206 | Simon Conway Morris on Evolution, Convergence, and Theism

0:00:00.1 Sean Carroll: Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. We've talked about evolution several times on the podcast in the past few months in this calendar year, 2022. And it's something that we can just keep coming back to over and over again. And I love talking about it because on the one hand, natural selection, Darwinian evolution, obviously true. Every scientifically sensible person understands this. It was a tremendous insight that Darwin came up with into how species evolve, how they change over time. But at the same time, huge controversies, rage within the field. You can have a bunch of people who completely agree on the basic outlines of natural selection, but have very, very strong and emotional reactions to individual sub-questions within it. And they're real questions, they're not fake questions. And they're not even way out at the speculative periphery. They're right at the heart of the matter. In the standard model of particle physics, we have a lot of success, it's obviously true in its domain of dependence, but we don't have a lot of controversy over the big questions, no one's really going to the mat over the value of the fine structure constant or how many cork flavors or colours there are, things like that.

0:01:11.2 SC: Hopefully we'll go beyond the standard model but the standard model itself is understood. Whereas in evolution, we can go to very, very basic questions such as, the relative role of randomness and luck, versus adaptation and convergence. We had on the podcast, my name sake Sean B. Carroll, who is a champion for taking very seriously the idea that there's a lot of randomness and luck that comes into the evolution of life. The basic idea being of course, individual species and populations adapt to their environments and their surroundings and their competition and so forth. But maybe there are a lot of ways that could happen, and a lot of ways to get there, because the space of possible genomes is incredibly big, way, way bigger than life here on earth will ever actually explore. So contingency and randomness and unpredictability play a big role in the actual history of life in this view.

0:02:05.9 SC: On the other side, we have people who think, look, given the constraints of how organisms and populations survive and flourish within a certain environment, they're going to find very, very similar conclusions. They're gonna design themselves, be designed in this sort of blind watchmaker kind of design sense, into more or less what works in that particular regime and that's going to be the same no matter how you got there. That's the adaptation-ist point of view. And we had Arik Kershenbaum, and also Richard Dawkins on the podcast recently. Those folks are on that side. Today's guest, Simon Conway Morris is a distinguished Paleontologists and evolutionary biologist, who is very much on the adaptation-ist side of things. So I guess we're a little unbalanced this year. We have many adaptation-ist this year, but that's okay. It's an interesting question to talk about. And Simon Conway Morris is most well known in scientific circles for his exploration of the Burgess shale, this is a fossil-bearing deposit that teaches us a lot about the Cambrian explosion. The Cambrian explosion was this moment in evolutionary history, when a tremendous number of new species came into existence 500 million years ago, something like that.

0:03:19.8 SC: And Simon as I said, is a champion of this view that evolution is converging on to the best possible solution even though it might get there from very different ways. And he has a new book out called, "From Extraterrestrials to Animal Minds Six Myths of Evolution". So he's pushing against some of the popular myths about how evolution works. And it's not... He's not fighting against intelligent design or whatever, but about the role of mass extinctions, the difference between humans and other animals, things like that. I will keep his actual claims until the actual podcast, you can hear what he has to say. The other very interesting thing from my perspective about Simon, is that he is a theistic evolutionist. So, unlike... I think it's fair to say, unlike most evolutionary biologist, he is a quite card-carrying religious believer. He believes in God and thinks that God and evolution are perfectly compatible with each other. Not my view, okay, but it's always an interesting one to come across and talk about with, with someone who really understands what they're doing and is not too dogmatic about things. If I read what Simon writes in his book, to me, there's little tiny elements of his religious belief seeping in.

0:04:32.4 SC: Not like, "Oh, Jesus did this." Something like that, but a comfort level with purpose, Telos, a special role for minds in the cosmos, a special role for humanity, whatever. But the reason why I think it's important to talk about is because, look, a naturalist like myself, I'm sure that my views seep in, to other things that I say. And the question is what... Where is the causality? Do I have these big beliefs about the ontology of the world because of my scientific discoveries, and understandings, or vice versa? Who knows? I think that the important thing is that we can get together and talk about it and see what's going on. So occasional reminder, we have on here, on Mindscape, a Patreon page, where you can support the podcast at patreon.com/Carrollton's, and you can join up, throw in a dollar or so to every episode, and you get the right to listen to the episodes ad free, and also to ask questions at the monthly AMAs. And, the general warm feeling that you're part of a pretty awesome community. Which I think Mindscape has grown up to be. So, thanks very much, and let's go.

[music]

0:05:55.7 SC: Simon Conway Morris welcome to The Mindscape podcast.

0:05:58.0 Simon Conway Morris: Thank you so much.

0:06:00.3 SC: So, evolution is something we've been talking about a little bit on the podcast in various directions. There are interesting sets of controversies and issues, unsolved problems within... Not between evolutionary biology and non-evolutionary biology, but even within the specialty. What are your... What is your feeling about what are the biggest... I don't even wanna say controversies, but big questions or divisions that the professionals are talking about amongst themselves?

0:06:32.5 SCM: Well, actually I would step almost immediately backwards and say that to the first approximation, sort of Darwinian thinking is rather static these days. You look at the great majority of papers being published, and they're doing much the same thing as they were doing 30 years ago. What's really changed course is the technologies and things like crisp and all the rest of it.

0:06:49.8 SC: Sure.

0:06:50.9 SCM: And I was... When I give lectures, and I'm... Actually, I have to say straight away, I'm retired, so I don't do so many lecturing. Which is probably just well for the world at large. [chuckle] I sort of say, well, actually in my view sort of biology evolution's got into a little bit of a rut. Whereas you think about those chaps who are cosmologists and physicists of course an area you know a great deal about, more about than I do. And look at them, and in the last 20 years they've managed to lose 90% of the visible universe. I thought, "Well done, they're really making progress." [laughter] And I usually cap that with that famous quote from Niels Bohr, which I mention in various places, where he says something along the lines of, "I really like your idea, I really do, it's absolutely crazy. There's only one problem, it's not crazy enough." And so, within evolution there is, if you like, paradigms and orthodoxes and my new book, which of course I sure publicized...

0:07:40.7 SC: Jeez.

0:07:40.8 SCM: Relentlessly as possible, a wonderful read, a wonderful read. Is trying to look at what I call myths of evolution, not areas which are fictional, but ones where I receive wisdom, in my view is overdue and here I use a very English term, very overdue for a really good kicking. I'm sorry. No, no. What I mean it's time to reappraise them. And so, for example, if we think about mass extinctions very briefly, we all know about those, we all know what happened in Shishila, we all know what happened to Deccan. So a combination of asteroid impact and massive volcanism in India leads to very bad news all around the planet. Farewell to dinosaurs, here come the mammals. You and I are now talking in a sense, almost as a direct result of that catastrophe. Because if the mammals hadn't radiated, then of course the mammal... The dinosaurs, I'm sorry, would've carried on as before. And that would've been more or less the end of the story. Well, I actually disagree with that, and again, I don't wanna unpack this un-ghastly detail, but there are a couple of things worth remembering. And one is of course, that the mammals were coexisting with the dinosaurs. They in fact, started to evolve seriously, in fact, probably in the late Jurassic, some sort of 90 million years before the asteroid hit.

0:08:48.0 SCM: More importantly, they were actually beginning to diversify, and although the traditional views of the cretaceous scene are gigantic dinosaurs and things which look like sort of scaled down mice, sort of shivering underneath the ferns. A point of fact, some of the mammals were getting quite large, some actually ate baby dinosaurs for breakfast. But more particularly, the mammals are sooner or later gonna take over the world in my view. And indeed, a book which has just been published, got very good reviews, I haven't read it yet myself by Steve Brusatte, looks at in fact, the whole story of the mammalian radiations. But to the first approximation, and here, it's not quite as simple as that, but mammals are more social, they're warm blooded, and they tend to have bigger brains. And by and large, that's a sort of winning combination. And another thing some groups do, as indeed in a convergent way to the birds, is they also make tools. And sooner or later in my view and I can unpack this a bit further if you're interested. That a dinosaur would be wandering through a glade, and there'd be a thud of a spear in its side, the mammals who turned up, dinnertime.

