If you ask me to name someone who exemplify scientific thinking, the first name that would pop into my head would be today's guest Richard Dawkins. A professor emeritus at the University of Oxford,

Richard Dawkins is both a distinguished scholar of zoology and evolutionary biology,

and a remarkably successful popularizer of scientific ideas

through his best-selling books including the selfish gene and the God

delusion. If you don't think like a scientist I'd suggest you stay out of his path.

There's no evidence, and if you want to believe in something positively, you need

positive evidence for it.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Levitt.

In 2017 the Royal Society, the United Kingdom's Academy of Sciences, conducted a public poll asking

readers to name the most influential science book of all time.

The winner was the Selfish Gene. That book published in 1976 starts from a simple premise.

Genes, not organisms, are the key players in evolution

and shows how this one idea can make sense of a remarkably broad set of phenomena we observe in the world.

Now, I suspect Charles Darwin, Isaac Newton, and a handful of others,

might have good reason to disagree with the result of that poll but

there's no denying the enormous impact Richard Dawkins has had.

I have to start with a confession before last week I never read your book to

Selfish Gene I have now and I was quite shocked at how eye opening the book was for me.

I've spent a lot of time around scientists. I know the basic mechanisms in math around

natural selection and the book is nearly 50 years old. I thought I knew what the book had to say but I

honestly didn't and I suspect that many listeners suffer under that same fallacy. So I'd like to start by talking

about some of the big ideas in that book and in particular you make a sharp

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