Krauss: ...and one of the pictures that people use to guide
themselves now which is called 'the many worlds interpretation", and which is just
ridiculous, is that
every time I look out at you I force you to be in a specific configuration
just like that electron.
But there's an infinite number of other universes that are existing
at the same time in which one of you is up here and I'm in the audience,
and they're all coexisting at the same time, and so every time we make an
observation, this quantum wave function of the universe branches into an infinite number
and that infinity keeps multiplying,
it's probably the only classical way understand what's happening but it's so
ridiculous that
I think that most people wouldn't accept it and I'm sure more physicists wouldn't accept it.
Dawkins: You say is ridiculous, but so is the alternative ridiculous.
It is almost as though you need a ridiculous theory to understand this ridiculous
observation.
Krauss: Well actually that is a good point.
I hadn't thought about that that's actually... [audience laughter]
Dawkins: Well, if you take the
Copenhagen interpretation of, say,
Schrödinger's cat. It's completely ridiculous, but then, so is the
many worlds interpretation completely ridiculous
Krauss: Well, that's what's great about quantum mechanics. Every interpretation is completely
ridiculous. Dawkins: Yeah. [audience laughter]
Well, we got into this by comparing it with Darwin's achievement
and, however, you might say there's a certain
foreignness about understanding Darwinism and you've got to get your mind
from a time scale of seconds, minutes, years, decades, perhaps centuries,
which we are quite accustomed to. You've got to to switch to
hundreds of millions of years. Well, that's difficult.
But it's not difficult in the same league as the quantum difficulty.
Krauss: Well, and that brings up something interesting,
which is that...
so you've mentioned quantum theory, and so, we don't have people
going to schools and demanding that,
it's a theory after all --
Dawkins: [audience laughter] Only a theory, only a theory, only a theory.
Krauss: But somehow when it comes to evolutionary theory
people say well, it's just a theory.
In fact, I was just about to tell you before,
during the stage before we came out, an amazing thing that happened it's a
wonderful thing happening. I don't know if you're aware of the news in Florida
-- every now and then something good comes out of Florida. [audience laughter]
So there was a big fight about introducing evolution in the schools and in fact
eventually the legislature or the School Board agreed
to allow evolution to be -- in fact require evolution to be -- introduced
but with the statement 'the scientific theory of evolution'.
The people who had agreed to that, of course, were the people who like to say 'well good,
now the word theory is there,
we can make it appear to be suspect'. But the great thing that just happened,
and I was just so thrilled with this, is that the school board said, 'okay,
but we're also requiring it to be called 'the scientific theory of electromagnetism'.
Dawkins: Yes.
Krauss: ...'The scientific theory of quantum mechanics'... and so now finally
people can understand that in science when you use the word 'theory'
it's very different than
than when we use it in common parlance. So it's a great success
although it was meant to be...
Dawkins: Yeah, that's very good. but [audience laughter] let's ask the question
why has evolution especially suffered from this?
Is it because people think they can understand it? Jacques Monod, the great
French molecular biologist said the curious thing about
natural selection is that everybody thinks he understands it
and they clearly don't.
Is it that because people think they understand it,
and therefore their skepticism is aroused, whereas they know they haven't even a prayer
of understanding quantum theory.
I mean, just, it's off the radar. And so they don't express skepticism
about it. Krauss: I think it's more than that. I think there's an immediacy of
evolution because it puts humans on the same
level as all other animals. And,
we're bound to get to this, so we might as well start now:
I happen to think that really evolution is a straw man.
The attack on evolution,
in this country at least, and I think largely elsewhere, is based on
a fundamental fear of science,
a fear that science is immoral,
because it doesn't explicitly mention god. Because god is not an explicit part
of our discussions. And because god is not an explicit part of our discussions,
therefore it must be immoral,
and that's why all these people are not so much trying to
attack evolution per se, it is to say 'what we want to do
is, in fact, have a theistic understanding
imposed upon science classes so that scientific "materialism"' --
which is led, if you look at the literature of these people -- 'has led to
all the evil things in the world'.
It is now turned into a moral subject.
So I think it is this immediacy that is the biggest slap in the face
to some people...
Dawkins: But why wouldn't physics have that same effect?