0:09:51.8 SC: Well...

0:09:52.5 SCM: So, that's... Enough, yeah.

0:09:53.8 SC: No that's actually great. And it's a little bit out of order for what I was thinking, but it's just so juicy and good that I would love to unpack some of these details here. So you're not... So one of your myths in the book is, let's get the title of the book out there for the listeners, From Extraterrestrials To Animal Minds Six Myths of Evolution. So one of the myths is labeled mass extinctions. And, so you're not saying the myth is that there were mass extinctions, you're agreeing with that, right?

0:10:21.9 SCM: Yeah absolutely.

0:10:23.3 SC: How could you not. [laughter]

0:10:24.1 SCM: They're bad. Don't go there.

0:10:26.5 SC: Right. Very good.

0:10:26.9 SCM: But in the long term, don't worry.

0:10:28.9 SC: Right.

0:10:29.2 SCM: If you're a mammal.

0:10:30.3 SC: And that's... Well, that's the interesting thing. So is this a general lesson that you're suggesting, that the changes that happened subsequent to mass extinctions largely would've happened anyway?

0:10:42.1 SCM: They would've happened on a time scale we know because there was a mass extinction. But effectively what I would suggest is that paradoxically, and I like paradoxes a bit like Niels Bohl I suppose. Mass extinctions actually accelerate something, they give you roughly 50 million years for free. So, in other words, instead of the grunt work of working your way up slowly, slowly, slowly, which would've been the case, if there had not been a mass extinction. In point of fact then, getting rid of the dinosaurs was terribly helpful, and of course, lots of reptiles survived, snakes, lizards, all that sort of thing. But it gave them... It gave the mammals a leg up, which they enjoyed. But otherwise I have a counter factor, which simply says, well, other things which happen on this planet apart from mass extinctions, which are roughly every 200 million years are glaciations. Every now and a go they... Every now and again, they go completely out of control and we call that a snowball earth. But mostly the ones we have at the end of the order vision, in the Carboniferous and the Permian, and the one we're in a present day, glaciate the poles.

0:11:41.7 SCM: So what happens in this counterfactual world? The world... The planet begins to refrigerate, in what we call the a legacy, probably about 30 million years after the asteroid, which never struck. And of course in that temperate zone and polar zone, you can get a handful of reptiles, but this is just the sort of place, which would provide in my view, a sort of stimulus for innovation amongst the mammals. So, the history would not be the same, why should it be? But the end result is almost indistinguishable.

0:12:10.6 SC: Well, is there any chance in your mind that the dinosaurs would have instead gotten better? Rather than mammals catching up and overtaking them, the dinosaurs would've become tool users and become more intelligent?

0:12:23.9 SCM: Well, Dale Russell who's a very sort of talented Paleontologist suggested much that and much... In as much as he sort of thought about this sort of Theropod-like dinosaur, which it became more and more of what we call Encephalitis, larger brain, and managed to manipulate things, and it was Bipedal, so it had hands and all the rest of it. But in a certain way, your question's already answered because of course, dinosaurs did exactly what you asked them to do. They turn into birds. And if we look at the parallels and the convergences between the birds in all sorts of ways with the mammals, including tool making such as we might see in the new Caledonian Crow, and again, we have to unpack tool making perhaps slightly further down the line.

0:13:00.2 SC: We will, yeah.

0:13:01.2 SCM: It's not quite what it appears to be etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Then in that way, they are feathered dinosaurs. And, if they suffer a... I'm wary about saying disadvantage, because by and large, biology is a genius at getting around problems. They never give birth to live young, with one possible exception. It is reported, and this is... I mentioned in a previous book, that... Of course they lay eggs and the eggs hatch and so forth, but in some lizards, for example, effectively the eggs hatch within the female and then you have live birth and you have the same thing in some fish as it so happens. So this is what we call Viviparity. But apart from this sort of rather mysterious Budgerigar in a town in England called Dorking and anybody who's in England will know what I'm talking about. It apparently did give live to... It gave birth to life Budgerigars. It's so ridiculous, we won't worry about it. So there we, they do lots of things, very similar to mammals. If you look at the crows and parrots, they have really quite large brains in proportion to their body mass, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. Sure.

0:14:06.1 SC: Well, it's interesting because this relates to one of the controversies or sets of issues that I wanted to get into, which was the famous one that you've been very active in arguing on one side for, about if we played the tape of life backwards. If we played it again, how similar would the outcomes be? And there's certainly an argument that, look, there are niches that need to be filled and they're gonna be filled one way or the other. I mean, maybe you can explain in your words, the state of play within the field about that particular set of issues, sort of randomness and drift, versus adaptation to specific sets of niches.

0:14:43.1 SCM: Thank you. Well, I find myself deeply surprised to be saying the following words, which is, I think more and more people are agreeing with this view. [laughter] That what we call evolutionary convergence. That is starting from different points in the tree of life and ending up with very much the solution... The same solution. In point of fact, it's something which is not only ubiquitous, but really underpins a great deal of what's going on in evolution. In other words, and again, I always sort of hesitate when I talk to Physicists of any description. But if you think about the potential number of... The Combinatorial immensity of biological space, it's just stupidly large. With great respect here, I think you chaps deal with fairly small change. What is it, 10 to the 90 basic particles in the visible universe? It might be something like that, not too many.

0:15:24.2 SCM: Whereas when you go to Biology, the potential number of alternatives simply 'cause of the combinatorics is just enormously large. And therefore the... That may... We proceed to another part of the conversation on some other planet, there will be life and it may indeed be cellular and so forth. But in all other respects, it would be genuinely alien. Whereas what we see here on this planet is by and large, convergences are seen across the board, and in particular, most of those are just the routine sorts of things, which oddly enough, Darwin never really dealt with them. He acknowledges it. But I suspect because in the sense he was trying to move away from the earlier 19th century religious establishment of creationism. He wanted to have everything going in all possible directions. In other words, nothing was constrained by some master plan, which might be sort of deep... Deeply concealed in the fabric of life. So whether that's the case or not, I'm sort of interested in, what is the likelihood of, let us say eyes evolving? Very high as Mike Land has pointed out. What is a possibility of other sensory systems evolving? Very high. It's a good idea to be able to detect molecules, which land on a epithelium and are converted into the smell of a white wine. We approve of that of course.

0:16:42.2 SCM: But one of the curious things which is slightly oblique to this is, it turns out if you go and look at the insects, they also have the capacity for what we call Olfaction. That is, they can smell things for very good reason, like finding humans to feed on their blood and all this good stuff here. However, it turns out that actually the molecule they use, which effectively acts as a way of transferring the physical stimulus of the molecule, arriving to the electrical signal, the transduction if you like, is based on a particular protein arrangement. We don't have to go into all the ghastly details, but it's actually something which looks identical to what we use for our olfaction and indeed in our other sensory systems, but blow me down, it's completely independent. And nobody knows why. [laughter] Why on earth did it throw away a perfectly good system? But the constraint is such that if you want to have an ability to smell something, you've got to use this protein. And there's a similar argument with other enzymes, which accelerate various chemical reactions. And I think that suggests that there is a fundamental predictability to evolution, both at a molecular level, but also all the way up to the development of large brains, warm blooded-ness, manipulability and precision grip and all those sorts of things. And collectively, they would suggest that, in my view, overall, something akin to a human is pretty likely to evolve on most planets.

0:18:09.8 SC: That's very interesting, yeah. Arik Kershenbaum made a very similar argument. He's very interested in exactly that issue. But let me... I forgot to ask him, I did ask Richard Dawkins and he thought it was an interesting question, but wasn't sure what the answer was. Certainly, the combinatorics of our genome is such that you could imagine huge numbers of different ways the DNA could be arranged, and we're never, ever gonna explore even most of that space. It's just too big. There's also a big space of possible morphologies, of bodies of various organisms. But what is the mapping between that like? Is there enough room in genome space to give us just about any organic morphology for an organism that we would want? Can we tweak the genome of a human being to give it a tentacle or something like that? Or... How much do we know about that?

