 It's Saturday, February 13th, and this is For Good Reason. Welcome to For Good Reason. I'm DJ Grothi. For Good Reason is the radio show and the podcast produced in association with the James Randy Educational Foundation, an international nonprofit whose mission is to advance critical thinking about the paranormal, pseudoscience, and the supernatural. Before we get to this week's guest, I want to let you, our listeners, know that this upcoming week registration is opening for the amazing meeting in Vegas. The next TAM, the next amazing meeting, which is July 8th through 11th, is the largest event of its kind in the world, and I want to let the cat out of the bag a little. The staff at the JRF are telling me, and I believe them, that this is the best lineup of speakers and the best program in TAM's history. We have more workshops, some incredible shows lined up, a great list of confirmed speakers and panels, so keep your eyes on randy.org, and be sure to join us in Vegas this year for the next amazing meeting. Also, stay tuned for an exciting announcement about TAM at the end of this episode. I'm happy that my guest this week is Richard Dawkins, who, until his retirement in 2008, was professor of the public understanding of science at Oxford University. And he's the founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. He's the recipient of a number of awards for his writing on science, including the Royal Society of Literature Award and the LA Times Literary Prize. He's also been awarded the Royal Society Michael Faraday Award for the furtherance of the public understanding of science. In a number of polls, he's been named Britain's leading public intellectual and one of the top few public intellectuals in the world. He's the author of a number of critically acclaimed books, such as The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, Unweaving the Rainbow, one of my favorites, The Devil's Chaplain, The Ancestor's Tale, of course, The God Delusion, and his new best-selling book, The Greatest Show on Earth. Richard Dawkins, welcome to For Good Reason. Great to talk to you again. I'm delighted to be here. Richard, before we get into anything, I want to heartily thank you and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science for the generous initial underwriting support for this show. I think these podcasts are new ways to reach new people, reach out for science and critical thinking, and I really appreciate your foundation helping make this show happen. Well, I'm very pleased about that. I think podcasts are very valuable as well. And I'm delighted to be able to help the Randy Foundation. Well, thanks again. Today, Richard, is Darwin Day. Happy Darwin Day. And to you too. It is the 201st anniversary of Darwin's birth all over the world. People are celebrating today as kind of a secular holiday, a science holiday. I have plans myself tonight. The St. Louis Skeptical Society. We're putting on kind of a party. Do you have any special plans yourself? No special plans. I think we'll just drink to the memory of the great man. Right, The Great Man. And that's, in fact, the focus of your recent best-selling book, His Theory, your book, The Greatest Show on Earth and your other writings. It's clear to me that you're in love with this great man, with Darwin, his ideas. Let me ask you, why Darwin, Richard? Why not equally be a champion of, say, Newton or Einstein or Galileo? You seem to have a special regard for Darwin. Is it something about his personality that you get reading his books? Or is it just that his idea more than the others is more powerful? What? I don't want to get into the business of ranking these great men of science. I don't want to say Darwin is a greater scientist than Newton or Einstein or Galileo. I think it's probably true to say that Darwin revolutionized the way ordinary people think about themselves, their life and the world more than any other. Einstein probably revolutionized the way scientists think about the world more than anybody else. But Darwin probably was the most subversive in the sense that he changed the way ordinary people think in the most revolutionary way. He changed our view of our place in the universe, our understanding of who we are, much like Freud might have changed our understanding in other ways, even if he's more discredited than these days. Or Galileo and Newton changed the way we saw the place of the world in the universe. But somehow I think the Darwinian achievement cut to the bone more. It really did make people feel we are just animals like any other animals. We are apes. We belong in in the great parade of living things. We're not special. Right. And in fact, I think that recasting of ourselves is one of the reasons people are so scared about evolution's implications. Seems to me that intelligent design people, they're not just so up in arms about evolution because of its atheistic implications, but because they're afraid that if we're just animals, if we're just apes, like you just said, then there's no reason to be humane or to be good. As you've engaged those cultural competitors with this new book, have you been able to see maybe empathize that that's the real fear? I think you