Growing Up in the Universe was a series of televised public lectures given by British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins as part of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, in which he discussed the evolution of life in the universe.Richard Dawkins, Brief Candle in the Dark: My Life in Science, Bantam Press, 2015, chapter "Christmas Lectures", pages 105-117 (). The lectures were first broadcast on the BBC in 1991, in the form of five one-hour episodes.
The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science was granted the rights to the televised lectures, and a DVD version was released by the foundation on 20 April 2007.
Dawkins' book Climbing Mount Improbable (1996) was developed from the ideas presented in the lectures, and the title itself was taken from the third lecture in the series.
Parts
Part 1: Waking Up in the Universe Dawkins discusses the amazing capabilities of the human brain and contrasts these with the limited capabilities of computers and other man-made machines. He notes that "the brain is a kind of computer, but it's a computer such as no human factory has ever turned out."
He uses a small totem pole (which is used in ancestor worship) to illustrate the importance of studying our ancestors to understand how we've evolved. To contrast ease of reproduction with the difficulty of becoming an ancestor, Dawkins uses the example of paper folding to explain exponential growth. Dawkins then tells the audience that exponential growth does not generally happen in the real world – natural factors come into play which control the population numbers, meaning that only an elite group of organisms will actually become distant ancestors. To be in this elite group, the organism must "have what it takes" to survive and pass on their genes to offspring.
The long chain of successful ancestors means that the probability of our existence is very small, and we are lucky to be alive. By turning down the lights and shining a small spotlight on a large ruler in front of him, Dawkins illustrates the darkness of the distant past and of the unknown future. After expounding on how lucky we are to be alive, and urging us not to waste the precious time that we have, Dawkins brings up the usefulness of science in aiding our understanding of the universe. He mentions that Michael Faraday, founder of the Christmas Lectures, was asked by Sir Robert Peel when asked about the use of science. Faraday's response was "What is the use of a baby?" Dawkins explains that Faraday was either referring to the vast potential of a baby, or to the idea that there must be something more to life than growing up, working, getting old, and dying. There must be a point to it all; Perhaps science can uncover the answers to our biggest questions.
He asks how we can shake off the "anesthetic of familiarity." He says we cannot yet visit other planets, but we can visit regions of our own planet so unfamiliar they might as well be another planet. Dawkins shows the audience Carl Sagan's imaginings of hypothetical lifeforms on Jupiter. He compares them to strange terrestrial organisms which he humorously nicknames "By-Jovians," since they're strange enough to be from Jupiter: an anglerfish and other deepsea fish that shine by bioluminescence. He quotes a colleague on octopuses: "These are the Martians". Cuttlefish are no less strange. He shows how the common insect body plan has been molded to strange shapes.
More strange forms are found on small scales. He uses a scanning electron microscope to look at small organisms including dust mites, mosquitoes, and a bee being parasitized by a strepsiptera.
Strangeness can be found in the human body. He presents a picture of a human neurons and the "bewildering forest of connections between them." He notes that the total length of nerve cells in a human brain, laid end to end, would stretch around the world 25 times. "But what's truly impressive about the nervous system is not the sheer number of elements, but their connections." Using a model of a eukaryotic cell, he discusses the mitochondria and presents the audience with a complicated diagram of the metabolic pathways. In the cell nucleus is the master molecule, DNA. He describes DNA's information carrying ability: every time you eat a steak, "your teeth are shredding the equivalent of a billion copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica." He shows a hemoglobin molecule, a vehicle for carrying oxygen.
Dawkins suggests that we can also shake off the familiarity by stepping backwards in time. Short of a time machine, we have to use fossils, exemplified by a trilobite, which is about 500 million years old. Dawkins admits: I can have no conception how old it is." "When we come to millennia, thousands of years, our spines start to tingle. Epic myths like Homer's Odyssey, tales of the Greek gods Zeus and Apollo, the Jewish heroes Moses and Joshua and their God Yawheh, the Ancient Egyptians and the Sun God Ra, these all give us an eerie of immense age. We feel we're peering back into the mists of antiquity. Yet on the timescale of this fossil, those mists of antiquity don't even count as yesterday."
