Dawkins vs Peterson: Memes & Archetypes | Alex O’Connor Moderates | EP 491

[Music] I had the opportunity today to engage in a long awaited discussion Dr Richard Dawkins and Alex o coner and we took the opportunity to explore things we agree about and things we disagree about in a manner that I think was very productive join us for [Music] that you said that you were a cultural Christian but what did you mean by that virtually nothing Dr Peterson you're drunk on symbols what I care about is the truth value I see no no truth value in the claims of Christianity the Virgin birth the resurrection do you believe

in any of those from a metaphorical perspective any culture that doesn't hold the image of the woman and infant sacred dies well let's go back to what you said earlier which I was very interested in you implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved well it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of the logos or order and I think it is I think that Jordan prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact I'm not interested in Dragons I'm interested in real in reality but my sense is that those two

Pathways have to unify now it's not like I know how to rectify that do you think that that is something that is is worth exploring further is that is that's very interesting [Music] yes I think our first point of contact in the spirit of finding those overlapping Circles of interests between you two will be the similarities if there are any between the concept of a meme and the concept of an archetype so Professor Dawkins perhaps you can begin by telling us what is a meme a meme is a virus of the mind so it's something

that spreads because it spreads because it spreads it's something that spreads by imitation as I understand it an archetype is quite different from that because an archetype is something which all humans have um as a virtue of Being Human something that's built in so it's not something that spreads as an epidemic it's something that we all have any way now I suppose that it could turn into a meme but I I would think it would be mudding the waters to even say that there's something very much in common between an archetype and a meme memes

are not embedded into the psychology of people as no they arise they're things like the backwards baseball hat which is not an archetype I mean it's it's something that that becomes fashionable and spreads as an epidemic around the population which is very different from an archetype which is sort of built in yes I've heard you in the past Dr Peterson say that a meme is very similar if not almost identical to an archetype almost as if you kept pushing the idea of what a meme is you might end up with an archetype that well I

think maybe the the appropriate way of tying the two I ideas together given what Dr Dawkins just said is the is to notice the fact that something spreads because it catches right and so things catch because they have an emotional resonance and so they attract people's interest and so they attract them in an exploratory manner that'd be one way of thinking about it that would be attraction on the positive emotion side or they attract them on the negative emotion side and so that would Loop the idea of the catchiness of a idea a meme let's

say with the more underlying motivational structures and as the idea is more related to the action of underlying biological motivational structures it it becomes more and more expression of something that's instinctual and archetypal like Yung defined an archetype essentially as something like the the manifestation of an instinct in image and then also in Behavior so the deepest level is something like the Instinct and that would be motivational or emotional drive and then there's a manifestation of that in imagination and behavior and it's more culturally constructed there and you could also imagine that there are depths

of these ideas the the baseball half idea for example that would be something that's manifesting itself at a fairly shallow level but there's a reason that the backwards baseball hat caught on you know it speaks of the moment for whatever reason and and it's linked to the biology through the fact that it captures interest for some reason so perhaps something like uh the archetype being a more fundamental psychological concept that memes can then play upon the backwards cap hatches on well that seems in plausible to me but the but the idea that the archetype could

be a reason why some memes spread that that seems to me to be plausible if you believe in archetypes at all yeah but you prefer to think of memes or you do think of memes as you refer to them as a virus yes doesn't have to have a netive it's spreadability which is which is a Salient point and if chiming in with an archetype is something is some a reason why they might spread then I could go with that yeah and presumably archetypes don't act in the same way they don't spread through cultures they don't

sort of grow up and die in individual Generations they're much more foundational than that I think you have to think about it hierarchically know that there are there's something in in in the structure that that would make it self manifest as an archetype there's something that's foundational and deep that wouldn't change over wouldn't change any faster in a sense than the species itself changes but then there would be efflorescences of that idea that would be less permanent as they as they were more attuned to the specifics of the time so and that's not saying anything

different really than saying that there are ideas that make themselves manifest at different levels of depth which is also a complex thing like it's not a it's not that easy to specify what makes an idea deep which makes it more archetypal and what makes it transient and trivial there's a relationship between such ideas there's no idea so trivial that it doesn't touch the depths because no one would care about it right so but but but archetypal ideas do have that capacity to spread virally and to rise and fall you see that I think you see

that in the history of religious ideas know that religious ideas are very can be very catching because otherwise they wouldn't spread now they do there's variation in them like there is in languages but they also there's also something that's core that makes them ident if iable let's say as religious ideas rather than as any other sort of idea I mean one of the things I was really interested about I sent you an email at one time asking you if you had read Rich eliad especially the sacred and the profane but he also has a three

book series called a history of religious ideas and I really like a history of religious ideas it's a great book and one of the things it does is analyze a particular widespread religious Motif which is the battle between the Gods in heaven you see this idea in many many cultures and each God is the expression of a motive perception or a motive being and what you see happening in multitude of cultures is that there are many many ways of seeing the world and acting in it that are metamorphous metamorphosed into something Divine and as cultures

mingle and mix their their gods compete in the space of the imagination and something like a hierarchy forms that's the emergence of something like monotheism and the associate so we've been talking a little bit about the concept of a meme I think it's it would be strange to be suspicious of the idea that memes are a thing that do exist and transmit but there might be more room for suspicion about this concept of the archetype I was wondering Professor Dawkins what you think about the concept of archetypes in general well for example if we take

the idea of the of the Gods competing with each other um that I take it is a is a is a proper archetype because it's it's it's present in all in all cultures I presume you mean is something that's built in genetically ultimately I suppose that that there something about our brains makes different cultures invent the same kinds of religious uh symbols and things like a battle between Gods is one that's one it it's and um there might be others it's not that convincing I mean such an obvious thing because we have human battles and

therefore an idea of battles between Gods would not be that implausible so it it doesn't strike me as a very penetrating observation well I think the thing that's interesting about it the thing that's been interesting to me about it is to is to start to understand the nature of the universal themes and how they're expressed in stories I mean one of the things I wanted to explore with you because I think this is an idea that's at the core of the cultural conflict is the postmodern types seem to have stumbled onto something which I actually

think is true and they're not the only discipline that's come to this realization because you can see it emerging in neuroscience and in in uh in Ai and in robotics as well that we see the world of facts through something that when described is a story because we have to prioritize our perceptions we have to prioritize facts and as far as I can tell a story is a verbal account of how of how our perceptions and the facts that we encounter are prioritized so for example when you go see a movie movie has a hero

and what the writers do is they show you how the hero prioritizes his perceptions what he attends to and how he acts and you derive from that the story of his life and his ethic and the the the idea that we have a story that we have to organize our Perceptions in priority and that the description of that organization is a story that's a very revolutionary idea and I think the postmodernists got that right and I think that's why we have a culture war going on at least in part is because the idea that we

see the world through a story or that a story is a description of the structure through which we see the world I think that's accurate because we have to prioritize our perceptions so that's a tricky problem well I would prioritize my perceptions like this the fact that I care about are the fact that are true and have evidence going for them and I'm not that interested in symbols um I think Dr Peterson you're drunk on symbols yes you mentioned i' i' I've heard your I've heard that comment yeah yes um I mean for example I've

I've um I I counted up in your book um we who wrestle with God the number of references to Cain um there are 356 references to Cain in the in the book and 20 references to the descendants of Cain um you're obsessed with Cain um because Cain is symbolic of uh evil um all the evil in the world you you more or less blame Cain for and um this is Kan I mean you you don't believe Kan actually existed I presume since I joined forces with the dailywire plus we've built a comprehensive collection of Premium

