RICHARD DAWKINS vs BRET WEINSTEIN for the FIRST TIME EVER! EVOLUTION, BIOLOGY, SCIENCE!

Let's pray, okay, no, that's not the direction of the night. Did you want to say a few words or will I say some in a moment? But then, I wanted to give a little guidance on where we are. tonight I think this is actually a unique opportunity because Richard and I are dead-in-the-wool

evolution

ary biologists and we come from a lineage of thought and that lineage of thought has led us to many of the same conclusions, but there are places where that our thoughts drift away from each other and that's why tonight we're going to talk about

biology

and I especially believe in what it has to say about human beings and the way they evolve, plus the fact that we don't agree on some things important.

It's, you know, potentially tense, but I hope that to the extent that there is a confrontation between ideas here, it's a friendly confrontation. I think we both belong to a tradition where we believe that honorable disagreement is important and is essential for society to function well, so I hope that even if the disagreements are intense at

time

s, that it is in the context of friendship, well , okay, okay, so we're on the same page, maybe I should do it too. I say I have a bit of an advantage here because Richard has done an excellent job of documenting his thoughts on

evolution

in his excellent books and during the 14 years I taught evolutionary

biology

at Evergreen, without fail I assigned the selfish gene to my students, now the selfish Gene you wrote in 1976, I'm right that you were 35, so Richard wrote that book as Young Gun and it's shocking to me to have to say this, but I think that book is still cutting edge.

The reason I assigned it to my students was that I thought overall it presented the best summary available of what we understood about evolutionary dynamics, and while there are some things that aren't in it that came up later, I still believe. That is the case and one of the things we can end up talking about tonight is why there hasn't been more progress after the huge burst of activity we saw in the late '60s and early '70s. Why, my era ? has been much calmer regarding important discoveries about Evolution that we all agree are true.

You have something to add. Yes. I'm not sure why this is shocking to you. I mean, of course, we all pay lip service to the idea that progress is good and we should be changing all the

time

, but what if we're right and then it doesn't necessarily follow that what people thought back in the day? 1960s and 1970s is still largely believed to be a bad thing, maybe it is? Actually, well, I think this is a very interesting perspective and it's one that I held when I was in college. I was a student of Robert Triers, who is a contemporary of Richards.

And as his student I looked at the landscape of the questions and I felt that it was not resentment, but I felt a little sadness because it seemed that Richard and Bob's generation had run the table and had solved all the big problems of evolutionary biology and that we were just They had left little problems and, over time, I realized that that was not the case, that there were important unresolved issues that we had stopped talking about because there was no progress, so I started to look at those issues and say: what have we gone wrong?

It made us stop moving forward on questions like why females in many species require males to put on elaborate displays before mating with them. That question is still unanswered. There are many ideas on the table, but as for one, we are all in agreement. agreement Nothing has emerged: Why are there more species as you approach the equator and fewer species as you move towards the poles? Why do we become weak and inefficient with age? These are all questions where some progress had been made, but that progress seemed like I think I've plateaued, so I don't disagree with you that your generation got it very right, but what I'm wondering is why progress has slowed down. , given the number of big questions that remain to be solved, and a related question is why there does not seem to be a generation of biologists who followed you and who seem to be working in a way that would allow them to solve big questions in the way that Ra did.

Fisher or you or Bob Triers. I don't see that generation of biologists who are capable of wielding tools in the bold way that you all managed, I think then the responsibility falls on you, let's talk about a particular example, like let's say the SE, the sexual selection that you bred and say What do you think has not been good? obviously you're right, it's still going on and there's a lot of controversy, it's a very burgeoning field, there are a lot of people working in the field, working in the field of sexual selection, there are two main streams of theory. of sexual selection um maybe you could trace them back to Fisher on the one hand and well, Wallace um from Harvey um Hamilton on the other and they're both very interesting theories, they both could probably work.

I mean, what's going on? with that's a great question, um, this is what's wrong with it, so what does Richard mean? And I think you and I would both side with Hamilton in this argument and I imagine we would both be advocates of good genes. interest no, I mean, I, I would be, we need to explain what this is, I mean, yes, maybe yes, um uh Darwin noted that uh many biological characters, animal characteristics of males, especially, apparently advertise themselves to females. . Peacock tails, um, beautiful feathers, beautiful fish, that kind of thing. and Darwin was content simply to say that that is what females like, it is a matter of aesthetics, a matter of female whim and, therefore, for a male to reproduce successfully and pass on his genes he has to be attractive and Therefore, the genes for being attractive are passed on. to the next generation because women choose them.

Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, hated that idea. Wallace was more utilitarian and believed that beautiful features like those in Peacock's Tales had to be useful. It was not enough to simply say that women love. You had to tell them that this is somehow an advertisement for a good man, a man who will be a good father or a good provider of good genes. Wallace would not have used that phraseology, of course, and that division between Darwin and Wallace has persisted from the beginning. From the 19th century to the 20th century, Wallace felt that invoking feminine taste bordered on mysticism, and Darwin's idea was rescued in the 1920s and 1930s by Ra Fischer, one of the great founders of population genetics. modern, and Ra Fisher made the d Darwin's theory is respectable by allowing female choice to be under genetic control much as male anatomy, male heels, etc., are under genetic control and Fisher produced a model that must have been a mathematical model, although he did not describe it in In mathematical terms, it must have been there that natural selection acts simultaneously on the genes of males to be beautiful and on the genes of females to like beauty and when you realize Since both male and female babies inherit their parents' genes for being beautiful and their mother's genes for liking beauty, those two go together and can produce something like a peacock's tail, which was the Fisher's theory which has been updated by modern mathematical biologists, but the current Wallace theory, which Brett favors and, to some extent, I also agree with Wallace that beauty has to be useful and adopts the idea that what a woman does when she is beautiful is advertising for men.

