195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

195 | Richard Dawkins on Flight and Other Evolutionary Achievements

Evolution has equipped species with a variety of ways to travel through the air — flapping, gliding, floating, not to mention jumping really high. But it hasn’t invented jet engines. What are the different ways that heavier-than-air objects might be made to fly, and why does natural selection produce some of them but not others? Richard Dawkins has a new book on the subject, Flights of Fancy: Defying Gravity by Design and Evolution. We take the opportunity to talk about other central issues in evolution: levels of selection, the extended phenotype, the role of adaptation, and how genes relate to organisms.

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Richard Dawkins received his Ph.D. in zoology from the University of Oxford. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, where he was previously the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. He is an internationally best-selling author, whose books include The Selfish Gene, The Blind Watchmaker, and The God Delusion. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature.


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Episoder(411)

144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

144 | Solo: Are We Moving Beyond the Standard Model?

I’ve been a professional physicist since the 1980’s, and not once over the course of my career has a particle-physics experiment produced a completely surprising new result. We’ve discovered particles...

26 Apr 20211h 11min

143 | Julia Galef on Openness, Bias, and Rationality

143 | Julia Galef on Openness, Bias, and Rationality

Mom, apple pie, and rationality — all things that are unquestionably good, right? But rationality, as much as we might value it, is easier to aspire to than to achieve. And there are more than a few h...

19 Apr 20211h 32min

AMA | April 2021

AMA | April 2021

Welcome to the April 2021 Ask Me Anything episode of Mindscape! These monthly excursions are funded by Patreon supporters (who are also the ones asking the questions). I take the large number of quest...

14 Apr 20212h 41min

142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them

142 | Charlie Jane Anders on Stories and How to Write Them

Telling a story seems like the most natural, human thing in the world. We all do it, all the time. And who amongst us doesn’t think we could be a fairly competent novelist, if we just bothered to take...

12 Apr 20211h 26min

141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World

141 | Zeynep Tufekci on Information and Attention in a Networked World

In a world flooded with information, everybody necessarily makes choices about what we pay attention to. This basic fact can be manipulated in any number of ways, from advertisers micro-targeting spec...

5 Apr 20211h 17min

140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain

140 | Dean Buonomano on Time, Reality, and the Brain

“Time” and “the brain” are two of those things that are somewhat mysterious, but it would be hard for us to live without. So just imagine how much fun it is to bring them together. Dean Buonomano is o...

29 Mar 20211h 27min

139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

139 | Elizabeth Anderson on Equality, Work, and Ideology

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed...

22 Mar 20211h 19min

138 | Daryl Morey on Analytics, Psychology, and Basketball

138 | Daryl Morey on Analytics, Psychology, and Basketball

You might think that human beings, exhausted by competing for resources and rewards in the real world, would take it easy and stick to cooperation in their spare time. But no; we are fascinated by com...

15 Mar 20211h 16min

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