Darwin’s Dangerous Disciple: An Interview with Richard Dawkins

by Frank Miele

Skeptic: In your latest book, River Out of Eden (lecture available on DVD), which is a best seller in the UK, you use deep-sea bacteria that metabolize sulfur (rather than oxygen) to illustrate how evolution takes place in a series of successive steps. Does the existence here on Earth of an alternative metabolic “fuel,” in some sense make it more probable that there could be life elsewhere in the universe, perhaps using a different base than carbon?

Dawkins: That’s surely got to be right, hasn’t it? You can speculate in a science fiction way about alternative bio-chemistries for life, but if you couldn’t find anything on Earth moving ever so slightly towards an alternative bio-chemistry, that would argue against the idea. But when you do find an alternative biochemistry for life here on Earth, that makes it more plausible that somewhere else in the universe there’s got to be an alternative form of life.

Skeptic: What then is the sine qua non of life? What raw materials and conditions are necessary for life to exist?

Dawkins: Well, you need raw materials that can self-replicate. I would have to be more of a chemist than I am to know how likely it is that you are going to get such molecules. I should very much like to direct chemists toward devising an alternative hypothetical chemistry that supports self-replication, a whole alternative system that could, in principle, give rise to life. The fundamental principle that will be required is self-replication. Chemists have begun to look at auto-catalytic functions in chemistry where at least some of the prerequisites are present. Thesine qua non, as you say, is self-replication. I don’t know how difficult it would be to achieve that chemically.

Skeptic: How likely do you think it is that “intelligent” life exists somewhere else in the universe?

Dawkins: At first glance, one might think that the really difficult step is getting life at all. Then once natural selection has gotten going (since the origin of life is really the origin of natural selection), you can proceed by an orderly progressive sequence through the evolution of some kind of information processing apparatus on to intelligence. On the other hand, if you look at what’s actually happened on this planet, it probably took less than a billion years from the origin of the planet, under fairly unfavorable initial conditions, to produce life. But intelligence of a high order has only come about in the last couple of million years, perhaps. So it does seem that on this planet at least there has been a rather short interval from the origin of the planet to the origin of life and then a very, very long interval between the origin of life and the origin of intelligence.

Skeptic: Are you then saying that the origin of intelligence is the bigger step?

Dawkins: It’s not my inclination to say that, but this disparity in time scale is the only data we have. We only have one sample — life on this planet. But for that fact, my personal inclination would have been to suggest that the origin of intelligence is not that difficult once you’ve got life. I’m quite intrigued by the thought that maybe it’s the origin of life that’s not that difficult.

Skeptic: If so, what are the defining qualities of such “intelligence?” I’m thinking here of concepts such as Immanuel Kant’s list of apriori ideas — time and space, number, cause and effect. Could, for example, a form of life evolve in whose mental map time’s arrow went backwards, or in no specific direction?

Dawkins: As for what one means by intelligence, I haven’t really thought about that. You posed the hypothetical question, “Could there be a life form whose concept of time goes backward?” I can’t imagine what that would look like. But I haven’t thought about it enough.

Skeptic: Of other species we know about here on Earth, we’re very familiar with cats and dogs. I was always amazed (and delighted) how my dogs could coexist with me given that their set of sensory inputs was so different from mine — they see in black and white, not in 3D; they use scent and vision in approximately opposite proportions. Yet they can come up with an equivalent map of the world so that they can fetch the paper, protect us from intruders, comfort us in distress. What does this tell us about the evolutionary process and how it molds not only the bodies but the cognitive maps of different species?

Dawkins: That’s an intriguing point. One thing you could say about dogs is that they have been domesticated, and a good deal of the domestication has been an inadvertent selection for coexisting with humans. While their wild ancestors, the wolves, do have facial expressions and other gestures which they use to communicate with each other, it’s probable that domestic dogs have been selected to have more human feelings and facial expressions. So while dogs don’t smile, they do other things with their eyes that appeal to humans. Maybe they have been shaped to be a bit less wolf-like and a bit more human-like, not by deliberate artificial selection, but by artificial selection nonetheless.

Skeptic: In the 1930s, von Uexküll used the term Umwelt to describe the different “real worlds” that animals construct based upon their differing sensory systems. He even built mechanical devices to try and create their perceptual Weltanschauungen. He manufactured optical devices to simulate the compound eyes of insects to allow one to see “what they saw.” With virtual reality now a reality, we could certainly do such things at a more sophisticated level than von Uexküll did. Do you think this might be a potentially valuable line of research?

Dawkins: Von Uexküll used the concept of the Umwelt to explore the differences between the perceptual worlds of different animals. He tried to find a way to “think himself into” the Umwelt(the perceptual world) of a bee or a bat, for example, by seeing the polarization of light or by seeing into the ultraviolet range of the spectrum and thus probably not seeing images as we see images at all. I think it’s a very important thing to do that, partly as a metaphor for “getting outside yourself” and seeing another point of view. We have an immensely human-centered view of things such as ethics and morality. Even if we pay lip service to being evolutionists, many people still think according to the Judeo-Christian view that all things have been put on Earth for the benefit of humanity and that the only justification for scientific research is if it benefits humanity. I think it’s a salutary lesson to try to “think yourself into” the Umwelt of another species. But as I said in my talk last night before the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, I suspect that the perceptual world of other species possibly may not be as different from our own as you might think, even though they get their information through different physical media.

Skeptic: So then doesn’t natural selection force us to assume that time’s arrow flies in a certain direction? Doesn’t natural selection force us to operate on the basis of Kant’s a priori ideas and Piaget’s operations?

Dawkins: Yes, I agree with that.

Skeptic: In your speech the other night you said that the perceptual systems of animals represent the world as their near, or possibly even far, ancestors constructed them based upon natural selection. Can the world evolve faster than the sensory systems of the animals? Are many animals living today in a sensory world that no longer exists, as when the moth flies into the candle flame?

Dawkins: When a moth flies into a candle flame presumably it is responding to the candle flame as if were a celestial object at optical infinity and acting appropriately to that situation, not the one it is in fact currently facing. It frequently happens that the real world evolves faster than an animal’s cognitive map of it.

Skeptic: Does that ever happen to human beings?

