Recently of selected writings of a passionate rationalist. Coated prospect magazine Number One World seeker on the Daily Telegraph 100 top genius this getty and his degrees from serology and his tour doctorate professor for the public understanding of science the blind watchmaker and a selfish she that have sold more than 3 million copies and translated into were the 38 languages worldwide. Please join me to welcome our author. [applause] can you hear me . So we have a lot of heavyduty questions to ponder tonight the game we can start with something a little later there is a wonderful essay toward the beginning of the book science in the soul i have bound galleys that is the complete license to write all over the of pages. Like to read what you have written. [laughter] so you have a wonderful essay about Charles Darwin and dr. Doolittle. [laughter] how many have read read the book or see the film . Pages a there is some similarity between dr. Doolittle and the young darlington. Dr. Doolittle would always say it is like the beagle is great merit naturalists like darwin they both love animals and they can was genuine the influence by dr. Doolittle i have never seen any of the films they good as. [laughter] they are pretty good. Well below one. If you really love the book the film will follow which. But he did influence me to value the nonhuman animals it away and might not have done. He is actually censored in a lot of Public Libraries because of racism that is just the symptoms of the 20s when he wrote the of books and every row racist type but in a very gentle kind of way dr. Doolittle of more than makes up for it. The doctor doolittle as you point out fixes over and over but that is held doubt by the animals to figure out whats he needs in that is a rescue. He can talk to don humid levels of that is the plot of the whole story this is the one trick that he has like Science Fiction then Everything Else follows from that. Is struck me in the last couple of years we had quite a number of bestselling books one was called peel woodwards the wonderful marine biologist and they are focused on the animal consciousness and they say animals care about their own life in day care about furthering their own life just the way that you and i do. Of course there is a plea at the center of the books to understand the cannot just write them off the face of the earth but he is helped by the animals the way we are without even the understanding how we are connected consciously all the time. Yes. Is the of bit of a stretch that way. Is a childrens book. [laughter] true. You are so right actually. [laughter] earlier in the book with the concept is disturbing in easy to read but then those that make you sit down and think one that i have been pondering is your discussion of how organisms are adapted perfectly because of Natural Selection to bring the next generation of jeans fourth and is pretty well adapted to the past but not to the president or the future so as we have successful cubans these the news that recreate together like the internet. That is of little bit beyond our own capacity to notice perfectly well. We will always be misaligned with our own president. So the idea of time and our placement is framed by the opening of your book so could you read from that . This is the introduction their burrows specifically for this book. Much of the rest of the book is previously published essays although not in this country. I am writing this two days after a breath taking visit to the grand canyon to many native american tribes that is a sacred place from that have this issue if i were forced to choose a religion that is the kind of religion i could go for the grand canyon has stature not just the of petty squabbling colts that still afflict the of world. [laughter] in the dark knight ill look down along the south rim of the canyon to gaze up at the milky way. Looking back in time with this the 100,000 years ago with the light sent out on its quest at dawn the following morning and returned to the spot as a realized where i was lying in the dark i looked down toward the canyon floor gis into the past back to a time with their own the microbes beneath the milky way joined by a prehistoric creatures in even dinosaurs. Won the evening up the canyon a soul spring into existence like a white that came on. In a typical human soul legend the on the scale of beethoven. It is said to silly like an overwhelming sense of personal identity. Is an illusion constructed as to radians might speculate the of a singular purpose that helps us to survive. [applause] i will tell you what i wrote is Richard Dawkins getting spiritual on us . That is not the point to. [laughter] it is meant to be a little provocative to put the word soul in the title but i quoted one of my great heroes a great medical scientist and biologist he said i hope i am not seen ungracious that nothing would allow me to with tent the type of lecturer i am about to give. [laughter] i hope i am not ungracious but if youve come to witness some type of conversion. [laughter] there are two meetings of the word and sold so what but the two definitions of the oxford definition one is the immortal religious natural sold upon death that is not what im talking about the other is the spirit of aesthetic and emotional response to the science its universe and life that is the way i used soul in the title. Could you elaborate on the emergent concept . You said earlier it was an interesting point how we are adapted to the part said genes that made us that have survived through countless generations with every single one of your ancestors died before achieving that least one heterosexual population. It is obvious but significant because many of their contemporaries died without succeeded in reproducing. So we contain the genes that help our ancestors to survive. I have a phrase called the genetic book of the dead. The g and said a modern and all that describes the past as a digital description of the world of our ancestors of the past survived. Not the present for the future. In the Merchant Properties mean it will be very different with our changing environment data break that breakneck pace in the way it is amazing we do thrive so well in this environment