probably said a lot that I think that probably true. In Victorian times, I think people thought it was a bit kind of undignified to be to be relegated to being apes. But I think you're probably right that nowadays, one of the problems people have is that they feel if we're just animals, then there's no reason to be good. We might as well just, you know, have a wonderful time and be selfish and horrible and and just sort of vicious as some people imagine nonhuman animals are. But the truth is that the great apes, for instance, are often more humane than people. Well, I wouldn't I wouldn't bank too heavily on that. That might be true, but no, both is probably not true of common chimpanzees. But in any case, it doesn't matter because we can be as good or as bad as we want to. And let's try and be good. It doesn't matter whether other species are or are not more wicked than we are. That isn't where we get our morals from anyway. So the big fear about evolution is the fear of moral decay. But you say that that fear is is misplaced. Because we can kind of figure out our morality, whether or not it's derived or informed by evolution. Yes. I mean, I don't want to say that that we don't get any part of our morality from our evolutionary history. I'm sure we do. But the way to understand that would not be to look at what other species do like common chimpanzees or baboons or bonobos and say, well, that's what they do. So that must be what we do as well. It's rather more that we would get it from evolutionary principles. I think we probably can make a rather good evolutionary case for where we get the basis of our morals from. But then it gets refined and developed in in cultural history by by philosophers, by lawyers, etc. And by just people thinking and and and talking. Right. Secular ethics gives us the justifications, the reasons for our moral behavior. Evolution doesn't tell us this is the way it should be. It may describe how it is, but not it may describe how it is. And it may it may give us some clue as to where we get some of our our moral inclinations from your last mega bestseller, the God delusion. We've spoken about it a few times on my previous show. In that book, while you touched on evolution, you really focused actually on demolishing belief in God, which you've argued, I think persuasively, can be harmful. Richard, did you get such a backlash from that book? I mean, here you are a leading world famous scientific thinker going out of your field to talk religion. Is that why you followed it up with this new book, this powerhouse on evolution, like you're getting back to basics? I wouldn't like to accept, I think, that I was getting out of my own subject. I mean, I do think perhaps unfashionably that the question of whether a supernatural gods exist is a scientific question. And I think it's a question that should be answered in the negative. But I don't think it's outside the field of science. I think that it really is in the field of science because it's a scientific question, whether the universe was created by an intelligence or war was not. I think that is a scientific question. So I don't think that I stepped outside my own field. Some people have said that I stepped into another person's field, namely theology, but I wouldn't accept that theology is a field at all. I don't think there is a legitimate subject of theology that's worth studying. And when you say the God claim is a scientific claim, you're in fact going against the prevailing view among many scientists that say, oh, religions over there, science is over here and never the twain shall meet. I am going against that. I don't think that's very rational. I think it's politically expedient. And I suspect that's why many of our scientific colleagues go along with that, because they want to appease religious apologists, the religious lobby, by saying you don't have to be afraid of science. Science is OK. Science is compatible with your religious belief. So you can feel good about science. I think that's politically why they do it. But actually, I don't have very much time for that view that science is over here and religion is over there and never the twain shall meet. Right. Even in the rationalist world, the rationalist community, you've been pilloried for daining to criticize religion from a scientific vantage. Some people say, well, you're out of bounds. Other people just say the way you do it is wrong. It's not seductive enough. You know, the whole framing wars, the debates on on the blogs, you it seems like you're just hopscotching over all of that. You're saying, yes, I don't really. I mean, I sometimes worry a little bit about the problem of being diplomatic. And there are times when I can be persuaded by some of my colleagues that it would be better for, for example, for the cause of getting proper science education in American schools. If people like me and PZ Meyers and Jerry Coyne and others were a bit nicer to religious people. But I think it's OK if some people are like that, but I really do passionately care about what's true, what's true about the world, what's true about the universe. And I'm not one who is going to compromise on that for the sake of of of some kind of