RICHARD DAWKINS

DESERT ISLAND DISK INTERVIEW WITH RICHARD DAWKINS

Programme transmitted on BBC Radio 4, January 1995.

Transcript by Dina Broughton.

Sue Lawley.: My castaway this week is a biologist. He is also an atheist. He believes that Darwin's theories of evolution provide the starting point for everything we need to know about our world. Religion can provide no answers at all. He was born in Kenya but came to England when his father inherited the family estate in Oxfordshire. He began to develop his ideas as a student at Oxford and later published them in popular books such as "The Selfish Gene" and "The Blind Watchmaker". Happy to be seen as a bridge between academic science and the general public, he is not frightened of controversy and has frequently found himself in dispute with leading theologians. He is - Richard Dawkins.
It is not surprising really that theologians see you as public enemy number one when you put God on a par with Father Christmas and the tooth fairy, but you don't draw those analogies lightly, do you?
Richard Dawkins: No, I think it is a very serious analogy. I think that Father Christmas and the tooth fairy are childhood props. They're aids to children to understand and I think God is very much like that except that people very frequently don't give up God when they should; when they become old enough to give up God - they persist.
Sue: But is it more than that? Do you see God, not just as an irrelevance like the tooth fairy ultimately, but as positively harmful?
Richard: It certainly can be positively harmful in various ways - obviously in causing war, which has happened often enough in history, causing fatwas, causing people to do ill to one another because they are so utterly convinced that they know what is right - because they feel it from inside - because they are being told from within themselves what is right - therefore anything goes. You can kill people because you know that they are wrong, you know that you are right. That is certainly evil. I think a less serious kind of evil is the way it tends to shut off enquiry. You feel that religion provides you with the answers to the world and the universe and why you exist, therefore you suppress your normal feelings of enquiry, your normal questioning and therefore don't come to the truly fascinating answers that there are for those questions.
Sue.: Which I want to talk to you about but I just want to explore a little bit more your view of religion because you obviously do think it is evil. You've called it a virus and you've said it is an infectious disease that is passed on to us when we are children.
Richard: I am interested in the idea of infection, the idea that something spreads from brain to brain to brain in the same kind of way as a virus spreads from body to body to body. It spreads just because it spreads, not because it has any very good positive reason.
Sue: Because parents pass it down to children.
Richard: In this case mostly parents pass it down to children. Sometimes it may spread sideways.
Sue: So just to put your position crudely on the table, as it were, as far as you're concerned there are no mysteries of life that ultimately will not be explained by science.
Richard: There are very profound mysteries of life which it is science's business to struggle to understand and it may well be that there are some that we shall never understand, but that should be regarded as a challenge. We should feel unhappy at anything that we don't understand. We should regard it as a delightful task that we should enjoy facing up to.
Sue: But the chances of the ultimate explanation for those mysteries, of being an invisible, omnipotent creator who oversees us all is just not on.
Richard: Well it's a non explanation. I want to sweep aside that kind of non-explanation so we really have a good go at finding what the true explanations are.
Sue: Right, so Richard Dawkins will live or die on his desert island according to his innate skills of survival and not because God wills it one way or the other. Is that right?
Richard: That is the position of all of us on our island of a planet, let alone me on my desert island.
Sue: Let's hear some of the music that is to accompany your struggle.
Richard: My first record is "In Paradisa" from Faure's Requiem. Sung by the choir of New College, Oxford. I am a fellow of New College and it is where I work and where I live and so it has very pleasant associations for me to hear the choir of the college singing. Also when I was at school I was a choir boy, a treble, and although I don't think we actually sang Faure's Requiem we sang very similar kinds of music so it would bring back my school days to me.
(music plays)
Sue: I should imagine your views have been the subject of many a heated debate in the senior common room.
Richard: No, I don't think they ever have. I can't recall any time when they have been the subject of debate.
Sue: But you have undermined the academic existence of some of your colleagues. You've gone as far as to suggest that theology is not a respectable subject to be taught in our universities.
Richard: Yes, I certainly have said that. My theological colleagues are quite intrigued and interested to discuss these matters. When my first book, "The Selfish Gene" was published two clergymen of my acquaintance, I think indeed they were the two clergymen in New College, both independently approached me and said that it reminded them overwhelmingly of the doctrine of original sin. I haven't anything to comment on that.