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realize that there arec types who exist and they're well yeah they are cane types Kan himself I mean you you give the game away where you say in your book Cain and Abel were the first humans to be born in the natural way now that that betrays you as as as it were pretending you think they really existed because you wouldn't have said they were born in a natural way unless you were muddling up facts with symbols there because you don't think that that Cain and abble existed well I don't what do I think about

Cain and Abel I I said I think the pattern that they repres always exists always exists different matter a pattern that they represent the the conflict between Brothers the Rivalry Between Brothers this is a fundamental pattern which which yes it's something that that's there but I care about facts I mean did they exist or did they not exist well I can imagine a situation where when the story was originated that it referred to two actual Brothers but as the stories propagated across time as they mutate as they adapt let's say to the to the structure

of human memory they deepen and they become broader and so then they become emblematic not only of the pattern of conflict that might characterize the original two brothers that the story was about but about the conflict between Brothers as such and then the more fundamental levels of conflict that exist within human beings which is what you see in more sophisticated literature it's like the biblical accounts speak of fact in a factual manner upon occasion but the biblical accounts also speak poetically and metaphorically and allegorically and people who are sophisticated in biblical analysis have known this

for centuries the bibl biblical liter interests generally suffer from the problem that they don't even know what it means to be literalist there's lots of unsophisticated ways of approaching a text okay let's see what Professor Dawkin thinks about that well I I I suppose I'm a literalist I mean and and you give the game away when you when you say Kane and Abel the first humans to be born in a natural way well I'm speaking allegorically there within the confines of the text I mean what I meant by that was that the way the story

lays itself out is that Adam and Eve are created by God and so they're they're they're not they're not they don't they're not emblematic of the pattern of human beings that exist in Fallen history within the confines of the text the first two people who are genuine who aren't creations of the Divine arcan enable and so for me they emblem atic of the patterns of conflict that rip people apart in the world of history in the world of normal history Professor Dawkins I know you take particular umbrage with that statement that Kan and abble were

the first normally born uh human beings but I think if I understand Dr Peterson correctly there are things that can be sort of true within a story it's true that Sherlock Holmes lives at 221B Baker Street and as far as I understand that's maybe what you mean by uh the the truth in the matter of of Cain and Abel being the first naturally born internal well in the context of the story they're the first two Spirits or patterns you could think of patterns of perception and action yes that that characterize human existence in the Fallen

World right so they're emblematic of what happens in history outside of the whatever is meant by the pre-existent paradise at the same time you must know I know this comes up all of the time when somebody says but did can and aable really exist and I know that want to say that the the story which I think it's a silly question I think it's like asking whether raskolnikov existed in crime and punishment like it's not it's not a trivial question because you can answer yes and you can answer no you can say well there was

no such specific person as raskolnikov but you it's it's not a helpful question because the reason that dov's crime and punishment is a masterpiece is because rascalov was everywhere in Russia when dovi wrote Crime and Punishment and so raskolnikov is hyperreal not not real but to be clear is that how you feel about Cain and Abel that that that is to say an identifiable hyper real Homo sapiens called Cain it's Mur in a sense it's irrelevant to me because it even if they were real like we don't know anything about them asig even if they

weren't real of course they weren't real well like I said it could have been the case that where when the story originated way back when it originated that the first people that were described by the first person who generated the seeds of the Canan aable story we're referring to actual people but it doesn't matter because the the the text is being compressed and modified over a vast span of time and it's acced all sorts of meanings that certainly weren't part and parcel of whatever the original story was take the point Alex was said making um

within the confines of the story um dosi was a great writer what makes you think the writers of Genesis were a great writer I mean who were they we don't we know nothing about them well I think they well I think they were great writers because I think I understand the patterning of the stories and what it points to I I think the idea for example that Cain and Abel are emblematic of two opposed patterns of adaptation to the world is brilliant it's it's it's almost brilliant Beyond imagining especially because the story is so insanely

compressed and it's certainly evident to me as a clinician that the patterns that are portrayed in the story of Cain and Abel play themselves out in the real world continually and terribly terribly you think the author of of that story in Genesis was a literary genius I think that there's a spirit of literary genius at work across Millennia crafting that story so that it has almost an infinite depth how that relates to the original author or sequential authors I don't know because it's lost in the seeds of time it's lost in the it's lost in

history so the story evolved you're saying the story like a meme yes interesting it evolved to match the Contours of the human memory that's exactly it is that these stories that's part of their archetypal nature like so they have a emotional and motivational expression but as they propagate across time they also evolve so they're maximally memorable and they're maximally memorable for a biological reason well that's very interesting if they really did evolve over time if you could if you could actually Trace successive manuscripts you can't do that I mean there's there's presumably a couple of

Hebrew manuscripts and and the Greek one and what do you what do you mean when you say well I I would say you can see that in the compilation of the biblical texts because one of the things that you see evolved you know you criticized the biblical text at one point correct me if I've got this wrong CU I don't want to get this wrong you said that there isn't anything in the biblical text that constitutes let's say uh significant original discovery which is something that you'd expect if it was of Divine Providence let's say

Divine Providence and so and I I think you know I was thinking about that objection and I think that one of the uh discoveries that the text lays bear in in an insanely brilliant manner is that the foundation of the community is sacrifice that that's an appropriate conceptualization and you can see the concept of sacrifice evolve across the biblical texts as their sequenced chronologically in the what in the overall story that makes up the biblical the biblical text the idea of sacrifice becomes more and more sophisticated it's more and more elaborated it's more and more

specified it's more and more embodied there's a obvious progression in ideas the progression where do you see that progression in in successive manuscripts or I don't in in the success of stories as the story as the text progresses the way the way a novel progresses something like sacrifice the Old Testament sacrifice in the old test through the entire through New Testament text is a sacrificial is a sacrificial story as well the passion story is a story of sacrifice it ised the sacrificial Motif recurs continually through the biblical text and it's elaborated constantly and okay so

the criticism is the Bible as a text gives us nothing to indicate that it has Divine uh or there's nothing that we can read in it where we think there's no way this idea could have evolved were it not uh divinely put into this text that's a criticism that perhaps made in the past well I think it's reflective of some of some order that's so profound and implicit that there isn't a better way of describing it than Divine but I don't really care if we if we look at that from the bottom up like as

a biological phenomena or is from the top down I don't think it makes any difference doesn't make a difference whether it was divinely inspired or whether it evolved within human I don't think fundament look if okay so so let me ask you this like I think that at bottom truth is Unified and what that's going to mean eventually is that the world of value and the world of fact coincide in some manner that we don't yet understand and I think that that Union the fact of that Union and the the the the fact of that