political expediency. Others can do that and maybe they're politically wise to do it. But I can't go along with that. I care too much about the truth. I do interested in the truth. It really is an interesting question, whether there is a supernatural guiding intelligence in the universe. It's an interesting question. Not one to be swept aside as nothing to do with science. Oh, that's religion. It has no connection with science. As we've discussed previously for you, the evolution creation is in battle is less important, or at least for the purposes of your last book, it was less important than the God question. Has your sense of priorities shifted with this new book? Or actually, I think what I'm hearing you say is that both of these books are two important aspects of the same exact argument. Yes, I think that's true. I mean, it is the case that in the latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, I don't actually attack God. And so, I mean, to that extent, I've shifted. But I haven't really shifted my own ground. I've simply shifted the topic of conversation, which is the evidence that evolution is a fact. Whereas the previous book, The God Delusion, was is there any evidence for a supernatural creator? Indeed, also, is there any evidence against such a claim that God exists? Oh, well, if you're going to ask that question, then, of course, there's no evidence, there's no absolutely conclusive evidence that all sorts of potential things don't exist, we like fairies and so on. But the onus is on those who want to believe in something outlandish, like a fairy or a god, to provide some positive evidence. There's an infinite number of things that you can't strictly speaking disprove. But you don't even bother to disprove fairies and goblins and leprechauns and things. And the same could be said to be true of God, or gods. What I was getting at, though, is that a contrast I see in your arguments and some of your colleagues called the new atheists from the old atheism arguments is that you used science and kind of evidence from science to argue for atheism or against God belief. So you weren't just using old philosophy arguments, right? You some of you have actually marshaled kinds of scientific arguments against the God claim. Yes, I'd be surprised if you didn't find the equivalent of such arguments in such writers as Bertrand Russell. Victor Stenger, who's a very interesting writer and could be called one of the new atheists, a physicist, he actually goes further than I would and says you can actually make a positive case for evidence against the existence of God. He's who I was thinking of. One of my last interviews as yet unerred on my last show, Point of Inquiry, was exactly on that point, so it's on my mind, yeah. Yes, okay. In greatest show on earth, you're not only Darwin's biggest advocate, you're also on the offensive against intelligent design creationism. You liken ideas to Holocaust deniers. So for you people who disagree with you about lies origins, they're not just incorrect, they're also denialists. Can't they just have a different view and you leave it at that or must they be denialists? Well, I mean, you could say the same thing of Holocaust deniers as well. You could say they just have a different point of view, but both these deniers are flying in the face of massive quantities of evidence. I've been a bit taken aback by the hostility that that comparison has aroused. It's as though people are saying that by comparing evolution deniers to Holocaust deniers, I'm saying that they are Nazis, that they are motivated by a sinister political agenda. Instead, you're just saying they're denying history. Exactly, they're both denying history. The quantity of evidence that you have to deny is about as strong for the case of Holocaust deniers and for the case of evolution deniers. Wow. So tell me how someone believing something that we think is nonsense about life's origins, someone believing intelligent design, creationism, whatever flavor of it, how does it really matter? I understand why you personally would be up in arms about it because you're a big booster of evolution. You're maybe the world's leading advocate of that view, but it doesn't really impact my neighbor's life in a day to day sort of way. If someone he knows believes in creationism versus evolution. I guess that's true. You could say the same thing about believing the earth is flat. You can lead a moderately successful life as a street sweeper or a dustbin empty or something, believing that the world is flat because you never have to go outside your hometown. But if you ever found yourself needing to go to Australia, you would be in trouble. But it's perfectly true that you don't actually need to understand about evolution in order to be born, get educated somewhat, get married, have children and die. And that's the end of it. But it's such a waste of a life, it's so tragic, it's so sad to be born into a world and not understand, firstly, that it's round, and secondly, not understand where life came from, why you exist, the astonishing, wonderful facts of the evolution of life, the fact that we're surrounded by plants that give us sustenance by herbivorous animals that