0:19:02.0 SCM: Well, it's... [laughter] I'm not surprised Richard Dawkins said, "Well, we need to think about this." I think that there are a number of difficulties with approaching that question in as much as there is not simply a direct connection between a genome and morphology. If you knock out parts of the gene, then you will often have some embryonic disaster. But in point of fact, sometimes when you abuse the genome in various ways, there are all sorts of rescue mechanisms whereby the form can then be re-expressed. And of course, there are very famous experiments for instance, using the gene, which is involved with eye development, where if you over express it, then on the insect, you have something which is really Frankenstein-ian in my view, in as much as the eyes develop on the legs and on the wings and all sorts of places where you don't normally see eyes.

0:19:50.2 SCM: But I think beyond that, there is a sort of cohesiveness to the form, which is obviously underpinned by the genome. But the genome in itself is, you know, as Dawkins himself has explained, it's just a way of making information, which is then transcribed through much more complex processes. So, I'm not trying to dodge the question too seriously. It's more that, in a sense, if you look at the fundamentals of the genome and the codons, the sorts of things which are responsible for the amino acids, the 64 variants on that, there is some reason to think that actually our genetic code, which is found on this planet is not your bog standard one. It is fantastically good. It really is exceptional.

0:20:32.7 SC: Right.

0:20:34.6 SCM: There may be better ones, yes, but even so, this one seems to do what we need it to do. And on that basis, given that actually the way in which the... Well, if you look at single celled organisms, for instance, by and large, they have very, very complex genomes. And the prediction was that when the human genome was going to be analyzed, they said, oh, we reckon around about 100,000, maybe 200,000 genes. And what's the total? Well, 21,000 thereabouts. And the reason for that in part is because, evolution hasn't got time on its hands. Things are streamlined, they're economized, there are all sorts of shortcuts taken. And probably perhaps to build something as complex as ourselves. You simply in embryology, don't have the capacity to deal with 100,000 genes. You've gotta streamline the whole section. And you can think of analogies in technology of course.

0:21:24.0 SC: Yeah. And as a physicist, the idea that keeps coming to mind is equilibrium versus non-equilibrium dynamics here. Because I'm wondering how often in evolution we get to a situation where the ecosystem, like the whole set of different populations have filled their niches and is more or less static versus things are highly dynamic and eventually everything will change. I mean, is it really true that everything is always changing, although sometimes it might be too slow for us to see?

0:21:55.8 SCM: I think... I mean, my view [chuckle] in a sorta way is, it's rather ironic that here the first species, which can actually look around the world and say, isn't this extraordinary? And we might come onto that in a later context, actually moved into a biosphere, which is probably the most diverse, which the planet had ever seen. And there were a number of reasons for this, partly because of the climatic sort of variability, which has been characteristic for the last 30 million years with pretty cool areas and warm equators and so forth and all the rest of it. But more particularly, we get things like a rainforest. Now rainforest actually appear in the time of the dinosaurs. And in that sort of sense, this is something which in its own way can accommodate an enormous amount of diversity and a similar argument applies to the coral reefs and things like that. And of course, subsequent to that, of course, we turned up and admired all this biodiversity and then decided a good part of it might be better put in zoos or put in farms and all the rest of it.

0:22:52.3 SCM: And by the way, I'm not going down any particular lines of argument here. The trouble is that if you have a sapien species, then all bets are off after that. There's not a lot we can necessarily do about it rather than to be responsible. But I'm not gonna preach about that either or the rest of it. So, there is some suggestion that in a way, not only is the world as diverse as it ever was going to be, but in point of fact, for various reasons, I think we probably reached the limits of what is possible. And you can approach it in all sorts of different directions, but there are, I think, upper limits on, well, things like body size and so forth. But more particularly, a very nice paper was... And it's not technical stuff, but if you look at a lobster, turn it upside down, and you've got a set of appendages, some for walking, some for feeding, some for respiration and so forth. So they specialize as you look along the length of the body. Now we assume that the [0:23:45.7] ____ lobster, which was much more primitive, had a more or less identical set of appendages along its length. They did basically one or two things, but as time goes on, they get more and more specialized.

0:23:57.5 SCM: Well, some years ago, colleagues of mine, in Bath University, actually then analyzed whether there was any more latitude for further differentiation? And they came to the conclusion, no. It's more or less reach the limits of what is possible. And what I find so intriguing of course, is that I think this applies for instance, to brain size, and in point of fact, with a human brain, you can argue, it's a pretty grotesque thought, but it's pretty close to what is absolutely possible in terms of the different growth rates of what we call a white matter and the gray matter. It can get a bit bigger, but not that much either. But of course, a crucial difference is that in a sense of brain sizes are so much the question now, it is because we now see the world in an utterly different way, in part scientific, in part artistic and so on and so forth. And in that sort of way, we have unlimited potentiality. It's rather ironic. You know, we come from a group of primates closely related to chimpanzee, what are they doing? Well, with great respect, not very much. [laughter] What are we doing? We're talking to each other.

0:25:02.2 SC: Right, right. And actually, this reminds me, I'm gonna ask again, because now I'm more educated since the past 20 minutes you've helped me. In the evolution of human or mammals versus dinosaurs, I think that I'm willing to buy the idea that there is... Well, sorry, let me just backup and not just buy the idea, but ask you about it. Do you think that over the course of evolution, there is a tendency towards more overall complexity in the biosphere?

0:25:30.3 SCM: Careful, Mortimer, careful. He's asking you a tricky question. [laughter] Well, yes, yes, I think there is. But complexity... Well, again, you're the expert, 'cause the physicists know what they're talking about, I don't. A complexity is deceptive, and something which looks exceedingly complex, like a single-celled organism at one level is more complex, if you like. And I have written a little bit on this, actually devising a metric for complexity in Biology is extraordinarily difficult. One has a sort of intuitive sense of what it might be. But overall, yes, my sense is that the degree of ecological integration, for instance, the interdependence of different forms, and one of my favorite examples is that if you're gonna be an insect, you wanna eat, okay, very good idea. Some insects, the aphids actually penetrate the surface of the plant and extract sugary sap. Well, that's not an ideal diet, but heck, they get by. But there's another groups of related forms, and what do they do? 'Cause just to remind your listeners 'cause a plant is basically a set of chew, some which are taking sugars from the leaves down to the rest of the plant, and from the roots, the water is ascending to provide the necessary underpinning of photosynthesis.

0:26:46.3 SCM: So these insects, what do they do? They drink the water in the center of the plant, what we call as xylem tubes. Now, as a source of nutrition, to speak technically, this is bonkers, [chuckle] absolutely bonkers, nobody in their right mind... 'Cause there are in fact traces of organic material in it, but that doesn't bother them, 'cause they ingest colossal quantities of water to extract that, but within their bodies, they have a consortium of bacteria and they are the ones who do a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to synthesizing things like the amino acids. And the way these bacteria integrate together is totally staggering. I mean, the degree of inter-penetration of molecular pathways of one separate species of bacteria is staggering. Now, if that isn't complex, I don't know what is. And there is a reason to think that that's more or less reached the limits of what is possible.

0:27:45.4 SC: Well, that's exactly why I think it's an interesting question, because you're completely right that no one agrees on how to define complexity or certainly has a way that is completely robust and can be shared, but there is a kind of operational question when it comes to evolutionary Biology, which is, when is a certain ecosystem in equilibrium, when does it fit all of the niches that are around it, and will stay that way for 100 million years if you let it, versus when is it just creeping very slowly, but a 100 million years later it's gonna look completely different? Is that the kind of thing that evolutionary biologists worry about?

0:28:20.3 SCM: I hope they didn't worry about it. [chuckle] I mean, in the end... This is not an area which I can claim any expertise whatsoever, but my limited understanding about it in a way is that, you can't really separate the organism and the niche, because the organism makes a niche. And also, to the very first approximation, Yes, if you live on a mountain or you live in an oceanic trench, there are considerable physical constraints and you adapt to those. But otherwise, most of the conversation is not doing... Is not dealing with the day-to-day facts that there is sunlight or darkness or wetness or drought or... Those things are handled, because first of all, the organisms to the first approximation show there is amazing homeostasis. You know, they have this ability to semi insulate themselves from the vicissitudes of the environment.