Union is equivalent to what's being described as divine order across Millennia there's no difference now and here's this is a tricky business because you either believe that the world of Truth is Unified in the final analysis or you don't those are the options and if it's not unified then it's it's there's a disunity there's a contradiction between value and fact or there's a contradiction well there's a contradiction between different sets of values and they can't be brought into Unity I don't believe that well let's go back to what you said earlier which I was very

interested in um you implied there's no difference between whether the text is divinely inspired or whether it evolved in progression during a series of uh manuscripts presumably now I think that's genuinely interesting but it's a huge difference it's not the same thing I mean I it was divinely inspired or it wasn't well it's the same thing if it's fundamentally reflective of the and accurately reflective of the implicit logos or order and I think it is like let me explain that a moment like it took me a long time to understand the concept of sacrifice in

the biblical text because it seems so anachronistic and so primitive you know and primitive and not understandable what are these people doing offering you know choice cuts of meat to a god that lives in the sky something disgusting about it well it's it's very it's very easy to saiz but when you start to understand that perception itself is sacrificial in its nature and you start to understand that there's no difference between work and sacrifice that they're the same thing and you understand that Community is predicated on sacrifice then the emphasis in the text on sacrifice

starts to become something quite market and remarkable especially because it's implicit it isn't obvious at all that the authors of the texts and the editors who sequenced them actually understood what it was that they were highlighting so with regards to the community why is the community predicated on sacrifice because it's not about you you the community every step you take towards the communitarian means that you sacrifice something that's local to what you want here and now right now you have to give something up you're you're you're wandering onto something else now which which is something

quite quite different um the notion of sacrifice as you say it goes right through the Old Testament and and the New Testament the sacrifice of Isaac Ishmael by Abraham and the sacrifice of Jesus um is the same idea uh I think it's a very unpleasant idea by the way um but what are you actually saying are you saying that uh Abraham did or did not sacrifice Isaac are you saying that Jesus really was Jesus really did die for our sins I mean do you believe that there are there are do you believe that as a

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now with bir gold text Jordan to the number 98898 for your free info kit today that's Jordan to the number 98898 today there are elements of the texts that I don't claim to understand what my experience has been that the more deeply I Lear I look into these texts the more I learn that doesn't mean that I can Proclaim full knowledge of what the texts Proclaim but I don't think and I I'm not trying to play a trick here you know I watched an interview that you did recently where you were talking I think it

was with Pierce Morgan yeah about the about the um complexities of trying to understand this strange realm of quantum phenomena right and we have a trouble with Quantum phenomena because at the micro level things don't act like things act at the macro level so they escape our intuitions and one of the things you said was that although it's perhaps even impossible for creatures EMB body like us to get a grip on Quantum phenomena the strange wave particle duality for example we have ample evidence that it works and [Music] is deeply mysterious and you're saying that

biblical texts are deeply mysterious the difference is quantum physics the predictions you derive from quantum physics are fulfilled to the tinth decimal place the tinth decimal place I I mean I think was Richard fan says equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the nearest hair's breadth that's impressive that that's no doubt the the mystery there as it were gains its credentials by its predictions the of the Bible don't have any credentials at all as far as I can make out well I guess the credentials that I would put you made a statement a

couple of months ago that I found very interesting and I don't claim to understand it and I'm not trying to put you on the spot with it you said that you were a cultural Christian okay and so that raised a number of questions in my mind you know and the first question was you are changing the subject no I'm no I'm no I'm not no I don't think so I may be leaping outside of the topic a bit to get do cultural Christianity but I think I I have a list of questions that you wanted

to ask and that is one of them but I think Professor you referring to the predictive power and to the utility of stories okay so that's actually what I was trying to Z in on okay so that that was the point well it seemed to me that your Proclamation that you were a cultural Christian was a recognition um and a and a statement that you had found something in the culture that had been derived from Christianity that you had an affinity with and that there's some reason for that and one of the things I wanted

to ask you is well what do you think that Christianity got right that allows you to make a statement like that I mean I know I know that there's differences perhaps in what we both think about the ultimate veracity of the biblical stories maybe there isn't differences like it would take a lot of conversation figure this out but but what did you mean by that like what do you think that Christianity got right that would able you to make a statement like that virtually nothing um I meant by that simp no more than that I'm

B brought up in a Christian culture I went to Christian Schools I therefore know my way around the Bible I know my my way around the book of common prayer I I know I know the hymns um that's all I I don't value Christianity as a truth system at all okay so let me let me ask you about that because maybe that's true and perhaps it's not so the first question is like do you think that there are any marked differences between cultural Traditions that would enable you to rank order them in terms of their

ethical validity okay so for example we could contrast mainstream UK Christianity with Islamic fundamentalism okay so there's a hierarchy there is a hierarchy hierarchy that points to what uh well in the case of Islam uh I dislike any religion which punishes apostasy with death that throws gay people of high buildings that practices clitoridectomy um that that seems to me to place Islam on a lower level than Christianity but that's not to say anything very positive about Christianity well it might it might be to say something positive about Christianity like I think that question is open

because you might ask yourself what did Christianity get right that led it away from those particular presumptions and towards something that you regard as more ethically appropriate like this isn't a trivial question it's a very modest claim uh there's not very much I mean to to be better than a religion that throws gay people off high buildings is not really a very virtuous achievement I I don't know I don't know if that's true because if you look at the barbarism that characterizes the human past you might think that any progression whatsoever towards something approximating mercy

and tolerance is nothing short of a bloody Miracle well people are pretty pretty ruthless and so are our chimpanzee cousins yes they are right so so we move forward into the light with great difficulty and the fact that we can take that for granted now and that it seems self-evident and deserving of faint praise it's not so clear to me that that's that that's a reasonable proposition okay let's let's Grant the the faint praise but that has nothing to do with the truth value and what I care about is the truth value I see no

no truth value in the claims of Christianity the Virgin birth the Resurrection The Miracles do you believe in any of those do you believe Jesus was born a virgin as I said before there are elements of the text that I don't feel qualified to comment on my experience has been that the more like I know from a metaphorical perspective and from a Mythic perspective what the story of the Virgin birth means and I accept that I know for example that any culture that doesn't hold image of the woman and infant sacred dies and I don't

know how that needs to be expressed in a form though do you mean that you don't know well let let me let me ask you about that because truth this is something I talked with Sam Harris about too truth as we know is a tricky business do you think there are differences in the truth claims between different writers of fiction like as DKI more profound than no well I wouldn't call fiction truth claims anyway I mean he's a then on what grounds do we rank order the the fiction in terms of quality like doeski is

a profound purveyor of fiction on the philosophical front unbelievably deep and profound there's something true about what he's writing about it's it's nothing to do with the truth the truth that science is concerned with the truth of science is the truth that gets us to the Moon I mean this has nothing to do with um whether one writer of fiction has a sort of insight into human nature that goes without saying I accept that okay so how do we deal with the notion that on the on the purely factual side how do we deal with

the idea let's take the no you you talked about clitoridectomy let's talk about the oppression of women yes we make a scientific case that that's inappropriate or is it a case that we're making on some other grounds like I see in the judeo-christian tradition one of the earliest pronouncement is that both men and women carry the image of God both and that sets a certain tone to everything that follows and it is a remarkable Proclamation given its radical age that both men and women are carry the carry the image of God and are to be

treated as something with intrinsic value outside of the domain of power and politics and it isn't obvious me it isn't obvious to me having thought about this a lot how we deal with that in the pure realm of fact because one of the facts is if I can oppress you why the hell shouldn't I yeah my job is to keep things on track here I think there are a number of questions question which Professor Dawkins has asked quite directly that we still haven't really heard an answer for okay okay and Professor Dawkin asking about the

Virgin birth you started talking about metaphor you started talking about myth I think anybody listening to this conversation will understand that maybe a society that doesn't believe in the vergin birth won't work maybe that's the predictive power that you're talking about but I I think you must understand that when Professor Dawkins is asking you do you believe that Jesus was born of a virgin he means something like a biological fact and and by the way saying I don't know or saying you know I'm not qualified to comment is an answer to that question but is

that your answer that you that you don't know I said earlier and and I I would hold to this is that there are elements of the text that I don't know how to that I'm incapable of fully accounting for I can't account for for what the what the fundamental reality and significance of the notion of the Resurrection is my my knowledge just ends sure but I know that whatever happened whatever happened as a consequence of the origination and the promotion of the Christian story was powerful enough to bring Rome to its knees and demolish the

