Richard Dawkins in Conversation with Chris Williamson | Richard Dawkins’ Final Tour in Austin
In this episode of The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins, Richard engages in a conversation with Chris Williamson on various topics, including his recent comment on being a cultural Christian, evolution and genetic adaptation, and, of course, his latest book release, The Genetic Book of the Dead.
This episode was filmed at the ACL Moody Theatre in Austin, Texas, on September 7, 2024, as part of Richard Dawkins’ final tour.
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The science of infant attachment with its mountains of research has disproved the headline of your podcast i think, unless i misunderstand your meaning. Comfort is how himsn beings and many mamals learn to manage their emotional systems ready for adult life. I adult life we comfort to regulate ourselves and each other, if we have this capacity developed in us (some call it mentalizing). If we dont mentalize, we have to use other strategies. And these strategies have anti-health or anti-social side effects. So our species has comfort as a central mechanism of social and emotional functioning.
The universe doesn’t owe us comfort—and yet modern civilization seems to move, day by day, toward maximizing it.
That tension is striking.
Because if life emerged and persists under conditions that offer no guarantees, then it does not rely on comfort, but on continuous engagement with its environment.
Not as something fixed, but as something that has to be maintained—moment by moment.
In that sense, the idea of genes being “immortal” feels true, but only within that living context.
Without a system that keeps things moving, they would remain information without consequence.
Your remark about the human back stayed with me.
If evolution shaped us over millions of years for upright movement, then from that same perspective one could argue: a human back is likely to struggle far more with decades of sustained sitting than with the transition to standing and walking itself.
Which makes your broader point even more tangible—life doesn’t fail because it is imperfect, but because the conditions it evolved for and the conditions it faces can quietly drift apart.
And once you begin to see it that way, a question seems to follow almost automatically: what are the everyday pressures, mismatches, and constraints that life—and regulation—must quietly navigate, just to keep going?