0:29:10.5 SCM: And in all other respects, what they're doing the whole time is either learning how to eat each other, learning how to live together, learning how to interact, learning how to communicate. And of course, when you go to bacterial systems, there are all sorts of fascinating stories whereby they are communicating using various molecules, and if you have a plant which has been attacked by an insect, it will release volatiles, which inform nearby plants that they might want to bolster their defenses against the insects. So the whole thing is this enormous communication racket going across all the biosphere, everybody, and here I use my words with lack of suitable care, are interdependent on each other.

0:29:52.8 SC: But... Okay, good, I get all that. That's very helpful, and it allows me to finally revisit the dinosaur question. Is there a plausible counterfactual history in which the mammals continued on, there's no great catastrophe, there's no asteroid or volcano, but both the dinosaurs and the mammals sort of flourished, but the dinosaurs became the intelligent dominant tool using species. Like, if there's a niche for having a bigger brain, I mean, maybe a different species could have gotten it, or maybe a little genetic tweak could have helped them give live birth, I don't know.

0:30:29.7 SCM: Yeah. No, that's an extremely fair question. And in a way, actually, I've got all sorts of off-the record interest, and one is counterfactual histories, including historical things like what would happen at Gettysburg or other battles going one way or the other. And so, in a certain way, and this is, I hope not entirely trying to dodge your question is, I don't actually care who does it.

0:30:51.2 SC: Perfectly okay, yeah.

[chuckle]

0:30:51.2 SCM: Obviously I have a parochial interest as a mammal, but if I was a dispassionate observer visiting this planet for the first time, of course, we might get on to that in a moment, that will never happen, but don't worry. Then all I'm interested really is you're gonna need to have some sort of "warm-bloodedness," but given that that's evolved numerous times, including its effective equivalent in plants for heaven's sake, and there's a basic physiological process there. It's actually, ironically it's a Darwinian process, which doesn't work, and because it doesn't work, it's inefficient, and therefore it generates heat. So there we go. So, I'd like some warm-bloodedness, I would certainly want some increase in brain signs, some degree of manipulability would be good, and you can see what for instance some parrots do with their beaks and their claws. You know, they're pretty adept to moving things around. So, in that sort of way I really don't mind, all I would say is, I'm gonna put my money on something which will ultimately be Sapient...

0:31:50.2 SC: Yup.

0:31:50.3 SCM: And able to make tools, and not only make tools, but make tools to make other tools, and that is one, but by no means the only crucial, crucial distinction between ourselves and other animals.

0:32:00.9 SC: Well, you've done an excellent job of leading us into the next great myth that I wanted to talk about, which are the animal minds. You don't want to say that it's a myth that animals have minds, they do, but they're different. And I think if it's fair to say, you want to push against the recent tendency to lower the differences between animal minds and human minds. You wanna really emphasize that there is kind of a shift in kind, not just in magnitude about how we think.

0:32:29.3 SCM: Sure.

0:32:29.4 SC: Is that fair?

0:32:31.3 SCM: Yes, indeed. And, it's not the sort of thing which makes for a successful career. [chuckle] So I recommend, if you think about this sort of thing, do it when you've retired. [chuckle] And indeed the orthodoxes are very much, and you mentioned you've been talking to Frank Savalle amongst other people quite recently, and I would imagine he would find some difficulty agreeing with this point of view. And from his perspective with very good reason indeed. And again, I have to emphasize, I'm not for a moment disputing the evolutionary continuity between ourselves and the common ancestor, which would say 7 million years ago and all the rest of it. But partly inspired by a number of books, including one by Thomas Suddendorf, who I've not met, but he's a chap that works in Australia on... He's got... On animal minds. He's got this book called, The Gap and he's by no means alone in this. There are a number of other workers who are skeptical.

0:33:23.2 SCM: They don't generally unpack it in any sort of metaphysical sense and perhaps that's a very sensible thing not to do. But in essence, the more I've read into this area, the more struck I've been by a whole set of observations about what animals can and cannot do. And people will say as indeed Darwin did, of course, in his Descent of Man, it's simply a matter of a qualitative difference. It's a slightly bigger brain. It's a reorganization of the genome. It's bigger social units and anyone of those may indeed be the explanation. But what struck me very much is... In a way... In fact, I was just looking at paper the other day, and this may seem entirely tangential. This paper, Proc Roy Soc as we call it. And it was some... It's to do again with our old friends, the Rhesus monkeys. And this particular one, if you read the fine print in these papers and they're very generous, 'cause they give you the fine print, they actually explain the experimental protocol. And the first thing of course is the animal has to be trained. Animals very seldom are spontaneous and sort of just pick up something and wander off and do it for you. And in a way which is actually contrast very remarkably with even young children. But the second thing is, the degree of training is staggering.

0:34:38.0 SCM: I mean, typically speaking, it will take 50,000 trials to eventually persuade the animal to do what you want to do, 'cause you can't tell it. And the reason for that, which I actually think is related is 'cause they can't speak.

0:34:52.4 SC: Right.

0:34:52.9 SCM: They can hear commands of course, that's okay. They're not stupid, as you say. In their own context, they are as bright as they need to be. But there was one particular example which is to do, again with Rhesus monkeys, where these people wanted to find out whether they could engage in entrainment? And it's no good me clicking my fingers like this, 'cause I can't dance to save my life and it gets too much of a despair of my wife, but that's another story. [chuckle] So they use a metronome and they change the... There's a pictures of it and so forth and they wanna find out can the Rhesus monkey entrain to these changing sounds? And after a year of relentless investigation they come to the conclusion, no they can't. Now we do know some animals, especially that cockatoo called, Snowball I think it was, which was more or less hopping around on its perch. There's a fabulous bit of filming of this creature. But animals don't dance by and large. And in the case of these Rhesus monkeys, it told me something extremely important. It told me not much about Rhesus monkeys, it told me a great deal about us.

0:35:51.2 SCM: In other words, as I say in various contexts, what other species would actually think, this is an interesting thing to do? [laughter] You have to take your hat off to these people. And then there's another area... And stop me immediately if I'm going too far off piece, but with animal experimentation, there are all sorts of explorations of cognitive prowess. And we know that the crows in particular show some very striking convergences with the more advanced mammals. And one of their party tricks goes back to, what's called the Aesop's Fable, whereby you've got a thirsty crow and it drops pebbles into the container, which raises the level of water so it can get a drink. So this is Archimedes with feathers on, okay? Very good indeed. And indeed it is very striking that they learn fast, but they do have to be trained and sure enough, they drop things in and they raise the level of water and they get their tidbit.

0:36:48.0 SCM: However, if you make things a little bit more complicated, like for instance, having U-tubes which are concealed beneath the surface of the platform where the tubes are sticking out, even a fairly young child will quite quickly learn about cause and effect. The crows, never. Never. [chuckle] They would do it by trial and error and there's nothing wrong with that, but they don't seem to have any substrate of rationality. They can't interrogate the world as something which actually has, if you like, invisible consequences to it. They are to the first approximation, completely visible.

0:37:25.0 SC: It's a very interesting parallel actually with a podcast I recently did with Judea Pearl, who's an expert in causality and he makes exactly the same point that a young baby, like very, very young human beings are constantly probing the world to learn about its cause and effect relationships and a computer won't. The AIs do not do that. And so...

0:37:47.3 SCM: That's right.

0:37:47.6 SC: AIs can... Are much better at chess and Go than we are, but they don't have this instinct for making a colossal map of the world that is somehow embedded even in very young humans.

0:38:00.0 SCM: That seems to be the case. And I can continue this path of destruction if you so wish, but or conversation if you prefer. But another aspect which strikes me very powerfully, again, entirely based on reading of other people's papers. Is that animals also learn. They have to, but they never teach. And the reason is of course, that they cannot enter the mind of the companion and realize that the pupil has a mind which can assimilate knowledge. So we have a chimpanzee and as it happens, the boys go off and hunt Colobus monkeys and a whole bag of stories there. And that's often described as warfare and so forth. It's not that at all, but that's a, yeah, a slightly different story. That the female chimpanzees, in some, but by no means all groups, get large rocks and bring them down firmly and smash open nuts and they get the interior and that's all very helpful.