Pagan Enterprise so there's some power in that story that's remarkable let's stick to the Virgin birth well the Virgin birth results from a mistranslation of Isaiah you know that I'm it like these sorts of questions it's what would you say they don't they don't strike me as they're not getting to the point has a purpose well and look I understand that there's there's perfect reasons to debate this I I know that and I know that your question is more than valid but it's beside the issue as far as I'm concerned and and it's it's partly

because well when we started this conversation I said for example that it it appears to be the case that a description of the structure through which we see the world is a story we see the world through a story and so that's a remarkable thing that's a remarkable Discovery and it's emerged probably in the last 16 year 60 years in multiple disciplines because we have to prioritize our facts and so we prioritize them according to a particular pattern and there are patterns that seem to work and to propagate themselves properly and to orient cultures towards

life abundant and there are other patterns the pattern of Cain for example that lead to Absolute bloody Devastation and I don't know exactly how to construe that sort of truth but we talked about the oppression of women for example it's like how do you make a case on Purely factual grounds that women should be treated as equals it's a moral question and I know that's exactly I I was dealing with a factual question which is did Jesus have a father and and you won't answer it Jesus father and a Heavenly Father like almost all mythological

Heroes so he wasn't the born of a virgin then so you so you're saying that Jesus was not born of a virgin I I said first of all that I don't I don't know how to mediate the fact value dichotomy in that case I said the same thing about the resurrection it's not a value it's it's a simple fact I mean did did did a man have intercourse with with Mary and produce Jesus that's that's a factual question it's not a value question you must understand what we're being asked here that that even if you

think that say the author of the biblical texts intended much more significance than a simple scientific analysis of events Professor Dawkins is interested in scientific truth that's the kind of truth that he's interested in and even if you think it's irrelevant to the point of what the the gospel authors were getting at that first needs to be clarified before you can then begin actually uncovering what the stories are about so I think Professor Dawkins is asking from a scientific perspective and maybe you think that that scientific approach is wrong but if you just take it

for a moment maybe this is how we find out that it is wrong let's take a scientific approach ask the question did this occur I think that it's inappropriate to use a question like that to attempt to under undermine the validity of the entire what would you say deep mythological Enterprise we weren't doing suppose we were asking out of Interest suppose that we were all here devout Christians maybe even yian Christians and we thought this is interesting over dinner do you think it really happened like scientifically would your answer just be I don't know yes

and you wouldn't consider it I mean it's not an inappropriate question to ask just on a point of Interest right did this really occur and I think so often people are asking you that and and especially given the context of this conversation we've we've heard everything that you're you're saying about metaphor and myths and but because the question is still then being asked did it really happen you know that that's what you're being asked and the way you just so easily said yes I wonder why you struggle to do that in so many other circumstances

I think because I don't look at the situation the same the the way that Dr Dawkins and I look at the situation are really quite different and at many many many levels you know so even on the meme question for example you know like I know the literature on the history of religious ideas I see how these ideas have battled across Millennia in a manner that is very reminiscent to me of the same sort of claim that do Dawkins is putting forward with regards to meme I know that literature Dr Dawkins doesn't know that literature

and it's very difficult for me to communicate from within the confines of that literature because it's extensive and deep and and we're de de with things that we don't understand the relationship between metaphoric truth and value predicated truth and factual truth we don't understand that it's a big problem we cannot there's no evidence whatsoever from the scientific perspective that we can Orient ourself in the world merely in consequence of the facts sure and that's a fact and it's a fact that's been detailed out in great detail in the last 60 years by people from a

variety of different disciplines we have to prioritize the facts that's a value hierarchy there may be true and false ways of prioritizing facts but you can't determine the truth or falsehood of the way that you prioritize facts by making reference to the facts that's a big problem okay let's let's let's talk about that as perhaps uh a slight detour here because I think we do need to come back to this Christ Resurrection thing but Professor Dawkins would you say that underlying the scientific scientific Enterprise is a fundamentally unscientific assumption you can you can make scientific

investigations in the world but in order to do so you need to choose what to prioritize you need to choose what to investigate you also need to um value the truth you need to have a value and a motivation for doing it in the first place those kinds of things cannot themselves be scientifically Justified and so does the scientif scientific Enterprise have an unscientific assumption at its space I suppose it does I mean I I I think we I think that maybe just be Jordan and Richard but by the way um um I think that

prioritizes myth and I prioritize fact and um I think myth is kind of vaguely interesting but is not the be on end all of my life I think it's it's somewhat secondary to scientific fact sort of facts that that tell us how old the universe is how old the world is um the history of Life the um engineering achievements of Landing a a a a spacecraft on on a comet the these are the things that science can do and as I said the predictions of quantum theory to come back to that but predictions of quantum

theory which are verified to a sufficient number of decimal places that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to one hair's breadth now that is however difficult Quantum theor is to understand that is what you can get from quantum theory now the mysteries of the Bible if they are Mysteries aren't in the same league I mean they they just don't cut it attention men who still believe in the American dream in a world gone mad the Precision five from Jeremy's Razer stands as a beacon of Sanity five blades a superior engineering offer a

shave as unshakable as your faith that the nation's best days still lie ahead experience an exceptionally smooth remarkably close shave and a testate to the fact that Merit still matters stop giving your money to woke corporations that hate you get Jeremy's Razer precision 5 instead available now at Jeremy rers.us axioms that need to be accepted I don't want to put put words in your mouth cuz I want to get this right before the Scientific Enterprise can begin so I've tried to think those TRS let me lay out a couple of them this is partly what

I've done while trying to make the case for example that you're more of a Christian than you think you are so for example I think that the scient scientific enterpris is motivated by the aaic presumption that truth tends towards a Unity I think that it's predicated on the notion that there is a logical order that's intrinsic to the cosmo that that fundamental order is good that it's intelligible to human beings and that discovering that order and aligning oursel with it makes for life more abundant I think that the scientific Enterprise is also predicated on the

idea that the truth will set you free and I think all of those axioms are religious and derived from the judeo-christian tradition and if you don't believe that you have to account for why science emerged in Europe and nowhere else in the entire history of humanity for examp ex Le and why it's also why it's under assault from like all quarters now as that underlying metaphysic disappear it's like you don't have you haven't had to be concerned with the mythological substrate in your lifetime in some sense because it was intact and so the universities could

flourish and you had your freedom remarkable freedom to pursue your scientific Enterprise wherever you wanted and people lauded you for it like that time is that time is threatened and serious ly so and I think it's partly because these metaphysical assumptions have now become questionable and that's part of the reason that I'm attending to them it's not because I don't admire the accuracy of quantum prediction for example or celebrate what musk is doing with his capability of sending Rockets to Mars it's like more power to the technological Enterprise but you know what's happening in the

universities it's awful and that's that's not a scientific problem it's under okay I agree that okay um I think it's an interesting question why science emerged in Europe I mean and I'm not enough of historian to know it is even possible that Christianity did have something to do with that and I I wouldn't categorically deny that but that doesn't in any way increase my trust in the validity of Christian propositions like the Resurrection The Virgin birth and miracles and Jesus is the son of God um Christianity may have had some kind of historical uh facilitating

effect that led to the uh Renaissance that led to to the Scientific Revolution and and that would be a very interesting historical analysis but it doesn't bear upon the truth of the propositions of the Christian religion okay let let's concentrate on the resurrection for a moment now unfortunately see this is part of the problem part of the problem with discussions like this is that the mode of approach that's taken by the mythological tends to Circle and wander like it doesn't because you have to shine light on the problem from multiple perspectives that's why it's often

