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Richard Dawkins

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2020-04-09
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2020-04-09
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  1. “I do think it would probably be a good idea to think in a Darwinian way about this sort of thing. Conventionally think of the transmission of ideas in evolutionary context as being limited to in our ancestors people living in villages, living in small bands where everybody knew each other and ideas could propagate within the village and they might hop to a neighboring village.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Well, the internet, of course, provides extremely rapid method of crowd emission. When I first coined the word, the internet didn't exist. And so I was thinking then in terms of books, newspapers, broad radio, television, that kind of thing. Now an idea can just leap around the world in all directions instantly. And so the internet provides a step change in the facility of propagation of memes.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Well, I think they're a bit more than a metaphor, and I think that. I mentioned the physical. Bodily characteristics which are a bit trivial in a way, but when things like the propagation of religious ideas, both longitudinally down generations and transversely, as in a sort of epidemiology of ideas, when a charismatic preacher converts people, that resembles viral transmission, whereas the longitudinal transmission from grandparent to parent to child, etc is more like conventional genetic transmission.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “In terms of these Even morphology, even anatomy does evolve by mimetic means. I mean, things like hairstyles, styles of makeup, circumcision, these things are actual changes in the body form. which are non genetic and which get passed on from generation to generation or sideways like a virus in a quasi-genetic way.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Can replicate. Well, it clearly does replicate. There's no question about that. The question is does it replicate in a sort of differential way in a Darwinian fashion? Could you say that certain ideas propagate because they're successful in the meme pool? In a sort of trivial sense you can would you wish to say though that in the same way as a animal body is modified, adapted to serve as a machine for propagating genes is it also a machine for propagating memes? Could you actually say that something about the way a human is modified, adapted For the function of beam propagation.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “It would mean the cultural equivalent of a gene, cultural equivalent in the sense of that which plays the same role as the gene in the transmission of culture, in the transmission of ideas in the broadest sense, and it's only a useful word if there's something Darwinian going on. Obviously culture is transmitted, but is there anything Darwinian going on? And if there is, that means there has to be something like a gene, which becomes more numerous or less numerous in the population.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think that it's just an act of card is to leap to religious explanations, and Shotter doesn't do that, of course. But I accept that there may be something that we don't understand about it.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I agree with Roger Penrose that there is a mystery there I mean, he's one of the world's greatest physicists. I can't possibly argue with his.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Well, of course, it's interesting whether it's promising, I'm really not qualified to say what I do find puzzling is that the brain being as small as it is compared to computer and the individual components being as slow as they are compared to our electronic components. It is astonishing what it can do. I mean, imagine building a computer that fits into the size of a human skull. The equivalent of transistors or integrated circuits which work as slowly as neurons do it's something mysterious about that. Something must be going on that we don't understand.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In order for them to be active, it would be necessary that the most called intelligence Not that intelligence is simply correlated with brain size, but let's talk about intelligence. In order for that to evolve, it's necessary that the most intelligent beings have the most individuals have the most children. And so intelligence may buy you money, it may buy you worldly success, it may buy you a nice house and a nice car and things like that if you're successful career. It may buy you the admiration of your fellow people. But it doesn't increase the number of offspring that you have. It doesn't increase your genetic legacy to the next generation. On the other hand, artificial intelligence, I mean, computers and technology generally is evolving by a non-genetic means by leaps and bounds, of course.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yes, I think that if superhuman intelligence is to be found, it will be artificial. I don't have any hope that we ourselves, our brains will go on getting larger in ordinary biological evolution. I think that's probably come to an end. It is the dominant trend, one of the dominant trends in our fossil history for the last two or three million years. So it's been swelling rather dramatically over the last two or three million years. That is unlikely to continue. The only way that happens is because natural selection favors those individuals with the biggest brains. And that's not happening anymore.