Exactly What Darwin Means by a Tautology

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Darwin's use of artificial selection pigeon breeding, was superb. I think it's exactly what was required. And then it's just seamless jump from that to say, oke. We don't actually need a pigeon breeder. Survival will do the job forr us. Or differential repogation will do theJob for us. But i did want to get your thoughts on directionality to evolution. You famously, uow wrote about the evolution of evolution, but that's something different than, say, convergent evolution, or is it inevitable? and i know you and i had this little debate years ago about, would extra terrestrial intelligences be something like us, with a

In episode 205, Michael Shermer speaks with Richard Dawkins, the author of The Selfish Gene, voted The Royal Society’s Most Inspiring Science Book of All Time, and also the bestsellers The Blind Watchmaker, Climbing Mount Improbable, The Ancestor’s Tale, The God Delusion, and two volumes of autobiography, An Appetite for Wonder and Brief Candle in the Dark. He is a Fellow of New College, Oxford and both the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Literature. In 2013, Dawkins was voted the world’s top thinker in Prospect magazine’s poll of 10,000 readers from over 100 countries.

This episode is heavily edited because Dawkins was having trouble with his voice, and Shermer tried to speak a little more to give Dawkins a chance to let his voice rest.