[Dawkins] We both, we're in the first day
[Dawkins] of the conference, we both have been a bit
[Myers] Right.
distracted by telephone calls from journalists (laughter)
about the Mathis fiasco. But I think
we both attended Ellen Johnson's opening speech.
She's the president of the American Atheists they call it?
[Myers] Yes.
[Dawkins] What was your impression of her speech?
[Myers] Oh I thought it was wonderful. I mean,
she's sort of put out a call for, you know,
more activism and I think that is what we need.
And she was saying "You've got to get off our butts,
You've got to get out and do things."
And she was making a very strong point that, you know,
if you talk about agnostics, atheists, you know,
free thinkers in general it is 11% of the population.
We are a pretty significant voting block,
if only we got our act together.
[Dawkins] Compared for example other voting blocks
[Dawkins] who are taken very seriously indeed by politicians.
[Myers] Yes. Exactly.
[Myers] And if you look at the United States and
the way she was portraying it is we're this
hodge podge of these little groups. All 5-15
percent, various groups, there is nobody that's
really hugely dominating the landscape.
But there are certain groups that are getting much more
media attention and are respected much more
by politicians because politicians know that
those little groups will turn out to vote
for them or against them. And atheists are not in
that group. We're a large group.
A very substantial group.
But we don't have that kind of unity
where they're afraid that we will,
you know, withhold our vote.
[Dawkins] Those other influential lobbyists,
sometimes Ive asked why this is, because
it's always puzzled me. And one of the answers
I've got is that they tend to be one issue voters.
So that they answer passionately in favor
of Israel or something of that sort. And so,
it's very easy for politicians to fall in with
their wishes, because their wished apply to
a particular issue or set of issues. Could it be
that we are too heterogeneous in the issues
that we support? I don't see why that should
be actually. I can imagine that we have a fair
degree of uniformity over issues.
[Myers] There are certain issues where I think
we do have unity. Things like, you know, keep the Ten
Commandments out of the court rooms and so forth,
that we would rather not see more secularization.
We'd like to see more money
flowing away the churches and into secular causes.
So let's end this faith based stuff.
[Dawkins] And stop the churches having tax breaks.
[Myers] Yes. One thing Ellen did not talk about,
[Myers] and I think might be a factor too is that
we tend to be a little different from all the
others in that we are posing things, you know, like
if we want to tax the churches, most of these
other groups thing that is a horrible idea.
So in aggregate they outnumber us pretty significantly.
Dawkins: Because those other 
groups are churches themselves.
[Myers] Yes. They can unite on that issue,
[Dawkins]
[Myers] Where even we cannot unite effectively on it.
Dawkins: No that's right. 'Cause although we're
quite big compared to any one of those
other groups, they are united on that so they
all add up together on that issue.
[Myers] Right. But I think it's also just a fact that
atheists tend not to be joiners. We don't
form these clubs very readily and even if we
do form these clubs they tend to be rather
fractious affairs where we argue a lot.
We put value on skepticism and argument, right?
It's not the kind of thing that fosters a strong
community, a unified community.
[Dawkins] Yes. I'm not sure that religious
people don't argue quite a lot as well. I mean,
various, in particular those denominations
that are right close to them.
[Myers] Right. But at least within their denomination
they can close ranks pretty quickly against the outsider.
[Dawkins] And they have a kind of hierarchy of authority.
[Myers] Yes.
[Dawkins] Which is, metaphorically,
[Dawkins] pretty much anathema to atheists.
[Myers] Yeah, hey you notice this in your talk too.
That right after your talk they come up and they
[Myers] argue with you.
[Dawkins] Yeah sure.
[Myers] Which is great. Even if you disagree
with them or you agree with them, what would
happen after your talk is there was discent
and debate and that's what we do.
[Dawkins] And that's very stimulating.
[Myers] Yes.
[Dawkins] That's what we want, yes.
[Myers] Yeah. I noticed that you conceded a few points
which is also what we do. You know, we're willing to
argue about these things and we're also willing
[Myers] to back down, say okay- Yes.
[Dawkins] To listen to the argument and back down? Yes.
