Having had so much fun during my last sojourn to the University of Maryland, I decided to repeat the experience this past Wednesday. Richard Dawkins was speaking, you see.
Here he is on stage during the introductions:
I attended with Douglas Gill and Clinton Jenkins, both of the University of Maryland Biology Department. And since we are all highly connected VIP’s, we wound up sitting in the center of the second row. Impressed? I sure was!
Dawkins had little trouble filling the venue:
There was an overflow room as well. My informal impression was that a significant majority of the attendees were students. Rather a lot of the students had their copies of The God Delusion with them. I found that encouraging.
Dawkins was introduced by another member of the Maryland Biology Department: Cristian Castillo-Davis. He described how reading The Selfish Gene as a young man inspired him to pursue evolutionary biology as a career, He praised the lucidity and forcefulness of Dawkins’ writing and extolled the virtues of natural selection as an explanation for biological complexity.
The formal proceedings were an interview between Dawkins and Castillo-Davis. Both the discussion, and the ensuing question and answer period, focused primarily on biology with only infrequent excursions into religion. Experienced Dawkins-philes will be able to anticipate most of the talking points that arose, but it was an enjoyable discussion nevertheless.
Dawkins opened by describing a bit of his background. It was not until he was a second-year undergraduate that he really became fascinated with biology, and it was there that he learned about evolution for the first time. There followed several minutes of discussion about the mechanics of natural selection and the sense in which it could be said to be random. He discussed his famous “METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL” experiment.
Next up was some discussion about the units of selection. Dawkins repeated his well-known view that genes are the only entity in the biological hierarchy possessing the necessary properties for being a unit of selection. That is, they pass occasionally imperfect copies of themselves down through the generations and differ in ways that are relevant to their survival. I would have been interested to hear some discussion of things like hierarchical selection theory (for example, Stephen Jay Gould used to argue that punctuated equilibrium suggested that species themselves could be viewed as units of selection.) Alas, the discussion moved instead to clay crystals, and the sense, proposed by Graham Cairns Smith, in which they exhibit a rudimentary version of variation and selection. Dawkins suggested that this was an interesting speculation, but it was not an idea that carries much favor with modern origin of life researchers. There was then some brief discussion of the origin of life, and the idea that RNA was a candidate for a middle-ground between lifeless matter and DNA. This discussion went on for several minutes and actually got a little bit technical.
The most interesting part of the interview came next. Castillo-Davis suggested that it was important to learn about evolution from an early age, since it is the scaffolding on which you can hang a lot of facts in biology. Dawkins replied,
When I learned biology, I learned evolution sort of last. I mean, I suppose I learned first of all about cells and cellular chemistry and things like that. How on earth can you appreciate cells and cellular chemistry without knowing what it’s all for? How can you even begin to learn biology without starting off with what it’s all for, where it all comes from? So I want to turn the textbook order in which biology is taught where very often evolution is left for the last chapter, and make it the first chapter. And teach it young!
This last was a big applause line. Dawkins went on to suggest that even six or seven-year-olds can be made to understand some of the basic ideas.
The conversation next addressed the gradualness of evolutionary change,. If you imagine lining up all of your ancestors from the present to the dawn of time, you would not find two consecutive ancestors that were of different species. But because of the spans of time involved, the small, negligible variations from one generation to the next get magnified into large changes indeed. He likened this to a child growing up. There is no clear dividing point between babyhood and toddlerhood, just as there is no definitive moment when you suddenly go from being a child to being an adult (in all but the legal sense of course), but with the benefit of hindsight you can see that great changes have taken place. Some discussion of “deep time” arose here.
Several more topics then arose. The importance of gene duplication and divergence in producing complexity. Speculations about exobiology. Questions about how much of what we find in life on Earth is the result of historical contingency, and how much reflects biological necessities. I was hoping Dawkins would address the question of whether or not humans would evolve a second time, since I have a chapter on that topic in my book, but the conversation sadly went in a different direction.
The conversation concluded with some talk about the blow evolution presents to human significance. Referring to explanations for humanity that depend on God Dawkins said:
It’s grossly wasteful isn’t it? When you’ve got a beautiful idea, a beautiful story that tells you how we got to be the way we are, the complex way we are from simple beginnings by utterly explicable, sensible, step-by-step processes, to suddenly say oh but I want to believe that there’s a supernatural being on top of all that. What a wasteful idea! What a profligate, superfluous …
and the rest of that sentence was drowned out by applause.
Then it was on to questions, nearly all of which came from students. Here’s what it looked like:
These sorts of things are always more exciting when some challenging questions get asked, but in this case all of the questions were supportive. As is typically the case in venues of this sort, the questions varied a lot in general quality. One person asked about the origin of morality. Another asked about the meaning of life. Still another asked about evolution and homosexuality.
One questioner asked for the the most interesting example he could provide of an animal structure or behavior that received a cogent explanation through evolution. That was how I understood the question anyway, but something seemed to get garbled, and Dawkins took the questioner to be asking just for an interesting story of some animal curiosity. At any rate, it led to the following interesting story.
There’s a caterpillar which pupates inside a wrapped-up leaf. And the way it achieves it is that it goes to the stalk of the leaf and bites it halfway across so that the leaf is still hanging from the other half of its stalk, but is cut off from its supply of water from the vessels in the stalk. So the leaf curl up and wraps itself around the caterpillar. Well, that’s pretty nice. But there’s more, the story goes on. There is a risk to the caterpillar in doing that because if it were the only wrapped up leaf around a lot of other perfectly good leaves hanging from the same tree it will be a sitting target for predators. So what it does is it goes around and bites through the stalks of a lot of other leaves then finally curls itself up in one of them.
The evening concluded with a book signing. It looked like he had quite a mob scene in front of him, so we decided not to hang around. All in all I can’t say I learned anything new, but since I don’t think most of the audience was quite so familiar with these issues I suspect a lot of it was new for them. He certainly had plenty of laugh and applause lines!
Doug was kind enough to give me a ride back to the metro station, from which I reversed my steps from earlier in the day, getting home around two in the morning. It’s not the easiest trip in the world, but well worth the trouble. I’m glad I went.