0:38:53.0 SCM: It's rich in nutrients. Good, good, good. The young chimpanzee sitting beside the mother will observe and it's not stupid, but unfortunately it will probably take that chimpanzee the best part of three years to learn how to do it. And the reason being of course that the mother can't sort of correct the baby and say, "No, darling, don't do it that way. Move your foot out the way you clot. Come on, stop fooling around. No, we'll have tea later, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera." And this is something, the only really good example of teaching in animals, oddly enough, is in ants. And that's a slightly sort of a bleak story.

0:39:26.9 SCM: So there's another famous example to do with the Meerkats. And, the young, amongst the other things, they're gonna have to learn how to deal with the scorpions, and once you know how to deal with them, they're probably, I guess they're pretty tasty actually, but of course, you've gotta be aware of what... So one end of the scorpion.

0:39:43.5 SC: Right.

0:39:44.5 SCM: So that's absolutely fine. And initially the young pups are given dead scorpions to play with, then subsequently they're given scorpions, which have been defanged, so to speak. So they're safe-ish. And only later on are they adept enough to deal with the real object. But it turns out that the levels of instruction are entirely dependent on the sounds which the pups make. So if you feed the wrong sound to the tutor, usually the female, I believe, it will assume the pup has a level of understanding, which it simply doesn't, because it is being misled by the sound it makes. So in other words, it can't go back into the mind of its pupil. And this again is something which is so difficult for us to place ourselves outside the context we find ourselves in, 'cause, you know, you and I know perfectly well in universities, we love teaching.

[laughter]

0:40:33.5 SCM: And it's always wonderful when you, sometimes, very often, first of all, the pupil gets it. "Oh God, I see it now." And then it's even more terrifying, 'cause they come back the following day, and say, "I've been thinking about this a bit more. Have you thought of doing it this way?" "Oh no."

0:40:46.0 SC: No.

[laughter]

0:40:47.4 SCM: You're past your sale by date. Come on, give way to the young person.

[laughter]

0:40:54.0 SC: Yeah. They keep making new young scientists. It's very frustrating sometimes.

0:40:57.6 SCM: They do. Yeah and I know. It's very satisfying. So yeah.

0:41:00.0 SC: There was a moment where I thought I knew all the people in my field and it went by very quickly. Look, let me just get my own feelings here on the table, which is that I don't have any strong feelings about animal minds versus human minds. On the one hand, I do perceive that there is this constant refrain of human beings saying, "Animals can't do X," and then we discover an animal doing X. But then I also see, which I think is the point you're making that when we dig into what's really going on in X, it's a much simpler, more direct call and response kind of thing than it would be in the analogous human situation where there's some abstraction and reasoning going on, so. And also I do look around and see that the human beings, like you say, have done things that animals haven't done. So there has to be some difference if we can just put our finger on it.

0:41:48.3 SCM: Sure. Sure. No, I agree of course. I mean, and this is a risky area because some people might then say, "Well, if animals really aren't human and so forth, we can treat them pretty well as we like." And I couldn't disagree more strongly. I mean, the very fact that we are aware, if you like of their predicament, means that in a certain sense they, I mean, this sounds very patronizing. It's not meant to be that at all, but they, we have a dog, it so happens, and maybe you have pets as well, but as you get to associate them, you know that they, as you say, they're conscious, they've got minds, they've got emotions and all the rest of it.

0:42:21.3 SCM: But in the case, at least of our dog, a spaniel, I'm afraid to say, it's quite clear, it's got the fuckiest idea of what we're talking about. If I give it a command, it sometimes does what I ask. And I think beyond that, I then sort of want to say, "Well, why the difference?" Is it just that we got smarter by accident?" And people use examples like dolphins, and in particular, and something which is convergent or a parrot, or a crow, is more encouraging. But in all these cases, not only is there a crucial difference, and not everybody will agree with me on this point, of course, is that they can't teach, but they don't speak, they vocalize. But once again, we underappreciate because it's so completely familiar to us that our language, isn't just a set of sounds, which have quote "a meaning." They are completely cognitive.

0:43:13.8 SC: Right.

0:43:14.4 SCM: You know, we cannot... There's some very interesting sort of counter examples. So there's one or two groups in the Brazilian jungles, for instance, which interestingly don't have the otherwise standard feature of language, which we call recursion, whereby you can embed meaning within meaning within meaning. And as I understand it, what's so fascinating about these people is that they're fully human in all respects, but they have no history. They have no folklore. And again, as an evolution biologist, one is fascinated as what was the environment perhaps where they didn't, in a sense, need this, because in all other respects they're absolutely attuned to their, in fact, very well attuned to their environment.

0:43:55.7 SCM: And there are very famous examples, the best known still is the vervet monkeys, and they have these alarm calls, one for snake, and one for leopard, and one for an eagle. And at first sight, this screams to me, "This is a proto word." But in point of fact, for a whole set of lines of investigation, this is, I think it's generally not accepted by anybody now that they're communicating, that's beyond a shadow of doubt, but there's no suggestion anymore than there is with a bird song. You might think, well, bird song, very complex, lots and lots of noises often to our ears very mellifluous, and what's it to do? Well to the very first approximation it's either to say, "Go away or come closer."

0:44:37.6 SC: Right.

0:44:38.1 SCM: And they never export that in a set of different meanings. So it's again, not a language and, again, this is going into dangerous territory, but it, and here we go, I can see you reaching for the off button here. I think this has been very good professor going. I think we just draw this to halt now. [chuckle] It is, what is on the nature of our consciousness and this is this is a graveyard of ambition.

0:45:00.9 SC: Well, yeah. I mean, look again, my own view is there's a lot of unanswered questions here, but it's fun to talk about them. And in fact, let's just assume... Let's just take for the sake of discussion, the idea that there is a difference in kind between human minds and animal minds, how without necessarily saying if it's true, let's assume it's true and move on.

0:45:20.6 SCM: Yeah.

0:45:21.3 SC: How would we characterize it? And, you know, from reading your book and also from a lot of other things, I can sort of try to boil it down to two things: One is a capacity for abstraction, and the other is a capacity for counterfactual reasoning, as we talked about before. And both of these are involved with language. Is that your feeling also? Or do you think there's other things... Other ingredients that I've missed?

0:45:43.8 SCM: Well, I think they're part of the ingredients, and in a certain way, a little bit like the weasel word complexity. So to the weasel word, abstraction.

0:45:52.0 SC: Sure.

0:45:54.6 SCM: Clearly you've got an understanding of mathematics, which I will never have. I understand that perfectly well. [laughter] In an ironic sort of way, but it is in a sense that we have these unlimited potentialities and this is what I find so fascinating about anything to do with, in a sense summoning the invisible. Now you correct me immediately, but I was... And I always like talking to people who are experts in areas, you mentioned a particular paper and they saw, yes, yeah. It's still read, yes, thank you very much. But Gene Weaknesses paper about the unreasonable factors and some mathematics.

0:46:30.8 SC: They certainly quoted the title a lot, no one reads it, but they've quote the title. [laughter]

0:46:34.1 SCM: Oh do they not? Oh, I've read it. [laughter] It's quite short. I highly recommend it.

0:46:36.7 SC: It's very short. Yeah.

0:46:37.5 SCM: It's very easy to find.

0:46:38.5 SC: Very readable.

0:46:39.2 SCM: And I understood it after a fashion, but if I remember correctly, amongst other things, and you'll have to explain to me what it is, it's, the complex number, and so forth. This is something which doesn't in any sort of, in any serious sense exist. Well, it does, but you can write it down and so forth. But as soon as you let it loose into your equations, off, it goes and does things which otherwise would not have been possible. I think this is... Is this fair? Roughly, and there must have been many more examples.

0:47:03.4 SC: That's his argument. No, that's exactly his argument. And, you're right. There are many more examples of kinds of mathematical structures that seem so abstract. And we would not have bumped into them in the jungles, and yet we come across them in our mathematical explorations and find that they describe physical reality really well. And so that's the mystery that he wanted to point to. I'm a little skeptical of this, a mystery. I think that Ex post Facto, whatever reality was doing, we would've invented the correct mathematics to describe it, but there is a point there about how the world works in very orderly, patterned mathematical ways.