Sue: It's a bit difficult to image that they just accept it on an academic level because you are saying that everything they believe in and everything they teach is hocus pocus. You are saying to all of us that we should now grow up at the end of the twentieth century - we should grow up, mature and leave all of this fairy tale stuff behind us.
Richard: Well that is what I am saying but I am trying to say it in a more positive way. I'm not just trying to say negative things, I'm trying to say there is a very, very exciting universe out there to be seen if only we shall open our eyes, take off our blinkers and see it and that is a more positive way of looking at it.
Sue: But why do you feel so strongly, I mean after all what you are preaching is Darwinism? Darwinism, as every school boy knows has been around for 140 years. Why now? If it hasn't faltered and fallen before now, why should it do so now just because you say so?
Richard: Well, my theological friends wouldn't thank me for allowing you to suggest that there is an opposition between theology and Darwinism. Respectable theologians, of course, accept Darwinism.
Sue: They didn't in the beginning.
Richard: No, they didn't in the beginning but nowadays, very wisely, they do. The evidence has always been overwhelmingly strong as far a Darwinism is concerned. The people who don't believe in Darwinism are just plain ignorant. That's all there is to them. So there is a need to fight that battle because there is a need to fight a battle against ignorance.
Sue: Well, just to simplify it, why are you saying we should dismiss God today in 1995 when we haven't dismissed him before?
Richard: Some of us have dismissed him before, I mean it's just a matter of if you believe something to be right you don't suddenly say "1995 seems to be the right time for a change of heart" it's nothing to do with that, what you believe is true, you believe is true and you believe it is true in 1995, 1985, 1975 whenever you happen to think about it.
Sue: So you believe that the answer to the most fundamental philosophical question of all, "Why are we here?", is that we are driven by our genes, by the desire of our genes to replicate themselves - simply that, no more, no less and there is no need of God?
Richard: Yes, that's putting it in a nut shell.
Sue: Let's have record number two.
Richard: Record number two - Paul Robson singing "Passing By". This takes me back to my childhood in Africa when my father had an old wind- up gramophone and a collection of Paul Robson records which I loved and still do. This particular song has associations with my wife, Lala, as well.
(music plays)
Sue: That gives you memories of your childhood in Kenya and in Nyassa Land.
Richard: I was in Kenya until I was two and thereafter in Nyassa Land until I was 8.
Sue: And your father was in the Colonial Office?
Richard: In the Colonial Agricultural Service.
Sue: So was it there that you first felt the stirrings of interest in the natural world?
Richard: Not really. Unfortunately, to my regret I've never really been a naturalist. I've never been much of a bird spotter or a insect spotter. My father was and it's rather a pity that I never was. I suppose my interest in biology came rather later.
Sue: But it is interesting that when you went up to Oxford you went to read Zoology. Obviously there was a scientific interest there.
Richard: Yes, I read Zoology at Oxford. My father had read Botany. There might have been a certain following in family footsteps there.
Sue: It was in the genes perhaps.
Richard: Well I don't know about that. I had always been interested in philosophical questions which I think biology can help to answer. It was rather that than natural history I think that attracted me at first. I now, belatedly, have become interested in natural history and wish I had learned more as a child.
Sue: How old were you when you realise that, for you, Darwin provided most of the answers?
Richard: About sixteen I suppose. When I first learned about Darwin I didn't believe it. I thought it couldn't do the job of explaining and then I thought it through and thought it through again and gradually realised that it was by far the best explanation.
Sue: You had been infected by the "virus" as it were? You had gone to all the perfectly proper Christian prep schools and public schools?
Richard: Yes, I wouldn't want to exaggerate that. I mean I am not one of those people who ever had religion rammed down my throat. It was done with a very light touch. I just had the ordinary Church of England fed to me which is the most civilised way of having it fed to you. It wasn't oppressive.
Sue: It was easy for you to shrug it off when you thought you had found a scientific answer.
Richard: Yes.
Sue: Wasn't that because someone or something in you had provided you with the intellect to question that religious belief and in the end to dismiss it?
Richard: Any child growing up I suppose with a bit of luck will have some sort of enquiring tendency to ask questions - to not accept everything that you are told on trust.