encoded in image for example or in drama it's not the same tack as a purely propositional and logical argument so it's more difficult to make but let me tell you a story that I believe Bears on the res Resurrection you tell me what you think about it because I don't this is a very difficult story to account for it's going to take me about 5 minutes because it's it's complicated but there's no way around it I don't think so there's a strange scene in the gospels where Christ tells his followers that unless he's lifted up

like the bronze serpent in there can be no hope for the Redemption of mankind unless he's lifted up like the bronze serpent in the desert okay this is a very strange thing for someone to say so you need to know what the story of The Bronze serpent in the desert was and what it signifies and I think we can understand it psychologically I really do believe this and so and the concordance of that story which was generated Millennia before with Christ utterance is something I just cannot imagine how anyone put those two things together especially

given the lack of explicit understanding about the relationship so let let me detail it so there's a scene in Exodus in The Exodus story where the Israelites are doing their usual fractious foolishness and whining about the fact that they're lost and bemoaning the loss of their privileges under the Pharaoh and complaining about the power dynamics of their leadership and just generally being followers of Cain let's say and God the cruel God that you refer to decides to send among his suffering subjects poisonous snakes to bite them which seems a little over the top you might

say but in response to that I would say there's no situation so terrible that some damn fool can't make it infinitely worse and so that's what happens to the Israelites so they're being bitten by these poisonous snakes and the leaders of the people who've wandered from God go to Moses and they sayl we know you've got a pipeline to God and you know there's a lot of snakes and they're doing a lot of biting and maybe you could just ask him to you know call off the serpents and so Moses who's not very happy with

the Israelites either decides that he'll go talk to God and God says something very strange he doesn't say to hell with the Israelites more snakes is what they need and he doesn't say well I produce the snake so I'll get rid of them he says something very very peculiar he says have the Israelites gathered together all their bronze and make a giant steak and put a serpent on it a bronze serpent which is the symbol of healing by the way that even the Greeks use that is symbol of asclepius it's a very old symbol very

widespread it's still used by physicians today and then he says put it up where the Israelites can see it and if they go look at it then the Serpent's poison won't harm them and I read that and I thought that's exactly what psychotherapists discovered as they all converged in the 20th century on the utility of exposure therapy as Curative and that's the pharmacon a little of the poison that hurts you cures you it's the same principle that's used for vaccines by the way so what we saw in Psychotherapy is that if you get people to

voluntarily confront the things that are poisoning them so to speak that hurt their life that en them and disgust them they become braver and more well adapted it isn't that they become less afraid because that's been very carefully tested it's that they learn by watching themselves expose themselves to the things that they once fleed from that there's more to them than they think and that that generalizes across situations and it's the same mechanism that underlies learning as such because children when they learn put themselves on the edge of ragged disaster and that's where they advance

and so what God tells the Israelites essentially in this dramatic um en Endeavor is that it's better for them to face the Terrors that confront them than to have than to be shielded from the Terrors or for them to hide from them that there'll be better people if they face what's right in front of them even if it's poisonous and so it's like okay that's pretty damn interesting and quite remarkable and then that symbol is used for example by the Greeks to symbolize medicine as such but then there's this additional weird twist which is Christ

identifies with that bronze serpent you think okay that's a very peculiar thing for anyone to do what is exactly what exactly does that mean well so then you might say well what's the most poisonous thing that you could possibly face if you if you dramatized the idea of poison itself if you wanted people to face what was worst so that they could become strongest and the answer to that is the most unjust possible painful death and the ultimate confrontation with malevolence and that's what's dramatized in the passion story now does that redeem everyone maybe maybe

maybe the idea is that if we were courageous enough to look death in the face unflinchingly and if we spent our time putting our finger on the source of evil itself it would revital us Revitalize ourselves to a degree that would be unimaginable now as a biologist you know you think about this too because I don't remember the philosopher said it I think it was Whitehead but that might be wrong we let our ideas die instead of us right so human beings have evolved so that we can undergo these deaths of our own ideas and

the Rejuvenation that emerges in a in consequence of that that seems to be something like Evolution towards what towards the the process of sacrificial logos as the thing that redeems human beings and that makes is biologically unique too cuz we can die in idation and Imagination instead of dying in actuality does that fundamentally redeem us does that Deliver us from death and evil maybe like the job isn't done obviously Richard the story that we've just heard the Old Testament bronze serpent it's it's it's rhyming with the with the New Testament uh Christ depicting himself is

that bronze serpent I think from Jordan if I may as Richard suggests um from what I've heard you say before on this same story there's something about that um that Harmony between that New Testament Jesus and that Old Testament story which is so profound and so impressive that it's difficult to imagine it having sort of naive human authorship what do you make of that story and of that assertion well it doesn't impress me I mean I I don't understand why you would say that has I don't think Jordan actually said it had divine inspiration maybe

he did um not divine inspiration necessarily but more than just as I say naive human authorship not like someone just sat at minimum it's a it's a staggeringly brilliant literary move especially given the fact that that relationship hasn't been explicated before do you think for example if you were looking in scripture for something which would identify this as a as a god-given text maybe you as a scientist would look for some scientific information it might have told you the shape of DNA or something like that but do you think Jord actually thinks yeah we can

perhaps get on to that but do you think that a literary uh Brilliance of a similar kind or a similar intensity that if the Bible is not a scientific text you might be looking for something which some scientific fact which it couldn't have Otherwise Known is it possible that some kind of Genius moral move or literary move could also indicate that this is this is something more impressive you more or less ask me whether what what would impress me and and and I'm a naive literalist and so I would say um if if any Prophet

had said something like um the the world is just one object in um rotating around the Sun something like that they never do I mean it's it's always there some kind of moral lesson which leaves me cold well why is it that there is no I mean they say that God meets you where you're at right and there are some people who just care about scientific truth that's that's what they know that's their profession why is there not anything in the Bible for them oh I think the idea that sacrifice is the basis of the

community is a remarkable uh and scientifically valid hypothesis I think that it's precisely akin to the uh what would you say to the process of cortical maturation I think they're the same thing because as we mature we move farther away from the immediate gratification of our of our self-centered emotional and motivational needs to a ethos of care that brings our future self into the picture and a wider and wider array of other people and I think that's associated with cortical maturation in fact I think the purpose of the cortex the purpose a purpose of the

cortex is to bring the Dynamics of the shortsighted underlying motivational and emotional systems into the kind of Harmony that allows for communal existence and the protection of the future at the same time that the present is what would you say cared for and and attended to that there's a kind of Harmony there there's also a pattern there it's not arbitrary at all and I think we know this biologically is that the number of ways and I think we already alluded to this the number of ways that a society can organize itself so that each individual

can harmonize their own future with the present and do that simultaneous with many other people that's a very there's a very limited Universe of possibilities there very limited Universe Richard asked you before about the difference between a story or an idea naturally evolving over the course of numerous manuscripts and throughout human history and the idea of it being divinely inspired and you were seeming to imply that these are almost interchangeable Concepts now if that's the case when you say that this this Divine Spirit behind the Bible is actually just the way that it has evolved

throughout the human history throughout the different manuscripts that we've had then saying that that is what Divinity is I think for you may drag the mundane up into the realm of divinity but I think for people like Richard and for many people listening what it doesn't said is drags the Divine down to the realm of the mundane very well put yes when we think about wildly successful businesses we often focus on their great products cool branding and Brilliant marketing but there's an un young hero in their success stories the business behind the business that makes