eat the plants, by carnivorous animals that eat the herbivorous animals, by all these different species, they've all come into being by the same process, evolution by Darwinian natural selection. It's a mind-numbing fact, it's a beautiful fact. And what a tragedy to go to your grave without understanding it. Although as I say, you can, if you like, muddle along through a boring little life without understanding that, just as you can without understanding that the earth is round. I hear you really arguing, not only about the importance of the truth of evolution, but that if you don't believe in it, your life's going to be diminished. You're kind of making an existential argument there. That's right, I mean, it would be like never appreciating music or never appreciating a good sunset. It's just so sad. I think your tone in greatest show on earth, let's see if you agree with me, I think it's a little different than in the God delusion. You said already you don't attack the belief in God in greatest show on earth, but there are still atheistic complications for Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection that you go into in greatest show on earth. While you pull no punches in how wrong-headed the arguments of the intelligent design folks are, would you say that, are you less stridently atheistic or is that just not a topic that comes up? Well, I don't actually think I was strident in either of the books. I like to think it's humorous actually, but I'd like to think that the God delusion is a funny book rather than a strident book. Well, when I agree with you, of course, I'm biased. It was a great read, but... I mean, I think there's a difference between poking fun at people's silly beliefs and being strident about them. And I think I poke fun in a fairly robust way, I suppose, but I think that even the God delusion should not properly be described as strident. There's a fair degree of sarcasm there, a fair degree of what I hope is humor, perhaps a sharp-edged humor, but it gets strident. I consider myself strident. I guess it depends on your definition of the term, but it sounds like you would not want to be considered strident, as if strident somehow meant close-minded or unthinkingly belligerent or something like that. Well, I think it's sort of, it's got an implication of being rather loud. It's got an implication of being kind of yelling at the top of your voice. I mean, I would say Hitler was strident. I would say Dinesh D'Souza is strident. I'd say people who adopt that kind of preachy manner of speaking who believe that by yelling the loudest, you can win a debate. That I think is strident, but somebody who uses wit and sarcasm like, say, Christopher Hitchens, he's not strident. When he uses strong language and he's a devastating debater because he's got such caustic wit, but that isn't strident. Even as witty and soft-spoken as you might be, you're rather loud just by virtue of the fact that you have the largest megaphone out there. You're mega best-selling books, your reputation, your world famous. So you come out with a polemic or an argument for one view versus another view. At least you can get why people might say, oh my gosh, Richard Dawkins is being strident again. Well, it's not my fault if my books sell very well, but I don't think I shout loud. I like to think that I put my arguments clearly. It's true that there are some people who even mistake clarity for stridentcy. And they're so used to mealy-mouthed obfuscation that even clarity sounds strident or even offensive. I wanna talk a little bit more about Greatest Show on Earth. Who's the main audience for it? I really don't see it being read in Bible school, although when I was in Bible college, I did read your books, other books, kind of on a know thy enemy basis. Do you think you're gonna change minds? Are you gonna convert intelligent design creationists into Darwinians? Or are you mainly just going after the fence sitters, folks who aren't hostile to science but haven't thought much about evolution before? I think realistically, it's the latter. I think realistically I'm not likely to convince people who are real died in the world creationists, but it's only because they're not gonna read it. And I mean, I've met this over and over again that there's a certain type of closed mind that is afraid to read a book which is at all likely to convert them. But I think there is a very, very large constituency of fence sitters who probably show up in some of the alarming statistics of 40% of United States and Gallup polls believing in young earth creationism. I think a great many of that 40% probably haven't really thought about it very much and might not resist a book which attempts to change their mind. And so I think it's those fence sitters that I really want to reach. And also people who are not fence sitters who are opposed to creationism but perhaps need a bit of a brush up on what the arguments are because they may have forgotten them or even may never have known them. That's what I loved most about the book. I know a lot of rationalist types, people who are in the organized atheist or skeptic or humanist movements, right? Who might not be up on the science. Not that they