Dawkins: Well, I think that is right. One way to put it is
that the ratio
between that which a theory explains as the numerator
and that which you need to assume in order to explain it as the denominator,
Darwin wins out on that. I mean what Darwin explains is everything about life.
Human life, animal life, plant life, the the diversity of life, the complexity of life,
everything is explained by one simple idea.
It's an idea so simple that you can express it,
actually, I think in a single word:
'heredity'. Once you've got on a planet,
anywhere in the universe, high fidelity
replication of coded information,
I think everything else then follows. You'd probably need to add
a little bit more than that. On the other hand when you compare the achievement of
an Einstein
with a Darwin,
a Newton with a Darwin, I think you need to be a lot brighter to be an Einstein
I mean, you know, any fool could have been a Darwin. [audience laughter]
Krauss: That's interesting.
Dawkins: Let me clarify that...
It's somewhat baffling to me why we had to wait
for our Darwin until the middle of the 19th century.
Two hundred years after we had to wait for our Newton.
You would think that the idea of the evolution by natural selection
could have occurred to any philosopher in an armchair from the Greeks onward.
Not one of them got it! Not a single one of them got it.
Krauss: I think that for me it's funny that you say that.
Maybe the grass is always greener on the other side, but I think, as a physicist,
how much harder
it would be to have been Darwin. My mother wanted me to be a doctor,
and I realized I couldn't, partly because
classification was not - when I grew up, biology was classification,
unfortunately, and I realized that that's just something I couldn't do very well.
And I think - well, you probably know more about this than I do that, but,
observation was such a key part
what Darwin did that I don't know if - I mean -
of course after the fact anyone could have had the idea
and one says that about many things in science. After the fact it is a lot
easier to understand where it came from
but having the idea, I think, Darwin,
it's so beautiful, yet so subtle, that
his expedition on the beagle and all the years he
spent observing things
was an essential part of ramming into the skull of someone...
...after all evolution is everywhere but at the same time it's nowhere.
It requires an understanding of cosmic time
in a way that is essential to understand
what's here and now. And of course the same's true about, in some sense,
astrophysics, but
but the fact that the many people are
are comfortable thinking about cosmos in grand scale
but thinking about our own selves in that way and understanding...
...I mean, one of the big problems for people understanding evolution is this realization
that the earth has been around a hell of a long time, and so has life,
and without that cosmic time the concept of evolution would
would clearly be wrong. Dawkins: Yes, you have to be able to
to grasp the immensity of geological time.
it's interesting, by the way, that Darwin was almost scooped by
Alfred Wallace. And both of them, they were very similar,
they had very similar careers. They were both naturalists, they both
traveled the world, they both spent a lot of time in the tropics
alone, free to think. Wallace actually had the idea in a fever dream
in a moment of lucidity in the middle of having
a high fever with malaria. I love that story. I mean, I love the thought that
that it took a kind of fermenting high-temperature [audience laughter]
in a brilliant man's brain to to get this idea.
Krauss: It would be good to know what other thoughts he had...
Dawkins: I know.
Nevertheless the idea,
when you grasp it, as you say, it is very simple.
Whereas Eisenstein and
quantum theory you no doubt understand them, I don't
and I bet most people here don't understand them.
Because it seems to me to be much further
from what the human brain is setup
to comprehend. We ought to talk about that, actually,
maybe not now, but... Krauss: Yeah, that'd be fun to talk about a little.
I think I'd agree with you.
Certain things like quantum mechanics no one understands. We do it but we don't
understand it.
And that's vitally important, I think. There's certain things we
will never have an intuitive understanding of, and it probably relates to
evolution. It is probably relates to
the fact that we're classical beings and the way the world behaves on a fundamental level
is just something that we have no direct or even -
well, no direct experience of. We can try and build up an indirect
understanding but we, just - it works, but it is so
counter-intuitive to realize that at a fundamental scale
objects are doing many things at the same time. Whereas you and I...
Dawkins: Going through two slits, for example.
Krauss: Going through both slits at the same time or a lot more
than both slits. And we exploit that, and as I say, maybe we'll talk about that.
But the interesting thing is I guess that
to me it's not so clear that at least
evolution - and well you get mail, I get mail,
and it's obviously not intuitively clear to many people that
what evolution is - you know I was telling you just before this, I
got a letter last night because I happen to have been on TV,
from a woman who said to me "well okay..."
I don't know if she said she liked watching me on TV...
But she said she did. She said "I just want to know one thing:
who decided which ape would evolve and which wouldn't?" [laughter]
I think thats the kind of
immediacy people have and the confusion people have with evolution
is a sense that that's exactly how it works.
Instead of working with populations. So, it is
this beautiful idea is still one step removed
from our direct experience, and I think that's one of the reasons why,
just one of the reasons why, so many people
are so up abjectly opposed to it. It appears to
go against their direct experience. I think
there's much more to it than that but...
Dawkins: Ernst Mayr, the grand old man of the new Darwinian synthesis, who died at the
age of 100, a couple of years ago,
he put it down to 'essentialism'
the modern name for what people like Plato-
I mean, one could call it 'the dead hand of Plato'...
"Essentialism" means people think there's an essence of rabbit,
an essence of rhinoceros: I mean a a rabbit is a rabbit is a rabbit and
and rabbits have the same sort of eternal verity
as triangles to Euclid and I mean maybe
all the Greeks like that thought like geometers,
and so a rabbit was a thing which was kind of hanging out there in space the
ideal rabbit.
So the idea of a rabbit evolving into anything else, or an ape evolving into
anything else
is utterly foreign. But, it seems to me that that's
a different and much smaller order of foreignness
than the idea of a particle
going through two slits, and in some sense knowing
whether well, you'll have to explain the thing...
Krauss: It's absolutely ridiculous what particles do when they go through two slits
because its, well, okay, we'll do this now.
[laughter]
So
When I throw a baseball, I'm a big baseball fan, when I throw a baseball
it takes a known trajectory, usually,
and ends up in a catcher's hand, and we can calculate that
and we force students
through endless boring calculations to calculate that.
But when you throw an electron of course it doesn't do that,
it does everything at once.
It takes every possible way to get from one place to another, all at the same time
and we can demonstrate that with a, with a wonderful experiment that
actually was
first performed by someone who was both a doctor and a physicist,
Thomas Young, and who also - it's amazing what they did then - and he also was one of the people
that was essential in decoding the hieroglyphics.
An electron, when you send it out
in their two slits, will go through both at the same time and interfere with
itself when it comes out the other end and therefore produce a very strange
pattern on the other side of the slits.
Now if you say 'well, look this is ridiculous, the electron either went through one slit or the other'.
So I'll watch it. And you turn on a light
or electron detector, and you watch it, and indeed the electron does,
each electron goes for one slit or the other. And you say 'ah hah',
but then you look behind slit, and when you're watching it the pattern
is different. Having watched it, having measured it, you changed the pattern
and so you know it was doing something very different when you weren't watching.
And uh, that is,
very objectionable [audience laughter] and
and in fact, Einstein as you know never came around to accepting that
as a fact of life, and it is truly
one of the strange - relativity is very...
is much simpler to understand. Quantum mechanics is profoundly unnerving because of that, and
it has many philosophical implications that many people are still disturbed about.
And, we're trying to understand. In fact my own field -
something I'm just working on - involves trying understand
if the universe is quantum mechanical -
what does a measurement mean? Because, if you're an external
observer turning a light on an electron
then you can understand that you might effect it . But if the universe as a
whole is a quite aa quantum mechanical system,
which it surely is, if quantum mechanics governs it, then what does it mean if
you're inside of it?