you get from there to the idea of the selfies yes well um bill hamilton w d hamilton um was um at that in the early 1960s he was a graduate student in london and he produced um a couple of papers in 1964 which were revolutionary pioneering and have had uh an enormous influence but after a tremendous delay nobody took any notice of them at all for about 10 years or or yes about 10 10 years until about 1974.

[00:44:37]and ever since then they have been hugely influential this is the whole idea of kin selection what hamilton called inclusive fitness the idea that um natural selection works at the level of the gene and what follows from that is that you can expect animals to take care not just of their own offspring which of course is pure darwinism but also of other relatives collateral relatives sisters brothers cousins why was that revolutionary at that at that time what was what was the the general consensus the thinking well people weren't thinking about it very much i mean people were aware that the social insects were an odd case and in a dim sort of way they had the idea but hamilton did the mathematics uh and um produced these seminal papers in 1964.

[00:45:25]um we became aware of them in oxford rather early because mike cullen who was nico tinvergen's number two and i think probably the most important mentor in my life um although he wasn't my official supervisor he was very good at keeping up with the literature and he gave us an evening seminar on hamilton's work and i was immediately fired up by this and read it myself and then in in 1966 nico tinbergen went on sabbatical leave and asked me to give his let give the lectures instead of him in his place in animal behavior and i was rather diffident but i wanted to include hamilton's work and make a big thing of it and make i think i'd in the end based two lectures on it which was quite a departure from what tim bergen himself had done um and i was rather pleased very recently while writing this book to discover my old lecture notes which i had no idea i still possessed but i found them and i found the relevant lecture and was quite astonished really to see that the um that the words i'd used in that 1966 lecture might have been straight out of the selfish gene which i wrote 10 10 years later and had sort of forgotten uh the lecture that all the same rhetoric about genes being immortal you know leaping from generation to generation casting aside a succession of mortal bodies um i used the phrase selfish gene uh in in this 1966 uh lecture and then um [Music] there's a facsimile of the of the page of lecture notes in in in the book gave the same sort of lecture gave the same nature really in berkeley and california as well um in 1967.

[00:47:24]and then didn't do anything with it until of sort of ten years later uh and then and wrote the selfish gene and by then there was a lot more work had been done what was it that grabs you about about hamilton's work on on kid's election was it the maths well it was the it was the idea of the gene as the unit of selection i mean that it's such a powerful um hamilton yes he did pretty much put it like that but but um it it the the gene is immortal in fact a publisher once when i showed him the first couple of chapters of the selfish gene said you shouldn't call it that you should call it the immortal gene and perhaps i should have done genes are immortal in the sense that the coded information they contain is reproduced is replicated with almost total fidelity significantly not absolutely total fidelity generation after generation after generation such that there are genes which are identical to what they were tens of millions of years ago hundreds of millions of years ago in a few cases um so genes are immortal not not the dna of course that's not that turns over in a very short space of time but the coded information is potentially immortal and that means that the difference between a successful gene and an unsuccessful gene really matters it's going to matter for millions of years so the genes that make it through those millions of years are the ones that are good at it and good at it means good at building bodies good at controlling the processes of embryology to make bodies which have what it takes to preserve those genes and pass them on and so i use this phrase survival machine a body an individual is a is a survival machine and that's by far the most powerful way of interpreting what an individual organism is an individual organism is a throwaway survival machine for the self-replicating coded information which it contains and the fate of that coded information is crucially bound up with the fate of the body in which it sits if the body in which it sits dies before reproducing then that coded information is not going to go on the next generation and the next and potentially for tens of millions of years so the genes that are in the world today distributed as they are in bodies of millions of different different species are here today because they were good at what they did in the past they've come through an in a literally unbroken line of successful ancestors where unsuccessful non-ancestors have been littered by the by the by the wayside and so the genes in a swallow or in a kangaroo or in a hedgehog or in a human are all very very good at making swallows or hedgehogs or kangaroos or or humans they had to be good at it or they wouldn't have come through the generations um today now that i think is an inspiring vision and that's what fired me up about about um uh the the very idea of the selfish gene in in my in when i first read hamilton and then when i when i wrote it down in my first in my lectures and then and then in the in the selfish genes so so the the idea the genesis of the idea comes in the mid-60s from from bill hamilton and then it big it sort of lies not not ignored but not not really researched further and then some people like bob trivers picks it up yes i mean actually to be fair i mean it's it's inherent in the neo-darwinian synthesis of the 1930s actually um in in fisher and and and holden um and and and hamilton particularly applied it to the problem of the relationship between kin between um [Music] but but it wasn't only a kin that inspired me it was the very idea of the survival machine of of immortal genes which goes back to the 1930s i think the so the um writing the book itself this is a it was a popular science book it was a bestseller it's one of the the biggest selling um popular science books ever how how did that transform how did you get from the end of the 60s giving this lecture and yes to it becoming