269. Richard Dawkins — Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 7 May 2022

⏱️ 89 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you sometimes dream you can fly like a bird? Gliding effortlessly above the treetops, soaring and swooping, playing and dodging through the third dimension. Computer games, virtual reality headsets, and some drugs can lift our imagination and fly us through fabled, magical spaces. But it's not the real thing. No wonder some of the past's greatest minds, including Leonardo da Vinci's, have yearned for flying machines and struggled to design them.

Shermer and Dawkins discuss: nationalism • Russian revanchism • the recent rise of authoritarianism and autocracies: worrying trend or temporary stumble in the arc of the moral universe? • U.S. acceptance of the theory of evolution finally breaks the 50% barrier • woke attacks on E. O. Wilson: why? • why Dawkins dedicated his book to Elon • What good is half a wing? • What is flight good for? • Why do some animals lose their wings? • Why flying is easier if you are small • physics of flying • unpowered flight: parachuting and gliding • powered flight and how it works • weightlessness • aerial plankton • winged plants • the difference between evolved and designed flying machines.

Richard Dawkins is one of the world's most eminent writers and thinkers, and a major contributor to the public understanding of the science of evolution. The award-winning author of The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, The God Delusion and a string of other bestselling science books, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the Royal Society of Literature.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show
0:20.9	Welcome to the Michael Sherman Show. I'm your host Michael Sherman. My guest today is the great Richard Dawkins
0:28.0	with his new book, Lights of Fancy, Define Gravity by Design and Evolution, with illustrations by Yana Lenzova. It's a beautiful book, of course I listen to it on audio as usual but also read it in the
0:36.1	print form because it's a beautifully illustrated book. It's for adults and young
0:40.5	adults and Yana just produced these gorgeous portraits and paintings and
0:47.2	and illustrations that I'm showing you here from the book and that's why I recommend it as a physical book. As most
0:58.1	of you already know Richard Dawkins is one of the world's most eminent
1:02.3	writers and thinkers and a major
1:04.0	contributor to the public understanding of science and particularly the
1:07.8	theory of evolution. He's the award-winning author of The Selfish Gene, his most
1:12.0	famous book except for possibly The God Delusion.
1:16.0	He also wrote The Blind Watchmaker, River, out of Eden, and just numerous other best-selling books.
1:23.0	He is a fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.
1:27.0	His illustrator, Yana Lenzoa,
1:30.0	born and raised in Brat-Slava, Slovakia,
1:33.6	and she's an illustrator, translator, and interpreter.
1:36.6	Her two great passions or language and drawing,
1:39.3	the former led to the latter after she had been commissioned
1:41.5	to translate the God Delusion by
1:43.7	Dawkins into Slovak she began contributing to his books as an illustrator so what
1:49.6	good is half a wing how do you go from a little nub of a wing to 10% of a wing to 50% of a wing
1:56.2	all the way up to a fully aerodynamic structure when none of the steps
	...

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