Sue: Quite, but my point is that therefore the virus wasn't as virulent.
Richard: Oh no, it's like any virus - you can shrug it off.
Sue: Record number 3.
Richard: Record number 3 is Tchaikovsky's Andante Cantabile for strings. This was the earliest piece of what you can call serious music that, I suppose, I heard. Again my father had a record of it. It was played by Fritz Krysler which was very swoopy on the violin. It has haunted me ever since and I've more recently got a record of it, this time played on the 'cello. I still love it. It is one of my favourites.
(music plays)
Sue: Now how do you, Richard Dawkins, with your scientific logic explain our appreciation of music like that? Or our reaction to lovely poetry or art - things which arouse an emotional response?
Richard: There are many things that we don't understand. That is different from saying that we can never in principle understand them. The kind of understanding that we shall eventually come up with, if we do, will be of the form: Brains are very, very complicated things and brains react to sounds and sights in very, very complicated ways. It isn't fruitful to attempt a scientific explanation in detail why one is moved by music or poetry.
Sue: People would say that you are copping out in saying that. People who oppose your views would say that that is something beautiful and God given, that man can make computers but he can't make computers appreciate music.
Richard: Let's take computers. There are many levels at which you can understand computers. You can understand computers in very great detail by looking at exactly what is happening to the electrons going through the transistors in the computer and ultimately everybody believes that you will understand computers at that level. That is in a sense all that is going on but nevertheless in order to try and understand how the computer is behaving, how it manages to do mathematics or do word processing you have to look at a higher level and similarly if you want to understand human appreciation of music you certainly will not get anywhere if you talk only about nerve cells. I believe that it is nerve cells that are really there but nevertheless we have to talk in terms of what those nerve cells are doing at a higher level. We have to move to, say, a psychological level and we can move to a psychological level. We can use units of discussion, units of description, units of explanation which are much higher level units than nerve cells.
Sue: Do you believe then that we have a pre-disposition or that we are pre-programmed to like or dislike music and when we are born are we already what we are going to be? Is it all there?
Richard: No, it certainly is not all there. When one says pre-programmed to like music I would prefer to say we are pre-programmed with brains that are going to respond in certain ways given a certain environment. There was probably nothing in the history of our species that led us to be favoured by natural selection if we liked music. There was something in history that led us to be favoured if we had brains that had certain kind of mechanisms wound up to ears which incidentally happen to respond to music when music came along. Now music must be tapping into something that was already in the brain for some other reason, as mathematics is. We were never naturally selected to do mathematics or to do philosophy but something about the way natural selection shaped our brains has incidentally left us equipped to do mathematics and philosophy and to appreciate music.
Sue: So does that rule out any space for free will in all of this? I mean if you have a pre-disposition you're highly likely, are you, to take to mathematics and you wouldn't otherwise. It isn't that you can suddenly decide?
Richard: No, I think that that is a misconception because at the philosophical level the free will is a very difficult subject which I should not get into - that is for philosophers - but you are asking a more simple question which is whether we are born with a pre-disposition to be good at philosophy or mathematics or music and if we are born like that there is nothing we can do to change it. I don't believe that. I think that it is possible to take somebody who does not have a particularly strong talent for music and teach them music or a strong talent for mathematics and teach them mathematics. There is an interaction between a genetic pre-disposition to be good at something and training to be good at something and you can make up for a lack of one with an excess of the other.
Sue: Record number 4.
Richard: Record number 4 is Judy Collins singing "Michael from Mountains". This takes me back to my first job in Berkeley, California in the sixties. I get a bit tired of people who call themselves a child of the sixties and are always banging on about the sixties. I think the sixties are one of the good candidates for one of the great bores of today. Never-the-less this particular music is evocative for me and a particular time of my life and I do love it.
(music plays)
Sue: You spent two years in Berkeley, California and came back to Oxford in 1970 and you have been there ever since. You had been back a few years when you decided to write a best seller, in inverted commas, a popular science book. Why did you suddenly decide to do that?