well it was rather different from my research and um but i was always interested in it from as a as a teacher really and then in the early 70s i forget which year might have been 72 or 73 um it was during grosser heath's um uh government and there was a series of strikes um and there was a three there was a three-day week uh when there were the power was cut for great chunks of every week so i couldn't do my lab research and decided that now is the time to try to put down these thoughts that i'd been in my lectures put down in a book and so i started writing this book and i think i'd done about two chapters maybe just one chapter when the strike ended the power came back on um rather unfortunately from one point of view um because i then shelved the book i've just put it in a draw and forgot about it and got on with my research and then um went back to it about three years later in 1975 and got a sabbatical leave and then wrote the book very very fast in in the meantime since since i started the first chapter new work had come along work as you mentioned by bob trivers um applying a sort of economic ideas bringing in bringing in um the ideas of of economists opportunity costs that sort of idea into evolutionary theory and the game theory of maynard smith the great main arts yes maynard smith absolutely um so in 1975 when i wrote the selfish gene i was able to incorporate these highly relevant ideas of trivers and maynard smith and add them to the ideas of hamilton uh and it made it it's all synthesized so there you go the unionization was the director uh genesis of of of the selfish gene i don't know whether there's a political message in there at all so so you then you then write you write this book it's a it was it immediately successful well um i tell you my my dad has a first first edition which we still have with the original desmond morris cover on it which he bought the year the first impression first of the month it was it was yeah um you might like to look on ebay at what price we have to sign it first um it it it was it was very widely reviewed uh i don't quite know why because i was completely unknown but it but i'm very grateful that it was widely reviewed and almost universally favorably reviewed with a couple of very notable exceptions um which which were very hostile um but mostly it was very favorably reviewed it was helped by a television program on bbc a horizon program called the selfish gene um uh the producer peter jones got hold of the book and wanted to make a program about it um i was he i he invited me to present the program but i was much too shy to um to want to go on television that stage and i suggested that maynard smith should do it which he did very well and so there was a program called the selfish gene a horizon program called the selfish gene in i think 1977 um and that did give a big boost to sales of the book it's the 50th anniversary of horizon next year and there will be various um re-showings and celebrations involving that i'm pretty sure that that is is going to be in in the menu for it tell us about the criticism because i i think it's interesting from a scientific point okay um the two the two major critics were well richard lewinton who was a very is a very distinguished american population geneticist um attacked it for what later became known as adaptationism um attacked it for a sort of panglossian view that everything is perfect in the natural world and and but whatever an animal does it must have some uh some advantage um i i dealt with that criticism i think in my second book the extended phenotype and and in a chapter called constraints on perfection the other major criticism was genetic determinism um the the idea which again i don't hold didn't hold and don't that um we are the slaves of our genes in an embryological sense so this was a straight misunderstanding the um from an evolutionary point of view genes are absolutely central for the reason that i just said that they are potentially immortal and therefore natural selection should be thought of as working at the level of the gene natural selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools so that kind of seems to elevate the gene to a position of great importance but it absolutely does not elevate it to a position of great importance in embryology it it's very important in in evolution but in embryology that would mean that genes determine the way you are in a way that was that is sort of irrevocable and rather sinister so if you talk about a gene for aggression and it's necessary to talk about a gene for aggression or a gene for doing all sorts of things when talking talking about evolution you want to know why it is that a particular characteristic like fighting or mate guarding or incest avoidance anything like that anything that animals do you want to know why it evolves and so you have to postulate a gene for whatever it is a gene for x in order to see how it how that gene would would increase or decrease in the gene pool over generations but that is misunderstood to be saying that if you have a gene this mythical gene for being aggressive you are irrevocably aggressive and nothing can stop you having brawls and fights wherever you meet wherever you you you meet anybody else um you can't cure yourself of this terrible genetic propensity to be to be aggressive was nothing to do with the argument i wasn't talking about that at all i was talking about the necessity of postulating a gene for x otherwise you can't talk about the evolution of x because the evolution of x has to come about through natural selection of genes in gene pools for a tendency to do x but it doesn't mean you irrevocably inevitably do x whether you do x or not may well depend very very largely on the environment it's an incredibly culturally pervasive idea that which i think has a long and interesting history but it is a fun game to go on google if you're actually people like us to go on google and type in scientists discover the gene for yeah yes and every newspaper every media outlet does it on a regular basis and i tried right with nothing other than pure vanity to suggest that this might be known as rutherford's law yes that's it if a headline says scientists discover the gene for x they haven't because it doesn't exist yes quite yeah um now we are we are a little bit short of time i want to ask you before i open it up to the floor i want to ask you how the selfish gene has survived how is it how it's born up over the last 35 years yes in terms of the science it's still a bestseller you only have to look on amazon and it's always in the top 10.