Sorry, what a man does when he advertises for women is advertising for women, for example. that he is healthy that he is strong in the extreme version of the theory because of Amos Zahavi, a man is publicity that he has, he is a man in such good shape that he is able to survive despite having this ridiculous story, um, he should have killed because it's vulnerable to predators, you can't fly very well with it, etc., and the less extreme versions of that theory are attributable to W. D. Hamilton, who thought that, um, health was the primary virtue that a man advertises to women and a beautiful story.

It's an ad for a woman, this is a healthy man, he doesn't suffer from parasites, he's resistant to parasites, otherwise he wouldn't have this beautiful, sexy tail, so, um, that was just an interruption because we were talking about um, the, the, zahavy. Hamilton-type theory that favors Brett, sorry, okay, then no, that's perfect, and it actually makes exactly the point I was trying to make, which is that now you've heard a lot, there's a lot of good work suggesting that this could be a disadvantage. That would show that genes have to be heritable for females to be favored when selecting them, but the problem is that there is a rotten part of this theory at the heart of this theory, which is that females choose to inflict this burden on their children. their male offspring, which is ecologically certain to be costly to them, so if females try to find good genes by testing males, then they are inflicting bad genes on their male offspring, those bad genes will be passed on by their female offspring but not expressed. then the females will not suffer the cost of that disadvantage, but there is the question of how the females recover enough benefit for their female offspring to justify the cost to the male offspring, so there is a way in which, although can make a mathematical estimate compelling argument for a disadvantage idea or a good jeans idea, um, that has to represent a very large benefit to the female offspring and, what's worse, if you imagine a species like let's say we're talking about peacocks, peacocks, the female, the feather inflicts this.

Wonderful story about her male offspring choosing parents who have it in peacocks, like all creatures that have these elaborate displays, the males bring nothing but genes, so if she chooses something valuable, it has to be encoded in the jeans, um, so she inflicts this cost on him. male offspring and presumably then acquire a benefit for their female offspring, but they do so in each and

ever

y generation, only a small number of males, the males in each generation mate, the females who choose these tales choose the same males over and over again, so it should leave the number of bad genes in the environment very small because females eliminate those bad genes in each and

ever

y generation, which means that after a small number of generations There should be very little advantage in choosing males with beautiful tails because there are no bad genes left and therefore The question is whether one of these good gene hypotheses is correct.

Why is female surveillance constant? Women should select against bad genes. The number of bad genes decreases. Female surveillance now has no value. Female surveillance should decrease. The bad genes should come back. Female surveillance should increase. again and we should see an oscillating pattern but we don't, what we see is that generation after generation the females choose the males with the most elaborate Tales, so it doesn't matter what the answer is here, the point is that this is a question of that year. After year it remains with us and we make no progress on it, we are still looking for explanations that have value but do not fully answer the question, so why?

But this is a question of mathematical modeling and it is being done and there are several different mathematical models that we can't get into right now, but, but I mean, this is something, it is an active field of theoretical research, well, and it is happening. I must say that I have become somewhat skeptical of mathematical models because it suffers. Of two types of errors that are quite obvious, one is that sometimes it will give you an answer that is not viable in reality; In other words, if we were to mathematically model the way a sphere sits on a razor, as long as no other forces enter.

In this system we will be told that a sphere will balance on a razor, but we all know that a sphere does not balance on a razor, the correct mathematical model will tell you that a cup of coffee in a room will require an infinite amount of time to equalize will approach the temperature of the room and the room will approach the temperature of the coffee but they will never reach each other, we know this is not the case so mathematical modeling has a way of tricking us. to think that we have the right answer when we don't and the other problem is that these mathematical models very often have so many parameters that you can match any natural behavior even if the model is not the reason why the natural behavior The behavior is what which is, so I'm actually a little surprised to hear you defend it, but the remedy for that is better mathematical models, it's not to dismiss mathematical models altogether, well, I don't know, I had a mentor, um. in graduate school, who was a mathematician and one day he told me something surprising, he said thatMathematics is the language we turn to when we don't know how to explain something, so I would say that yes, mathematical models can reinforce an explanation that in itself is sensible, but if we don't have an explanation that actually satisfies the fact that we have a mathematical model that suggests it, I don't find it particularly convincing because there are so many ways to get there and back. to what you started to say about the difficulty with the zahav theory that the female inflicts the way you put it, it was correct for the female to inflict on her offspring the disadvantage as well as the benefit.

I mean, that's exactly what what I said in the Selfish Gene when I ridiculed the Zahavi theory and I was wrong because my student UAlan Grafen, who is now an associate professor at Oxford, produced a mathematical model showing that, in fact, the Zahavi theory can work and we were wrong. Everyone else was wrong and Graphin proved us wrong. wrong by producing a mathematical model that shows that zahav disability theory can work um and uh, I'm not a mathematician and I have to bow to that. I understand the model and I think it works. I think it's very good. one and I in Humble Pie said I was wrong and my student Alan Graphin was right well, but I think you're too quick to accept that you were wrong and in fact, I'm not sure about this.

