Episode 144, Steven Pinker x Richard Dawkins: Live in London (Part II - Audience Questions)
The Panpsycast Philosophy Podcast
Jack Symes | Andrew Horton, Oliver Marley, and Rose de Castellane
4.8 • 604 Ratings
🗓️ 29 June 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This is a live recording from our recent show – The Future of Humanity – held on 3 June 2025 at London’s Royal Institution Theatre.
The event was a conversation between psychologist Steven Pinker and biologist Richard Dawkins – both previous guests on The Panpsycast – exploring the evolution of human beings and the challenges we face in the future. Richard leads the discussion, questioning Steve about his extensive catalogue of books and his contributions to psychology, sociology, and evolutionary theory. They focus a lot on the past but, eventually, get on to the future. It’s a brilliant exchange, covering a wide range of topics and packed with some of Pinker’s most important insights.
The first part of this podcast special is their free-flowing conversation; the second is a Q&A with the audience, hosted by Jack. Thank you to everyone who came along and made the show possible. Without further ado, here’s the audio from our live show – we hope you enjoy the conversation.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan Pan |
| 0:07.0 | Pan Pan Pan Pan Scicast |
| 0:10.0 | Thank you Richard and Steve for a wonderful discussion. I can see Richard |
| 0:25.3 | reading Friedrich Nietzsche's book there. I'm not, I don't approve. It's not my choice. |
| 0:32.0 | Please raise your hand if you have a question for Steve or Richard. You can field your question |
| 0:35.7 | to either of them. Please keep your questions short and tell me who your questions for at the beginning as well. We'll start at the |
| 0:41.7 | front here just with the red shirt and we'll take the second question at the top left there, |
| 0:47.9 | the young lady in the whites. Amazing. Thank you both. Amazing to see the conversation. Question for |
| 0:53.3 | Richard, if that's okay. How do you see religion influencing the future of humanity? |
| 0:58.0 | That was one of the things that was listed on the crib sheet. I rather avoided it. |
| 1:04.0 | I think it, I'm looking forward to it's going extinct. |
| 1:17.0 | Can we bring Steve on the same question? |
| 1:18.9 | Yes, so there's two. |
| 1:20.1 | It's a question I did take up in my book Enlightenment now. |
| 1:23.1 | So I'll just, it was largely a book driven by discussion of graphs and trends. |
| 1:29.2 | It's actually two trends that are going in opposite directions there. |
| 1:33.5 | One of them is that people tend to lose religion. |
| 1:36.8 | I mean, that's the overwhelming tendency, that when people do, more people kind of convert, |
| 1:43.5 | often not to atheism because the word is kind of scary, |
| 1:47.3 | but in the United States the word is nuns, not the ladies with the habits, N-O-N-E, that as you |
| 1:55.3 | ask people what their religion is, they say none. And that is growing and it's a very strong |
| 1:59.9 | generational effect. It's not actually |
... |
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