Dawkins: Human beings are completely surrounded by the equivalent of “candle flames.” Notorious examples are our desire for sugar and fat — in nature the rule is, whenever you can get them, eat them. But when there’s a surplus of those substance, they become bad for you. Most of what we strive for in our modern life uses the apparatus of goal seeking that was originally set up to seek goals in the state of nature. But now the goal-seeking apparatus has been switched to different goals, like making money or hedonistic pleasures of one sort or another. Natural selection equips us with “Rules of Thumb,” which in a state of nature have the effect of promoting the survival of our selfish genes. The Rules of Thumb go on, even though in this world of “candle flames” they no longer promote our inclusive fitness.

Skeptic: Would you consider increasing population and war to be examples of candle flames?

Dawkins: Increasing population itself is not an individual behavior pattern. It’s a consequence of many things which are manifestations of individual behavior in a collective environment. To take a much simpler case, the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation of attacking and subservience between pairs of individuals, but the dominance hierarchy itself is not something that natural selection favors or disfavors. What natural selection favors or disfavors is the individual behavior of which the dominance hierarchy is a manifestation. I would put war and overpopulation in that category.

Skeptic: In River Out of Eden, you also say that, “Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not” (p. 33). But doesn’t one first have to make the choice or decision to use pragmatism as the standard by which we judge? That is, we must first agree to base our decisions on what works, rather than on revelation or intuition. Isn’t the most we can ask of the religious crowd, “Either lay hands on flat tires and pray for the sick, rather than taking them to a mechanic or a doctor, or if you are not willing to be consistent, just shut up and go away?” Doesn’t the religious view amount to, “When we’re afraid, we seek God. When God doesn’t answer our prayers, blame it on the Devil?”

Dawkins: Yes, it’s a kind of pathetic, childish response to some failure.

Skeptic: Then could you say that the reason that evolutionism is resisted so strongly is that our minds evolved to think in terms of personalities and entities rather than in terms of processes?

Dawkins: Yes, it’s the idea that somebody has got to be responsible. It’s what children do — the petulant throwing the tennis racquet on the ground, blaming it for their bad shot. So is the reflex to sue somebody when you slip on the ice and sprain your ankle. Again, somebody has got to be blamed. It doesn’t occur to many people that nobody’s to blame, there’s just ice and it’s slippery and you fell down.

Skeptic: Along that line, you have the following passage in River Out of Eden: In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference (p.133). This sounds rather like physicist Steven Weinberg’s, “the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless” (The First Three Minutes), or William Shakespeare’s “a tale told by an idiot, filled with sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Is that in fact your position?

Dawkins: Yes, at a sort of cosmic level, it is. But what I want to guard against is people therefore getting nihilistic in their personal lives. I don’t see any reason for that at all. You can have a very happy and fulfilled personal life even if you think that the universe at large is a tale told by an idiot. You can still set up goals and have a very worthwhile life and not be nihilistic about it at a personal level.

Skeptic: Well, if we don’t accept religion as a reasonable guide to “what is” or even a reasonable guide to “what ought to be,” does evolution give us such a guide? Can we turn to evolution to answer not what is, but what ought to be?

Dawkins: I’d rather not do that. I think Julian Huxley was the last person who attempted to. In my opinion, a society run along “evolutionary” lines would not be a very nice society in which to live. But further, there’s no logical reason why we should try to derive our normative standards from evolution. It’s perfectly consistent to say this is the way it is — natural selection is out there and it is a very unpleasant process. Nature is red in tooth and claw. But I don’t want to live in that kind of a world. I want to change the world in which I live in such a way that natural selection no longer applies.

Skeptic: But given the clay from which we are made, doesn’t natural selection make it relatively unlikely that some things will work? Doesn’t Darwinism undercut the great socialist hope, “Why, because we will it so!”?

Dawkins: Some goals may be unrealistic. But that doesn’t mean that we should turn around the other way and say therefore we should strive to make a Darwinian millennium come true.

Skeptic: But then isn’t what we ought to do (as David Hume argued long ago) just a matter of preference and choice, custom and habit?

Dawkins: I think that’s very likely true. But I don’t think that having conceded that point, I as an individual should then be asked to abandon my own ethical system or goals. I as an individual can adopt idealistic or socialistic or unrealistic or whatever sort of norms of charity and good will towards other people. They may be doomed if you take a strong Darwinian line on human nature, but it’s not obvious to me that they are.

Skeptic: I think that you are saying that many of the lessons of evolutionary biology about morality or ethics are contrary to what we might normally call morality or ethics in ordinary discourse. When we look back at the Old Testament and the New Testament, it seems there’s a lot about how to maximize one’s inclusive fitness. If that’s the case, do such religious views have anything to tell us?

Dawkins: If it is true that some of the morality of the Old Testament, say, maximizes somebody’s inclusive fitness, I don’t think that has anything to tell us about what we ought to do.

Skeptic: Then wouldn’t we be better to throw out all this half-baked religious mumbo jumbo and move on to something else?

Dawkins: Well yes, but that’s obvious!

Skeptic: Do you think that group fitness is a meaningful concept in evolutionary biology? If so, does it play a role in discussions of evolution and morality?

Dawkins: I think it’s logically meaningful, but I don’t think it plays a role in evolution in the wild and therefore it doesn’t play a role in anything else. I think it’s of no importance.

Skeptic: Can we use Darwinism and natural selection to analyze other events in history? To put it in its crudest form, if Hitler had won WWII would that have proved that his system was better (in a Darwinian sense) than that of the Allies? Or does the fact that the Soviet Bloc crumbled tell us anything about the relative fitness of market-based economies versus command economies. If might (or at least survival and reproduction) doesn’t make right (as well as everything else), what does?

Dawkins: I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful. Darwinism is the differential survival of self-replicating genes in a gene pool, usually as manifested by individual behavior, morphology, and phenotypes. Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it. There is a very vague analogy between group selection and conquest of a nation by another nation, but I don’t think it’s a very helpful analogy. So I would prefer not to invoke Darwinian language for that kind of historical interpretation.

Skeptic: The publication of the controversial book, The Bell Curve, has set off yet another round in the seemingly never-ending nature-nurture (or heredity-environment) controversy. Is this in fact a false dichotomy? You had this passage in The Selfish Gene (1989, p. 37):

No one factor, genetic, or environmental, can be considered as the single ‘cause’ of any part of a baby. All parts of a baby have a near infinite number of antecedent causes. But a difference [original emphasis] between one baby and another, for example a difference in length of leg, might easily be traced to one or a few simple antecedent differences, either in environment or in genes. It isdifferences that matter in the competitive struggle to survive; and it is genetically-controlled differences that matter in evolution.