It's been a while since I read it, but if I'm right, what you said about zahav on self-esteem was that this was not like that. I'm right that you said it didn't sound like how natural selection works. I think I was a little bit more helm than that, that's likely, um, but I'm not quite sure what I mean, how could you argue the case without? There are some cases where you generally didn't use math and I have made AR verbal arguments and so I should agree with you on this, but there are times when I have to say that a verbal argument just isn't enough, You have to do the sums right.

I think a verbal argument has to be proven by data and a way to obtain data. I have to say it's not my favorite, but one way to get data is to generate a model that is robust enough to generate behavior that reflects what you see, but I also think that in a sense that the field has adopted this mode of trying things because you've forgotten what to do, that there are actually features of the modern academic environment that effectively rule out the kind of wonderful work that Ra Fisher did or that you did, and that's why I think it's very fashionable to give in to these very tools.

The point is that we build the model, so if we can take the example of George Williams and his famous article on the evolution of the senses. The wonderful thing about this article is that it says if George Williams is right about the cause of the senses being the weakness and inefficiency that accumulates with age, he said, if I'm right about the cause of this, then you'll see these patterns in nature and we knew it for a long time before we could find the genes that he had predicted, we knew it for a long time. For a long time that his hypothesis was correct, in other words, that it was a theory because when we looked at nature we saw the exact pattern that he had described and that's why I'm a fan of that kind of work, you say, well, here's an observation , here is the hypothesis that would explain it and if this hypothesis is correct this is the pattern that we will see in nature which we do not know if it is still there and then it is there.

I think we need to pause and explain George Williams' theory of sin. Essence um because otherwise I don't think it makes sense um um the problem of why natural selection favors um aging and dying of old age and um there were misconceptions things like um it's for the good of the species that the old die and give way to young people something like that, well, that doesn't work, that's not the way natural selection works. um PB meow and then refined by George Williams came up with a much better theory based on genetics, which is that if you imagine a gene, you know that any gene has its effect at a particular time in life, mainly during embryology, but genes continue to mature making their presence felt at different times in life now, if you imagine one gene for um giving you a fatal cancer when you are 10 and another gene for making you give yourself a fatal cancer when you are 20 another when you are 30 another when you are 40 another when you are 50 Etc. which of them will be passed on to the Next Generation, a gene that gives you cancer and kills you when you are 60 years old has already reached the Next Generation when a gene that gives you cancer kills you when you are 10 years old and it kills you it doesn't reach the next generation, so there will be natural selection in favor of late-acting fatal or sub-fatal genes that was the mewing version of the theory the Williams version of the theory was a nice refinement of what is that Genes are modified by other genes, so any gene that has a good effect when you are young makes you fit when you are young but kills you when you are old. is likely to survive and the opposite is not likely to survive, so there will be a pressure in favor of um maybe uh running around and expending all your energy when you're young so you can carry your genes to the next generation when you're young at the expense that you become more likely to die when you're old, then that's a pretty bad summary of Williams' theory, but now we have to get back to No, it's pretty. well actually I don't know if you know I worked on this puzzle in grad school sorry I didn't know that no oh yeah this is the place where you start to understand what history really is and actually , it gives you a lot. of power to your point about the need to rebel against selfish replicators, I mean, let's look much further than World War II, yes, right, even the terminology where you had the Homeland effectively raping Mother Russia, I want I mean, that's even the correct terminology, so what this was was a lineage-level phenomenon in which a popul potion went after two other populations, one that was internal to their borders or their close neighbors and a population that was distant but had many resources, but the point is understood from the perspective of German genes, uh vile.

As these behaviors were completely understandable from the aptitude level, it was abhorrent and unacceptable, but understandable that Germany should have seen its Jewish population as a source of resources. If you saw the Jews as non-people, then any resources they had could be uh appropriated German genes and in the same way the future of Germany is in Russia, all the resources of Russia and how many millions is 20 million Russians who are needed to change the German war machine, so what you have are these conflicts of population against population if If you see it as a selection of groups, it doesn't make sense, but if you see them as lineages, it makes a lot of sense and the structures of Beliefs that caused people to enter battlefields and fight were clearly understandable as adaptations of the lineages in question.

I think nationalism might be an even greater evil than religion, and I'm not sure it's really very useful to talk about it in Darwinian terms. I think perhaps this is a case where we should defer a little to the historians. and non-biologists and think about it in other ways why I'm curious why you would resist because I think human affairs are very complicated and although we are ultimately evolved creatures, we have our human affairs, our historical Affairs, our Social issues are so distantly related to a superstructure biology that it is probably best not to try to explain them in simple biological terms, so I think that is why we disagree on the importance of this and I would say that it is absolutely vital that we face this in biological terms.

If one imagines that we are alienated from evolution by virtue of the fact that cultural evolution has taken over and does not promote the interest of genes, then this becomes a complicated issue. um, that's uniquely human if, on the other hand, human beings are involved in a fundamentally biological phenomenon that they don't consciously understand, then in order to deal with it, I really think that we have to look at what we are and that its point of rebelling against the selfish replicators is the key, yes I mean, this is my feeling: yes I am a robot that is programmed to be willing to put other people in a gas chamber under the right circumstances, but I, as a sentient being, find that idea horrible, then I, as a conscious being, find that idea horrible.

