Podcast #266: Reading and Writing Science

Introduction: Hello, Quillette podcast listeners. Happy New Year. I’m Iona Italia, co-host of the Quillette podcast and the managing editor at Quillette. What follows here is an interview I conducted with Richard Dawkins in June 2021 for Two for Tea, the podcast associated with Areo Magazine. Dawkins’s insights, as always, are evergreen. I hope you enjoy my interview with Richard Dawkins.

Iona Italia: My guest today is Richard Dawkins and, of all the people whom I’ve had the privilege to interview on this podcast, today’s guest is the person who I have admired the most and for the longest time. My own background is in the arts. I have no formal background in science at all, and I didn’t really discover how enjoyable or how enlightening it could be to read books about science until 1991, when I was in my early twenties, when I read Richard’s book, The Selfish Gene and it blew my mind. And after that, I read all of his other books that had been published at that time. And that began a habit, an enthusiasm I’ve kept since, which is reading science books and reading about science. It was his books that led me to the discovery of how wonderful that could be. Thank you so much, Richard, for joining me today.

Richard Dawkins: That’s very nice to hear. Thank you very much.

II: I’m going to begin by reading a passage because I would like anyone who isn’t already familiar with your writing to get a sense of how captivating it can be. This passage is from a piece taken from the latest collection, which is called Books Do Furnish a Life, and it is a passage that you suggest as an address to be read at your funeral.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship’s ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life.  If one in a million planets is suitable at best, and it takes centuries to travel from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship’s robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky.  After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkels, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn’t it what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn’t arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn’t burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we gradually apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discovering it, should not subtract from its wonder.

Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that would have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just privileged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close forever.

So, Richard, you have said before that you believe that more people should and would be able to enjoy science in the same way as we enjoy music, literature or art. What do you feel non-scientists can specifically gain from an understanding of science, in terms of the kinds of pleasures that are analogous to appreciation of art?

RD: A difficult question to answer. By the way, you read that beautifully. Thank you very much indeed.

II: My pleasure.

RD: I think that, what science can tell us, especially we who live at the time that we do, what science can tell us is so wonderful, so amazing, so exhilarating. We are close to an understanding of why we’re here, what it’s all about, what life is for. We’re close to an understanding … perhaps not so close to an understanding of how the universe came into being, but we understand a great deal about the universe. And it is beautiful. It’s amazing. And I feel that artists and poets haven’t really done justice to how amazing science is and what science can tell us. So I do believe that science ought to be a subject for great literature, great art, maybe even great music.

II: Yes. You said once that you feel that Carl Sagan would have been a good candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature.

RD: Yes. I think that if you look at it … I mean, obviously scientists win the Nobel Prize for Physics and Physiology and Chemistry, but why not Literature? Why wouldn’t somebody like Carl Sagan or Peter Atkins, Jacob Aronofsky—all of whom were mentioned in Books Do Furnish a Life and quoted—why wouldn’t one of those deserve the Nobel Prize for Literature? The only approach to a scientist who’s ever won the prize for literature is only [Henri] Bergson [in 1927]. And that’s a terrible precedent, because he was mystical rather than scientific.

II: You said also, more than the fact that when scientists write more eloquently and more clearly, it’s clearly more enjoyable to read and more accessible to the general public … you have also said that you feel that writing more clearly often makes it possible to do better science.

I’m going to quote a passage here, which is again from the Books Do Furnish A Life collection.

I feel I have a mission to persuade my scientific colleagues to write their science as if they had a layperson looking over their shoulder, not to write in a language which is completely opaque to other people. I believe they’ll do better science if they do that, and I think they’ll communicate with other scientists better if they do that. I even think they’ll understand better the science that they themselves are doing.

One of the very surprising and, I think, really unusual things about your work is that it’s not just science explanation in the sense of: you had already done the science or other people had done the science, and you are now explaining to the layperson what that science is about. But in the course of some of your books—I’m thinking particularly of The Extended Phenotype and The Selfish Gene—you allow the readers to eavesdrop on you actually doing the science. So it’s addressed both to scientific colleagues and to lay readers. Can you say more about the kinds of possibilities that that opens up and how and why that can be a particularly good way of actually doing science?