that is rapidly different in which our genes survive in the past. We have close and huge cities, fast cars, we do suffer from psychological problems because the world is so different this all comes under the heading to the merchant. That is very beautiful with the timeframe than the cosmic time frame talking about the past that we are responding so with that rate of change why has that increased . That because of the numbers . Is increasing. A computers we are living in an astonishingly fast changing world, and its showing no signs of slowing down. Two questions related to that. If c. Is, it seems we are driven by our own tools in this telescope of satellite technology, the microscope, the ability to drill down to evermore granulated discernment. It becomes a social the internet and facebook and twitter in the way we organize ourselves socially. It would seem it is driving the social behavior in many ways. And i wonder what you think about that. The art, culture, understanding of history would be what would determine us but the toolmaking is the thing it would seem. They make way for the next advance and in our case in the world of computers we have hardware and software where the advances in hardware make possible software that wouldnt have been possible before the hardware was invented, so each one page the way as it opens the door for the next advance, and that is getting faster. One thing that is kind of willynilly as we go is biology. The biological reality of other species. One of the things it seems a couple thresholds that weve passed, one is the aggregate number of human beings have become a bio geographical force in the record, the American Society for the geophysicists were i never get this right but they want to now call this to reflect on its profound impact of humans on life on earth. One of the things we are doing is reducing biodiversity and other species the way that some scientists put it is depriving other species that other it is taking away the habitat because we are putting so many more human body is on the earth that we are making buildings and we are doing something very scary and dangerous and tragic which is reducing diversity itself and i wonder if you can tell us about diversity going back to the profound and simple mechanism of Natural Selection and how it depends on diversity and how do you see the horizon as we take it out . I mourn the diversity and the extinction of species. Thereve been mass extinctions before and sometimes as people say the socalled but its tragic and i respond to it in an emotional way and i mourn the life of cyrus and the Passenger Pigeon but what you are saying is more than that. Ecologists tell us that it is necessary for the continuation of the balance of the ecosystem. I think this intersects pretty strongly with your expertise because you were talking about this genetic book of life but when i first started writing about evolution myself and i was taugh told by evolutiy biologists have some have conserved genes in it that it is all different and in some cases no longer exists but it existed through the eons and are likely to be the most hardy in the future scenarios, so it is very important to conserve the ancient lineages. Thats very interesting. I didnt know that. Its very fascinating how some have things for a long time in this variance. Right in that introduction the growth of consciousness mirrors a similar progression over the longer time of evolution do they have a rudimentary feeling of consciousness and to connect to that a little bit of a really fascinating essay about the internet in which you wonder if, here is a sentence from its called next game and its how the internet may be changing the way we think. The worldwide unification mirrors the nervous system and cellular animals end up in a little bit later you say that its a interstellar traveler whose nervous system consists of units that communicate with each other by radio, orders of magnitude faster than our nerve impulses. But in what sense is it to be seen as a single individual rather than a society . I should interject this cloud as you are talking about is from Science Fiction, not Science Fiction but fred was a great astronomer and he wrote a love of Science Fiction much of it not very good but his first book is extremely good called the black cloud that the obnoxious hero you cant help but wonder may be modeled. [laughter] it keeps turning up under a different name and character. The black cloud is a mega super human that appears to be on the energy of the sun and eventually they get in touch with this and managed to communicate with it and learn about it. Different parts communicate with each other by radio and the scientists raise a very interesting question in what sense are you the cloud a single individual and the cloud replies if the question doesnt mean very much when the rate of communication, the speed of communication between the different communicators is very fast you might stop talking about them altogether and if all of us could communicate telepathically with each other instead of a slow lack of speech to communicate our thoughts directly at the speed of light and speed of radio waves than it wouldnt mean anything to us we wouldnt talk about ourselves as separate individuals. I think the point you are getting at is the internet may be moving towards a sort of non sciencefiction future where it becomes a single being, a single living organism of some kind of. The passage that you read made the analogy where its been suggested that the consciousness forms of self as a kind of melding of separate entities in a single agent at all as we have just been talking about. Its all pretty fascinating. Its the best of times and worst of times. Looking at it both ways it seems exciting. And its terrifying at the same time speaking of which, i was reading the selfish gene which was just out in the last year and i was just remarking to myself how timeless your book is and what you are explaining hasnt changed that much in the decade since it was published. A couple things have changed and one is our ability to mess with the gene, so now we can alter it at the level we can suppress the expression of certain genes and weve developed the ability to