[00:59:31]i mean an awful lot more is now known about genes themselves an awful lot more more is known about genomes um the human genome has been secrets the chimpanzee genome has been sequenced lots of other animal and plant genomes have been sequenced so a lot is known about genes a lot is known about how they interact with each other um and that's wonderful and extremely exciting i mean really really rivetingly exciting the way genetics actually the whole of biology has become a branch of information technology i mean it's just like computer science it's not binary it's quaternary but apart from that it just is computer science and that is fascinating um i don't think it actually changes the fundamental message of the selfish gene at all because um the gene as in the selfish gene is the gene as used by george c williams who's another of the of the sort of four major influences on the book um it's the it's the unit that um population geneticists study and i've always started even before dna was known was really known about so when you study pedigrees when you look at the inheritance of characteristics you can talk about genes without actually knowing that there's anything to do with dna and when you're talking about evolution natural selection you're looking at the frequency of genes in gene pools in butterflies or peas or whatever it might be and you don't have to know about dna to do that you just need to study pedigrees so although it's very nice to to to know so much more about what genes actually are the knowledge of what they actually are hasn't changed the fundamental message that natural selection works at the level of the gene natural selection is changes in gene frequencies in gene pools and therefore individual bodies individual organisms can be regarded as survival machines for their for their immortal genes um embryologically it's very complicated uh embryologically genes cooperate with each other in very very intricate ways to build to build bodies and that that actually is i i've already sort of put that in the self-esteem it's all it's it's all there and that's um that idea has become more and more substantiated i i i think one of you know one of the big revelations of the human genome project the first sequencing of the of of our total dna was how few actual genes we have so um 20 around about 22 000 which is the same number as you know family car parts um and and also that almost all of our genome is not genes at all um so three billion letters of genetic code of which less than three percent is is actually genes i i've spoken to a number of geneticists who are thinking about moving away from the traditional concept of the gene as being a unit of protein encoding information and to start looking way beyond into into the bits of the genome which we used to call junk dna but we now know are far from rubbish but we but often we don't know what it is they're doing those you know the majority of of dna that we carry does do those bits fit into the sort of the overall concept of a unit of information which is which is what's embodied in the the genome it's it's sort of like um like the hard disk on a computer which is filled with rubbish and filled with you know old copies of things that you once wrote and saved and deleted and when when you think you've deleted something from your hard disk it's still there all you've done is delete the pointer to it and um there are lots and lots of parts of the genome which are which are like that which are which are old outdated genes that are no longer being being read there are repetitive bits of dna which are just simple nonsense just an 80 80 80 8080 um so the the genome is sort of a mess um but um just like um just like computer disks are um we are finding bits in what the things that don't directly code for proteins more and more by looking at whole genomes yes surveying more and more people's genomes yes we're finding many more bits of things which once looked like nonsense but we do see they are conserved that many people have similar bits and also that we see variations in those non-coding regions which seem to associate with characteristics in humans particularly interested in diseases yes um and they're probably very important when another striking fact is that um we we wanted humans have the same number of genes as other mammals and and um so i think the way to look at that is um once again using the computer analogy um something like um well a modern desktop computer a mac or something has a toolbox of routines which do all the familiar things like pulling down menus and resizing menus and those little boxes that you click in and they make a cross and things like that um the reason why macintosh programs all look alike and the reason why windows programs all look alike is that they all use the same toolbox repertoire of of routines and so the the resizing of a window no matter whether it's microsoft word or excel or whatever it is it all uses the same toolbox routine for um and that's the that's the way to think of many of our protein encoding genes they're they're a toolbox um for embryological technology and it's the same toolbox from for mice and men but mice and men use the call those toolbox routines in a different order and that's what makes the difference between uh between a mouse center and a human they have essentially the same and that's true of of computer programs too they they