Being aware you have to look at that program and say under no circumstances will I be a part of it. I don't care if it's biologically advantageous, it's not for me and therefore the ability to resist the will of the replicators, I think it requires us to look in the face the role this has played in our history, uh, to the today. Well, I think we agree on that. I think we're out of time. It is not like this? Well, that's a question for the audience. Seriously, keep going. So, okay, what are we going to do, wait, wait, okay, we should vote and we should give people the opportunity.

The alternative is questions from the audience, yes, so what we are going to do is be the

first

. We're going to ask how many people would like to answer the audience's questions and then we're going to ask how many people would like the discussion to continue the way it's going, so the

first

question is how many people would like us to do so. move on to audience questions, uh, shout out if you want audience questions, okay? your ear um okay, I don't know if you wanted to respond to the last point, what I was saying is effectively that, no matter how ugly, we must face what we are programmed to do if we want to resist a recurrence of those patterns in the future okay , let's let that one go, okay, we'll let him go, um, okay, number six, adapt, adaptation can directly explain forced homosexuality, suicide and celibacy in humans, well, I think we have, as Darwinians, We have an obligation to try to explain things that are frequent enough not to be considered simply a mere aberration, so homosexuality in humans is frequent enough that it is genetic, so we cannot avoid it. our responsibility is to try to say that it at least deserves a Darwinian explanation.

We know there's a genetic component from things like twin studies and we know it's frequent enough that it's not just the result of a recurring mutation, so yes. There has to be some kind of Darwinian explanation, yes, and there is also a fascinating pattern that also suggests a Darwinian explanation, albeit a confusing one, so I would point out the right hand rule of the older brother, yes, the more older brothers you have, the more likely you will have to be. gay, but only as long as you are right-handed, that is a very interesting pattern that has been replicated several times and suggests that there is something happening with homosexuality rather than a failure due to novelty, it suggests that there is some kind of structure and meaning that still we haven't figured out, so how about suicide?

Do you see it as explainable? Well, I'm not. I haven't thought about it to the same extent that you have thought about it. I mean, um um, yeah, okay, that's right, I can easily think of psychological explanations, mimetic explanations, maybe genetic explanations for suicide, do you have them right? I think in principle a lot of these things come back to the same couple of places where our field has instantiated a bad assumption and therefore the assumption about individual selection where lineage selection might be a more powerful concept has made us , I think, missing the boat on these three characteristics, what I would say is let's just take a uh, a Middle Eastern example, for example, let's say you have two populations in the Middle East and they both correctly recognize that in 500 years they won't both are probably there, which is probably one or the other, but If both were not the case, then any Fitness being done today would be more or less meaningless if it were in the population that disappeared within 200 years. years, so you would find a rational investment in behaviors that discounted individual Fitness and prioritized Lineage Fitness, in other words, you would see extraordinary levels of self-sacrifice in order to ensure that the population to which the individual making the sacrifice belonged was the that would continue to exist.

I don't know how clear it was, but the basic idea is that in extraordinary circumstances like, say, a piece of land that doesn't get any bigger and is completely inhabited and has competing lineages, uh, they can't just live together. in peace, that suicidal self-sacrifice could be rational, now again, the naturalistic fallacy is what it is. It's just because somethingIt doesn't mean it should be and I'm not advocating it as a good thing, but what I'm saying is that we can understand it rationally if we think about the adaptation that happens at the lineage level. I think it's not difficult.

I see cases where, um, suicide, I mean, actually, it's a step beyond getting on a boat and crossing the horizon to see if you can find a new land mass that no one has discovered. It is almost suicidal behavior. Somewhat understandable behavior. Actual suicide can make sense if, um, the circumstances. It's quite extraordinary and I would also say, closer to home, that if we look at cases where people commit suicide in our own culture very frequently, they are plagued by the feeling that they are more than useless, that they have no no value, which its existence is simply assuming. resource and then you can imagine that this could be a question of kin selection or lineage selection.

If you and I think that most people who believe that in our culture are not calculating correctly, they have bad results. We have no data on the value they could bring, but even so, if you were moved to imagine that it has no value and that it is simply burning resources, then this is a rational course of action. I don't think it's helpful to express this kind of explanation in Darwinian terms Darwinian evolution is all about natural selection of replicators and the primary replicators we're talking about are genes and the vast majority of biological evolution and you've been arguing the priority of this genetic selection, that is, the production of bodies and brains. as they are and now we get to things like nationalism, things like, um, individuals sacrificing themselves for the sake of the long-term future of their lineage, their society, their nation, um, this is not Darwinism, this is, this It's something else, this is this.

It's a complicated mix of human-level issues that historians deal with. Sociologists deal with psychologists. This is not Darwinism. It's not useful. It's not useful. It's not useful to try to express this in what sounds like Darwinian terms. Well, let me ask you a question. let's see where you disagree my statement is that yes it is true and obviously I can't say if it is or not, but it is true that things like xenophobia, genocide, suicide are products of adaptive evolution that In order to address these things In a useful way, understanding its nature will probably be more than helpful and may even be essential.