Doesn’t a passage like this indicate why E.O. Wilson’s Sociobiology, The Bell Curve, and your own writings automatically set off a vehement, moralistic, and often hysterical reaction from a cadre of left-wing scientists?

Dawkins: On the face of it, I don’t know why you lump those three books together. When I was talking about genetic differences as being analyzable, that’s the position of any geneticist. All I was saying was that when you look at something like eye color in Drosophila (or indeed in humans), although there are hundreds of genes and environmental factors that enter into making an eye, nevertheless if there’s a one gene difference at a particular locus between two individuals, that can be the determining factor as to why that particular individual has a pink eye rather than a black eye. That is just straight genetics. You can’t get away from that. The reason why left-wing ideologues attack books like The Bell Curve has nothing to do with that. Those critics are concerned with issues like race and I never mention race. I don’t mind mentioning race, but it has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

Skeptic: But those same left-wing critics also attack your books.

Dawkins: But they don’t read them!

Skeptic: Well, you document examples of such attacks in the end notes to the 1989 edition ofThe Selfish Gene. Isn’t it just as ideological for Marxism to be brought in as an argument against genetic differences as it is to bring in Biblical fundamentalism as an argument against Darwinian evolution? Aren’t we dealing with religion, rather than science here?

Dawkins: I suspect that we may be. The reason I think so is that the criticisms in some cases just seem to be silly. They seem to be a hysterical reaction to a misunderstanding. It’s as though some people think that any mention of genes in the context of human behavior is somehow tainted with the tar of Social Darwinism and all the horrors that social scientists see in the history of their subject. So instead of just calmly and peacefully sitting down and thinking about what actually is the truth — “Are there genes that influence behavior?,” the immediate response is to flame up old fires of what once upon a time were important political issues. That kind of thing bores me rigid! I care about what’s actually true.

Skeptic: In a Darwinian sense, isn’t it somewhat meaningless to argue about any supposed displacement of “superior” beings by “inferior” beings, or that evolution “is going backwards.” Don’t such arguments turn Darwinism on its head?

Dawkins: Because whatever evolves is, by definition, superior? There’s nothing nonsensical about saying that what would evolve if Darwinian selection has its head is something that you don’t want to happen. And I could easily imagine trying to go against Darwinism. I don’t see why that’s inconsistent. I can easily imagine saying that in a Darwinian world, the fittest, by definition, are the ones that survive and the attributes that you need to survive in Darwinian sense are the attributes that I don’t want to see in the world. I can easily see myself fighting against the success of Darwinism prevailing in the world.

Skeptic: Shortly after publication of The Selfish Gene, you wrote a letter to the editor of Nature[the leading British science magazine, similar to Science here in the US], in which you stated that kin selection theory in no way provides a basis for understanding ethnocentrism. You said you made this statement, in part at least, to counter charges that were being made in the UK at that time by Marxist critics that Selfish Gene Theory was being used by the British National Front to support their Fascist ideology. In retrospect, do you think you went too far in trying to distance yourself from some would-be and very unwanted enthusiasts, or not far enough?

Dawkins: As to distancing myself from the National Front, that I did! The National Front was saying something like this, “kin selection provides the basis for favoring your own race as distinct from other races, as a kind of generalization of favoring your own close family as opposed to other individuals.” Kin selection doesn’t do that! Kin selection favors nepotism towards your own immediate close family. It does not favor a generalization of nepotism towards millions of other people who happen to be the same color as you. Even if it did, and this is a stronger point, I would oppose any suggestion from any group such as the National Front, that whatever occurs in natural selection is therefore morally good or desirable. We come back to this point over and over again. I’m definitely not one who thinks that “is” is the same as “ought.”

Skeptic: How do you evaluate the work of Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, J.P. Rushton, and Pierre van den Berghe, all of whom have argued that kin selection theory does help explain nationalism and patriotism?

Dawkins: One could invoke a kind “misfiring” of kin selection if you wanted to in such cases. Misfirings are common enough in evolution. For example, when a cuckoo host feeds a baby cuckoo, that is a misfiring of behavior which is naturally selected to be towards the host’s own young. There are plenty of opportunities for misfirings. I could imagine that racist feeling could be a misfiring, not of kin selection but of reproductive isolation mechanisms. At some point in our history there may have been two species of humans who were capable of mating together but who might have produced sterile hybrids (such as mules). If that were true, then there could have been selection in favor of a “horror” of mating with the other species. Now that could misfire in the same sort of way that the cuckoo host’s parental impulse misfires. The rule of thumb for that hypothetical avoiding of miscegenation could be “Avoid mating with anybody of a different color (or appearance) from you.” I’m happy for people to make speculations along those lines as long as they don’t again jump that is-ought divide and start saying, “therefore racism is a good thing.” I don’t think racism is a good thing. I think it’s a very bad thing. That is my moral position. I don’t see any justification in evolution either for or against racism. The study of evolution is not in the business of providing justifications for anything.

Skeptic: In The Extended Phenotype you talk about the Green Beard Effect, and last night Napoleon Chagnon, the President of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, actually dyed his beard green before introducing you. What is the Green Beard Effect and why do you mention it only to then dismiss it as being too improbable to be a factor in evolution?

Dawkins: I use The Green Beard Effect as a way of explaining kin selection. If you imagine a gene that has two pleiotropic effects that apparently have nothing to do with each other (and in practice that’s common enough), if one of its effects is to give somebody a label, such as the Green Beard, and the other is to give somebody a propensity to act altruistically towards individuals so labeled (that is, Green-Bearded individuals), then theoretically that gene will spread. The Green Beard Effect is a way in which a would-be selectively altruistic gene can recognize copies of itself in other individuals. That means that the gene can propagate itself by looking after copies of itself when it has the opportunity to do so. That’s relatively easy to understand. But as far as I know, in practice Green Beards don’t exist. But kinship is a kind of statistical Green Beard. Although your brother is not guaranteed to contain the gene that’s making you practice “fraternal” behavior towards him, the odds that he has that gene are statistically higher than the odds that a random member of the population has it. Kinship is therefore a statistically watered down version of the Green Beard Effect that actually works.