Krauss: Because I think it doesn't -- it's not so personal. Which is one of the reasons why
I think many people are more intimidated by physics,
is because it's not that personal.
I think it's one of the reasons biology is taught first in high schools,
which I think is a huge mistake,
and in fact, me and a physicist named Leon Lederman, are working
to try to get physics taught first,
not because we like physics better, [audience laughter]
but because --
maybe one reason I'm not a doctor is that, you know, I was taught biology, and I needed to
memorize all this stuff.
And, but in fact, of course, physics is the basis of chemistry
and chemistry is the basis of biology, so if you really want to understand biology
at some level you should understand things like energetics and
and mechanisms -- Dawkins: Ah, yes. Krauss: And so, I think, but, the reason
biology is taught first is that many people, feel because it's about things
you can see and touch
and immediate things, it's much more intuitive and much more friendly.
But at the same time it's much more terrifying
to, in some sense, for some people, to say that humans are on exactly the same plane,
at some level, as every other animal that's ever -- Dawkins: Yeah.
Krauss: -- walked across the earth. And, for for you,
you'd say that's a good thing
that it attacks that belief that some people have that humans are special and
different.
But for those other people, they'd say 'that's why science is bad, it shouldn't attack
that because we are divinely inspired and and God has created us
in her image. [audience laughter] Dawkins: Within biology...
[clapping] Krauss: Alright, that was pandering. That was pandering, it's OK.
Dawkins: Within biology, the order is wrong as well.
Evolution is taught last, at least it is in Britain, and so many people get
to the end to their biological education never having learned about evolution.
That means they learn all about facts -- just like you did as a doctor,
well, when you weren't becoming a doctor -- they learn all about lots and lots of facts,
lists and lists of facts,
and not the slightest inkling of the explanation.
And the explanation has been with us for 150 years -- 149 years,
and it should come first because otherwise you're learning facts without
any rationale,
without any sense of what it's for. And the rationale is so beautiful and
so elegant,
and actually so easy to understand, I think.
Krauss: Well let me ask you, in this regard, to that,
are we making a mistake by calling evolution a theory? I mean, evolution is a
fact. Is natural selection perhaps, is the theory?
Dawkins: Ok, if you look up the word 'theory' in the Oxford Dictionary,
you'll find two main definitions. One is the 'only a theory' one,
as in, 'it's just a hypothesis, nobody knows for sure,
it's just a theory'. The other one is 'a body of knowledge
which is coherent and which is taken to be factual,
until maybe something better comes along.
So the theory of gravitation, Einstein's theory, Quantum theory,
and Evolutionary theory.
And, clearly scientists are using it in that sense, whereas laypeople,
eagerly egged on by unscrupulous creationist propaganda,
are taking it in the hypothetical. Krauss: So you're comfortable calling evolution a theory.
It seems to me, if I look around
the facts of evolution are obvious. Dawkins: I would call it a fact.
I think that that we are playing the wrong game
by using the philosophically sophisticated term 'theory',
since the other side is playing the game of using the
colloquial term. The colloquial term for what evolution is
is fact. Krauss: Yeah, exactly. Dawkins: It is a fact.
[audience applause] Krauss: Exactly. I'm all in favor of that.
Dawkins: It's a fact in the same sense as that's a table.
Krauss: Exactly, or the Earth goes around the sun.
Dawkins: And if you're going to get sophisticated and philosophical
no doubt it's only a theory that that's a table. [audience laughter] Krauss: Yeah, exactly.
Dawkins: And there are sense-data pouring in which
which so far has failed to have falsify the hypothesis
that that's a table. [audience laughter]
In the colloquial sense,
if ever the word fact should
ever be used, then is used of the fact that that's a table,
and it should be used of the fact that we
share a common ancestor with monkeys,
that we share a common ancestor with sea squirts and starfish,
and bacteria. That is
a fact in the ordinary language sense of a fact.
Now, natural selection is a theory for what has driven
evolution in adaptive directions, that has put together
the powerful illusion of design
which nobody could fail to notice. It's not the only thing that drives evolution,
much of evolutionary change is driven by random
genetic drift, by so called 'neutral theory'
of molecular genetics but, uh...