Richard: The particular reason for writing "The Selfish Gene" was that there had been a spate of popular books at that time suggesting that Darwinism works at the level of the group or species. Natural selection favours the fittest group or the fittest species and that led to the sort of idea that individuals are expected to be generous and unselfish and working for the good of the group because any group whose individuals were selfish would tend to go extinct. That's just wrong. That's a misconception, misunderstanding of Darwinism - alas - it would be awfully nice if it were true for all sorts of ideological reasons. It seemed to me to be a great conflict between what would be ideologically nice and what was actually true and I wanted to tell people what was actually true - not so that they would sit down under it and say, "Oh dear we're all selfish and horrible" but rather that they would learn to hit back against it. The message of "The Selfish Gene" in a sense was: You can expect no help from biological nature if you want to be nice and unselfish and generous so we have got to work at being nice, unselfish and generous.
Sue: But you were saying just now that you didn't want everybody to sit down and say, "Oh dear what a terrible thing" but people did, didn't they? People wrote to you. You had a huge mail bag as a result of writing what did turn out to be a best seller and people saying, "You have robbed me of my religion. I see exactly what you mean. You must be right."
Richard: One or two people felt melancholy about it. The vast majority were extremely cheerful about it and they said, "Thank you for liberating me."
Sue: But have you never felt any guilt for those others because you mentioned earlier on about the psychological level of it all and of course people have a psychological need for religion which, if they read and understood your book, you have taken away from them and people need it - in bereavement, in illness, they need to believe that there is someone there looking after them, someone who had a reason for making whatever terrible thing it is happen.
Richard: I think one is over optimistic to think that one changes the minds of religious people that easily.
Sue: But isn't that what you want to do?
Richard: I love to be able to show people some understanding of why they exist and what life is about. That is the mission of my books. I don't see it as a crusade against religion. I am not very interested in religion. I am interested in the truth and I am trying to tell people what the truth is. If they choose to interpret it as undermining their religion then I am afraid that is their problem.
Sue: More music.
Richard: The next one is Vaughan William's Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis. It conjures up for me visions of the English country- side. I think of clouds scudding across high chalk downlands and I feel I should be reminded of England by this record.
(music plays)
Sue: You talked about genes being selfish, being bent on their own replication. Let me run some other popular scientific questions past you. Do you believe that cold viruses cause us to sneeze in order to increase their chances of replicating - finding another host?
Richard: A very interesting idea. There is a large literature on the idea of parasites more generally manipulating their hosts in order to get themselves passed on to other hosts. Whether cold viruses really make us sneeze for their own good I'm not sure, but undoubtedly there are various kinds of worms and other parasites that do make their hosts change their behaviour in such a way as to be more likely to pass the parasites on.
Sue: It's a very interesting reason for sneezing though isn't it? There doesn't seem to be any other reason.
Richard: Yes, that's true. Another possibility is rabies causing dogs to bite and salivate and foam at the mouth so that the virus passes out through the saliva into the next victim. That's another possibility.
Sue: You also believe, don't you, that there are other forms of virus - what I would call fashion - but you believe that a lot of young people like the same kind of music because they have caught it from each other.
Richard: Yes, it's almost in a sense obvious that things like that spread in a virus-like way. I'm sure you could apply the mathematics of epidemiology to the spread of certain kinds of music. There is a universal epidemic amongst students at the moment for the so called IQ reducer. That's the baseball hat worn backwards. A base ball hat worn forwards is an IQ reducer that reduces your IQ 10 points, turn it around with the silly bit of elastic at the front and it reduces the IQ a full 50 points, so science proves.
Sue: Are you saying that this is more than just a fashion?
Richard: No, it is a fashion but it is just another way of putting fashion. You could trace the spread of the backwards facing baseball hat just as you could trace the spread of a measles epidemic I believe and I think it would be a fascinating thing to do.
Sue: More music, number six.
Richard: Part of the second movement of Schubert's String Quintet in C Major. I wanted some beautiful string music because my daughter, Juliet, who is ten, is learning to play the violin and, as I am on my desert island, I could imagine her getting better and better at the violin until she sounds something like this.
(music plays)
Sue: You obviously, Richard, hold your views with deep conviction and you have promoted them reasonably hard as a lecturer and latterly reader at Oxford and through your books and television programmes but do you crave a wider audience still. How frustrated are you that your message isn't being heard and being taken on board more widely?