take the science as faith claims so they know enough about it to be persuaded but they're not steeped in it. This book is an entree into that. Couple more questions on the book. What would you say is the strongest argument against creationism? Give me just one, the one big argument that if you had just a few minutes at a cocktail party and you wanted to wallop a cultural competitor what would that argument be? I suppose it would probably be the comparative study of molecular genetics because that has now become so enormously detailed since Darwin's time, well really since Watson and Crick because every living creature contains within every one of itself a massive database of digital information which is written in the same language, the same machine language as the digital information in every other living creature and where the actual details of the genes themselves are very often so alike that you can actually trace the same gene through different animals, different plants, the same gene but with minor differences. So you can actually count the number of minor differences that separate any species from any other species for any particular gene, you can do the same thing for lots and lots of genes. When you do that, you find a very elegant, a very beautiful hierarchical pattern, a branching tree pattern which can only intelligently be attributed to a family tree. It's a family tree, it's a pedigree, that's the only sensible explanation and it is so detailed, the evidence just piles on massive amounts of evidence, piling on massive more amounts of evidence and it is just utterly convincing, the more you look at it, the more convincing it becomes and that of course is just one kind of evidence and then you look at the geographical distribution, you look at the fossil record, you look at comparative anatomy, it all adds up in a totally convincing way, if only you sit down and look at the evidence. That's what's amazing about Darwin coming up with the theory in that he didn't even have the evidence from molecular biology, he didn't have these new lines of evidence and yet he saw what really no one else maybe Alfred Russell Wallace accepted saw. Yes, I mean, that really is just to say that although the molecular evidence is the most powerful evidence, even without the molecular evidence, the evidence is extremely powerful as Darwin showed. So he had the evidence from comparative anatomy, he had the evidence from geographical distribution which was particularly persuasive to him. He also had the evidence from domestication which I do quite a bit about in The Greatest Show on Earth as well. So I think what that is telling us is that the fact that Darwin could come up with such a convincing case even without molecular evidence shows that now we've got the molecular evidence which is the most convincing evidence there is. How much more convincing is the whole story? Last question, Richard, you were contrasting comparing the God delusion with The Greatest Show on Earth and suggesting they're two sides of the same argument. Would you settle for everyone believing in evolution if they also believed in God or do you think it's important to really be all in? Like to follow what I think are the implications of evolution and give up God belief completely which is more important, I guess I'm asking. That's a very penetrating question because I think that does get to the heart of the political argument. We were talking about earlier there are many of my colleagues especially in America who would quite clearly settle for they're quite happy about people believing in God. What they really, really want is to get evolution properly taught in the schools. And that of course is immensely important and it really breaks my heart to think of children being denied this very, very important truth about the fact of evolution. Nevertheless, I do think that it's only a part of the truth and I don't think that I would actually go along with them. I think the National Academy for example has more or less said this. I don't think I'd go along with them in saying that that is so important that we can forget about the what I think of as the larger battle of whether there is any kind of supernaturalism going on in the universe at all. I do think that supernaturalism is a betrayal of science. And that's a larger question than the particular question important of that is about evolution. So to finish up before we say goodbye I want to announce for our listeners and I'm very grateful to you for this. You have agreed to be the keynote speaker for the next amazing meeting in Vegas this next July 8th through 11th, TAM 8. Yes, I look forward to that very much. We're very excited as well. Thank you Richard for joining me on For Good Reason. I really enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed it very much too, thank you. And now the honest liar considers the high price of nothing. Here's Jamie Ian Swiss. How much would you pay for nothing? Recently I've been thinking about homeopathy because on January 30th, skeptics in the United Kingdom, America, Australia and New Zealand gathered in the world's funniest attempted suicide. Okay, normally attempted suicide isn't funny but in this