Skeptic: Could there be selection for a mechanism that would operate like this — “those who look like me, talk like me, act like me, are probably genetically close to me. Therefore, be nice, good, and altruistic to them. If not avoid them?” And could that mechanism later be programmed to say “be good to someone who wears the same baseball cap, the same Rugby colors, or whatever?” That is, could evolution have a produced a hardware mechanism that is software programmable?

Dawkins: I think that’s possible.

Skeptic: In his book, Complexity, Roger Lewin includes interviews with a number of evolutionary biologists. One of the topics they examine is progress. Is there a general tendency towards progress in terms of say, increasing neural complexity, increasing brain size, or increasing behavioral plasticity over the course of evolution? Or is this, as Stephen Jay Gould has termed it, a rather noxious concept that we should read out of evolutionary thinking?

Dawkins: I think that there has been an almost hysterical over-reaction against the concept of progress. I’ve been as against some mistaken interpretations of the concept of progress as anybody. I very, very strongly object to the idea that living creatures can be arranged on a ladder, a kind of phylogenetic scale, with humans at the top. Not only should we not treat humans as being on the top, we should not see the animal kingdom as being layered as we often do. All zoology textbooks present their chapters in the same order — you start with protozoa, then you move through the coelenterates, then the flatworms, then the round worms and so on. Certainly that interpretation of progress is just a logical error. Evolution is a branching tree and that’s all there is to it. However, it is another matter to say that there is no progressive evolution within one lineage as you go from the distant past, through the more recent descendants, up to the present. There very well could be such progress. To the extent that adaptation is to the a-biotic environment (such as the weather), you would expect no progress. Evolutionary change would simply track the weather. If it gets cold, you get a thick coat. If it gets hot, you shed your thick coat, and so on. To the extent that adaptations are to the biotic environment (that is, other organisms, rather than natural conditions), then it seems to me quite plausible that there is in fact a progressive arms race as I term it. The better a predator gets at running down prey, the more it pays the prey to shift resources into anti-predator adaptations and out of other aspects of life. There are always trade-offs in the economy of life. If the predators are getting really good at their job, it makes sense for the prey to shift resources (which admittedly could have been put into making more offspring), into making better legs for running or better sense organs for detecting the predators. The predators then shift their resources accordingly. Given the extraordinary elegance and beauty and complexity of the adaptations that we see all around us in living creatures, I think it’s ludicrous to deny that those are the result of progressive evolution. There has been progress.

Skeptic: In your most recent book, River Out of Eden, you try to clear up some misunderstandings about the First Mother and the First Father. Would you like to repeat them?

Dawkins: I refer to things like the belief that Mitochondrial Eve was, like the mythical Biblical Eve, the only woman on Earth. Nonsense, she could have been the member of a huge population. She’s simply the common ancestor of all living humans. Another error is to think that Mitochondrial Eve is our most recent common ancestor. She most certainly is not our most recent common ancestor. That distinction much more likely goes to a male. The reason for that is pure logic and it’s spelled out in River Out of Eden.

Skeptic: A few years ago, you and Stephen Jay Gould got in to a bit of an intellectual row about the question of punctuated equilibrium. By the time you wrote The Blind Watchmakeryou seemed to say that more was made of the controversy by journalists than was warranted. What is your current position on this controversy?

Dawkins: I think that punctuated equilibrium is a minor wrinkle on Darwinism, of no great theoretical significance. It has been vastly oversold.

Skeptic: Why?

Dawkins: That’s a matter of individual psychology and motivation and not my province.

Skeptic: You also took a bit of flak for likening religion (I think specifically Catholicism) to a virus? Is that still your position?

Dawkins: Yes. I come to it through the analogy to computer viruses. We have two kinds of viruses that have a lot in common — namely real biological viruses and computer viruses. In both cases they are parasitic self-replicating codes which exploit the existence of machinery that was set up to copy and obey that kind of code. So I then ask the question, “What if there were a third kind of milieu in which a different kind of self-replicating code could become an effective parasite?” Human brains with their powerful communication systems seem to be a likely candidate. Then I ask, “What would it feel like if you were the victim of a mind virus?” Well, you would feel within your-self this deep conviction that seems to come from nowhere. It doesn’t result from any evidence, but you have a total conviction that you know what’s true about the world and the cosmos and life. You just know it and you’re even prepared to kill people who disagree with you. You go around proselytizing and persuading other people to accept your view. The more you write down the features that such a mind virus would have, the more it starts to look like religion. I do think that the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus.

Skeptic: But couldn’t the Pope (or Evangelical Protestants for that matter), reply, “Look, we just have a terrific meme. It’s winning what you would describe as a Darwinian battle and you’re angry because you just don’t like it.”

Dawkins: Religion is a terrific meme. That’s right. But that doesn’t make it true and I care about what’s true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does its job magnificently well. That doesn’t mean that it’s a good thing. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see it stamped out.

Skeptic: So once again the discussion goes back to how do you determine whether something is good or not, other than by just your personal choice?

Dawkins: I don’t even try. You keep wanting to base morality on Darwinism. I don’t.

Skeptic: Given the number of popular and scientific controversies in which you have been involved, is there anything on which you have changed your mind, on which you’d like to correct the record, or which you see differently now than you did when you first became a household name?

Dawkins: Well, my second book, The Extended Phenotype, published in 1982 and summarized at the end of the second edition of The Selfish Gene, does downplay the role of the individual organism as the only vehicle of the genetic replicators. Previously, I rather blurred the distinction between vehicle and replicator. In The Extended Phenotype, I emphasize the distinction. I think I was right to say that fundamentally what is going on in natural selection is the differential survival of replicators. Replicators survive by virtue of their phenotypic effects upon the world. As it happens, it is a contingent fact that most of those phenotypic effects tend to be bound up in the vehicle (the particular individual body) in which the replicator (the gene) is housed. But that doesn’t have to be so. I use the didactic device of looking at animal artifacts like beaver dams, the effects of parasites on hosts, animal communications, and indeed all of the interactions in ecosystems as illustrations of the ways in which genes might in principle and sometimes in fact do insure their survival by exerting phenotypic effects outside of the body in which they reside. That’s a kind of change of mind. My original purpose in introducing the concept of memes really was not to produce a theory of culture, but rather to say that Darwinism doesn’t have to be tied to genes. It can work wherever you have a self-replicating code. We should actively be looking around for other examples of self-replicating codes which are “doing the Darwinian thing.” The important thing is not to get too hung up on genes when you’re doing your evolutionary biology.