selling simple for millions of entrepreneurs that business is Shopify Shopify is home to the number one checkout on the planet and here's the not so secret secret with shopay they boost conversions up to 50% that means fewer abandoned carts and more completed sales our marketing team uses Shopify every day to sell our merchandise and we love how easy it is to add more items ship products and track conversions in today's market growth-minded businesses need a Commerce Solution that's just as flexible and dynamic as they are whether your customers are browsing your website scrolling through social

media or wandering into your store Shopify ensures you're ready to sell ready to elevate your business upgrade your business today and get the same checkout daily wire uses sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com jbp all lowercase go to shopify.com jbp today to upgrade your selling that's shopify.com jbp well I don't know why it would drag the the Divine down into the realm of the mundane if we're speaking of something like a the straight narrow path of Harmony between multiple multiple modes of being I don't think it doesn't make any difference

to me whether it's the material reaching upward or the Divine descending downward I don't think there's any difference between those two things you don't that's exactly right that's the problem I don't you don't see the difference look look look at it this way so for example in in this conversation you you you know this to be the case like there's various ways that this conversation could go sideways right seriously like we could either of us could try to win either of us could try to demonstrate our intellectual superiority right each of us could misrepresent the

other or we could both try and I do think we are in fact trying that and I think Alex is helping along with that just just fine we could try to follow the thread of the exploratory truth and see if we could get somewhere now I don't think there is any difference between that by the way and what's expressed in the biblical text as the spirit of the logos that's why we have dialogue I'm very interested in the possibility that truths emerge through evolving manuscripts now that's a very interesting idea and it's totally different from

divine inspiration and I I want to pursue it because I don't believe in divine inspiration but I would be prepared to believe in evolving manuscript well I would say well I would say this is why I had uh set forward the possibility of taking a look particularly at merer alata because that's where you'd find the best work he's a he's brilliant the history of I believe that if you study the history of religious ideas it's a three volume manuscript or the sacred in the profane which is probably his single best work that you'd see profound

analogies between the manner in which you've been construing the world biologically including the trains of thought that led you to the development of the idea of the meme I really believe that well analogies is one thing but but is it the same thing I think it's the same I do I think look I don't know that's why I'd like your opinion on it you know well seriously like it's a complicated question I've talked to it's a complicated question most people don't know both literatures there's not a lot of people to discuss this sort of thing

with P I talked to Camille P about this she studied the work of a man named Eric noyman noyman wrote a book called the history Origins and history of Consciousness which is a work of genius and also another book called the great mother which is study of the symbolism of the feminine it's a great book Pia told me that she believed that if the academy would have turned to Eric nyman who's a student of Yung although the greatest student of Yung and maybe one who surpassed him that the entire culture War that's torn the universities

apart wouldn't have happened people don't know this literature and it's it's it's let let let me give you an example this you tell me what you think about this okay so I I spent a fair bit of time studying the psychophysiology of the hypothalamus okay so the hypothalamus is set up it's it's got two halves basically one half deals with fundamental motivated States hunger thirst defensive aggression sexuality and so forth and when those areas are dominated the biologically relevant goal is activated and perceptions are oriented towards that goal okay so now then you might ask

yourself well what happens if all those biologically motivated states are satiated and the answer seems to be is that the other half of the hypothalamus kicks in and it mediates exploratory behavior and so the default structure of the mamalian nervous system is if satiated or in doubt explore and gather new information there's no difference between that and hero mythology they are the same thing they're the same thing the the dragon fight for example which is the oldest story we have it's it's coded in the Mesopotamian mythology the dragon fight story is explore the dangerous unknown

discover the treasure that revitalizes the community there's no difference between that and the science that you practice they're the same thing what do you think the same story I don't know what to make of that I mean um you say they they're the same story you you you analogized the the dragon fight to how many dragons have you overcome in your life I'm not interested in Dragons I'm interested in real in reality okay so let's let's Okay so I I read a book a while back that described the described the uh the biological reality of

the dragon say well there's no such thing as a dragon it's like okay it's is there such a thing as a predator of course well that's that's a meta category what's the category of Predator bear eagle if you're a primate fire is fire a predator well it's complicated because a fire kills you okay so is there a worse Predator than Serpentine flying fire breathing reptile is that not the imagistic equivalent of Predator so is so in what way if Predator is real in what way isn't dragon real doesn't take that much imagination to to see

the identity and then wouldn't the fundamental task of edible primates be to figure out how to overcome the dragon forever I don't know why you say dragon I mean we have L we have tigers we have Sabertooth we have why not out there right but why not abstract because it's for the same reason that we have the term Predator like we have the term bear lion kodo dragon well you make an amalgamation you saywell the the relevant set of features is an image well what's the image Predator as such what's the image of that the

dragon that never disappears and then there's a Twist on that which is so cool it's so interesting because you can imagine rabbit mythology which would be something like Predator appears freeze but that's not the human Story the human story is predator appears there's a treasure somewhere right that's completely that's a completely different pathway of of evolutionary significance like the way that we construe The World Isn't freeze like Predator it's like oh there's a predator maybe there's something valuable lurking in our conflict with it you know our sticks in our Spears that enable our fragile bodies

to stand up against the dragons of the world so a dragon is a pictoral representation of the abstracted concept of a predator yes as you say we already have the term predator and so it be useful in art in narrative to I mean you can't paint an abstraction we had the image way before we had the word sure okay no but but that's a seriously important thing to understand but now we have the word we have the word predator and maybe if we were doing art maybe if we were all going to sort of draw

a picture or tell a story we wanted to invent a story to give our children a good moral message we might invent this dragon or use this dragon as well we do always we do it continually we do it with Harry Potter we do it with the Lord of the Rings we do it with the aveng when you say escaping from but when you say the biology of a dragon you must understand how that can be misleading as to as to the the Enterprise that you're engaging in because we're talking here about narrative we're talking

here about art we're talking here about uh representations in literature I don't think the category of dragon is any less valid than the category of lion any less biological well it depends on your level of analysis we have the term Predator which implies that all predators have something in common because otherwise we wouldn't have the term it's like there's no reason to assume ontological priority for the category of lion over the category of Predator like it it depends on you all that would determine which of those terms should be used is the purpose towards which

the conceptualization is being directed if you want to identify a particular class of Predator well then lion is a good term you would say that lions are an instantiation of this bracket term of Predator well I would also say would you therefore say that a lion is an instantiation of the Brack term of dragon yes yes because see because we're not only fact oriented creatures right it actually matters to us whether we get eaten like there's it's one thing to lay out the nomenclature of the animal kingdom it's another thing to remember that Predators can

eat you and then it's another thing and this is very interesting and it's relevant to that story of The Bronze serpent it's like what do we want to teach our children well to identify ify Predators obviously well what do we want to teach them more profoundly What attitude they should take towards the Eternal fact of the predator and the attitude they should take is something like the courage to voluntarily confront and not to run away and not to hide and not to freeze and not to casually demonize but to assume that in the combat with

the Eternal Predator an eternal treasure might be found that's exactly what you do whether you know it or not when you teach a child to be courageous and that and we know from the psychological literature that generalizes and I do think it's identical with the mechanism of learning in human beings because kids us we always learn on the edge you know and in your own life I know and I don't want to be presumptuous but no doubt there have been situations where you've been battling to have your ideas distributed even to modify your own conceptions

when you had something new to learn that's a sacrifice you have to kill your stupidity so that you can move forward that's what happens in the story of Abraham by the way when he makes sequential sacrifices so in in the story of Abraham you tell me what you think about this because it staggered me when I understood it Abraham is a protected person he doesn't have to lift a finger he lives in the Socialist Utopia he's got everything delivered hand to mouth he's at home till he's 70 and God comes to him as the voice