He tries to give a scale of time, startig with the first Christmas. By using a single pace to represent going back 1000 years, he starts at year zero and takes four steps in front of his desk, going back to 4000 BCE. Pointing to a portrait of Homo habilis, he states that to go back to the time of habilis, he would have to walk about two kilometers. He has audience members hold up portraits of other human ancestors, telling them how far he would have to walk to get back to the time of each one: Ramapithecus, an ancestor of the apes, would be about 14 kilometers away. Early primates would be in Hemel Hempstead, early mammals in Lutton, Lincolnshire, insectivores in Newport Pagnell, synapsida in Manchester, amphibians in Middlesbrough, early tetrapods in Carlisle. To find Pikaia, you'd have to go Glasgow. To get to the earliest bacteria, 3.5 billion years ago, we'd have to "march all the way from here to Moscow. He shows a model of the tree of life. The genetic code is universal, and allows us to see how closely related species are.
By imagining what an advanced alien species would think of humans if they were to arrive on Earth, Dawkins suggests that their science would be similar to ours, since the laws of physics are universal. They would know about pi, the Pythagorean theorem, and the theory of relativity ("although they won't attribute it to Einstein.") However, Dawkins argues that the alien anthropologists would most likely scoff at our local, parochial religious beliefs. He then contrasts evidence-based beliefs with revealed, tradition-based, and authority-based beliefs.
To explain the problem with beliefs in the supernatural, Dawkins conducts a small experiment with the audience to "find the psychic." Using a coin, he assigns half the audience to will it to land on heads, and assigns the other half to will it to land on tails. After each flip, the section of the audience that was wrong is eliminated from the experiment, and he repeats the experiment using the remainder. After eight coin flips, only one boy in the audience remains. Dawkins then asks the question "Is he psychic?" Obviously, because of how the experiment was set up, one person was bound to have been correct about the result of each coin flip. Dawkins argues that this is exactly how seemingly supernatural events occur in the real world, especially when the "audience" is the entire population of the planet.
To conclude the lecture, Dawkins claims that there is nothing wrong with having faith in a proper scientific prediction. To illustrate this, he takes a cannonball which has been suspended from the ceiling with a rope, pulls it aside and touches it to his forehead. He announces that he is going to release the cannonball, letting it swing away from him, and that when it comes back to him, he is going to ignore his natural instinct to run because he has faith in his scientific prediction of what will happen – the cannonball should stop about an inch short of his forehead. He releases the cannonball, and his prediction is proved correct.
Part 2: Designed and Designoid Objects Dawkins' second lecture examines the problem of design. He presents a number of simple objects, such as rocks and crystals, and notes that these objects have been formed by simple laws of physics and are therefore not designed. He then examines some designed objects – including a microscope, an electronic calculator, a pocket watch, and a clay pot – and notes that none of these objects could have possibly come about by sheer luck. Dawkins then discusses what he calls "designoid objects", which are complex objects that are neither simple, nor designed. Not only are they complex on the outside, they are also complex on the inside – perhaps billions of times more complex than a designed object such as a microscope.
Dawkins then shows the audience a number of designed and designoid objects, including the pitcher plant, megalithic mounds built by the compass termite, and pots made by trapdoor spiders, potter wasps, and mason bees. He examines some designoid objects that use camouflage, such as a grasshopper that looks like a stone, a sea horse that looks like sea weed, a leaf insect, a green snake, a stick insect, and a collection of butterflies that look like dead leaves when their wings are closed. Dawkins notes that many animals share similar types of camouflage or protection because of convergent evolution. Examples of such designoid objects include the hedgehog and the spiny anteater (both of which evolved pointed spines along their back) and the Tasmanian wolf (which looks like a dog but is actually a marsupial). He illustrates the reason for convergent evolution by using two small models of commercial aircraft. The reason they look similar isn't due to industrial espionage, it is due to the fact that they are both built to fly, so they must make use of similar design principles.
Using a camera and a model eye, Dawkins then compares the designed camera with the designoid eye. Both are involved in similar processes – using a lens to direct light onto a film or a retina. Both the camera and the eye also have an iris, which is used to control the amount of light which is allowed in. Using a volunteer from the audience, Dawkins demonstrates the contraction of the human iris by shining a light into her right eye.
The lecture then moves into an explanation of natural selection, which brings forth designoid objects. To explain natural selection, Dawkins first explains artificial selection by discussing the evolution of wild cabbage into broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, red cabbage, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. He continues the discussion of artificial selection by explaining the evolution of the ancestral wolf into the many varieties of modern dog. Starting with the ancestral wolf, Dawkins imagines that everyone on one side of the room is breeding for small wolves, while everyone on the other side is breeding for big wolves. By selectively breeding the smallest or largest of each litter for a number of years, you may eventually end up with something like the Chihuahua on one side of the room, and something like a Great Dane on the other.
Dawkins then introduces an Arthromorphs computer program (similar to the Biomorphs programBlind Watchmaker Applet ), explaining how it works while a volunteer uses the computer to selectively breed more and more generations.