Skeptic: What are the areas in biology into which Darwinism should be extended?

Dawkins: Sex is one that is being actively worked on. That is, the question of why it exists. Then there’s the embryological gap. In our Darwinism we postulate that there are genes for this and genes for that. We just leave the embryological causal link between genes and phenotype as a black box. We know that genes do, in fact, cause changes in phenotypes and that’s all we really need in order for Darwinism to work. But it would be nice to fill in the details of exactly what goes on inside the black box. To me, human consciousness is a deep, philosophically mysterious manifestation of brain activity and is in some sense a product of Darwinian evolution. But we don’t yet really have any idea how it evolved and where it fits into a Darwinian view of biology. I don’t know whether it will yield to a sudden flash of enlightenment, whether it will become one of those rather messy problems that never really get a proper solution, or whether it will eventually turn out that there never was a problem at all and that we were actually making up problems where there really weren’t any. From where I sit, it seems to be a deeply difficult problem that has always been a philosophical problem but which I think is ripe for a take-over by evolutionary biology once we think how to do it.

Skeptic: Thank you very much.

Glossary

ALLELE(S)

The alternative forms of a gene that can exist at a particular locus. Thus, A, B, and O are the alleles of the ABO blood group system; positive and negative are the alleles of the Rh system.

GREEN BEARD EFFECT

A term coined by Dawkins for the situation in which a gene has two effects (pleiotropy), one of which produces a recognizable phenotypic trait (the hypothetical Green Beard) and the other produces the tendency to manifest altruistic behavior toward others who also manifest that trait.

GROUP SELECTION (THEORY)

The theory that natural selection also operates at the level of the group and not just the individual organism.

INCLUSIVE FITNESS

The total reproductive success of an individual, including the proportionate success of his relatives based on the percentage of genes they share in common (100% for identical twins, 50% [on average] for siblings, parents, or offspring, 12.5% for first cousins, and so on).

KIN SELECTION (THEORY)

The selection of genes so as to cause individuals to favor their close genetic relatives as they are statistically likely to share genes in common. Often invoked to provide a neo-Darwinian explanation of behaviors such as altruism.

MEME(S)

A term coined by Dawkins for units of cultural inheritance, analogous to genes (the units of genetic transmission), which are acted upon by natural selection.

MITOCHONDRIA

The cell organelles that are the site of energy-releasing biochemical reactions. Mitochondria have their own DNA, which is passed through the female line only and thus is often used in tracing genetic lineages. MITOCHONDRIAL EVE, believed by some to be the common ancestor of all humans, was determined by analysis of mitochondrial DNA.

PHENOTYPE

The observed trait, morphological or behavioral, manifested by an organism. It is the product of the organism’s genotype and the environment in which the organism has developed.

PLEIOTROPY(-IC, -ISM)

The condition in which one gene produces two (or more) different phenotypic traits.

PUNCTUATED EQUILIBRIUM (THEORY OF)

The theory proposed by Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge that evolution can consist of long periods of stasis (no change), punctuated by short periods of rapid change (speciation events), rather than a steady series of small, incremental steps.

In 1921, Einstein, while discussing the significance of mathematics in the development of scientific thought, remarked `` .... an enigma presents itself which in all ages has agitated inquiring minds. How can it be that mathematics, being after all a product of human thought that is independent of experience, is so admirably appropriate to the objects of reality? Is human reason, then, without experience, merely by taking thought, able to fathom the properties of real things? " Fifteen years later, he went on to say, ``The very fact that the totality of our sense experiences is such that by means of thinking...it can be put in order, this fact is one which leaves us in awe, but which we shall never understand. One may say `the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility' (Kant)."

Has evolution shaped us for reasoning? Would there have been some form of Darwinian selection that gave an advantage to those with the ability, or at any rate, the trait that would lead eventually to the ability, to make a model of reality in the brain. This evolutionary advantage, amplified over time, has led to the human brain that has great skill in describing the world. At the same time, then, the brain has also retained all those features that helped it along the path and gave selective advantage, and among these could be those attributes of the human mind that we find so difficult to describe and define--- creativity, imagination, emotion, philosophy, and religiosity, for instance. Therefore, argues Hamming [10] in an insightful article on the effectiveness of mathematical thought, ``we can cope with thinking about the world [only] when it is of comparable size to ourselves and our raw unaided senses.... Evolution, so far, may possibly have blocked us from being able to think in some directions; there could be unthinkable thoughts".

What about other, thinkable, thoughts? If evolution has ensured the development of the human brain with its billions of interconnected neurons to be capable of mathematical thought, are there other aspects of consciousness that are similarly the product of evolution? Indeed, perhaps the sense of soul has also conferred evolutionary advantage, bringing us to this stage of humanness.

In the Footsteps of Gandhi: An Interview with Vandana Shiva

While Mahatma Gandhi is best remembered for his campaign to end British colonialism a half-century ago, the greater part of his life's work was devoted to renewing India's vitality and regenerating its culture from the ground up. He was a tireless champion of what he called swadeshi, or local self-sufficiency. He felt that the soul of India was contained in the village community and that the freedom of the Indian people could only be achieved by creating a confederation of self-governing, self-reliant, self-employed people living in villages and deriving their right livelihood from the products of their homesteads.

As history would have it, Gandhi's ideas were widely ignored following India's independence, especially his teaching of frugality and resource conservation. Like many nations in the developing world, India flirted for a time with socialism but then abandoned it in favor of Western-style market reforms. Today all the mainstream political parties in India are committed to a high-tech future, one that will most likely bring short-term economic prosperity to some Indians but not without long-term social and environmental consequences.

But there is a growing movement underway to reclaim Gandhi's ideas. More and more people, in India and elsewhere, are beginning to question the value of free-market reforms and deregulation. As they see it, the push toward economic globalization has had a host of negative outcomes, from deepening economic disparities and overcrowded cities to ecological destruction and the flattening of local traditions and cultures.

One of the most prominent of Gandhi's intellectual heirs is Vandana Shiva, a physicist and philosopher of science by training who has developed a considerable reputation as a champion of sustainability, self-determination, women's rights, and environmental justice. She has written more than a dozen books, including Monocultures of the Mind,Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, and Biopiracy. She is also well-known in India for her grassroots efforts to preserve forests, organize women's networks, and protect local biodiversity.

