On Edge.org, John Brockman writes,
The toughest ticket in London's West End last week wasn't for a new mega-hit musical from Cameron Mackintosh, or a new play by Tom Stoppard. The people who flocked to The Old Theatre were greeted by famed British radio and television presenter Melvyn Bragg ("Start the Week") with the following opening words:
"They are in you and me; they created us, body and mind; and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence. They have come a long way, those replicators. Now they go by the name of genes, and we are their survival machines."
The words are from The Selfish Gene, by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. And the evening was a celebration of the thirty year anniversary of the publication of his classic book. (…) Physicist and computer scientist W. Daniel Hillis has noted:
"Notions like Selfish Genes, memes, and extended phenotypes are powerful and exciting. They make me think differently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time arguing against people who have overinterpreted these ideas. They're too easily misunderstood as explaining more than they do. So you see, this Dawkins is a dangerous guy. Like Marx. Or Darwin."
Part of Dawkins' danger is his emphasis on models derived from cybernetics and information theory, and that such models, when applied to our ideas of life, and in particular, human life, strike some otherwise intelligent people numb and dumb with fear and terror. Some have called the cybernetic idea the most important in 2000 years…since the idea of Jesus Christ. And that would make it one of the most dangerous ideas.
Link to archived audio (1 hour 22 minutes, and in two formats: streaming, or downloadable 75 MB mp3) and 12,000-word transcript. Speakers: Daniel C Dennett (Tufts), Sir John Krebs, FRS (Zoology, Oxford), Matt Ridley, Ian McEwan, Richard Dawkins, FRS (Oxford), Chair: Melvyn Bragg; Organiser, Helena Cronin.
Here's an Amazon link for the original book: The Selfish Gene.
Reader comment: Andrew Platt says,
Melvyn Bragg presents ‘In our Time’ not ‘Start the week’ (that’s Andrew Marr) Podcasts of Radio 4s marvellous ‘In Our Time’ can be found here.