all use the same toolbox routines calling them in a in a different order and so the the sort of high level controlling genes which are calling other other genes is what is what is where the interesting action is right i'm going to open it up to the audience now we do we have um wandering mics brilliant so if you thrust your hands up and wait for a mic to come to you and i'll try and pick you in as democratic order as i can gentlemen at the very back row was was first up and then this chap in the front row and then this gentleman here it's quite difficult to see with the lights yes hello um fascinating lecture and i'm fascinated by your work and your lectures um is there another career that you might have gone into had you not gone into the one you did go into was there another branch you might have gone off into biological or otherwise when i was born in the escoteen nursing home there was another young dawkins born i think the same day also his father was also c dawkins and my mother sometimes jokes that we may have been muddled up um the other c dawkins was a missionary and the boy the boys also has become a missionary i actually met him in nairobi a couple of years ago i don't think i'm a changeling i don't think i could ever have been a missionary i could have been a computer scientist i think and was constantly even in the career that i have had was constantly being seduced uh into the addictive vice of computer programming um so that would be one definite uh one definite possibility yes okay then it was next this gentleman here professor dawkins i'd like to thank you for everything you've done because you've really inspired me as a as a student but my question is um i would love to go into popular science like yourself or neil degrasse tyson or carl sagan what advice can you give to an 18 year old student who really knows nothing yet about science as a whole and how to get into popular science in the future oh yeah i hate that sort of question um admitting that you know nothing that's the first step yes um i think adam should answer these questions as well um well science is beautiful um there is there's enormous beauty to be found in the real world studied uh properly physicists know this very well of course because beauty sort of rules what they do to such a large extent but it's true of biology as well um there is um the the real world is wonderful the fact that we evolved creatures at the end of four billion years of evolution are capable of doing science of doing of of understanding the process that gave rise to us in the case of of biology is an astounding fact which i never really fully get used to so if you choose a career in science i think you've you've chosen one of the noblest careers you could have done i mean teaching is another one and you can combine the two i don't know whether you want to teach science or do research or what but both of them are a wonderful things to do with with it with you with your life i wish you i'm good fortune i mean science is difficult uh it's um um but it's it's hard but but worth it um there's enough difficulty in science that you sh that you should never be seduced by the device of um [Music] languaging it up to try to make it sound more impressive or more difficult than it really is let other academic disciplines do that because they've got less difficult about anyway science is difficult enough already so so keep it as simple as it got einstein said everything should be as simple as possible but no simpler from a practical point of view do do what you love but do it and do it over again over and over again and practice and be the best at it because there isn't a single route that's right you know you're here now after a sort of torturous um pathway that started in academia and went via multi-million selling books and and then little dalliance with the church and which you can talk about the next time you're here um so just just be brilliant i think it's the answer thank you easy as that yeah thank you thank you so much honestly um i think this guy was next and and then and then right behind him if you could uh go back in time and be around when a scientist made an invention or a discovery or published a part-breaking piece of research which one would it be did everyone hear that um so if you could go back in time and be present at the discovery of a a great piece of work which would it be well sorry to be boring but i think it has to be darwin doesn't it really yes uh i mean it would be it'd be lovely to know why he sat on it for so long um uh until until wallis almost scooped him um and whether he really didn't didn't realize that it was such a you know a likely thing that somebody else would would come along um with hindsight the idea does seem so astonishingly simple that the surprise is that it didn't occur to somebody a thousand years earlier two thousand years earlier um you've said that before and you've said that in using using the quotation from huxley who said how extremely stupid of me not to have thought of that yes yeah now i i i've read that and i've quoted it myself and and sometimes i think yes yes it's so once you explain natural selection it's such an elegant and brilliant idea probably the best idea that anyone's ever had and then you look at the amount of work that darwin puts into the origin and the the years he did sit on it for complex reasons but the years of research before