RD: It’s an aspiration of mine to do that and to encourage other scientists to do it. It’s not always easy. And I don’t envy, for example, modern physicists, who have acquired an extraordinarily difficult subject to convey. It would be very hard to expect them to write their research papers, theoretical physicists, for example, to write their research papers in a way that would be understandable by laypeople. They could perhaps make a bit more of an effort. [For] biologists, people in my own field, it should be a lot easier to do that. And you’re right that I do think that they might, actually we scientists might actually understand what we’re doing ourselves better if we explain it in a way which is intelligible to non-scientists.

When I was editor of a scientific journal, Animal Behaviour, I tried to encourage authors to depart from the standard format of a scientific paper, which begins with Introduction and then goes Methods and then Results, and then Discussion or Conclusion. It’s a boring, stereotyped way of writing a paper. I think you should be able to write a scientific paper as a story. As something about what experiments you did, why you did them. Perhaps there’s a sequence of experiments. Experiment one began with a question. You did the experiment. You got a result that prompted a new question, which led to experiment two, which prompted a new question, which led to experiment three, and so on. Since you have a paper that describes four experiments, it should be in that form, as a narrative flow from one experiment to the next, instead of which what you often see in such a scientific paper is Methods 1, Methods 2, Methods 3, Methods 4; Results 1, Results 2, Results 3, Results 4—totally losing the narrative flow, which would grip the reader and help the reader to understand what’s going on, why the experiments were done. That’s a rather mundane example, but I think in general, if you do write your scientific papers with a view to a layperson looking over your shoulder, not only will you enjoy writing it more, they’ll obviously enjoy reading it more, but also, I think, you really may understand yourself what you’re doing better than you would if you wrote it in the standard scientific jargony way.

II: Yeah. I recently interviewed Erik Hoel, who is a neuroscientist and also novelist, and he said that he feels that in neuroscience, for example, it’s very easy to play the neuroscience game, which is “We put these subjects into the fMRI machine. And we measured increased blood flow to this region of the brain.” And it’s very easy to stop there and to say, “Well, this is the meaning, this is the result.” And it seems a little bit like, as he describes it, he uses the old analogy of the drunkard who is looking for his keys under the lantern, because that’s where the light is. It can allow you to avoid asking the larger question of, “Why would an increase in blood flow, why would these correlates suggest … what do they tell us about what is going on and why are we looking in this specific place?”

RD: Yes, exactly. I remember once when I was a graduate student and I went and visited my colleagues in Cambridge, these sort of opposite numbers, and I met one of the Cambridge graduate students, a contemporary of mine, and he was telling me what he did. And he began, “What I do is…” when he should have begun, “My question, what I wanted to know is …” with “The question I want to ask is … and that’s why I did these experiments.” Instead of which, he began by saying, “What I do is ….” So that’s just a little illustration of what you’re saying.

II: A lot of your writing is finding very pertinent and illuminating analogies, which not only explain ideas, but present things from a different viewpoint, which opens up new questions and new explanations. You talk about the whole enterprise of science as being a kind of analogy: It’s about explaining complex things in terms of the interactions between simpler things. [There are] a few analogies that you use, which I I think are particularly illustrative, and perhaps you could go over them for our listeners. The first the one that I found particularly fascinating recently was your idea of “continuously updated virtual reality.” That animals model their environments and they reflect an adaptation to their environments, but not only their current output environments and their ancestral environments, but also their internal environments, i.e. the internal models that they have of the world. Could you say more about this notion of continuously updated virtual reality?

RD: Yes. I think if you look at, for example, visual illusions … you know the various famous visual illusions like the neck, a cube, and like the multi-layer illusion and things. What these suggest is that what the brain is doing is setting up models in the head, [with] which there’s some relation to the outside reality, but, nevertheless, what you’re actually looking at when you look at a box or something like that is a constructed internal model. And when I say updated, it’s not just a pure fantasy like a dream. Dreams are also internal models. When we’re out in the real waking world, these internal models are updated by sense data coming in all the time. So it’s rather like virtual reality. When you don a pair of goggles for virtual reality and the computer presents to you a vision of, as it might be, an ancient Greek temple. And every time you turn your head, you get the illusion that you’re moving your head around to the left in this Greek temple. You see what’s on the left in this imaginary Greek temple. Or it could be a Martian landscape, or it could be anything you like. It could be an underwater scene. It’s constructed in the computer, it’s virtual reality, and it’s updated as you move your head. I think that that’s sort of what’s going on anyway. Our brain constructs a virtual reality, which is updated by what’s coming in through the eyes and ears and other senses. And I think that makes sense of how we navigate through the world.