insert and flowing as in i wonder if you would explain what crisper is. Some of you probably know but not everybody does and tell us what you think about this moment in time. Yes as it happens i read this on the plane coming over from england a very interesting book by jennifer who is a professor. Its a wonderful opportunity to read books. I read this entire book between london and new york. Reading an entire book by the way is more than donald trump has done in his entire career. genetic manipulation, the actual changing of genes is something that has been impossible to do until recently. The main way to do that has been to transplant from one organism into another one. Youve probably heard about this because they had jellyfish genes. It is a new technique which jennifer was one of the main pioneers of. A wonderful book i do recommend called cracking the creation and its about her career and explains all about the technique into the misgivings she has. Its a very powerful and fast technique for changing the programming any organism like. It comes from the bacteria that are heavily afflicted with. That attack bacteria use to recognize viruses is a technique that humans can now exploit in order to edit the any organism that you like so it is a powerful and a new technique giving light to great possibilities and also misgivings whereas in the past for thousands of years we have controlled the evolution by manipulating the selection part of the equation. Weve used that and its changing from that side to huge great things, cabbages, ko, karate, cauliflower, broccoli, all these things are modified versions. Now we can actually change the mutation part of the equation and the selection and its much faster, much more powerful, potentially dangerous as people worry about it so we recommend the book very good. This might be an over simple question but lets say someone messes with a gene in humans and create some kind of human that is dangerous from Science Fiction what would happen after that and as a possible somethint something could be released that could never be . I suppose it is. Its a sort of discussion partly centered on the distinction is the one thing between the negative and positive manipulation. Its already been used quite successfully for removing genetic disorders come things like how hemophilia and things like that and people object on ethical grounds doing that and meddling with nature and playing god. What is more come th, people obo the manipulation, trying to change the gene of a human so that they can become better at say music or mathematics or running, things like that. A lot of people have objections to that and i think partly because it sort of snow said hitler. You do make an important distinction between the draconian dictatorial government imposed genetic changing the. You can still object to going to a doctor and saying i want my doctor to make the child to be a brilliant musician please give her my genes which may be possible. There are people who do object to that and i can kind of see why also if you think of it naturally we dont worry too much about parents that are ambitious to make their children and musicians and force them to sit down at the piano for three hours and work at it is it really all that much different than putting this gene into the child . [laughter] so people are worried about that marching on with the same in the new world order. As you said in the best of times and the worst of times the future can be pretty scary sometimes. We have some really fantastic questions and since we are on kind of a technical topic i will read this one. Thereve been many recent events both in the area of potential components and metabolism what are your views in this area . I think that they are talking about the beginnings of life, the creation of life from nonlife that have been at least once. It may have happened more than once. Its one of the big mysteries that faces biology. We dont know how it happen hapd but it happened about 4 billion years ago and thereve been various theories of how it might have happened. We know the kind of things that must have been. It was the origin of the first self replicating entity in effect the first gene. It is almost as if it was not dna. It was a self replicating entity then thats the prerequisite for the selection to get going. Once i started, then the whole story kind of takes off, the direct competition between genes and building and then lots of cells and so on. Once that started and we understand what happens and it gave rise to the full complexity but how did the first step has been . Is a huge mystery. It couldnt have been dna almost certainly got started because dna was a high tech replicator. Its a very efficient replicator but it needs a complicated infrastructure in order to direct replication and you cant have a complicated. Its a related molecule as many dont know the. It also has the capacity to be an enzyme. You cant have dna unless you have protein and you can can he protein unless you have dna and it can do both jobs. So, that sort of current most fashionable independent replication function was taken over by dna and protein. Im going to aggregate a few questions that have to do with machines and Artificial Intelligence. How did they adapt to the inevitable evolution to learn and is there a point that we must learn to unplug it is worrying as another one of the questions does about Artificial Intelligence. If there is another question referenced to the anxieties about a possible threat from Artificial Intelligence. He is a genius and no doubt about it. As a philosophical naturalist i am committed to the view that theres nothing ithere is nothis or our bodies do this and the view that anything our brains can do potentially can be simulated and done more so by machines, so i think it is definitely possible that they will do everything we can do and likely that they will do it better, so it may not happen for a long time, but in principle it is possible and this people including worried about it some people that are not being necessary anymore if our jobs are to be taken over by a robots and maybe we will be dispensed with altogether if they get to the point they can make new and they dont need us at al