he felt reluctantly that he had to release it but i think it's slightly when you say how stupid of me not not to have thoughts of that myself as huxley did it it's slightly underplays what a brilliant scientist he was what a hard work he didn't pluck it out of nowhere no you you have to say that because the fact is that that well arguably one or two other people but it nobody thought of it until the middle of the 19th century and so it must be hard um and but but hindsight is a wonderful thing and it does i mean it seems so much easier than many of the great discoveries of physicists for example but you get no argument from me there yeah um so i would like to know why he sat on it for so long um he was a lovely man he was a gentleman um a very a very kind honorable man um as was wallace i mean the whole the whole interaction between darwin and wallace is a is a very heartwarming heartwarming story because it could have been a very ugly dispute um so there was one question right behind you so if you might pass the mic back and then there were a cluster of hands on this side so we'll just try and spread it across the room um yes um maybe this isn't quite so easy um i was very interested in your description of a body as a survival machine and and the fact that the genes are the mechanism for fine-tuning this um i just wondered where you view this horrible thing we may have in the brain which religious people love to refer to as free will would you want to separate that activity free will from the genes or would you want to roll them in together i was thinking of things like free will takes us to the first world war which nearly wipes out the aristocracy we're all charging over the top towards the machine guns i mean you can't see the genes really controlling that it's something else oh yeah which can be very lethal to the human body and even to tribes not just yes i i would never ever um have suggested that that genes are somehow um controlling the will in that in that sort of way i mean philosophically i think any materialist um has to be pretty well tempted by the view that free will is an illusion and that um what we decide to do and we really do think we decide to do it it really does feel like free will must be determined not by genes except in a very statistical sense but determined by um the the chain of causation immensely complicated causes in the nervous system in the environment i mean so complicated as to be um almost impossible to to to trace but i don't think we want to be to be mystical about about free will it it it like anything else in the in the world it is what what we do what what we decide to do the thoughts that we have the the actions that we take must be determined but not in a not at all in an easy way and the illusion of free will is so powerful that we might just as well have it because we all think we have it and we all um but but you don't have to drag genes in at all because because genes are just um among the many causal factors which feed in in a statistical sense uh into the making us the way the way we are uh but but i wouldn't put it any more stronger than that okay so there was a there was this lady in the second row and then the gentleman in front of her thank you you mentioned shyness your own shyness a couple of times and given the very public life you've lived i was curious to know whether that was something you had to consciously overcome at some point in your life or whether it just dissipated with time sorry i didn't catch the key word shyness shine oh shyness [Music] you mentioned in the book that you had a stutter quite a not insignificant stutter as a yes at school well yes as a small boy i had a stutter and then at school it resurfaced um probably because it was rather stressful environment and um to the point where we we we had to when we marked ourselves out of 10 in a in an exercise and then we had to sing out the mark that we'd got at the end of the lesson when i got 10 out of 10 i would say 9 because i couldn't say 10.

[01:17:48]um so yes but when stutters are rather complicated i mean you know i don't really understand what that's about i i vividly remember the trauma of it it is quite a difficult thing to have um but shyness may be a bit different um i suppose i was very shy as a boy um i was certainly very shy about approaching girls um and um yes i suppose i got a bit less shy um but not that wasn't supposed to it wasn't that wasn't supposed to raise a laugh you are married to you're all married to one of doctor who's assistants which uh uh i i think the best one well you're right there i mean yes that's because i was five when i was when i was watching this yes um she yeah i mean that that that is the definitive doctor who and isn't it um and yeah okay we don't we don't want to enrage any other groups you've already got christians and creationists yeah doctor whovians are much worse than both of them um this gentleman on the front row with a stripey t-shirt hi there a question about um science in film um san francisco 68 i imagine you saw 2001 a space odyssey not too long after it was released i wonder what you thought about what it said about evolution the god question and indeed what some of your other favorite films are or were that include science as a major theme right um to 2001 um one rather rather sad thing is that it was more optimistic about the progress that would have been made by 2001.