Richard: Not exactly frustrated. I think my message is being heard and taken on board very nicely, thank you. There is a certain frustration, I suppose, in lecturing to an audience of fifty or a hundred undergraduates and feeling that it would be nice to be lecturing to a larger audience really because the scientific matter that I am trying to get across, that any scientist is trying to get across, is so fascinating, is so powerful in what it can explain and is so sadly, tragically, unknown to so many people. I feel that it is terribly sad that a lot of people out there are going to their graves without ever knowing what is perfectly simple and common place and in lots of books that they could know. It is a very positive thing. I feel that part of the conversation that we have been having has had a rather negative sound to it as though I am constantly knocking and putting down things. I am not that at all. I am not interested in the point of view that I am portrayed as knocking down. It just isn't important.
Sue: You don't like being classed as a militant atheist?
Richard: No, I had much rather be classed as an enthusiastic scientist who is trying to open people's eyes to how much there is that we do already understand and can understand in the future. I don't see it as a negative knocking down at all.
Sue: Record number seven.
Richard: Vangelis, "Conquest of Paradise" from the film 1492. The association for me with this is a slightly odd one. Having spent my early childhood in Africa, I had the opportunity to go back to Africa just very recently with my wife. There was a great sense for me of going back to my roots, back to my childhood. But also, of course it is back to humanity's roots because we are African animals. We have spent almost all of our last many, many million years in Africa and only very, very recently come out of Africa. So we did feel a sense of going back to humanity's roots. This was heightened by the fact that we were then to visit Richard Leaky and to be shown, in the vaults of the Nairobi museum, many of the great fossils of human history which I found a deeply moving experience. Then we went on to stay with Ian and Auria Douglas-Hamilton, the famous couple who have worked on elephants, in their, what is called, Pink Palace, which is a most astonishing building - a great big 1930's art deco palace in the middle of the African bush on the shores of Lake Nivasha. It was a really surreal experience to go into this palace in the middle of Africa and hear, blaring out across the Lake Nivasha the strains of this magnificent music through very, very large loud speakers. It is something we will never forget.
(music plays)
Sue: Tell me about Richard Dawkins on a desert island. What are your practical pre-dispositions?
Richard: I'm not desperately practical. I think I have suffered from the fact that my father is desperately practical. So whenever there was anything to be done he would tend to do it. I wish I could have watched more carefully how to do it. I was sent to Arendal, which is a school renowned for its practicality and has the finest workshops, I think, in the country. The trouble with fine workshops is that there are things like high powered lathes and milling machines and you don't get them on desert islands. So working with bits of string and driftwood is not the sort of thing I am very good at. It is what my father is good at. I'm not really sure how I would manage.
Sue: What about your own company - are you happy with that?
Richard: No, not really. I'm not very good on my own. I do need company.
Sue: And what about death? Do you fear that?
Richard: Not more than I think many people do. Certainly I don't fear it because I know it is the end. I think I would rather it was the end than almost any kind of eternity. The time may well come when I welcome it if I'm ending up in some kind of painful terminal disease then I shall be very annoyed if the law prevents me from ending my life when I want to end it - because of some idiotic scruples.
Sue: What about if you were in that kind of condition, lying alone on your desert island, poisoned by a venomous snake or something. Do you think that if you were alone and dying a slow and painful death and had no way out, do you think that you would ever be tempted to call on God for help?
Richard: No, I think I would be more tempted to find some poison if that seemed like the best way out. I don't think that I would be tempted to call on God.
Sue: You would never revert to your early childhood beliefs?
Richard: I can't imagine so, no.
Sue: Last record?
Richard: The aria "xxx" from Bach's St Matthew Passion. It's a great favourite of my wife's for one thing, it's hauntingly beautiful for another. You have just been talking about death - it is salutary to think about last things from time to time. Even if one isn't religious, nevertheless one can be moved by religious music.
(music plays)
Sue: If you could only take one of those records?
Richard: It is very difficult, but I think it would probably be the Schubert.
Sue: What about your book?
Richard: Well, I thought something that I could read over and over again because of the style rather than what I learn from it, so it would be Jeeve's Omnibus by P.G. Wodehouse.
Sue: And your luxury?
Richard: A solar powered computer - really because a computer is so many different things. You can program it to be one toy after another. It is not limited to being one thing. By its very nature you re-program it to be something else and so it would be an infinitely versatile toy and source of amusement. There are so many things you can do on it.