To give an example, let's say that the impulse to genocide is something that lurks within human beings waiting for certain indicators that it is time to activate that program, if in the event that you would like people to consider that question with in advance, when they were in possession of all their faculties, and recognized that they might have within them a program that violates the values ​​that they believe to be their guide, yes, but I think I would prefer to say that these impulses are byproducts of some primitive and evolved , so something like genocide, we know that chimpanzees, for example, practice genocide against rival groups of chimpanzees that one can do. a case of genetic evolution that says something like this in our wild ancestry uh using Hamilton's idea of ​​living in villages living in small groups um the companions that you know are familiar to you from day to day everyone you meet are relatively strangers they are not. and therefore killing strangers, genocide, killing groups of neighboring people, as occurs in some parts of the New Guinea Highlands, for example, that could be considered a byproduct of natural genetic selection and something like Nazi atrocities could be considered a manifestation of that genetically evolved tendency, but it is in a totally different context and, of course, I agree with you that we must resist, we must rebel against selfish genes, but I prefer not to talk about the things we do . in our modern society in a direct biological way, but rather to say that these are relics byproducts of our genetic past and one can do this all the time and I think we do, we do a lot of things like, um, desire. for business executives to have a bigger, thicker office rug, that kind of thing, this is it, um, you can interpret that in a biological way as representing something like something that came from our biological past, but you have You have to be very careful when you do it and uh, I don't.

I think very often it's not very useful to try to apply Darwinian ideas directly to the kinds of things we encounter in modern society, whether it's horrible mechanized warfare or executives demanding more. desks or whatever is um I I I just think we have to be very careful in applying I I I'm all for evolutionary psychologists who do this kind of thing, but I think they do it in a careful way. and I think we need to be very cautious in how we do it right. You and I agree 100% that we must be extremely careful when applying evolutionary logic and it is possible to get carried away.

I, for example, wouldn't argue that we can apply evolutionary logic to anything so new that we don't know if it will stand the test of time, so I have an adaptive test that simply tells you whether or not you are on solid ground to assume that something It's adaptive and it involves looking at whether something has complexity, whether it has a cost, a variable cost that could be reduced, and whether it persists over evolutionary time, so wanting a bigger desk is, I think you and I would agree, certainly. , in a manifestation of something. evolved but it is very difficult to analyze desks with Darwinian tools because the desks are new um but something like genocide is not new war is not new and that is why these things are complex and expensive we are seeing a story that goes into antiquity and more there and I think that not only gives us license to apply Darwinian tools but I would say that A is the most parsimonious explanation and B is our best hope of ending these patterns permanently if I didn't think I would be much less enthusiastic about what these analyzes reveal I would say they are justified, but I may not be an advocate of doing it and I may not be that interested in doing it personally, but to the extent that I would love to see the end of the genocide, I think facing what it really looks like.

Being is essential, okay, but suppose you take the example of the Nazis in the invasion of the eastern lands, which you did before. You have a nation that makes a decision that is a dictator and advisors and a parliament and all of that is a complicated matter of one state making the decision to invade another state using modern weapons and using the weapons of diplomacy to argue the case in court. internationals and so on and then you have the individual soldiers going out and killing people and the psychological motives of the individual soldiers are going to be very different from those.

I mean, they're not the ones who are actually making the decision to go invade Poland, um, they are. very different things are obeying their officers maybe they are giving free rein to uh Motives of revenge because their comrade was killed in a previous battle or something like that these are very, very complicated mixtures of motives psychological motives um and yeah They are all products of brains that were perfected by natural selection, but I don't think it's useful to put them all together and say, well, this is all a biological drive to do something rather than these being different things. on different levels, well I think you're right about that on one level, so if we look at the genocide between Hutus and Tosis, these distinctions were actually imposed phenotypically, in other words, this is the rare case where you have a drive genocidal that seems to be triggered by the artificial and now may reflect a phenomenon of real lineage, but what there was was people measuring noses and eyes and things like this and imposing the feeling that these are your people and those are the enemy. and it triggered a genocide, on the other hand, which I think we need to be aware of, and I, this is a dangerous topic to open, but I would say that during the last presidential election, we had a cynical guy who started incriminating some of the same ideas that drive people to a kind of nationalistic fervor and to the extent that that program that looks for the moment in history when this is the right way to behave, those detectors could have been active waiting for someone to use that kind of rhetoric that we can get dragged into something that we could anticipate but we won't if we don't face it and that is much better to understand, for example, than when you go from a phase where you have growth or something that looks like growth It makes people feel comfortable, it makes them keep their heads down, it makes them treat their neighbors basically well, when that breaks down at the point where you run out of growth, the natural impulse is to go tribal and go after those who don't. they are. so closely related to you and therefore to the extent that a leader could take advantage of us that would, cynically or otherwise, lead us into some kind of tribal war, we need to recognize that danger and say, is there really an exit?

That's novel here, can we do something that is not evolutionary but that really matches the values ​​that we believe we have and that are defensible? I think it's right. I think it's important to recognize things like tribalism. I think that's probably a real phenomenon, a real phenomenon that is important and that can be and is exploited by um demagogues and um so yeah, uh tribalism and there are some other things like that that are important um and when I say they are distanced from the biological some of them are more distant than others and some of them are quite naked, quite close to the surface and I think that, uh, the tribalism that is invoked both in the case of the Hutus and the Tootsies and in the case of the recent election disaster um that's probably close enough to um to the surface that it's not unreasonable to use biological terminology and do uh and notice similarities to say the battles between new Highland tribes that sort of thing well Well, I guess that suggests then that there is something that I don't think I have seen and that is that there is a program in which people look for what are the legitimate limits of discussion for Darwinian selection and when to do it.