of Adventure which is something remarkable to see and says you leave your zone of comfort and go out into the world have your terrible adventure and Abraham says yes and then a series of cataclysms occurs around him just like it does in every adventurous life and every time an episode concludes he makes a sacrifice why to get rid of what's stupid and old about him so that he can progress and transform and that happens to such a degree that he gets a new name which means he's changed so dramatically he's not even the person he

used to be and that's a consequence of following that adventurous pathway and that's all coded in the story I think we just have to agree that we have different kinds of minds and you're interested in symbols and I'm interested in facts I mean let me let's take Predators I mean Predators I'm fascinated by predators predators are the relationship between predators and prey is an arms race an evolutionary arms race and whenever you see a really complicated beautifully designed piece of biology what um Hume I think uh one one of hum's characters called things that ravish

in into admiration all who contemplate them this is almost certainly the result of an arms race probably between predators and prey could be between parasites and and hosts and so um if we are talking about adaptations to just the climate W rhinoceros es grow hair because it's getting cold that's relatively boring but when it's an adaptation to a predator then you get an escalation of adaptations by prey which are counted by Predators which are counted by prey counted by so you get a gradual escalation now that's interesting that that that explains why you have animals

that run fast why they have keen sense organs why they have teeth why they have sharp teeth why they have have um Behavior patterns that that either protect them from predators or if they're Predators help them to catch prey the the idea of the arms race is the thing that grabs me the arms race between nothing to do with dragons and so okay so fair enough right and and I share your appreciation for that remarkable what what the remarkable phenomena that emerge in consequence of that okay so let's take the idea of arms race all

right so we here's how I would construe what I said in what I think might be your terms okay all right we transformed the battle with the Predator into a meme battle we abstracted it so that we could figure out how to deal not with a predator but with the class of all possible Predators right exactly and the appropriate way to deal with the class of all possible Predators is something like a meta ethic it's a stance that let let me give you an example of this we actually know something about this psychophysiologically and you

can look at it spiritually or physically and it doesn't matter so for example if you take people in Psychotherapy and they're accidentally exposed to something they're afraid of they they have a stress response that's damaging if it's sustained and they become more frightened but if you expose them to exactly the same stressor and they do it voluntarily they manifest it an entirely different pattern of psychophysiological activation okay and it's it's a it's a it's a stance of challenge right and not of fear all right and so what are the things that you're doing in Psychotherapy

when you get people to expose themselves to you could say Predators because that's an accurate way of dealing with it is that you get them to shift into a mode of voluntary confrontation instead of pray like apprehension and Retreat and what they learn from that is that they can embody that pattern which I would call a spirit metaphysically they can embody that they can practice it it's also the case there's some evidence that there's epigenetic consequences of that if you practice that process of voluntary confrontation with the terrible unknown it can catalyze Transformations that reach

all the way down into the cellular and so we we abstracted the fight with The Predator into the imaginal space we play out various tactics some of them are conserved and transmitted they adapt themselves to the structure of human memory and they make the foundation for our most fundamental narratives look you know the the the reference I made to Harry Potter the reference I made to the Lord of the Rings and to The Avengers these aren't casual references you know we spend most of our computational high-end computational power generating fictional worlds where we can portray

meme battles so that everyone can observe them yes so lion as genetic dragon as mtic Richard the this concept of the dragon as the abstracted Predator as a whole can we talk meaningfully about the truth in these stories where instead of talking about a predator or this predator or that Predator we're talking about the concept of Predator meme yes dragon's a meme yeah it's a deep meme well it it doesn't get me doesn't impress me I mean I I like reality and and um um it obviously impresses Jordan and that's fine it it just we

have a different kind of mind I think well I I had a comment about that too you know because I actually think that's true so there's a psychological trait openness and openness fractionates into two types one type of mind is associated with deep interest in ideas people like that tend to prefer non-fiction a variant of that is openness proper and it's associated with a much deeper orientation towards the fictional and metaphorical I do think we have different kinds of minds but but if we accept the presumption that there is a Unity of knowledge and I

don't I don't know if that's a presumption that you entertain or or presume or share because we could discuss the alternative my sense is that those two Pathways have to unify now I don't think we know how to unify them in the west that's why there is this conflict between the scientific and the religious it's not like I know how to rectify that the best I can say is this is what I've learned from studying those stories but but I would also say because I've studied your work I do believe that that idea that you

formulated of meme is exactly the same thing that merer Elliot is detailing out in his work and I think the reason that he's not attended to by the universi is because he's pay in the history of religious ideas is because everything he says demolishes the postmodern marxists demolishes them which is something that seriously needs to be done and so I keep think I keep hoping I think God it would be such a remarkable thing for Dr Dawkins to know especially iliad's work although Eric neyman would be a close second because it takes the notion of

meme which is what was the recreation of the world in imaginal space and the transmission of those Recreations and their potential battles that's what you specified and it expands it out into something that ends across Millennia it's The Logical extension of your idea and it's not like people know this because there aren't people who know both literatures so this idea of lion as me lion as Gene dragon as meme I I I think in so many words that that it sounds like that's sort of a summary of what you're getting at and I get the

impression Richard that you might agree with the idea that the dragon is an effective uh mtic abstraction of the concept of individual Predators but it's just not that impressive yes it's just not that impressive be impressive at the same time that you are compelled and interested by the idea of meme I mean let let me ask you a psychological question if you don't mind you're obviously welcome not to answer it but there's a reason that the idea of meme gripped you and there's a reason it's spread it's because you put your finger on something so

can I can I ask you how that idea emerged and why it attracted you as a darwinian I'm interested in the process of natural selection natural selection is the differential survival of replicating entities DNA is a very excellent replicating entity which is whose replication and selection has given rise to the whole of life on Earth I wanted to make the point that DNA is not the only possible replication you could imagine uh there might be on other there probably is on other planets um a different kind of replicator not DNA and then I thought maybe

we don't have to go to other planets maybe there's another replicator staring Us in the face the virus of the mind um something that spreads not by DNA replication but by imitation from mind to mind so it could be a fashion in clothes it could be a musical sty it could be an accent a speech accent it could be um a a children's game that spread through school all all these things are replicators which spread by a non- gentic means and might therefore potentially be the basis for a form of darwinian selection yep that darwinian

selection would be popularity uh the the spreadability of an idea the longevity of an idea yes vity of an of an idea the spread the spreadability the Fidelity of it of the idea um how about the grip of Motivation by the idea like would you expect okay that that's that's a possibility uh and I would even concede that that an an archetype might be a one way in which certain memes might spread more than others it might be compatible with a with a with a with a Yan archetype so that that's my answer to the

to the question it was coming at it as a darwinian and wanting to make the point that DNA probably having spent the whole rest of the book stressing the gene as the unit of selection I want to make the point that it may not be the only one okay okay so so that's what I understood from your work so it is on that grounds that I saw the concordance between what you were doing and what eliotti was doing in his investigation into the spread of religious ideas I like what you described is what I understood

okay so let let me ask you let me ask you another question about that okay so could you imagine a scenario where a meme had sufficient functional adaptive significance so that the individuals who acted it out gained a reproductive Edge yes okay so then you could imagine a situation where there was I think I've got this right a Baldwin effect between the meme and the genome okay so then could you imagine effect where the heroic Hunters of the past who decided to cease acting like prey animals maybe when they got rocks or sticks were acting