Vandana Shiva is the director of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy in Dehra Dun. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the 1998 Alfonso Comin award and the 1993 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize. David Brower, the late environmentalist, once said that Shiva would be his choice for world president, if there were such a thing.

Scott London: You were trained as a physicist and philosopher of science. How did it happen that you branched out into environmental activism, women's issues, and the problems of the global economy?

Vandana Shiva: I did physics because of my love of nature. As a young student of science, I was taught that physics was the way to learn nature. So my travels through physics really are the same urges that make me travel through ecology. They are not really different, except that there is an added dimension of seeing ecological destruction and seeing the very life-support system that makes us survive on this planet being destroyed. That makes me do more than just inquire; it compels me to act and to intervene.

I'm a woman, born the daughter of a feminist and the granddaughter of a feminist grandfather. I don't think I could have avoided working on women's issues. I don't do it as a career or profession; it's my very essence as a human being. When I find too many puzzles about the way explanations are given about why there is inequality — why people who work the hardest in the world end up being the poorest — I can't just sit back and not try to understand why the gaps between people are increasing, or why there are so many homeless and hungry people in the world. To me, all these issues — of justice, of ecology, of a scientific inquiry into nature through physics — come from the same source. In a sense, I haven't really moved; I've travelled the same road.

London: Isn't it somewhat unusual for an Indian woman to be interested in physics and to pursue a doctorate in the field?

Shiva: I was unusual. In fact, I still can't figure out what inspired me to do physics. But since I was nine or ten years old, I wanted to be like Einstein. He was my hero. I knew no physicists. I knew no scientists. I had nobody around me. And I went to a convent that didn't even have higher mathematics and physics. I taught myself these subjects in order to get into university.

But given that I was interested in physics, I think it was easier for me to do physics in India. I think the structures of exclusion are more systematically built up in American society, for example, so that young girls interested in science eventually lose their confidence over time. The structures of exclusion work against them. We have other structures of exclusion in India, but not around modern scientific knowledge. So, if you can make it, nobody stops you because nobody defines it as something women shouldn't be doing. In a way, there are more mathematicians, more doctors, more scientists in India than there are in this country. We even had a woman head of state, and that's something the United States has yet to catch up with.

London: [Laughs] That's right. So, after getting your master's degree in physics, you went on to earn a doctorate in the philosophy of science.

Shiva: Yes. I started out in nuclear physics. But after I became more sensitized to the environmental and health implications of the nuclear system — I was being trained to be the first women in the fast-breeder reactor in India (and was in it when it first went critical) — I didn't feel comfortable with it. So I went into theoretical physics.

I did my masters in elementary particles. But the foundations of elementary particles is quantum theory and there were too many conceptual problems around quantum theory that I couldn't live with. So I decided I was going to work on the foundations of quantum theory. That's what I did my Ph.D on.

The only place it was offered as a program was at the University of Western Ontario. The university collected mathematicians, physicists, philosophers, logicians from across the world. So I was part of this amazing department at its most exciting peak, in what were probably the five or six most glorious years in the foundations of quantum theory work.

I didn't leave physics because of boredom. I left it because other issues compelled me in a bigger way. And I always say to myself, "When I'm 60, I'd like to go back to what I interrupted."

London: What were some of the hot issues that compelled you in those early days?

Shiva: The first issue that compelled me was a very strange split between India being highly development scientifically (we were the third biggest scientific manpower in the world then) and yet at the same time struggling with amazing poverty. The linear equation that says that modern science equals progress and the reduction of poverty did not apply to India. It wasn't working. Something was wrong. So understanding the social context of science and technology started to become one of my imperatives.

The other issue was the disappearance of the Himalayan forest where I had grown up. There was a movement blossoming called the Chipko movement. Peasant women were coming out and embracing trees to prevent logging. My father had been a forester and I had grown up on those hills. I had seen forests and streams disappear. I jumped into this movement and started to work with the peasant women. I learned from them about what forests mean for a rural woman in India in terms of firewood and fodder and medicinal plants and rich knowledge.

My father who was a scientifically trained forester knew something about the forest. But it became clear to me that these women knew much more about the local diversity than any trained forester could. They knew about every nook and corner of their local ecosystem. So I learned from them, and I worked for them, writing their reports and counter-reports.

That's what made me leave university teaching and start an institute called the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Active Resource Policy. It's a very big name for a very humble objective — to put research at the service not just of the rich and powerful in society, or of government and the private sector, but also of grassroots movements.

I saw brilliant ideas coming out of the movement that needed better articulation, that needed elaboration and systematic analysis. I just followed that and it's been very exciting.

London: You've said that the most critical issue confronting the world today is a dual one: the need for ecological sustainability, on the one hand, and social justice on the other. Many people, especially here in the United States, see these issues as separate and unrelated. But for you they are inextricably linked.

Shiva: Yes, for me the two are very closely linked, in part because my view of ecology comes from the margins of Indian society, from the agricultural producers who make up 70 percent of India — people who are dependent on natural resources, on biodiversity, on the land, the forests, the water. Nature is their means of production. So for them ecological destruction is a form of injustice. When the forest is destroyed, when the river is dammed, when the biodiversity is stolen, when fields are waterlogged or turned saline because of economic activities, it is a question of survival for these people. So our environmental movements have been justice movements.

I think the reason it doesn't appear that way in the North American setting has a lot to do with the history of this country. The occupation of America (and Columbus's arrival quite clearly was an occupation, no one can deny that) meant that the entire history of the Native Americans was rendered invisible. The land could only be occupied if it was first defined as empty. So it was defined as a wilderness, even though it had been used by native people for millennia.

So historically nature has been defined as wilderness. Later, when the wilderness movement emerged, it emerged separate from the issue of social inequality and the economic problems of survival. It was a preservationist ecology movement created by an occupying culture. Clearly, a wilderness movement started by Native Americans would not have had the same roots.

So today the environmental movement has become opposed to issues of justice. You can see this in the way issues are framed. It's a permanent replay of jobs-versus-the-environment, in nature-versus-bread. These are extremely artificial dichotomies.

I think we have reached a stage now where we need to find solutions to economic injustice in the same place and in the same ways that we find solutions to sustainability. Sustainability on environmental grounds and justice in terms of everyone having a place in the production and consumption system — these are two aspects of the same issue. They have been artificially separated and have to be put back again in the Western way of thinking.

