Music: Steve Reich and Musicians
Dawkins: Darwinian natural selection is the key to understanding the whole of the existence of life.
Dawkins: A self replicating molecule really began the origin of life.
Dawkins: It replicates, it produces copies and copies and copies and copies.
If its successful, there are are going to be thousands of copies in the future.
Dawkins: copies, copies and copies (looped)
Dawkins: these things competed in the primeval soup
Dawkins: They started to build –
cells around themselves –
colonies of cells –
which are what we are.
Dawkins: The ones that were good at it, stayed,
the ones that were bad, didn’t stay.
Dawkins: Natural selection.
the blind, unconscious, automatic, process –
has no purpose – in mind.
Joshua Getzler: Evolution is –
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: A new religion
in a sense, the emergence of a new religion.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Consider
Dawkins: Consider the idea of God
Lanier: Its a terrible mistake, to think of the spiritual impulse, as arising from cognitive weakness.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Terrible mistake
to think of the spiritual impulse, as arising from cognitive weakness.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Religious war
Getzler: Well, its a religious war –
its a war between religions.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Survival value
Dawkins: God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Abandoned
Getzler: The 20th century, where religious thinking was abandoned for secular and Darwinian ideology
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Demanded evidence
Dawkins: If we all demanded evidence before we would believe something,
religions would get nowhere.
2 sopranos, 2 tenors: Worst graveyard
Getzler: The 20th century was the worst graveyard in human history…
and that should give us pause…