players or restaurants, but I tend to offer quite mild criticism of religion. HARI: At the same time, you engage a number of people in the religious community who are more favorable to the scientific view of the world. You speak often with pastors and priests, and there have been a number of questions here about whether there is any real optimism in your mind to change some of the minds in that world by engaging folks in that realm. DAWKINS: You are talking now of people who are good scientists. I actually form alliances with such people when it’s a matter of trying to deal with problems of fundamentalist creationism, for example. In Britain the problem is not quite as bad as it is [in the United States], but there are schools in Britain which are openly teaching young-earth creationism. There was one in the north of England, which got a lot of publicity. And I got together with the then-bishop of Oxford, who’s a very nice man called Richard Harries, and we mustered a group of scientists. I got a number of fellows at the Royal Society and he got a number of bishops, and we wrote a joint letter to Tony Blair – six bishops and nine fellows from the Royal Society – asking Tony Blair to intervene and look into this creationist school. Tony Blair did nothing, of course. That was an example of a collaboration with a set of bishops. HARI: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about genetic determinism. DAWKINS: Genetic determinism is one of those pejorative words that get trotted out, like reductionism. People always talk about reductionism, and they never know what it means; they just know it’s a bad word. Genetic determinism is a bit like that. When I wrote The Selfish Gene, it was criticized in a few corners for genetic determinism as though it was making a thesis about embryology. A genetic determinist thesis about embryology would be that your genes determine the way you are going to be, and there’s nothing you can do about it. [I’m not talking about physical characteristics, which are] genuinely deterministic. But in the field of behavior, we’re interested in the evolution of things like aggressive behavior, cooperative behavior, nest-building behavior. In order to talk about that in a Darwinian way, because natural selection works at the level of a gene, you have got to postulate a gene for the behavior you’re interested in.
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That doesn’t mean you think there’s only one gene that influences [that behavior]. What it does mean is that if you talk about a gene for aggression, what you mean is that an individual who contains that gene is statistically more likely to be aggressive than an individual who doesn’t. You have to postulate that or you can’t do Darwinism. Darwinism has to be done as differential survival of genes, and therefore you have to postulate genes for “X” where “X” is the quality whose evolution you’re talking about. The critics understood “gene for X” to mean a deterministic influence, such as that if you’ve got the gene for X, then there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t change it; if you’ve got a gene for aggression, you’re going to hit everybody you see and there’s no question of education or taming or anything
“In Britain the problem is not quite as bad as it is [in America], but there are schools in Britain which are openly teaching young-earth creationism. ” like that. That was miles away from anything I ever intended. This was a book about evolution, not a book about embryology. Genetic determinism is an embryological concept, and I was interested in evolution. As I said, for the purposes of talking about evolution, you have got to postulate genes, which statistically increase the probability that you will do such and such a behavior under normal conditions. It says absolutely nothing about the possibility that you can change those conditions to remove, or even reverse, that behavior. HARI: So what is your reaction when you see headlines [saying] that scientists have found the gene for “x”? DAWKINS: That’s OK as long as you understand that it only means a gene that statistically increases the possibility [of “x”]. You could ask yourself, is there a gene for religiosity? Is there a gene for being gay? The most clear-cut way of testing that is to do twin studies, where you look for identical twins, monozygotic twins who have identi-
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cal genes, and you look for fraternal twins as a control, and you look for both kinds of twins who have been reared together, which most twins are, and you look for those rare cases where twins, for accidental reasons, have happened to be reared apart. Identical twins being quite rare anyway, the number who have been reared apart is pretty rare, but nevertheless, there are a few dozen cases and they have been intensively studied. If you compare the religiosity, the sexual inclinations, the aggressiveness, whatever you like, of these four categories of twins, you can calculate what percentage of the variants in a normal population is attributable to genes, and what percentage is not. And that’s a perfectly respectable way of doing science, and the results vary. In the case of something like hair color or eye color, the heritability is 100 percent. In the case of behavioral measures, like musical ability, mathematical ability, that kind of thing, it’s not 100 percent, but the correlation is higher for identical twins, even when reared apart, than it is for fraternal twins, indicating a significant genetic component to the variance. That’s all that natural selection needs in order to go to work and favor a gene for “x.” HARI: What do you think the legacy of Richard Dawkins will be? DAWKINS: I’m supposed to be writing a second volume. This is the first volume, taking me up to The Selfish Gene, and I’m supposed to write volume two. I’ve been trying to think of how to do volume two. One [option], obviously, is to do it chronologically – just take off from where I’ve left of in volume one. But somebody suggested that it might be a good idea to do it as a flashback, to start, say, in an auditorium in San Francisco and then say, well, how did I get to this point? I thought, why not go even further into the future, and start on my deathbed and have a flashback from a hypothetical deathbed and think, what when I’m dying would I regret? What would I hope for my legacy? What would I feel that I had missed doing? But I haven’t actually told you what I would miss, have I? John Betjeman, a very, very delightful poet, a real character; in his extreme old age he was asked by an interviewer, “Sir John, you’ve had a long and interesting life; is there anything you regret looking back?” He thought for a bit and then he said, “Not enough sex.” Shall I leave it at that? I didn’t really mean that.