Richard Dawkins on Genetic Insights Into the History of Life

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Science, Natural Sciences

4.3 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 August 2024

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

Evolutionary biologist and author, Richard Dawkins, explores how the body, behavior, and genes of every living creature serve as a record of their ancestors' worlds, similar to how a lizard's skin reflects its desert origins. In his new book, Dawkins shows that these genetic "books of the dead" offer insights into the history of life, revealing how animals have adapted to challenges over time. He argues that understanding these evolutionary patterns unlocks a vivid and nuanced view of the past, allowing us to see the remarkable continuity in how life overcomes obstacles.

Richard Dawkins was the inaugural Charles Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. He is best known for The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. Dawkins has made significant contributions to evolutionary theory and popular science, emphasizing the gene-centered view of evolution. His latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, explores how genes serve as an archive of ancestral history. Dawkins continues to write and lecture on science and reason.

Shermer and Dawkins discuss Dawkins' new book, The Genetic Book of the Dead, exploring how an animal's genes can be interpreted as a record of its ancestral history. They delve into the interdisciplinary nature of evolutionary studies, linking archaeology, biology, and geology. The conversation clarifies the difference between genetic and phenotypic records, using the metaphor of QR codes to explain how genetic information encodes environmental history. They also touch on the future implications of this research for understanding evolution.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Michael Sherman Show. The Michael Sherber Show My sense Richard is that this is almost a bookend book. The genetic book of the
0:30.6	dead is almost like a bookend to the selfish gene and the
0:35.1	extended phenotype. To what extent had you been thinking about this a long time
0:38.8	and you're kind of closing the circle there? That's a very perceptive remark. I think it is a
0:43.7	bookend is a lovely image and I think that is what it is. It doesn't
0:47.6	contradict anything that I've said before, far from it, but it looks at it in a
0:51.3	different way. I call it a Darwinian reverie, and it is a kind of thinking aloud
0:59.0	along the same kind of lines as the selfish gene, but in a slightly different way. Yeah in a way you're doing history as science and I always think of history as a science. I mean archaeology, paleontology, geology, cosmology, everybody accepts these as science, as historical science and in a way Darwin was himself one of the first historical scientists in how he perceived the evolution of islands, for example, in the Pacific, not as different
1:28.4	types of islands, but at different stages in an evolutionary process.
1:31.4	And in a way, that's kind of what you're doing here,
1:33.3	looking at different organisms,
1:35.6	at their current bodies, and then trying to infer from that a history.
1:39.8	Yes, it's my belief that the animal itself and especially its genome is a kind of written
1:46.8	record of its history, of the history of the environments in which its ancestors survived. So we can't do it yet, but my conceit is that
1:57.7	as theologist of the future, scientist of the future, will be able to pick up any animal and with its genome read as though it were a book describing
2:09.2	the series of ancestral worlds. Of course there are a whole lot of different ancestral worlds at different
2:14.8	stages of history and so it has to be a palimpsest with recent writings over-writing
2:21.8	earlier ones.
2:23.2	Could you explain to our audience what a palimpsest is and why you're using that
2:28.2	as an analog?
2:30.2	A palimpsest is a manuscript which would have once upon a time have been a papyrus or
2:36.0	vellum which was because it was a scarce commodity had to be reused and so they would partially
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