London: It's interesting to me that even though you were trained as a scientist and schooled in a distinctly Western intellectual tradition, you represent a very different worldview.

Shiva: Well, my training in science is actually one that is very critical of mechanistic science. I was trained in quantum theory which emerged at the turn of the last century. We are a whole century behind in absorbing the leaps that quantum theory made for the human mind. For example, the idea that objects have properties out there in fixed ways is an incorrect idea about the world. Properties are created through relationships and processes. They are not inherent in electrons or photons or quanta any more than they are inherent in soil or trees or people. So my critique of reductionistic science is a critique that I have inherited from my scientific training. But it has been deepened by my experiences as an ecologist, in seeing the ecological destruction taking place today.

My reading of this, basically, is that our dominant structures of science have been extremely good at manipulating objects for single functions and for external objectives. So, for example, if you want a cow to be not just a cow but a milk machine, you can do a very good job at that by creating new hormones like the Bovine Growth Hormone. It might make the cow very ill, it might turn it into a drug addict, and it might even create consumer scares about the health and safety aspects of the milk. But we've gotten so used to manipulating objects and organisms and ecosystems for a single objective that we ignore the costs involved. I call this the "monoculture of the mind." Seen from a monocultural perspective, manipulating objects is very, very clever. But seen from a multidimensional perspective, from a perspective of diversity, this is extremely crude because what we have lost out on is a cow that serves as a source of sustainable energy.

In India, crossbreeding programs aimed at mimicking the milk yields of Western cows like the Jerseys and the Holsteins actually breed out the capacity of our animals to pull ploughs and pulley-cars. So, thanks to cross-breeding programs, we now have humpless cattle with no stamina. If you see cattle as a source of organic manure, animal energy, as well as milk products, then Indian cattle are not inferior. It is only when you measure them as milk machines that they become inferior. What if we measured the dairy cows of America or Jersey or the Swiss Alps in terms of their work functions? They would be terribly inferior.

So a single, one-dimensional way of thinking has created a monoculture of the mind. And the monoculture of the mind has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. This is the root of why we have pitted equity against ecology and sustainability against justice.

London: We've tended to justify these monocultures in the name of growth and human development.

Shiva: When you take the entire system into account, ways of developing more of something in one dimension can actually create scarcities in another. If we say we have to increase production because people need more food, more housing, more meat, or more milk, we can make one thing grow in a certain way. But by doing that we create externalities so that there are scarcities in other related things. So, for example, there are scarcities in drinking water when you pollute the groundwater with nitrates. There is a scarcity in diversity when you create huge cornfields with the same strain of corn so that when one disease strikes — which happened in the United States in the 70s — all the cornfields in the country are wiped out. That was the first time the U.S. realized the value of diversity in agriculture and began to discuss genetic resources and their conservation.

The system of technological production that we have today has been justified in terms of creating more goods to feed more people and to meet more needs. But it actually destroys more of the resources that we need in order to meet those multiple needs. If we shift to an ecological perception, a diversity perception, we realize that some of the instruments of which we are very proud are actually extremely primitive for dealing with nature. To me that is the great lesson of ecological awareness at the turn of the millennium.

London: You have spoken out against the patenting of plants and herbs, something the pharmaceutical industry has been pursuing very aggressively in recent years.

Shiva: Yes, it's a phenomenon that started in the United States in which corporations make claims on the life forms, biodiversity and innovations of other cultures by applying for patents on them. For example, pesticides made from the neem tree in India are patented. There is now a patent restricting the use of an herb called philantis neruri for curing jaundice. An even more blatant example is the use of turmeric for healing wounds, which is something every mother and grandmother does in every home in India. Now the Mississippi Medical Center claims to have "invented" the capacity of turmeric to heal wounds.

London: You describe a dramatic case in which some American researchers traveled to India and basically co-opted time-honored and widely known folk-remedies for purely commercial purposes.

Shiva: Absolutely. I have called this phenomenon of stealing common knowledge and indigenous science "biopiracy" and "intellectual piracy." According to patent systems we shouldn't be able to patent what exists as "prior art." But the United States patent system is somewhat perverted. First of all, it does not treat the prior art of other societies as "prior art." Therefore anyone from the United States can travel to another country, find out about the use of a medicinal plant, or find a seed that farmers use, come back here, claim it as an invention or an innovation, take a patent on it, and grab an exclusive right to the use of the products or processes that are linked to that knowledge.

London: Do any other examples come to mind?

Shiva: I've just been told that Nestle has taken out patents on the making of pullao. (Pullao is the way we make our rice in India, with either vegetables or meat or whatever.) Before you know it, every common use of plants will be patented by a Western corporation.

To me, this is an absolute outrage. It's worse than slave trade because what is being traded is the very knowledge that makes survival possible for 80 percent of the people of this world. These 80 percent live on the biodiversity and the knowledge they have evolved as part of a rich collective heritage involving the use of seeds for growing crops and medicinal plants for healing.

The statement that this kind of piracy is an "invention" is a bit like the statement that Columbus was the first to "discover" this country. In fact, this country was "discovered" over millennia by the Native Americans.

The enclosure of the biological and intellectual commons in this way is a real threat to the future of people everywhere because it creates a situation where common practices that have been part of people's lives for generations become monopolies of a handful of pharmaceutical, agribusiness and agrichemical corporations. People then become incapable of looking after their own needs. Every farmer must go to the seed industry every year to buy their seed and pay an 80 percent royalty to a corporation. This is already happening in this country. Over-the-fence exchanges have started to be treated as crimes. Or, if you need a biological pest control, you can no longer use the need seed in your back yard. Instead you have to depend on the Grace Corporation or some other entity. That kind of dependency basically leads to increased poverty and increased ecological destruction.

London: How do you and the women that you work with counter this?

Shiva: We have a multi-levelled program of resistance. The first step is challenging it as a moral and ethical issue — in the same way as slave trade was challenged on the grounds that it's unethical to trade people. You can't pirate knowledge; it's illegitimate, and shouldn't be done.

The second step is to develop methods of rejuvenating people's knowledge, of making sure that people regain confidence in their own knowledge so that biodiversity and knowledge is kept in the common domain.

The third involves working on legal alternatives. One of the movements we have developed is to say that, just as intellectual property rights protect the inventions of individuals, common rights are needed to protect the common intellectual heritage of indigenous peoples. These are rights that are recognized through the Convention on Biological Diversity. We are working to make sure that they become foundations of our jurisprudence.