under the impulse that facing down the Predator was the appropriate strategy because I was thinking about this reproductively like you know that women are hypergamous they like men cross culturally about four years older than they are the most fundamental female pornographic fantasy involves vampires werewolves Pirates surgeons and billionaires dominant men who are capable of standing up to Predators who can be brought into an individual relationship okay so that's that's the fundamental reproductive Story meme that seems to drive women it's allied with the hero myth there there there are the the different variants of the same

story the different sexual variants of the same story and it seems to me it's not unreasonable to note that that's the fundamental story of humanity and so I don't understand why you're not impressed by that talking about the Baldwin effect and and suddenly we got into women what what women like I mean well the men who act out the hero of meme are much more likely to reproduce it's an example but but perhaps we need to explain what the B I was going to say that totally help yes that would be useful okay um it

it was suggested by Baldwin um I think in the late 19th century uh it's a kind of genetic assimilation of a cultural or a learned idea so the idea is that certain animals learn things learn a clever trick it might be nut cracking by chimpanzees for example or potato washing by Japanese maacs or opening milk bottles by English tits um and they perhaps it perhaps spread as mimetically as an epidemic of of of copying and that that's known to have happened with the with the blue tits and great tits in Britain now C certain individuals

are likely to learn it faster than others and there may be genetic variation in the speed with which they learn it and as the generations go by natural selection would have favored speed of learning the new trick and eventually they would have learned the new trick so fast they didn't need to learn it at all it becomes genetically aimilar ated into the genome that that's the Ballwin effect okay that I would say that that's essentially the same pattern of archetype Evolution that's implicit in the yian theoretic well that's very interesting because that's that suggests that

that yian archetypes might be genetically assimilated via the Baldwin effect that's a fascinating idea yes yes yes yes yes okay so now I know we're coming to the end of our time soon anyway it's it's nice to end on a on a shared point of Interest which is the Baldwin effect and the archetypes potential origin in in the Baldwin effect do you think that that is something that is is worth exploring further is that is that something that we can crucial well it speaks of the potential relationship between the spread of memes and the alteration

of of the genetic process by SEL by I would say it probably happens fastest by sexual selection so what right so imagine that imagine that a M okay so imagine a meme that a meme develops a representation imaginal and the people who embodied are more effective in dealing with predators and then imagine that there's a concordance between that and the attractiveness of those males to women seems highly probable well then you can see that that because sexual selection is a pretty rapid mechanism that that Baldwin effect could get SP I totally agree with that I've

even suggested actually slightly way out suggestion that the habit of standing on our hind legs might have been sexually selected and then genetically assimilated bya the BN effect um chimpunes do sometimes walk on their hind legs now if for memetic reasons that was sexually attractive in our in our ancestors uh so it spread as an as an epidemic of of of sexual display then natural selection could have savored those individuals who were best at standing on their hind legs Genetically speaking and then would become genetically assimilated this sexually selected mimetic effect could have been genetically

assimilated and given rise to the genetic tendency to to walk on our hind legs so so I remember what I was I was going to ask you about this so imagine you have a situation in the biblical narratives where the idea of sacrifice is dramatized and ritualized so it's acted out it's not exactly understood it's dramatized and acted out well there's a I believe there's a concordance between the probability that that sacrifice would be offered and the ability of someone to forego gratification or to work towards a future end they're the same thing and the

ability to forego gratification which is associated with uh cortical development is a great predictor of future success let's say future because we know for example that trait conscientiousness which is something like the ability to delay gratification is the best predictor that isn't cognitive of long-term future success the ability to sacrifice the present for the future is a Hallmark of a strategy of adaptation that's going to propagate down the generations that's interesting as a Canadian you probably know about the Potlatch phenomenon yes where so a great sacrifice is is a social display um destruction of one's

own property as a which which is a form of sacrifice destruction of one's own property is a a mark of prestige right well it indicates your it indicates at know those communities it indicates two things your willingness to distribute generously to the community because you're a big man if you can do that but also your faith in the process by which that wealth was generated I'm so good at see I think women use wealth as a marker of sexual attractiveness not because they're interested in wealth but because wealth is the best single predictor of the

ability to generate wealth and the Potlatch is that kind of manifestation it's like yes I have all this stuff I can give it away and burn it and I can make it again because it isn't the wealth it's the capacity to generate the wealth right it's a process or a spirit you could say if you wanted to get metaphorical about it so there's this remarkable concordance between your work and these these works that I've been investigating like I said no one knows the two literatures and so it's very frustrating in a sense because I I

understood your concept of meme I would say in exactly the way that you just laid it out and I thought this is this is exactly what I've been studying there's these fundamental narratives and the people who embodied them look the heroes in in the theater they're actors of a narrative meme they're obviously Attractive people flock to watch them they you know that among if you take verites and you show them pictures of the other vervet in their troops they spontaneously gaze longer at the higher status verit right it's exact so imagine this in the human

society is you have people who act out the appropriate meme let's say which is something like a meta strategy for dealing with predation it's something like that you can approximate that to a greater or lesser degree the more you approximate that the higher you are on the sexual selection in the sexual selection hierarchy and I think that's clear like it's a bit more complicated than that because women's seem to be the the pornographic literature that women prefer is both the capacity to stand up against predation and maybe even to be a predator but that has

to be brought into alliance with the ability to make a intimate relationship and share so it's like half monster half Cooperative distributor Cooperative generous distributor it's something like that you can see that's a real knife's Edge evolutionarily because you want someone who can keep the real monsters at Bay but if they're such a monster that they don't share and aren't generous and can't take their care of their children they're just another bloody Predator so Richard the baldwi effect applied not so much just to the mtic preference for people who stand up for example but something

like a dragon the abstracted Predator is is there any kind of bold when effect implication of of this kind of I think there could be I mean I I think it's it's an interesting idea that that yungan archetypes could be Baldwin IED um memes and perhaps the uh the dragon could be one of those well you have that terminology even the Baldwin effect terminology but that notion is implicit in his writings like he he was struggling he also didn't precisely understand sexual selection let's say so the idea lurks implicitly in his work there's never a

statement like that but you can see clear indications of his struggling towards something like a Baldwin effect explanation chaps I'm afraid that we are just about out of time uh but we will be having a secondary conversation on dailywire plus which we'll be doing in just a moment so people listening if they're interested in more can go and find more there but for at least this part of the conversation hopefully we've landed on a point of somewhat agreement between Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson which I think is a is a is is a pretty um

significant success I would say in many ways well I think we also established part of the reason that there's a difference like I do think that your temperamental Tack and my temperamental tack are are different they're gen different you know are you more interested in things or people would you say because that's a fundamental dimension of differ say in in terms of Interest it I don't think I admit the question really okay okay well the reason I asked is because the proclivity to prefer non-fiction which is more of a masculine proclivity is associated with a

tilt of Interest towards the domain of things rather than the domain of people so I'm interested in in Eternal things I'm interested in things that were true before there were any humans and will be true long after humans are extinct which sort kind of lets out all symbolism and metaphor and stuff like that maybe depends on the Baldwin effect yes okay thank you sir I'm I'm very happy that I have theun to talk to you today and thank you very much Alex for for hosting this and for everybody who is watching and listening as Alex

pointed out we're going to turn to the Daily wire side right away and if you want to join us for another 30 minutes of this conversation then you'd be more than welcome to do that um and so thank you one way or another for your time and attention today thank you to the film crew here in Scottsdale for spending the time and energy necessary to make this I hope a raving success I certainly was interested in the conversation and so um thanks to you guys as well [Music]