[01:19:36]i mean you know um pan-american didn't have spaceships going to jupiter and won't have for a very long time um so so that was opt over optimistic um [Music] the the sort of theological question you're asking um i suppose the main thing i got from it really was the idea that um i mean i did the the the thing about extraterrestrials coming and firing up our um eight ancestors that that's obviously an interesting science fiction idea but obviously it's not true but um but the the the end sequence where the where the hero um is transported into what i suppose it's meant to be a wormhole or something i mean it's a it's a it's a very it's um it conveys to me the idea that there's a hell of a lot that we have yet to understand that that we are we are just infants we're babes in arms where the deep problems of the universe are concerned and i find that a very inspiring thought it could be wrong i mean it could be but physicists of every generation have sort of thought physics is coming to an end and maybe this time they'd be right but i find myself actually more as equally inspired by the idea that physics really might come to an end and we really might understand everything and equally inspired by the idea that there's always going to be something more and it's more and more mysterious the deep problems are ever more um elusive um as um as as we make make progress towards them by the way there's a live performance of 2001 with the the score being performed by the philharmonia next month at the royal festival hall i went last year and it was singularly the the best concert i've ever been to i thoroughly recommend that um did it have the richard strauss the whole school done performed live in front of the film it was and christina kubrick introduced it as well which didn't didn't hurt at all sorry about that this is just a little plug for the royal festival hall there um this gentleman was first and then this lady on the end can you would you chuck the mic over thank you um you said earlier that um when you wrote the selfish gene you were sort of putting down ideas uh that you had used in your lectures and your teaching when you started writing the book what was your initial uh idea of the what the finished product would be and uh what audience were you giving it towards and did that change during its writing well when i first started writing it that was before the injection of the trivers and maynard smith theories which fleshed it out a good deal and which inspired me to take it up again um so i suppose it was going to be mostly about natural selection the jean's eye view of selection i certainly was going to talk about um kinship and social insects and aggression but game theory was something that came in came in later um what was the other part of your question that oh the audience was there a culture of popular science books at that time i suppose jim watson's slightly fabulous account of the discovery of dna yes um that's a bit different that's more autobiographical and gossip um and um slightly unkind i mean he's slightly yeah okay it's wicked yes um there was um desmond morris there was um conrad lawrence um carl sagan was because this was afterwards was it after yes um the audience well in the preface to the selfish gene i distinguished um uh i think three possible readers the student the professional biologist and the and the lay person and i and i said that i had all three of them in mind i think i don't think i'd be too wrong in saying that it actually has succeeded in not only um being read by laypeople but actually changing the way professional evolutionary biologists think uh it's it's not that i made any original contribution to that and since it was already inherent in the synthesis of the 1930s the fisher haldane right synthesis and made very much much more explicit by hamilton and and others um but i do like to think that people who are actually out there in the field working on lions or giraffes or palm trees or whatever it is um from an evolutionary point of view now think in terms of maximizing gene survival that's what their lions are doing that's what their zebras are doing um and i like to think that the selfish gene might have had something to do with changing the way professional biologists think when they go into into the field and and actually work on on on animal behavior i think that's undeniable now i think we're just about out of time but the lady who's got the mic at the moment on the on the right oh sorry there's there's also one have you got the mic there you will hold you hold yours for just a second there's one from the gentleman they i can't see you're behind a light sorry um most scientists usually stick to this sort of adult side of science so why did you start writing children's like books for children as well um i have written one book for children um well let's say young people um 12 and down and up called the magic of reality sort of jointly when dave mckean did um the pictures um which are um very very beautiful pictures um and it's um it's a book about science generally it's a book about a whole series of questions about science and each chapter uh is a question like what is the sun or what is a rainbow or why do we have night and day why do we have uh winter and summer and each chapter begins with myths from around the world in answer to that question and then is followed by the scientific answer to the question and i took care to make sure that the myths were drawn from all all around the world and so some are familiar some are unfamiliar but that's the only children's book i've written okay and i think the final question from this lady on the right here um advances in medical science can bring a great deal of joy to people whose lives are saved and to their families and friends but do you think that there's a risk or a concern for the human race as a whole if what it's leading to is the survival of people who previously would have died well it's nice to have a nice uncontroversial question um and cheery yes um this actually um is something that that bothered w.d hamilton himself um and he became quite unpopular for doing so um well not unpopular but controversial um i think that if if if what you if you're misgiving is is right and then certainly in theory there's a lot to be said for it um i would not um wish to take action to to bring medical science to a halt as a result i think it's worth it um i like living in a world where there are doctors and hospitals um and uh i wouldn't wish to go back to a sort of law of the jungle um in the interests of the future of the of the of the race um so um you you you may have a point um but um i think it's worth it well i agree and i think that's a very positive note to finish on so wrapping up quickly i'd like you to join me in thanking richard dawkins [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you