II: Yeah. A related thing is the idea of “the genetic book of the dead.” So the idea that if a talented zoologist is confronted by an animal body, the zoologist can draw conclusions about the animal’s environment. For example, if the animal has dappled fur, the zoologist can conclude that that animal or the animal’s ancestors lived in a forest environment with dappled light and shade. Could you say more about that idea: the genetic book of the dead?

RD: Yes. The genetic book of the dead is one of my favorite themes, and I’m even starting to write a book called The Genetic Book of the Dead. As you say, if a deer has a dappled fur pattern suggesting the dappled sunlight pattern, or if a frog has has a pattern of bark on its back, atick insect looks exactly like a stick even down to the minute detail. This is a particular case where the animal most literally has its environment painted on its back. That’s an extreme case of the genetic book of the dead. But I wanted to generalise that, to say that, right through the warp and woof of the animal, right through the animal, everything about it can be thought of as a kind of description of the environments in which its ancestors lived. This follows from the power of natural selection to shape an animal to fit into the environment of its ancestors, of course. That’s where the selection took place. So in those cases where the animal has its background painted on its back—has the bark of the tree, the grass where it lives, whatever it is, the dappled forest, the sunlight painted on its back—^±that’s an extreme case. But right through the biochemistry of the animal, the physiology of the animal, the internal anatomy of the animal, everything about it is a description of the world in which its ancestors survived. And as you said, a talented and knowledgeable zoologist, presented with the body of an animal, should be able to reconstruct the set of environments in which the animal’s ancestors lived.

Now it’s a complicated palimpsest of different periods because, of course, the ancestors lived through hundreds of millions of years in the past. And you have to think about which parts of those ancestral environments receive the heaviest weighting. It’s tempting to say that the later parts, the most recent ancestral environments are the ones that are imprinted most heavily on the animal, but that’s not necessarily obviously true. Biochemists have speculated on the idea that you could say that the salty blood is a relic of ancestral seas, which were salty—perhaps a bit less salty than today’s. So the genetic book of the dead is a picture of the animal as a model, a description of the environments in which its ancestors lived, both ancient environments and modern environments superimposed upon one another as a palimpsest.

II: The third of the ideas that I think are particularly good examples that I can think of now for that way of arguing by analogy is your idea of The Extended Phenotype. In that book, you talk about various ways in which animals change their environments in such a way that it increases the likelihood of survival of the genes that prompt that behaviour. So, for example, at the very simplest level, when caddisfly larvae are making their little brick shelters, shells—I’m not sure what to call them—having a gene that prompts that behaviour increases the chance of survival of the caddisfly and therefore, the survivability of the gene prompting that behaviour. Are there some clear examples of how that happens at the human level? I mean, clearly we have transformed our environment a lot. But are there specific ways in which we can see humans transforming their environment in such a way as to increase the survivability odds of the genes for that behaviour?

RD: I would prefer to say no. You talked about the caddis larva. Caddis larva builds houses out of stones or sticks or snail shells or little bits of vegetation and the house serves exactly the same function as, for example, the shell of a snail, or indeed the skin of any animal. It’s separate, it’s protective, and it’s quite a hard protection in the case of a stone house. Caddis has beautiful behaviour patterns where it picks up little bits of stone, little miniature pebbles and glues them into place, literally glues them like a mason with mortar building this little house. Now the house, the outer shell of the caddis larva, is made of stone. It’s not made of body in the normal sense. It’s not made of skin. It’s not made of hair. It’s not made of even snail shell. But nevertheless it is phenotype. It’s part of the phenotype which the genes of the caddis manifest as. So the extended phenotype is generalising the principle of the phenotype. That which helps a gene to survive—the colouring of your eyes, the the shape of your nose, the length of your legs—all these things are part of your phenotype, which may assist the survival of the genes which influence the shape of your nose or the length of your legs, etc. Now the caddis house, although is made of stone, is clearly a proper phenotype in the same kind of way as a snail shell is, or a crab shell is, it’s just that it’s not made of living tissue or it’s not made in the same way as a snail shell is, from living tissue. It’s made by external stones. A bird’s nest is another example of an extended phenotype.