0:47:45.0 SCM: Yes. But the fact, if I understand you correctly, that we would have got there one way or the other in a way, and...

0:47:49.8 SC: Yes.

0:47:50.2 SCM: From that perspective, and I'm no expert on the history of mathematics at all. And of course, one knows all sorts of different traditions, of Indian and Islamic and so forth, and all the rest of it. But then you say you go back to an animal, and I think this is true. I mean, one of my favorite examples is, the parrots that they used quite extensively, by various people and, with a huge amount of effort. You get, you can more or less get them to understand two plus three, and they tap it a bit like a seance, I suppose and it comes up with the answer five. Very good. Okay. And then you say, and what is six plus zero? And they all say, oh, no, that's an easy one. Seven.

[laughter]

0:48:25.4 SC: I don't know that I was not aware, but, yeah. It's... There's a set of mysteries there, and also about whether math is real or not that I, again, these are good questions. I wish I had more strong opinions about them.

0:48:38.7 SCM: Well, I don't think I have strong opinions about... In a certain sense. I don't have strong opinions about anything. It's more, I just... One wants to be... One wants to sort of challenge things if you like, and just say, well, hang on a moment. This is now received wisdom, where's his nodding their head and quite frequently in a whole set of areas and we better not go into this area. Otherwise all sorts of terrible things will happen, but to a certain sense, do you agree that actually in many areas of life, including even science, there are, imposed conformities and sort of thinking outta the box is not necessarily encouraged. And it's difficult because you generally have to work in large teams. You're dependent on grant income. There are all sorts of constraints on your life these days, but, in the case of the animal mind business, actually, and I don't have the paper immediately at hand, but the recent it's actually on the archive series.

0:49:33.1 SCM: It's not actually. It's not peer reviewed and all the rest of it, but gently pointing out in, reality, the, reliability of a lot of this experimental work is it's not false or fake or, dishonest or anyway, but it just suffers from enormous difficulties. The groups are quite small. Nearly all the animals they work with, not all, but many of them, are what we call enculturated. That is a lived in close association with humans. And we know that they are smarter by and large. And so you have these spectacular case, examples of, sign language and all the rest of it, but not only is this very intensive training, but these aren't the sort of things they do in the wild. And one such example is to do with what's called mirror self recognition.

0:50:18.9 SC: Right.

0:50:19.3 SCM: And you, and, I mean, I don't know about you these days. But when I look in the mirror in the morning, I, for heaven sake, this is not too good at all. You must drink less. You must drink much less, etcetera, etcetera. And indeed there are some animals which seem to have this ability to recognize themselves, whereby you put a mark on them. And then, they start there's a metaphorically speaking, doing a scratching of the forehead, and so forth. But almost without exception, these are animals which are enculturated. So they've been in human contact often for years. So you... When you go to the jungle, you never see a chimpanzee looking into a pool of water saying, "Well, I'm a handsome chap, gosh, yeah.

[laughter]

0:50:54.9 SCM: A haircut perhaps," and that again, tells me something that going back to your question about the limits of what they can do, you can take them that much further if they're in association with us and in its own way, that's very satisfying. I mean, why are pets so popular? Who would... Who in their right mind would bring into a household full of children, a carnivore full of parasites.

0:51:22.1 SC: Yeah.

0:51:22.5 SCM: That's Bonzo.

[laughter]

0:51:23.9 SC: Right. That's a rhetorical question. We know the answer, but it's a very human kind of thing to do, but, I can imagine as a complete non-expert that there was some kind of phase transition, some kind of, little change that led to a large outcome. Certainly the theory of computation and mathematics. We have these examples where you add another Axiom to your system and suddenly it's immensely more powerful. And I can imagine that there was a transition, from other primate brains to the human brains that gave us levels of abstraction or counterfactual thinking that really made a difference. Do you think that there's some prospect for locating such things physically in the brain? As we understand the human brain, more and more?

0:52:08.2 SCM: Not a hope.

0:52:08.9 SC: Okay. [laughter]

0:52:11.7 SCM: I'll tell you why, for various reasons, what this again is, it goes back to this tricky question, in effect that there are various sorts of what are known as hydrocephaly. These are where by substantial amounts of brain tissue are missing and the sinuses are greatly enlarged, and there are some cases, it's not a simple area at all, but every now and again, somebody turns up for a routine scan in the hospital, they might have something... Not something not quite right with the feeling in the head, and they find out they've got a thin layer of neural tissue, and they've hardly got a brain at all, and that tells me something... Again, it's not... The brain, if you like, is essential in the sense that it's there to conduct things, but it itself is not the seat of it, if you like, and another story which is very haunting in a way 'cause it's so widespread now, and this is again, is simply on my reading is Alzheimer's, and we all know from our people, we know is a very strongly distressing, it's just ghastly.

0:53:19.7 SCM: But not infrequently. So I read towards the end of the life of these people, they actually enter a time of so called terminal lucidity, where suddenly all their memories come back and they're almost as if they were before the Alzheimer's developed, and as you say, there may be some final stage in the reorganization of the brain tissue, which leads to, if you like a reverse phase change and similarly, you can say, "Well, how much neural tissue do you actually need to do these things." But I would find those less easy to accept and again, it's... Well, like so many of these areas in orthodoxy that it is, the mind is just material and is within the brain, but persistently over actually a number of centuries, but I think more recently... And some people are saying,"Well, come on, this is just ridiculous, we're not getting anywhere with this one at all." And not only are there cases of hydrocephaly, there are sometimes cases...

0:54:13.5 SCM: And these are less common now for very good reasons for really drastic brain surgery, even a removal of half the brain, which in terms of animal organization would be catastrophic, but not necessarily, but... And I see probably time is getting on and your patience wore more than anybody else's. [chuckle] But the way we're gonna answer all this of course, is to find an extraterrestrial, so ask me about that and I'll say there aren't any.

0:54:39.8 SC: Good, that was exactly what I was gonna ask you. You're clearly seeing where we're going here, okay, so this is another one of your myths, extraterrestrials, but what exactly is the myth that you want to puncture about extraterrestrials?

0:54:51.0 SCM: Well, there aren't any.

0:54:52.3 SC: Right. [chuckle] So the myth is that there might... Sorry, the myth is that there might be some.

0:54:58.2 SCM: Hardly. I mean, again, look at the Deep Field photograph, so many galaxies and all the rest of it. Part of my thinking here, again, as I've derived from other people, is that there is no evidence of any visitation of any sort. And even a fossil record would not be a silly place to start looking after all, why not? Or is there any evidence of signals. Well, there's that famous wow all those years ago, but the most recent evidence suggests it really was a nearby satellite, but it's something which Charley Lineweaver, he's an astronomer in Australia, pointed out, and I think a number of other people have as well. So it's the first approximation, the solar system we inhabit is relatively young, it's about four and a half billion years old, whereas there are many other solar systems which pre-date ours by some billions of years, and we have every reason to think possess Earth-like planets.

0:55:51.7 SCM: And, and you have to accept a big, "And" if indeed they have life. Yes, if they have evolution, of course, and if they are likely to end up with a thinking dinosaur, I don't really mind, but as long as it's Sapient and all the rest of it, then they've got a head start of two billion years, and if you assume they wanna go walk about, one paper had suggested that actually going around the galaxy takes maybe 100 million years, not that long. So where are they? As Enrico famously asked, "What's going on?" And there's a book by Stephen Webb, which is... His second edition quite recently, on this where on... I think 72 different explanations. They blow themselves up, their health costs go through the roof, it doesn't really matter which one you want, but it's... None have really seem to quite be sufficient to explain, given the humongous number of planets, do they all fall at some stage and nothing. And search for Dyson spheres, the idea you got a super advanced technology which actually starts to harness most of the stellar output, and if you look at mad, but plausible ideas of that whole galaxy.