We're getting into phenomena that aren't amenable to or don't benefit from that kind of perspective, so I think you and I converge on the idea that this is dangerous territory, that it's very possible to overextend it, but that there can be big Okay. It's worth it if we want to avoid the worst instincts that human beings have to understand what their Darwinian foundations are and how we could know it in the same way that you invoke birth control. Family planning is, I think we both agree, against physical fitness. In many cases, how can we take that model where we've moved away from a biological imperative to increase fitness at all costs and done something more reasonable about family planning?

How can we apply that same kind of logic to things like war, genocide, and Demagoguery is a useful model because contraception is a case where we have moved away from biology and it shows that we can do it yes and yes, okay , but it also shows us this arbitrary nature of uh when you can because the reason that we can do it with birth control is an accident of evolution, and that is that sexual pleasure and sexual reproduction are not synonymous. We have been wired with a program that makes us seek sexual pleasure in a way that results in reproduction, but because we are not.

At the same time, they can be technologically decoupled, making family planning an almost trivial matter. You can participate in it without fighting with yourself. Would you say tribalism is decoupled? He has disengaged in sports. Hooliganism in football. And um, uh, yeah. I would say this is a place where you really see loyalty to your team and yes, not necessarily in a productive way, but it is a case where you see people's tribal impulses being applied to what is effectively one corporation fighting another. on a field. I mean, that's what they are one corporation buys a bunch of players, another corporation buys one, it's not like two cities are fighting each other, but people get into it as it is, so yeah, I think it's a place where it has been undocked almost by accident.

Did you notice what soccer players do when they just score a goal, they throw a spear, they run and they like it, that's good, that seems to be what they do, okay, should we go down the list to something even more infuriating? everything is fine, number seven. I really want to know your reaction to this. I've been waiting all night. um cast Catholics, are you sociable? Everyone in the audience understands what the claim is that you have a non-reproductive cast within Catholicism and other religions as well, but Catholics are very kind to us and make everything as elaborate as we can, worker bees don't reproduce, priests, in theory, no, yes, priests, in theory, don't and they don't, I think most of them probably don't.

Do you agree? Yes, yes, so okay, the question is:Do you know that you allege in the selfish Gene that a celibate clergy is a failure of Darwinian selection? My claim here is that this is not a failure, that it is an adaptive celibacy that serves a purpose at the lineage level; it is at the meme level that is what is happening there, but if it is at the meme level then each of those priests and each of those nuns is involved in a spectacular loss of a reproductive opportunity. I mean, this is the argument you make, so the question is why are they so vulnerable to accepting?

I mean, most people couldn't accept romance and sex if they tried, and yet there is a group of people who are motivated to avoid these things and they do it in service of a bunch of ideas that, yes, they are literally a bunch of ideas that are exactly right A B A bunch of memes, so memes that make some people in Ireland, for example, traditionally been something prestigious for a family member, a brother becomes a priest and a celebrating priest, so the priest dedicates all his energy to valuing and spreading the mhm meme and the other one and all the other memes to better persuade other Catholics to have more children than they should and so that ah but then it's not interesting that this person who you claim is involved in a failure of Darwinism happens to behave in a way that is likely to spread your genes by virtue of the fact that he is promoting your genes, your memes, not your genes, he is part of a lineage, oh, as it actually happens, well, but I mean this is my claim, is that it will almost always be the case in any persistent religion that where there are people involved in what appears to be a spectacular failure of Darwinism that turns out to be they are spreading ideas that will result in genes that allow them to fail as Darwinian entities to succeed in the lineage that sustains those beliefs they dedicate. all their energies to spreading Catholic memes and they don't have to worry about the time and responsibilities of a family, so they are totally dedicated to spreading Catholic memes, including, by the way, more than incidentally, the celibacy meme.

Well, they spread it. the celibacy meme I'm referring to is my statement, if I'm right about this, then my point would be that Catholic, uh, Catholic bloodlines would actually do worse if everyone reproduced that there is an advantage in having people who have come out of celibacy. celibacy. reproductive market and therefore being able to speak on behalf of the lineage that someone who is outside, I mean, think of a priest, cannot make a lot of money and cannot reproduce properly, at least not in public, and therefore That's the point is that it shows them two ways through which they could be corrupted: someone who cannot be corrupted because they are not in a position, even if they accumulated money, they would not be able to spend it without attracting attention and We are not in a position to be sexually corrupted. , at least not in public, so those two mechanisms put them in a position to speak for the lineage.