So the idea of the extended phenotype is that when you talk about phenotype, you’re talking about any influence which genes have upon the world, whether or not they have that effect directly on the body of the animal concerned. In the case of the caddis larva or the bird’s nest it works via the building behaviour of the individual animal, but the end result is phenotype in the same sense as a crab shell is phenotype. Now, when you come to humans, something like a building, it’s designed by an architect. But I don’t think you’d want to say that gene differences between architects are reflected in differences in buildings. It doesn’t work like that. There’s no gene for making skyscrapers as opposed to low-rise buildings. There may be genes that influence how talented an architect is in the profession of architecture, but I don’t think you can say that the actual phenotype, the building, whatever it is, is a proper reflection of variation in genes. Yes. Well, I think I probably pretty much finished talking about why you don’t want to talk about extended phenotypes with humans.

II: Changing topic a little bit: you have said that you are all for romantic love and poetry and “the emotions that lie so close to what makes life worth living.” And that “It is a mistake to think of those things as irrational. Those are things that are tangential to rationality rather than orthogonal to it. And they’re very different from irrational beliefs and superstitions.” Could you tell tell me a little bit about your favourite writers of fiction or poetry? Who has most influenced your work and what role has art played in your life?

RD: Yes. Well, I suppose my favourite poets are A.E. Housman, W.B. Yeats, Rupert Brooke, Shakespeare. I have been a bit disturbed by people who think that, as talented folk, their view of life somehow precludes emotion and the things that go with emotion. I believe we can be rational about why we have emotions. For example, after The Selfish Gene was published, I had a number of letters from people saying that they were driven to despair by the thought that the the world was a cold, hard, rational, unemotional place with no room for emotion, no room for love, no room for passion. That seems to me to be totally and completely wrong. One teacher, I think, was a professor from Canada. I believe it was said that a young woman, a student, had come to him and said that she had read The Selfish Gene, and was almost driven to suicide, and he advised her not to show the book to any of her friends.

This is so utterly misguided. Of course we have emotions. Of course we have passions. Of course we fall in love. That’s all part of our biology. And no doubt, ultimately it is susceptible of a rational, scientific explanation. But that’s not what we do when we actually fall in love. We don’t think to ourselves in a rational way about the neural pathways, the hormonal pathways that are being activated: we just fall in love or we weep in the present moment when we hear a Schubert quartet or read a Shakespeare sonnet. So there’s really no problem with reconciling being a rational scientist with being an emotional poet.

II: There seems to me often to be this misconception that the gene’s eye view, which is a startlingly illuminating way of understanding what is happening in evolutionary terms, is therefore somehow the real truth about people, that their other thoughts and feelings and impulses are some kind of superficial froth or mendacious excuse-making over the top and the real truth is just about genes, relative survivability. That’s an extraordinarily odd way of looking at things, to me. Would you agree?

RD: Yes, I would, Really, I can’t answer that much more different than I already have. It’s the same point. I recognise that if I fall in love, or if I feel sexual passion, say, in some sense this is my brain being driven by my evolved genes, but the connection is so indirect and so long drawn-out, the causal chain is so elusive that it doesn’t really help you to explain what’s going on when you have a feeling of passion or of deep emotion. You have them anyway.

II: Yes. It reminds me of—I can’t remember which scientist it was who made this joke—He asked, “Have you met my my wife?” and the other scientist said, “Yes, I’ve met your wife. She is a collection of quarks and electrons.” At one level, that’s true. But at another level, it’s quite irrelevant to our normal way of experiencing life relationships and interactions.

RD: Of course. Absolutely.

II: In a review of Jerry Coyne’s book, Why Evolution Is True, you said that the molecular genetics revolution would have taken Darwin’s breath away. Could you say more about: if you could resurrect Charles Darwin and talk to him today, what would you be most keen to tell him? And what advances in evolutionary biology do you think would most surprise and delight him?