0:57:04.1 SCM: And we don't understand much [0:57:05.3] ____ regard to the astronomy of infrared detection and everything else. That that's something astronomers do rather well, and there have indeed been searches. Not extensive, but of whole groups of galaxies. So it's not just stars, but really big numbers being looked at for anomalies, nothing. Occasional maybe, question mark, but... So what's going on here? And then, are we allowed to talk about these things? Just looking at a newspaper thing here because your US Navy people, and I've met a few of the military pilots in the States in one time or another, and I must say I certainly trust my life with them, they know what they're doing. Of course, have been reporting unidentified flying vehicles, and it's this disk thing which is only in today's paper said apparently NASA is going to do... Well, is become involved. And if you start going into this area, most people are reaching for the off button as fast as possible. But these guys seem to have seen things which just are impossible. So are they figments of our imagination? I don't know. But if you hear the voice-over from the cockpits... I love listening to these voice-overs.

0:58:20.5 SC: Okay, so sorry. I'm not quite sure where you're landing on the conclusion.

0:58:22.9 SCM: No. But what I'm trying to say is I'm trying to be... I'm not being necessarily oblique about this. It is the, you have a steady sort of mainstream science, which says that there are extraterrestrials of course and they will come, rest assured, they will come in peace and all the rest of it. And then people start going into all the sort of UFO business, alien abductions, all this sort of stuff, which I don't think is got anything to do with extraterrestrials at all.

0:58:46.8 SC: Okay.

0:58:47.1 SCM: But on the other hand, we have some Navy pilots who are documenting these fast moving objects, which are conceivably either a Russian or a Chinese or somebody else's technology. But if they're not, then what on earth are they? And the fact that the Pentagon, your government and NASA, at least are willing to say, "Well, we can have a conversation about this." And it may turn out it's some atmospheric phenomena we don't recognize. I'm not saying it's beyond explanation, but it's a sort of reminder perhaps that things aren't quite as straightforward as we would like them to be.

0:59:27.1 SC: Right. But just so I'm clear on where you are coming down, your guess is, or your most, your biggest credence is just on there aren't any other technologically advanced alien civilizations out there.

0:59:40.4 SCM: As we would recognize.

0:59:42.1 SC: As we would recognize it, okay.

0:59:43.5 SCM: So our thing is, again... And reason enough is we of course we tend to extrapolate existing things, and of course, we have a lot of fun about steam engines which couldn't go faster than 20 miles per hour 'cause everybody would burst into flames or whatever, or supersonic flight. But in another sort of respect actually, those sort of constraints are somewhat better understood. And then, as in fact, we discussed very briefly a little bit earlier about computers which can do Go and Chess. And so the idea is that, rather than sending delicate protoplasm to the far reaches of the galaxy, you send some sort of AI. Well, I'm not sure that's gonna be a great deal of use because they don't know how to think. So unfortunate.

1:00:21.9 SC: Certainly not yet. Yeah. Yeah.

1:00:26.4 SCM: You need a human there. And I... Sorry, go on. You ask, so I beg your pardon.

1:00:31.1 SC: Well, no, no, no. I was just gonna... We are, we've been talking for a while and we haven't gotten to the juicy stuff that I want to get to because you have a perspective on why it makes sense to you that we might be the only advanced civilization in our observable universe that might rub some of your scientific colleagues the wrong way.

1:00:51.2 SCM: I'm afraid it might. I'm not doing this to irritate people, very far from it.

1:00:57.1 SC: Oh, no.

1:01:00.3 SCM: It is I think, I mean when Fermi asked that question in Los Alamos, the gist was probably what is the feasibility of interstellar travel? And it could be that that actually really is a quarantine zone. It may be that however hard we try, just is impossible. And if that's the case, and I can think of various science fiction stories which have explained how you get around these and all the rest of it. But what I'm really trying to do is, the far back of my mind is trying to say, "What is so special about ourselves which animals do not possess?" What, as we discussed briefly with regard to capacity for abstraction which goes far beyond mathematics of course, because I'm no great reader of poetry, but the little poetry I do read is it can unhinge me in terms of conveying meanings, which a novel will never do. 15 lines can put you in a completely different perspective.

1:01:57.8 SC: Right.

1:01:57.8 SCM: And I find that remarkable. People tend to take it for granted. I just... I sometimes have to put down my gin and tonic exact, it's that serious. I do pick it up very quickly afterwards.

[laughter]

1:02:08.7 SC: That's a... Thank goodness. But, okay. To go back to the controversies that we started with, there is a controversy outside of professional evolution about evolution versus creationism, especially here in the United States. We've had a whole big thing. But there's also kind of a middle ground and I don't wanna hide it. I wanna bring it out here. There are... I have a good friend, Don Page, who is a cosmologist. Do you know Don? Do you know...

1:02:36.4 SCM: I don't, I don't I'm afraid.

1:02:37.7 SC: He's a very good cosmologist, a collaborator of Stephen Hawking, et cetera. He's also an Evangelical Christian, born again Christian, and he was at a conference with a fellow cosmologist and the fellow cosmologist said, in all good humor, right? "Why are you here? Why can't you just say God did it? Why are you still being a cosmologist?" And he had a very articulate and sensible response to that. So if I understand correctly, you are in a similar situation vis-a-vis evolution that you study evolution scientifically, but when it comes to sort of the meaning of the universe, you're not a purely materialistic guy.

1:03:14.4 SCM: That's exactly correct. But even, I think amongst nearly all biologists, there's a slight unease with any sort of what we call a telos. And so they... They think that these animals can't, they don't have purpose do they or they wouldn't understand purpose. And a point in fact, I think that actually ironically turns out to be the case. But indeed with your colleague Don Page, if one's going to have a theology, which is go to God, which is interfering continuously, then that's not gonna be a very rich theology.

1:03:42.9 SC: Right.

1:03:43.3 SCM: But you're gonna have to discuss that from a theological viewpoint. And you could also step back, has been argued, and this is not a defense for Christianity as it is. But to the first approximation, the roots of these European science were very much based in Christian Europe, especially in Paris and Oxford. And the reason was, or so I read, is that they realized that the world was open to interrogation and they were perfectly comfortable that it was God's world which was open to interrogation. But even so, it was something which was rationally constructed. It wasn't arbitrary. And therefore it wasn't something where in most other civilizations, at one point or another, if there was a causality, it was magic. And that's a crucial difference.

1:04:24.5 SC: I was very interested... Yeah, and I was very interested to learn. I had known for a long time that Isaac Newton was extremely religious and put a lot of his intellectual effort into studying the Bible and so forth. But he was actually a believer and an interventionist. God, he was smart enough to realize that given his own laws of motion, the solar system couldn't last forever. One of the planets would throw away the others through gravitational interaction. So he imagined that God continually intervened to keep the solar system on track. And I take it that in the case of evolution, there's sort of two ways to go for a theist. There's the idea that God just set everything up and made the rules, but then nature obeys those rules. But there's also a way that you could imagine God guiding the course of evolution. Do you have strong feelings about that dichotomy?

1:05:18.1 SCM: Oh, I have a strong feeling against the second option, very much so, 'cause that's something which as you say goes dangerously close to intelligent design or creationism of which I could begin to shout. I will have... No, I haven't had no trouble with this at all. But the view that in a sense, the cliche of the fire and the equations and all the rest of it, what is it which instantiates the entire universe not only to develop its physical structures of one sort or another, and we could... I wouldn't go in that area 'cause I simply don't know anything about it, but Martin Rees' areas and many other people about the various fine tunings and so forth, and I well understand these things are not clear cut either for very many good reasons.

1:06:00.3 SCM: But one could sort of say, if you're making a universe, which as I've said elsewhere, sort of if you like, self-rectifies, and in a sense it engenders its own creativity, but then blow me down right at the end of the day, who turns up but a sapient species which actually understands what creativity is. And you could then say, well the massive category mistake they fell into was to say, "Because we are creative, there must be a creator." But I myself would say, "Well, in point of fact, the very fact that we have this capacity, as JRR Tolkien called it the sub-creation, is actually that richness we have in your mathematics or that cosmology or that music, is a very dim reflection of the creativity of God." And that seems to me... And people say, "Well, you're hedging one way or the other, you're not coming out, you're not putting your cards on the table." In a certain way, I say, "Well, I'm entitled to do that, these things are not straightforward."