case it's hilarious. Because all these skeptics around the world tried to kill themselves with overdoses of homeopathic remedies. Now that's funny. Why is it funny? Because since no one died from the attempt which I suppose is a good thing for everyone except the New Zealand Council of Homeopaths a representative of the council later admitted publicly that, quote there's not one molecule of the original substance remaining, close quote in the dilute forms of these remedies that you buy over the counter. Whatever it is, whatever the dilutant is is the only thing you're buying whether the dilutant is water or alcohol or sugar that's what you're buying. Eventually the result is so dilute it is indistinguishable from the dilutant. Now we didn't just discover this the other day. In 1842 physician and author Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote an essay entitled Homeopathy and it's kindred delusions of very good choice of words. As the honest liar I'm interested in deception and in homeopathy though it's sometimes hard to tell the deceivers from the deceived. Is it the manufacturers? Is it the doctors? Is it the pharmacists who sell these things? Do they know or do they not know that they're selling nothing? Do they tell their customers? Are they willing to tell their customers? And it's only in this contemporary Western world of people with too much education, too much money, too much good health and too much spare time in their hands where those same people are more eager to believe that their doctors and pharmaceutical suppliers are the enemy and that the useless con man homeopathic profiteers and alternative healers at their local yoga parlor are somehow their real friends. Now homeopathy is one of the most scientifically studied alternative medicines in the history of the world certainly in the history of modern science and I will leave it to other sources to provide you with the details of the mathematics of the procedures for dilution of the magical shaking of the notion that like cures like all the mystery magical voodoo that describes and defines homeopathy but no matter which aspect of homeopathy you are examining, the bottom line is it is magic. It's not the kind of magic I do where something actually happens. It's a delusion, it's wishful thinking. It is in fact epistemological hedonism. You know, if it feels good, believe it. It is obscenely expensive. It is a waste. It is a tragic loss of resources to all of humanity and let someone say it plainly now, okay? I'll say it plainly. It is downright idiotic. Perhaps you think I exaggerate. Perhaps I am merely unkind. Well, consider this item that came across my desk recently for a product called Nelson's Noctura, a homeopathic remedy for insomnia. Reading from the website, it says, a bad night's sleep is often the result of stress. A refreshing natural night's sleep will help reduce that stress. Wait a minute, let me get this prescription right. So in other words, these experts recommend that getting a good night's sleep instead of a bad night's sleep will then reduce your stress. Well, WTFF, here's the best part. This is a medication for the relief of insomnia. What does it say? Does not cause drowsiness. What? Does not cause drowsiness. You're trying to get some sleep but this will not cause drowsiness. Well, then what the hell does it do? People like to ask, what's the harm? What's the harm in homeopathy if it's just water or sugar pills? What's the harm if that's what folks want, if it offers a little comfort? Well, putting aside the cases of people who abandon conventional medicines, you know, that's medicine that works in place of ineffectual alternative therapies, put that aside, just think about what else you could do. What else you could do with your time, do with your brain, do with your valuable human resources instead of investing them in literally nothing. How many schools could we build? How many libraries could we keep open a few hours longer each week? How many children could we feed? Write your own list of whatever it is that you value with the energy, the time, the resources wasted on nothing. And those aren't the only costs. There's also, of course, the money. So, how much would you pay for nothing? Well, a 2009 report tells us that Americans spend $3 billion a year on homeopathy. That's right, $3 billion a year on nothing. Isn't there something we could do with that money? And isn't something better than nothing? This is Jamie Ian Swiss, and I am The Honest Liar. Thank you for listening to this episode of For Good Reason. For updates throughout the week, find us on Twitter and on Facebook. To get involved with an online conversation about this episode yourself, join the discussion at forgoodreason.org. Views expressed on For Good Reason don't necessarily reflect the views of the James Randy Educational Foundation. Questions and comments on today's show can be sent to infoatforgoodreason.org. For Good Reason is produced by Thomas Donnelly and recorded from St. Louis, Missouri. For Good Reason's music is composed for us by Emmy Award-nominated Gary Stockdale. Contributors to today's show included Jamie Ian Swiss and Christina Stevens. I'm your host, DJ Grovey.