RD: I suppose at first congratulate him on being so far-sighted as he was. He really [only] went wrong with genetics, that’s the big one. He would have been fascinated, he would have been spellbound, I think, by molecular genetics. Actually, he would have been pretty keen on Mendelian genetics long before it became molecular because it’s digital. Mendelian genetics is digital and Watson-Crick genetics is very, very digital just like a computer. Mendelian genetics is digital in the sense that genes are all or none, and you get a particular set of genes from your mother, a set of genes from your father and of those genes you pass along a particular subset to each of your children. They pass through you unchanged on their way through. They are unbreakable digits. And that would have been the answer to quite a lot of the problems that Darwin had, a lot of the problems that led Darwin to revise The Origin of Species such that the sixth edition is actually not so scientifically accurate as the first edition, because Darwin was obliged to make changes in the sixth edition because he misunderstood, he didn’t know about genetics and and he would have been rescued in the criticism that the first edition faced if he had known about Mendelian digital genetics. So that’s one point. But then when we come to Watson-Crick genetics, where it is superbly, preternaturally digital, it’s just like computer data. It’s quaternary rather than binary. But apart from that, it is computer data: a chromosome is like a great big computer tape. That is beautiful. That is elegant. I think Darwin would have loved it. And I think with hindsight, we could say that evolution really needs genetics to be digital. So I’d stick my neck out and say that if there is life elsewhere in the universe, however weird and strange and alien and foreign it may be, one thing we can say is that it will be Darwinian life and it will have digital genetics, albeit in detail no doubt very different from ours.

II: What do you think is the most common and persistent misunderstanding of your work, or evolution, or evolutionary biology?

RD: Evolution in general, I suppose. A consistent misunderstanding is that the mere demonstration that something is complicated and looks designed somehow makes evolution less likely. When something is complicated and looks designed, like an eye or a knee joint or a heart or a kidney or a leaf, then the challenge is: how do we explain that? And Darwinian natural selection, evolution by natural selection is the only feasible way that has ever been proposed to explain that. The common misunderstanding among creationists is that if you’ve demonstrated that something is highly improbable—and there is a sense in which things like eyes and kidneys are highly improbable—that that in itself is evidence for a divine creator. Whereas what it is, is it’s evidence we need some kind of special explanation. And a divine creator is not a special explanation because it presupposes what you’re trying to explain, which is a complex design in this case. But evolution by natural selection does explain it. So that’s a very common misunderstanding.

A very common misunderstanding of evolution is that it is missing the point about how long geological time offers, the great stretches of time that geological time allows. Therefore, people say things like, “Well, I will believe in evolution when I see a monkey give birth to a human.” That is not realising this. It takes millions of generations for that sort of change to to happen. As for misunderstandings of my work: I suppose, many people think that in The Selfish Gene, at least, I’m advocating the idea that we are all selfish or we ought to be selfish, which is the exact opposite of what I’m actually saying. Genes are selfish. But that means that individuals cannot be selfish or may not be selfish.

Another misunderstanding is that I’m advocating a sort of genetic determinism such that you’re stuck with your genes, and if your genes tell you to do something, then there’s nothing you can do about it. There’s no possibility of being educated away from whatever innate tendencies your genes may have built into you. That’s another very common misunderstanding.

II: And you’ve said that we we defy our genes every time we use a condom, for example.

RD: Yes, absolutely. And that’s a model for any kind of of defiance. We defy our genes all the time when we spend our time writing books instead of rushing out and procreating.

II: Yes. And I know that you have also said that you feel that, although you are Darwinian in science, when it comes to ethics you are an anti-Darwinian. Could you say more about that distinction?

RD: Yes. I’ve often said that. I think that if you base your morals or your politics, your belief about what society should consist of, you imagine it to be a Darwinian world, it will be a very unpleasant world. And I think the rather hackneyed phrase, “nature is red in tooth and claw” is accurate. That is nature. And the beauty of being human is that we have the power to depart from that. T.H. Huxley said this, in the 19th century. Nature is not pleasant. Nature is ruthless, nature is fierce and red in tooth and claw. So do not base your politics on Darwinism. On the contrary, learn your Darwinism as a key to understanding how not to organise society, how not to organise your politics.

II: Absolutely. And what do you see as the threats to the understanding of science today? What do you see as the new, more recent challenges—f you think that there are new challenges—and what is your best advice for how to try to counter them?