So what do we disagree on? I mean, I don't know, maybe. nothing, but if that's the case, then okay, you say, what do we disagree on? Is Catholicism a mental virus? Well, it's a mental virus complex. Yes, that's what we disagree on. Alright. My claim is that Catholicism is a complex. of adaptations that are lineage-level adaptations and that are largely responsible for the success of the lineages that hold this set of beliefs that have spread throughout the world and have been so successful in creating adaptations of all kinds. Let me try to put my worldview into a few sentences please, Darwinian natural selection has to do with the differential survival of replicators, there are several types of replicators, some of which are genes and some are memes, and all They are involved in a kind of fight with each other to survive as replicators using Vehicles that are bodies and that are brains and that are all kinds of other artifacts and things like that, our separate genes, although they are us, we unite them under one word genome, I actually think of them as similar to viruses in the sense that they are changing their partners in each generation and you can think of the entire genome as a massive collection of viruses, a massive collection of replicators that fight independently and that survive better because They walk together as a gang in which they survive better. in the company of other similar replicators and that is why we call them genes instead of viruses, there are others that survive better not by hanging out in gangs, but by sneezing in the atmosphere or whatever, spreading by other means, the only difference the fundamental difference between those replicators that we call genes and those that we call viruses is that the method of transmission to the future of those that we call genes is through our sperm or our eggs and therefore they have a common interest in preserving the body they share because that is the only way to enter the Next Generation.

That minority of them who are not destined to enter the Next Generation reach the future through sperm or eggs, but by sneezing into the air. or um defecated in the sewage system or very or or left like blood lying around or something like that um we call them viruses and the only difference is that their hope of reaching the future is not to cooperate with others to get into an egg or a sperm, but leaving the body in a different way by being sneezed now um memes are more of the latter category, they do not pass through sperm and/or eggs, however, they largely pass through generations longitudinally, so although they are not sperm or Eggs, yes they go from parents to children, but we live in a big soup of replicators that float around, some of them are memes, some of them are genes, some of them are cooperative genes that are passed from generation to generation through sperm and eggs, some of them are cooperative memes that are passed from generation to generation in the form of parents indoctrinating children or schools indoctrinating in indoctrinating children but all we see around us is a soup of replicators and their phenotypic tools of replication. among which are extended phenotypic tools of replication and that's my article, okay, so of course I agree with most of what you said.

In my opinion, I think about the genes at the time the zygote is created, they can be very uncomfortable with each one. others until that moment, but at the moment they fuse into a zygote, that single cell that then becomes a human being of 30 billion cells, let's say they fall in love because, as you say, they have no mechanism to reproduce other than create such effective coordination. creature that is capable of reaching a moment of reproduction and so being trapped with a shared destiny that made them behave like an organism that is united in its purpose so I think we agree on that um to To explain my perspective and where I think we differ, I need you to lend me a concept and I think you've described it as your most important contribution and you've just invoked it as the extended phenotype.

Do you want to briefly explain what that means? Can you do it how much time do I have? I mean, I can do it pretty briefly. In the normal fen, the word normal phenotype is applied to bodies and the gene is found inside your body and influences the phenotype through embryonic embryonic processes, so wings and noses and toenails and hairs and things They are all phenotypes, extended phenotypes are outside the body and include things like beaver dams, termite mounds and bird nests, they are not part of the body but should be considered phenotypes. adaptations by genes for gene propagation, so even though the genes don't actually live inside the nest or don't live inside the house of the caddis fly or the Beaver Dam dam, these artifacts are all phenotypic devices for preservation. and the spread of the genes that created them, you generalize that to parasites that influence hosts, uh, for their own benefit, parasites that make their intermediate host more likely to be eaten by their final host and, by So, moving on to the next part of the parasite cycle, the parasite genes are exerting phenotypic effects on the host, so the parasite genes have widespread phenotypic effects on the host bodies, they spread even further and you have like a cuckoo that manipulates its adoptive parents into feeding them, um, the genes that make the baby cuckoo effective. by manipulating and persuading the foster parent to feed it are exerting widespread phenotypic effects on the parent's behavior, generalize it further and When a bird sings When, when a nightingale sings and influences the hormonal state of a female nightingale, when a canary sings, etc. so the effect on the female body of the male song is the extended phenotypic effect of the genes on the male song and that is the story of the extended phenotype so let's take the example of a beaver pond just to make this very clear, so that a beaver is a rodent that creates a dam by cutting down trees and blocking a waterway that dam is necessary for its ecology it uses water to preserve wood it can eat during the winter um and your point on the extended phenotype which I think is brilliant is that the pond is as much a part of this story as the molecules inside the beaver, that the genes inside the beaver create a system of physiology that is the cells of the beaver, but they also create the pond that is part of the ecology of the beaver. beaver and it is artificial. to split the beaver pond which is the extended phenotype of the beaver beer that is in the pond.

I agree with this, my point would be that memes are phenotype extended and that the claim that memes compete in their own meme sphere is a bit like saying that ponds reproduce using beavers, which they definitely do. you may argue, but it is not the most parsimonious explanation for beaver ponds. Beaver ponds are created by beavers to facilitate their own ecology and are passed on to the next generation beavers in this fragment of ecology is passed on sometimes over decades or even a hundred years these ponds these landscape alterations are passed on as a legacy to future generations of beavers and that to me looks a lot like an AG line passing on a belief system that results in being ecologically effective at doing things like holding onto a piece of territory by excluding others from taking over the New Territory through dispersal and, therefore, memes are extended phenotype.