[Myers] Yes. You've given me a better idea. I think
that's a better idea. I will follow that idea.
[Dawkins] It's quite hard to imagine a Catholioc
Bishop or someone to be doing that. (laughter)
[Myers] Well yeah because you can't
argue with God and he's given you the answer.
[Dawkins] Yes. Or the Pope anyway.
Dawkins: One of the fashionable jargon words
in our field at the moment is evo devo.
Evolutionary development. What does it mean to you?
[Myers] Well it's a funny work for one thing. (laughter)
[Dawkins] Yes.
[Myers] But what it means is that we were trying to
bring developmental biology into the mainstream
of evolutionary biology. We have a
long tradition where development has been
kinda left out of most of the formulations of
evolutionary theory. And that goes right back
to the neo-darwinian synthesis, you know.
Richard Goldschmidt was our proponent at that point
and a lot of what he suggested wasn't quite
right and antagonized a lot of people, although
I think there was a lot of worth to what Godlschmidt was
actually saying. And since then developmental biologists
and evolutionary biologists didn't relate much
until roughly the 1980s when
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
and Eric Wieschaus did all their
ground breaking work on molecular
biology and the developing drisophila embryo.
And just broke the field wide open.
Because now all of the sudden we had molecules,
we had the tools, the genetic tools to do comparative
work in lots and lots of different developing systems.
We could look at the developmental processes that are
going on in nematodes and fruit flies and
zebra fish and mice and people and all
these kinds of good things. And obviously
at that point we had to bring evolutioary
theory right there into the middle of
developmental biology. It was crucial to
make that a part of it. And since then it has
grown stronger and stronger. It's become
a hugely powerful discipline within biology
where we're learning all kinds of new things.
Where we're explicitly comparing developmetal
processes in many different organisms and trying
to figure out how they are related through
evolutionary events. So that's evo devo in a nutshell.
[Dawkins] Godlschmidt indeed could be said
to be the father of that but he also is known
[Dawkins] for championing macro mutational steps in evolution.
[Myers] Yes.
[Dawkins] And I think a lot of the hostility to Goldschmidt
comes from that. Would you wish to defend that?
[Myers] Leaps in a single generation? No way. (laughter)
The thing is a lot of what Goldschmidt was saying
was really interesting phenomena.
We've kind of neglected it, kind of swept it
under the rug for a long time. What Goldschmidt
studied were first of all he's studying Lymantria,
the moth and he is looking at metamorphosis.
And he's saying ok well you've got
caterpillars and you have these moths,
They're are very different morphologies yet obviously
it's the same genetics, the same genome in
all of those. He is looking at male and female.
And again, differences between these but they've got
basically the same genes. And he was also looking
at phenal copies where you can have environmental
effects that induce phenomena that look
very much like genetic changes
so you can mimic genetic changes with the
environment. And he was arguing that there has
to be large scale regulatory elements that can
switch the genome into one mode or another mode,
and from that perspective hopeful monsters
started to look more and more promising.
Well it's just a mode switch. You know?
Like the switch between male and female.
[Dawkins] Which Waddington took up in a big way later.
[Myers] Yes, but since what we've discovered, it's
much more complicated than that.
It's not, you know he talked about global
systemic macro mutations and we really don't
see those. What we see is lots and lots of little
[Myers] switches all over the place, where again
[Dawkins] Yes.
we're back in the field of conventional
Darwinian theory where we're looking at
gradual changes by making small changes in
lots of places over time. And you really can't
call that hopeful monsters any more. But the
general principle is the same. Switches
are important. Ok. Little switches and little
changes in stead of big switches.
The phenomena he was describing, like metamorphasis,
like sex differences, they're still there.
They've got to be explained. I've got to
understand what is going on in the genome to
reconfigure itself basically into these modes
over life histories and how we did that in evolution.
[Dawkins] When a caterpillar metamorphasizes
into a butterfly, it more or less turns itself
into soup inside and then it starts again.
It's not a macro mutational state. You don't have to
talk about macro mutation state. You can...
But I mean there is still sort of, bit of a problem in
explaining how the, I suppose ancestrally
it must have been a much more smooth affair.
