Last night I went to Richard Dawkins’s appearance at the Chicago Theater as part of his “The Final Bow” tour: the last time, he says, he’s going on the road to do lectures. (After here he goes to Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Vancouver, winding up in Old Blighty with talks at Oxford and Coventry.) I suppose that Richard, now 83, figured he was too old to be traipsing around on a five-week tour, but he also has a new book to promote and discuss, The Genetic Book of the Dead: A Darwinian Reverie.
The event last night was mixed: redeemed almost entirely by the presence and eloquence of Dawkins himself. As far as I can see, this tour, organized not by the Richard Dawkins Foundation (RDF) but a commercial outfit, was thrown together at the last minute, with the format being an initial ten-minute “warmup” lecture unrelated to the discussion, and then an interchange between Richard and a selected interlocutor, who happened last night to be journalist Jessie Singal. In my view, it was not a great choice to enlist both Singal and the introducer, Angel Eduardo (now an editor with FIRE). They weren’t even announced until a few days before the event, something that the RDF wouldn’t have done had they hosted this event. And neither person performed as well as I expected.
Eduardo talked for ten minutes about the divisiveness of online discussions, and how we should always assume the best intentions of our opponents, as well as characterizing their arguments as strongly as possible (“steelmanning”) instead of giving distorted views of their arguments (“strawmanning”). He bemoaned the nasty tone of much online argument. But these points have been amply made others like by Dan Dennett, and the hand-wringing about divisiveness, while pointing out a real phenomenon, was anodyne: we’ve heard it a million times before. I just wanted to get to the discussion between Singal and Dawkins, which lasted about an hour. You don’t need a warmup act for Dawkins.
Singal’s expertise in biology is limited to gender issues, and so the biology part of his questions concerned Richard’s views of transgender issues, and although the audience might not have known them, they do now. Richard asserted, for example, that it’s simply wrong for a man to identify as a woman and immediately, for example, to start competing in women’s sports. It was good to hear that pronounced with such authority from the stage, though I have no idea whether the audience questions took Richard to task about this (I had to leave after the discussion to catch a train).
Richard was also asked about having his 1996 “Humanist of the Year” award revoked because of the first tweet below:
Shame on the American Humanists for this! Richard was simply puzzled about why changing gender is applauded but changing race is demonized. He was especially baffled because, he said, gender is a spectrum, and it’s much easier to sell the claim that you’ve changed genders (without drugs and surgery, that is) than to claim that you’re actually a member of a race you weren’t born into. This in fact is the subject of Rebecca Tuvel’s famous Hypatia article that caused such a fracas when it was published, and yet it’s a valid subject to discuss. (In fact, I’ve discussed it here.) I still don’t understand why it’s okay to change genders but not races—especially, as in the case of Rachel Dolezal, her identification as black (she was born white) seemed to be an honest one.
At any rate, perhaps the audience didn’t know this, but in my view Singal, who actually crowdsourced most of his questions to Richard from friends and others, sorely neglected Richard’s book itself (I wonder if he’d read it) in favor of asking a series of largely unrelated questions—questions about life on other planets and the future of humanity.
Richard did get in a few statements about evolution. One was an eloquent description of how cuckoos parasitize the nests of other species and mimic the eggs of their hosts, who will reject eggs that look “wrong.” This had led to the enduring mystery of how each cuckoo manages to lay eggs that mimic those of its host, given that each female lays only one kind of egg but different cuckoo females parasitize diverse species of birds, and yet the different egg-types of female cuckoos (“gentes”) manage to remain egg-color specific despite mating with males who carry genes for other egg color. Why doesn’t a female carry both her color genes and different color genes from the male, producing intermediate eg that would be rejected by the hosts?