RD: The challenge from religion hasn’t gone away. It’s still there, but I’ve written enough about that. I think there are new challenges coming from a sort of trendy philosophy which possibly originated in France and became fashionable in Britain and America. This philosophy, in a rather incoherent way, cast doubt upon science, on rationality, on the idea that there is a real world which science is equipped to elucidate. It goes with the idea that your truth is yours and you’re entitled to your truth and evidence doesn’t come into it. Or you could despise evidence, you can reject evidence. You can say, “I have my own truth, and scientific evidence has nothing to do with it.” In extreme cases, it really does look like a mistrust of scientific evidence.

I think you probably know more about this than I do, but I think there is a tendency for people like me to have concentrated too much on religion as the enemy of science and not realise that there may be a new enemy of science rearing its head.

II: Richard, is there anything that you would have liked to have talked about in this interview, which I haven’t given you a chance to talk about?

RD: Well, I suppose I could say a little bit about different books I love and about Books Do Furnish a Life. I can say a little bit about it. It is a collection, it’s a third, really, of my collections of previously published essays. A Devil’s Chaplain was the first one, and then the second one was Science in the Soul, which is much more recent. And, when we were working on Science in the Soul, we realised that we had too much material. So we split it into two. And the obvious way to split it was to have those essays which were to do with books, book reviews, forewords to books, afterwords to books, essays about books, could be a separate volume. And that’s what this is. That’s why it’s called Books Do Furnish a Life. So it’s, as it were, my life with books. Scientific books, mostly, but not entirely. It’s a collection of miscellaneous book reviews, etc. about books, divided into sections by the editor, Gillian Somerscales.

II: It’s a very generous characteristic of your work in general that a surprising amount of your published work is recommendations of other people’s books and other people’s works and praise of other scientists. Which is something that I find very delightful. I thought you also do a a wonderful—and I think perhaps underappreciated—line in satire.

I’d actually like to read another little passage, to contrast with a rather more emotive passage that I read earlier. It’s from your review of Michael J. Behe’s book, The Edge of Evolution. Behe suggests that evolutionary change is limited by the number of naturally occurring mutations. I’m going to read now:

Now, if you sought an experimental test of Behe’s theory, what would you do? You’d take a wild species, say a wolf that hunts caribou by long pursuit, and apply selection experimentally to see if you could breed, say, a dogged little wolf that chivies rabbits underground: let’s call it a Jack Russell terrier. Or how about an adorable, fluffy pet wolf called, for the sake of argument, a Pekingese? Or a heavyset, thick-coated wolf, strong enough to carry a cask of brandy, that thrives in Alpine passes and might be named after one of them, the St. Bernard? Behe has to predict that you’d wait till hell freezes over, but the necessary mutations would not be forthcoming. Your wolves would stubbornly remain unchanged. Dogs are a mathematical impossibility. … From Newfies to Yorkies, from Weimaraners to water spaniels, from Dalmatians to dachshunds, as I incredulously close this book I seem to hear mocking barks and deep, baying howls of derision from 500 breeds of dogs—every one descended from a timber wolf within a time frame so short as to seem, by geological standards, instantaneous.

There are wonderful moments like that.

RD: Thank you very much.

II: You’re welcome. Although the balance between hostile and laudatory reviews very much errs on the side of laudatory reviews, I think the two hostile reviews—and this draws back in to what you were saying about postmodernist-influenced ways of thinking that seem to reject the whole basis of rationality and science … One of the other hostile reviews is of Lynn Margulis’s book that she wrote jointly with her son, Dorion Sagan, which also takes this very postmodernist, word-play-based view of knowledge and sex and is, as you put it, “elite tossings-off.” Which I think is a good summary. “It expects to be taken seriously as a theory, but doesn’t do the work of being falsifiable or producing evidence.”

Which is your favourite of your books that you have written and why?

RD: I usually answer that question with The Extended Phenotype. It’s, I suppose, the idea of which I’m most proud, the only book I’ve written which was specifically designed for academic colleagues and is fully referenced in the way that academic books are. But I’m pretty fond of all of them, actually. I don’t disown any of them.

Climbing Mount Improbable, I think, is the most underrated in the sense that it’s the one that sold the least number of copies. And I’m really pretty pleased with that one as well. But, as I say, I wouldn’t disown any of them.

II: Well, I’m not surprised. They have hugely enriched my life. Richard, thank you so much for joining me. It’s been an honour.

RD: It’s been a real pleasure for me. Thank you very much indeed.

II: You’re welcome.