My way of thinking is that they should not be analyzed on their own, they should be analyzed as they serve. the interests of the underlying genome in the same way that ponds serve the interests of Beaver's underlying genome. I'm familiar with the fallacy that that's absolutely incorrect, um, there's a sequence that goes beava Gene Pond Beaver genene Pond and so and superficially you can say that either one should be considered the PED type of the other replicator, but the key point is that ponds don't mutate and are therefore more likely to survive than genes, and that's the fun part.

The fallacy in this argument I call the Batson fallacy, who said that birds are just the way that one nest makes another another nest, um, it's, it's, you have to look, the replicator is the one that mutates and as a consequence it produces more copies of itself that survive that's what genes do that's what memes do but that's not what ponds do that's not what beavers do that's not what nests do right I mean, I must I mean when you turn your back on me and say ponds don't mutate, I'm just tempted to take that challenge because I think they do and I don't think this is a good way to understand them.

This is my point, is that we can treat them the way Beaver Ponds actually do. empty when a dam breaks, but then they do not give rise to empty ponds sons, but the point is that a beaver that builds a pond that empties is much more likely to suffer from hunger and is the beaver the beaver that Does the building Beav Gene that makes? This is exactly my point that the way to understand something like Catholicism is not a thing in itself, it is a program that runs on the computer inside the head of a Catholic and therefore the way to properly understand it .

The way to gain maximum power is to understand it as the extended phenotype of the creatures the program is run on, just as the way to understand beaver ponds is to understand them as the extended phenotype of the beaver, they are a means to achieve maximum power. purpose used by beavers. to preserve food during the winter, among other things, I can only quote wb8, you are still torn between pagan dreams, wait, I don't think I speak English well enough to understand what you just accused me of, the fundamental logic of selection Naturally, there are replicators that mutate, yes, and that produce copies that may or may not survive because they are good at surviving, the way they are good at surviving is by building phenotypes, genes mutate, ponds, right? , that's an absolute when you say that the pondsThey mutate you.

You didn't really mean that what you meant was that ponds change, of course, they do, they drain, they leave, they break their dam, but that doesn't replicate, that doesn't give rise to a new generation of defective ponds, it does. which does give. The emergence of a new generation of defective ponds is a mutant gene in a beaver that builds a bad dam. We don't, we don't disagree on that, we don't agree with the beaver example and what we don't agree on. It's how to map it onto the example of people and belief systems that exist over a long period of time; that's the question, we agree that it is an inferior understanding of beaver ponds to imagine that they mutate and are transmitted or not.

Based on the quality of the information encoded there or whatever, the question is what is the best way to understand someone who says something that is perfectly at odds with what we can discover in a scientific laboratory but who by saying that has a lot success in uh. recover resources from their local ecology and spread into new habitats and take over territories to the exclusion of others, all of these things and my point is simply that it is the extended phenotype of the creature that engages in this behavior and to the extent that it persists throughout of evolutionary time. what it tells us is that despite the fact that those beliefs are not literal, they are effective, I think you can argue that, um ideas, uh, for example, now you're talking about religious ideas, um religious ideas spread because they are spreadable is historical as is natural selection um and the reason they are spreadable is that they attract people, they appeal to people's psychology, etc., that's why they spread, um, you're trying to say, what are you trying to say? extended phenotype that the one that the um that a meme is an extended phenotype no, a meme is a replicator, it is a replicator and I am not saying that, in the absence of any other system, there would be a trivial system competition between memes, in fact, we see a trivial competition between memes on the Internet.

I agree that it might be trivial and I don't think I ever wanted to argue that there really is important evolution resulting from the natural SEL of memes. I think there could be a hypothesis that there could be. I just wanted to say that they work like replicators. I think it's not useful to call them extended phenotypes. They are not phenotypes. It's time? Well, let me make one more comment. you can make the final point and then we'll close this. The key question and prediction of the model I am presenting is that memes should show no interest in being transmitted when it is not in the interest of the creature in whose minds they are operating, so, for example, we both agree that a language It's a meme complex and my point would be that if you move to another country that doesn't speak your language, you will have problems adopting that country's language, but their children will not experience a tension between their ancestral language;

In fact, they will very easily acquire the language of the new habitat; why, because their ancient language is not fighting for survival, they are fighting for survival and the best tool they can have to survive. in this new habitat it is the language that allows them to interact with the people who are there, so the question is whether you are right about the nature of memes and that the point of their stickiness is their own spread and is orthogonal to the propagation of the creature genomes that have these cultural structures then those things should fight like mad to remain even in circumstances where they have no value in my model, those things will gladly disappear in favor of higher meme complexes when it is advantageous to do so in some local circumstances, so it actually predicts different behavior.

I don't know if I don't know if the differential survival of the meme of the meme really is an important evolutionary effect or not. All I'm saying is that what matters in natural selection is the differential survival of replicators in the case of gene replicators, so we know about the phenotypes that can cause them to survive and it's very clear that we understand it pretty well in the case of memes that we don't know and it may be that, um, maybe. natural selection at the meme level is only in its infancy, perhaps the internet will see it develop further, but I see no reason to consider that if there is a reason why some media spreads more than others among those reasons, it is It will likely be predispositions provided by genes and genetic selection, but that is not the only one.

Memes exist in an ecology of their own and are very likely to spread, whether or not the ecology in which they spread is, as you would say, the former favorable. What is provided by the gene is an important component, but not the only one. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion and I have to say that I think we've made more progress than we could have made, so let's give a big round of applause to Richard and Brett Weinstein.