When I first heard about this years ago, I immediately thought of a solution: the egg-color-and-pattern genes must be on the female’s W chromosome. In in birds females are “heterogametic” WZ and males are “homogemetic” ZZ—unlike in mammals, in which males are XY and females XX. Thus, in cuckoos, the W chromosome is passed on exclusively from mothers to daughters, and no genetic material on that chromosome is mixed with DNA from males. This could ensure that a female lays only the same type of egg as her mother, no matter with whom her mother mated. (Females imprint on the nests of their hosts, and thus return yearly to the same species of host to lay their host-mimicking eggs.) We don’t yet know if this is the answer, but I suspect it’s correct, and we’ll find out within a few years. Richard clearly became excited when describing this, and I was sad that this was about all the evolutionary biology he discussed in detail. Most of the “discussion” was simply Richard answering a series of diverse questions from Singal. Singal was more interested i, for example, n whether humans would somehow be made of metal in the future, and whether there was life on other planets—a tired old subject.
But what redeemed the discussion was Richard’s ability to take any question, no matter how many times he’d heard it, and make the answer fresh and interesting. So, with the exoplanet life question, he didn’t just saym “yes, there are millions of planets that could support life, so it must exist somewhere else”. Rather, he added that there were likely several barriers to producing technologically advanced life elsewhere in the universe (without technology to produce radio or light waves, we wouldn’t know if such life existed). The barriers, which Dawkins said were of several types, included the origin of life (probably pretty easy given that life evolved very soon after Earth cooled down), and then harder barriers like the evolution of a eukaryotic cell, the evolution of multicellularity, and then the evolution of a multicellular species with the smarts to produce technology.
Singal apparently didn’t have the acumen to ask Richard what I would have: a problem with his thesis that I wanted to explore. The thesis of The Genetic Book of the Dead is that we can reconstruct the environments of our ancestral species simply from knowing their DNA sequences. We simply sequence a species (ours is done, of course), look at the genes we have, figure out what those genes were involved in when they were active, and from that going on to conclude which adaptations our ancestors had. Ergo, we might conclude what kind of ancestral reptile, or what kind of ancestral fish, our ancestors were, and thus what environments they lived in.
There are two problems with this. We can certainly use DNA sequences to reconstruct family trees, confirming our conclusion (already known at from morphology, fossils, and development) that yes, we’re evolved from fishy and reptilian ancestors. But trying to suss out the environments of those ancestors from DNA sequences is probably futile. For one thing, we don’t know what most genes actually do, and thus would be stymied since we don’t know which ancestral DNA constituted adaptations to the environment,—and if so, what kind of adaptations. More important, most of the ancestral DNA we still have has been overwritten by the endless churning of natural selection, so even finding out what deep ancestral genes we had would be nearly impossible today. That’s the first question I would have asked Richard after he described the thesis of his book.
But perhaps this is just the biologist in me kvetching. Yet somehow, having known Richard for years, I think he’s most energized when discussing his first love, evolutionary biology and its wonders, and less energized when answering questions like “Would you like to be immortal?” (His answer, “No. I love life, but the prospect of eternity is frightening. Still, I’d like to have 200 years.”)
But one of the last questions from Singal was good: “If you died and found yourself in Heaven, and could get answers to three questions that have puzzled you, what would you ask?” Richard’s answers:
“How did life on Earth originate?”
“What is consciousness?” (I presume he means what neuronal configuration gives rise to subjective sensations, or “qualia”.)
“Is there ‘advanced’ life in other places in the Universe?”
The audience applauded these answers, which were good, though I’m sure Richard’s been asked this before. (I would probably have thought of the first and third, but not the second.)
I just thought of another question I would have asked him. (I may have even asked this during the few times I’ve been part of an onstage discussion with Richard.)
“If you were put in a time machine, and could be transported back to one location for one day, hoping to answer a question about biology, and were given only a paper and pencil to record what you say, when would you choose?”
(You couldn’t say “I would like to be there when life originated”, because in a day you couldn’t answer that question. But you could go back and look at things like dinosaurs or hominin ancestors.)
My conclusion: go see Richard if you get the chance. There are only a few more stops on his tour, and tickets are available. No matter who questions him, he will be giving good answers—and often funny ones. But really, the organizers of this tour should have thought better about who to enlist as interlocutors and “warm-up” acts. (To their credit, though, Masih Aliejad was one warm-up.) And they shouldn’t have chosen these people at the last minute.
If you go, and if you’ve bought VIP tickets, bring your Dawkins books, for he’ll autograph as many as you have (no duplicate books, though, and you have to have shelled out for those VIP tickets. Still, when else are you going to get him to autograph his books?)