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Surprising is there aren't more of them in a way what's surprising is that the design of living things is so good. So natural selection manages to achieve excellent results, partly by tinkering, partly by coming along and cleaning up initial mistakes and as it were making the best of a bad job.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The most direct pathway was behind that artery, and then when the tetrapods, when the land vertebrae started evolving, and then the neck started to stretch, the marginal cost of changing the embryological design to jump that nerve over the artery was too great, or rather was each step of the way was a very small cost, but the cost of actually jumping it over would have been very large. As the neck lengthened, it was a negligible change to just increase the length, the length of the detour, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, a tiny bit, each millimeter at a time didn't make any difference. But finally, when you get to a giraffe, it's a huge detour, and no doubt is very inefficient. Now that's bad design. Any engineer would reject that piece of design. It's ridiculous. And there are quite a number of examples, as you would expect. It's not surprising that we find examples of that sort.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Very, very inefficient. The reason is historical. The ancestors are fish ancestors, the ancestors of all mammals and fish. The most direct pathway of that of the equivalent of that nerve, there wasn't a larynx in those days, but it innervated one of the gills.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “That's bad design. My favorite example is the current laryngeal nerve. I've used this many times. This is a nerve. It's one of the cranial nerves, which goes from the brain. And the end organ is that it supplies is the voice box, the larynx. It doesn't go straight to the Laras, it goes right down into the chest, and then loops round an artery in the chest and then comes straight back up again to the larynx. And I've assisted in the dissection of a giraffe's neck which happened to have died in a zoo, and we watched we saw the recurrent laryngeal nerve going whizzing straight past the larynx. Within an inch of the larynx, down into the chest and then back up again, which is a detour of many feet”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's a paradox, isn't it? I mean, on the one side, it is deplorably wasteful. It's fundamentally based on waste. On the other hand, it does produce magnificent results. I mean, the design of a soaring bird, an albatross, a vulture, an eagle is superb. An engineer would be proud to have done it. On the other hand, an engineer would not be proud to have done some of the other things that evolution has served up, some of the sort of botched jobs that you can easily understand because of their historical origins, but they don't look well designed.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “That's an interesting question. I'm committed to the belief that is ultimately possible because I think there's nothing non-physical in our brains. I think our brains work by the laws of physics. And so it must in principle be possible to replicate that. In practice, though, it might be very difficult. And as you suggest, it might be the only way to do it is by something like an evolutionary process. I'd be surprised. I suspect that it will come. But it's certainly been slower incoming than some of the early pioneers thought.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I stuck my neck out and said that if ever we do discover life elsewhere, it will be Darwinian life, in the sense that it will work by some kind of natural selection, the non-random survival of randomly generated codes. It doesn't mean that the genetic would have to have some kind of genetics, but it doesn't have to be DNA genetics, probably wouldn't be, actually. But I think it would have to be Darwinian, yes.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I think so. I suspect that they will have Pythagoras' theorem, etc. I don't think their mathematics will be that different.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “My radio. It's highly unlikely they'd ever visit us. But it's not that unlikely that we would pick up radio signals. And then we would have to have some means of deciding that it was intelligent. People involved in the SETI program discuss how they would do it and things like prime numbers would be an obvious thing too. An obvious way for them to broadcast to say, we are intelligent, we are here. I suspect it probably would be obvious actually.”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, if we accept that there's intelligent life here and we accept that the number of planets in the universe is gigantic, I mean, 10 to 22 stars has been estimated, it seems to me highly likely that there is not only life in the universe elsewhere, but also intelligent life. If you deny that, then you're committed to the view that the things that happened on this planet are staggeringly improbable. I mean, ludicrously off the charts improbable. And I don't think it's that improbable. Certainly the origin of life itself, there are really two steps. The origin of life, which is probably fairly improbable, and then the subsequent evolution to intelligent life, which is also fairly improbable. So the juxtaposition of those two, you could say, is pretty improbable, but not 10 to the 22 improbable. It's an interesting question. Maybe you're coming on to it, how we would recognize intelligence from outer space if we encountered it. The most likely way we would come across them would be”

    2020-04-09 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #87 – Richard Dawkins: Evolution, Intelligence, Simulation, and Memes · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source