1:07:02.4 SC: On that much we absolutely agree. Let me ask and feel free to answer as much or little as you want, but when it comes to believing in God or theism as a ontological stance toward the world, do you get there from a similar set of reasoning that you get to your belief in science and evolution, or are there different considerations that come in?

1:07:25.0 SCM: I think there are different considerations in as much as, if for the sake of argument, you are a Christian, as it happens I am, then one can certainly interrogate the historical records. And I don't speak New Testament Greek and that sort of business, but even so, there's a very rich field there and one would be willing to argue in point of fact, that the historical narratives there are actually reasonably trustworthy. But other people would say that's nonsense, so we needn't go down in that [1:07:51.8] ____. But more particularly, it is this question, "Where does my imagination come from? Why do I find myself in some parts of the world which are just staggeringly beautiful?" In a rather unexpected way, not just tourist sites. They could be in surprisingly mundane ways. And also again, this is a very, especially 'cause of ghastly things going on in the Ukraine at the moment and other things. And this is a standard argument against belief in God and very reasonably so, is how do these dreadful things happen?

1:08:24.6 SCM: And my own sense of, suggested elsewhere, the so-called topic of theodicy, why is evil allowed to flourish? And having rather too much information now about European history in the last hundred years, you cannot believe your eyes. In the 1930s, you sort of see this trainwreck coming towards you. And you've kept on wanna screaming to people, "Don't you see what's happening?" But there it just went out straight onto catastrophe. But it's no comfort to anybody in any sense who suffered one way or another, where it's an unexpected brain tumor, loss of child, all the terrible things which happen. But my own sense is that actually it's even worse to have a material universe where this is simply meaningless than at least having some prospect of it being sorted out. And that's gonna give no comfort to all the people who experience these... I think about what happened in Poland from 1940 onwards, it's just heartbreaking.

1:09:25.3 SC: Yeah. Well, yeah. So I do feel the pull of that, even though I'm completely atheist myself. But I'm an atheist who believes that, following Nietzsche, once, if you stop believing in God, that's not the end of your journey, there's a whole bunch of questions that you're now faced with that you thought you had answers to before. But let me ask this and I think I know the answer but I want to let you put it in your words. Does this belief that you have in the existence of God setting things up have any effect on how you do the science, how you think about tracing out the path of evolution and so forth? Or is it once you believe that God set it up, it's your job, just like it's Richard Dawkins' job, to figure out exactly what happened along the way?

1:10:10.5 SCM: Well, believe it or not, in this particular context, I'd be with Richard Dawkins, which if he'd ever listen to this might surprise him, there we go. [chuckle] First of all, I don't make any great claims to be a particularly competent scientist, but it is simply that most scientists, as they go through their career, tend to think a bit more widely. And they realize that things which... When I did my early work in the Smithsonian Institution, and even when more recently doing a lot of work in China, which has really been great, but I don't wanna keep on doing that forever. That's good, I did it fairly well at the time. And more, I sort of get more and more intrigued about, partly just looking at one's own history, how did I end up being here? Where is this imagination which I'm so lucky to possess come from? And it could be completely delusional. It may simply be a series of sort of artifacts and category errors, but I don't think so.

1:11:04.4 SC: Okay.

1:11:04.5 SCM: But I certainly... So yeah. Sorry, I beg your pardon. I mean, from the perspective of studying the evolution, I don't sort of say, "Well, if I can see the footprint or the handprint of God in this, I'll feel that somehow I've done a better job." Absolutely not.

1:11:18.4 SC: Yeah, okay good. Interesting. Okay, so to wrap things up then, I wanna go back... I wasn't expecting this to come up, but it did, and it's an intriguing thing that could be a podcast of its own, "The role of slightly non-orthodox ideas in science." So you asked me if I had experienced this myself? Sure. I think that, I want to recognize two things at once, so I would like to hear your take on it. On the one hand, the way that we do science and academia, in universities, in the establishment, has been amazingly successful in many ways. We get a lot of science done. On the other hand, it's at the expense of shutting down certain lines of inquiry, inventing certain kinds of conventional wisdom and following them to the end, and those who fit into the dominant paradigm have it a lot easier. And on the third hand, when you say, "I don't wanna fit into the dominant paradigm. I wanna be bold and creative," everyone will say, "Oh sure, that's great." And until you tell them exactly the way in which you want to be bold and creative, like, "Oh no, no, no, no. Not that way. We didn't want that." So I actually am a little bit up in the air about how to balance all of these considerations against each other. And therefore it's not really a question, but over to you, what do you think about these issues?

1:12:39.6 SCM: Well, I share very much all those perspectives, but I think in a way, and again, this is slightly dangerous territory, because we do think that science does have some degree of independent objectivity to it, which has got nothing to do with where you were born or what you think or what you believe. And I think that is correct, as it so happens. On the other hand, we know perfectly well that cultures do change and evolve, and there are cultures and societies which I would suggest are more propitious to open and free thinking. And so as you can see, it's gonna lead in some very, very dangerous territory with almost no effort at all.

1:13:16.4 SCM: And another one, which tend to be far more inward looking. And we can think of historical examples to do this, and again, there's a whole set of baggage associated with this 'cause apart from anything else, when you have a scientific solution to something which incidentally happens to lead to the destruction of a city, then once again, or as I said much earlier, all bets are off. But my sense at the moment in terms of, let's just say western universities, is that they are less encouraging for speculative thinking. And in fact, quite frequently, if you're really lucky, we had a series of really splendidly strong gin and tonics and people say we're off the record. And they will very frequently say, "Well actually, you know, I think you're onto something," or "I had this really weird experience," or, "This really strange thing happened to me. I can't explain it." And certainly, I can't see any way in fitting these into a simple paradigm at all.

1:14:16.4 SCM: And as you know, I mean, there are people on the orthodox side, right on the fringes of this, people like Rupert Sheldrake, for instance. And everybody says, "Oh, for goodness sake, he... " But he is a trained scientist, and you might say, "Well, he's just gone too far off. He's to be believable." But if one assumes that in the end, there are no limits to knowledge, and I don't think there are in point of fact. And if one assumes in fact that in a way science is the capacity not so much to confirm things, that's rather boring. But actually, and I don't think I've got... Can I ever get this story quite right, but I had... I wouldn't say the privilege, but when I was a very young research fellow in my college in Cambridge, Paul Dirac, who was a fellow of my college, came back from Florida in the summer, and I had to... I had to sit beside him a couple of times at lunch, and he was... There are many, many stories about Dirac as you know, a man of very few words.

1:15:09.9 SC: Very few.

[chuckle]

1:15:10.9 SCM: One of his stories I'm told, I don't know if it's true or not, is some young student at some conference said, "Well, Professor Dirac, could you please explain this slightly more simply?" And Dirac was famous for these long silences. So he said, "Please, could you explain this a bit more simply?" And then Dirac after about a minute said, "No."

1:15:27.5 SC: "No."

[laughter]

1:15:29.4 SCM: But he sort of... If I understand Graham Farmelo's biography of him, he sort of found this sort of... Not number, but this thing which was essential to explaining what he wanted, I think to do, with antimatter or something like that. You're the expert on this sort of thing. But here's something plucked out of thin air, which in a way, analogous to the complex number we were talking about earlier, suddenly has enormous traction. And for all we know, actually beyond it, there's a mathematics where this is actually trivial. It doesn't really matter anymore. It's a plus sign. But even a plus sign, going back to animals, is something which they'll never understand.

1:16:09.1 SC: Right.

1:16:11.5 SCM: So yeah, I feel very strongly in the sense that the way we teach, the way we deal with university research does not necessarily always encourage imagination.

1:16:23.1 SC: It doesn't.

1:16:23.2 SCM: There are too many...

1:16:23.8 SC: Yeah, and we would like it to. And I'll just thank you again for poking our brains to think about things in slightly different ways. Simon Conway Morris, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:16:34.8 SCM: My great pleasure, thank you.

[music]