It's not very easy because every second day we are threatened, as a country, by the United States Foreign Trade Act. It has a clause in it called Special 301 which says that if India or another country doesn't have laws like those in the United States which allow these monopolies to grow, then there will be a trade retaliation.

So we have to build movements in the face of trade retaliation on the basis of people's democratic rights, on the basis of an ancient heritage of collective innovation. We work from the grassroots all the way to the national government and the World Trade Organization. It basically means being very multidimensional in our campaigns. And that is where part of the fun is. It involves both resistance and creativity. It involves constructive action, while at the same time saying "no."

London: The emphasis on peaceful non-cooperation has a lot in common with Gandhi's approach to social change.

Shiva: Well, in fact, when we first started out, we called it the seed satyagraha. As you know, Gandhi had started the independence movement with the salt satyagraha. Satyagraha means "struggle for truth." The salt satyagrahawas a direct action of non-cooperation. When the British tried to create salt monopolies, he went to the beach in Dindi, picked up the salt and said, "Nature has given us this for free, it was meant to sustain us, we will not allow it to become a monopoly to finance the Imperial Army."

We've done exactly the same kinds of actions around biodiversity and seed. Nature has gifted this rich biological diversity to us. We will not allow it to become the monopoly of a handful of corporations. We will keep it as the basis of our wealth and our sustenance.

For us, not cooperating in the monopoly regimes of intellectual property rights and patents and biodiversity — saying "no" to patents on life, and developing intellectual ideas of resistance — is very much a continuation of Gandhiansatyagraha. It is, for me, keeping life free in its diversity. That is the satyagraha for the next millennium. It is what the ecology movement must engage in, not just in India, but in the United States as well. People who believe in the freedom of ideas must engage in this wherever they are.

London: You quote Gandhi as saying, "In the resistance is built the creative construction of an alternative." So putting up resistance is not just an act of saying "no," I take it. It's also part of a very constructive effort to find a better alternative.

Shiva: Yes. We always draw lessons from the independence movement. Gandhi did not merely say "no" to the imported textile that was destroying our textile industry; he put everyone to work spinning cloth. The spinning wheel became the symbol of Indian independence. So we always say, "if the spinning wheel was the symbol of our first independence, then the seed is the symbol of our second independence."

London: The most urgent ecological issue facing the planet today, by many accounts, is overpopulation. The issue is often framed, particularly here in the West, as a "third world problem" since the birthrate is highest in poor countries. What is your perspective?

Shiva: The people who see the population explosion in the Malthusian way — as a geometric progression — forget that population growth is not a biological issue. People are not increasing in numbers out of stupidity and ignorance. Population growth is an ecological phenomenon linked very intimately to other issues, such as the usurpation of the resources which allow people to live.

In England, the population explosion can be linked very clearly with the enclosure of the commons that uprooted the peasants from their land. In India, it was the same thing: the population increased at the end of the 18th century when the British took over and Indian lands were colonized. Instead of the land feeding Indian people it started to feed the British empire. So we had destitution. Destitute people who don't have their own land to feed themselves can only feed themselves by having larger numbers, therefore they multiply. It's the rational response of a dispossessed people.

The population explosion is an ecological phenomenon of displacement. Unless we solve that ecological problem of displacing people - to build huge dams, to build motorways, to take away what people need in order to survive — we will keep pumping more and more money into population programs. We will have more and more coercive and violent methods through which women's bodies are treated as experimental grounds for new contraceptives. Yet we will not have a solution to the problem of numbers.

London: How do we address the problem?

Shiva: The problem of numbers can only be dealt with by recognizing that people have a fundamental right to economic security. If you provide them with economic and environmental security, the population will stabilize itself. The example of Kerala shows this very clearly. Kerala is a state in south India in which the trends are the absolute opposite from the rest of the third world and from the rest of India. There are two or three reasons. There is tremendous equality between genders in Kerala. Also, there has been a very strong land reform program in the state so that even the poorest of people own the plot of land on which their hut is built. For example, landless laborers might not own the land on which they do their agricultural work, but they own the land on which they have their hut. That resource-guarantee has tremendous implications for the security of the people.

When I was in the capital of Kerala state, I remember some rich people telling me, "You can't get the maids to come every day out here. They have a house and don't need to work every day because if they stay home they won't starve."

That is where the population control issue needs to be addressed. Population control is not an issue involving contraceptives for third world women. It is an issue of ecological justice.

London: Do you have any great role-models?

Shiva: A I told you earlier, Einstein quite clearly was a big role model. Now there are all kinds of rumors that he played the fool with women and was very nasty with his wife, and maybe if I had known all that, he wouldn't have been such a hero.

I do sculpting sometimes when I have the time, and the first thing I sculpted was a bust of Einstein. It still sits on my table and still inspires me. He was a person who triggered my imagination and my ideas.

Gandhi is the other person. I believe Gandhi is the only person who knew about real democracy — not democracy as the right to go and buy what you want, but democracy as the responsibility to be accountable to everyone around you. Democracy begins with freedom from hunger, freedom from unemployment, freedom from fear, and freedom from hatred. To me, those are the real freedoms on the basis of which good human societies are based.

The women of Chipko and people like Sunderlal Bahaguna who have been part of Chipko have also been tremendous role models for me. Having worked for years and years on environmental issues, there are a handful of creative people across the world who constantly inspire in their interactions — which is what makes this kind of work inspiring. It makes it worthwhile to leave home and travel all the way to California, to be with the people in the Forum on International Globalization (Edward Goldsmith, Jerry Mander, and others), people of creativity, integrity, and deep fearlessness. There are plenty of people in the world who inspire me.

London: Are you hopeful as you look toward the future?

Shiva: I'm absolutely confident that things will change. I believe that we will see a lot of destruction, but I believe that if we can see the right patterns and draw the right lessons from that destruction, we might be able to rebuild before it's too late. And then I have that ultimate optimism that even if we can't, life will rebuild itself. In a way, the global economy might collapse, but Gaia won't, and people's ingenuity won't. We will rebuild society, we will rebuild local economies, we will rebuild human aspirations. The kind of global monoculture in which everyone feels as if they have to run faster than they are running to stay in the same place cannot continue. I think we will become disenchanted with the glamour of globalization.