Professor Richard Dawkins' Seminar at Science World 2011 Part 4

"Should doctors be Darwinian?"
Professor Richard Dawkins visited Science World 2011 and presented some challenging new ideas about medicine and evolution to a packed out audience. Famous for his popular science books The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion; Dawkins changed track in this lecture and discussed the need for doctors and medical researchers to be mindful of evolution when treating and studying disease.
Professor Dawkins is Vice President of the British Humanist Association and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. The mission of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science is to support scientific education, critical thinking and evidence-based understanding of the natural world in the quest to overcome religious fundamentalism, superstition, intolerance and human suffering.

Register for next year's Science World event at: http://www.fisher.co.uk/scienceworld

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Science & Technology

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• darwinism

[Ceenymeeny]

@PaulP567 In a social species such as ours that has developed complex societies and cultures, we must remember that while our biologicy can influence our tendency towards certain behaviors, our upbringing (parents, peers, community, etc) can have a larger impact on who we ultimately become. In the case of Hitler, he grew up in the Roman Catholic Church in a time when the Jews were scapegoated as the murderers of Christ. His community instilled upon him needless hatred that he acted on later.

[permypoo]

@PaulP567 Not all traits are adaptive and they may be by-products of another trait. Maybe our fear of the unknown was adaptive in a forest setting to avoid predation but it had the side effect of making us naturally racist later on when we ran into slightly different humans.

[sulljoh1]

@PaulP567 There are many theories. One of the most interesting is put fourth in Steven Pinker's book, "How the Mind Works." Pinker presents one model of the evolution of emotions that explains why emotions that were adaptive in human history today lead to tragedies like genocide.

[Ceenymeeny]

@PaulP567 You might enjoy Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. All throughout the book he uses birds as examples for the evolution of cooperative behavior and he points out that in every flock you will have a few outliers that don't cooperate as often or not at all. The same can be said of any group. You'll always have variation (in genetics, in opinions, in preferences, etc) in any sort of group. All behavior is to some extent Darwinian, in the sense that all things biological evolved. However...

[PaulP567]

If it is the case that all physical development is Darwinian, and this does seem to be the case, then what about behaviour? If pigeons and wilderbeest behave in a manner determined by Darwinism (presumably) then human behaviour must also have a Darwinian explanation. So what of genocide and holocaust? Are these 'qualities' as Darwinian as love and compassion? And is the devising of nuclear weapons and the conducting of biological warfare also Darwinian? I think it must be. If not, what?