#but i believe i wouldn’t have gotten away with killing santa claus in december so maybe it’s for the best | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

woonybin · 4 years

Photo

ONE FUN HOUR WITH RICHARD DAWKINS AND BRIAN GREENE

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Starting it off with telling Richard’s life stories which are emphasized in the book An Appetite For Wonder, in this interview which leads to a wide-ranging conversation between physicist Brian Greene and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the nerds proceed to cover the expansiveness of the human brain. This is worth reading because it gives you a combined perspective of a scientist who believes in the existence of higher power, and a scientist who doesn’t. Also, it’s a fun conversation.

HAPPY READING! <3 (click on the heart emoji)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

To get us going and to sort of clear the air a little bit, you know there's been some ambiguity about your position. Some uncertainty and I thought we could just sort of hit it head-on. Richard Dawkins, do you believe in God?

Which God?

[crowd laughs]

No, I don't believe in any.

Alright, that's out of the way, we're good now we can keep going. So we're here to talk about this great book that Richard just came out with, published today in the United States, An Appetite for Wonder. And this is actually volume one of a two volume memoir and it kind of ends with a cliffhanger where you've just published The Selfish Gene. So the question is, why that structure? And in particular, why is The Selfish Gene the publication of that book and natural breaking point?

It wasn't intended to be that way. I actually signed a contract with the publishers to do the whole thing in one go and when I got halfway through, when I got to the age of 35, I thought I want bit of a sense of achievement here and so I thought I'll stop now and I will publish it as the first volume. I was going to stop before The Selfish Gene but then the publisher said “no you've got to go and go through The Selfish Gene that's got to be the end of the first volume.”

It is a natural break point because before that, I was a research scientist with a white lab coat giving lectures killing tutorials at Oxford. And afterwards, I went on doing that as well but I then wrote a whole lot more books and did things like television and radio visits. My life did rather change as a result of The Selfish Gene, so it was a natural breakpoint.

I mean, certainly that is the book where you became known to the world, right? That's certainly where I first encountered you. I was a physics student at Harvard, not doing any zoology or biology, and The Selfish Gene A chapter was put into a reading packet for a course in philosophy that I was taking. I do hope they gave you royalties for the several copies that they did. But the writing was, for me, a revelation. Because it was the first time that real difficult science was just being spoken in plain language. So, for me it was a wonderful experience. But certainly I didn't know much about your early life until reading this book and I suspect many are in the same boat, so I thought maybe we just do a quick history that you cover lyrically in the first chapters of the book.

Where were you born?

Nairobi. A place of rather unfortunate association just at the moment. I lived in Kenya for only the first two years of my life, and then went back to what’s now called Malawi and was then called Nyasaland, where my father was in the British colonial service. That was his career. And so I don't remember Kenya at all but I do remember Malawi.

And what was schooling like?

Well, I was sent to boarding school at the age of 7 in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now is Zimbabwe. It was a remarkable school. It was a very very English boarding school. It was a kind of export of a rather famous English boarding school called The Dragon School which is in Oxford. And it's a very fine school. And a master from The Dragon School called Tank-that was his nickname-I thought the nickname referred to sort of tank you have in your roof, but it obviously in fact meant the kind of military vehicle that won’t stop for anything. That must have been how he got his nickname. He went out to Africa to seek his fortune and started a kind of son of Dragon School called Eagle School, and they had the same kind of traditions. They had a very adventurous spirit, they had the tradition of calling the teachers by their nicknames. And it’s the only school I've heard of where-apart from the dragon school where this is encouraged-you even said and called the headmaster tank when he was beating you. “Sorry, Tank.” you say.

Hahahaha. And is there something about that experience that you look to now or that you would say have your fans or your readers know that was really highly impressionable on who you became? I mean, is that a vital part when you look back?

I'm not sure about that. I mean, it was so English although it was in Africa. It was a very very English school and we played cricket and it was just like being in an English school really. Home life was a little bit more exotic and home life was getting the same. Home life in Africa was a rather spoiled privileged one. It was like Edwardian England. We had servants, there was a cook, and people served a table, and there's a gardener and everything. In other respects, it wasn't very luxurious. There were no water closets or anything like that. No pipe water. Baths had to be filled with what I heated on the stove, but there was a service to do it for you.

There's one thing that struck me running through the early sections, the early chapters of the book where you were looking back on, say, young Richard. Young Richard Dawkins as kind of, I don't know, naive and gullible? In some ways. And you told a couple of stories. One, you're playing hide-and-go-seek and the person you're playing with said that they were invisible and that's why you couldn't find them and now you look back and say “how could I have believed that?”. You also told a charmila story about lightning and thunderstorms. What was that one?

Uh, that was our house that was struck by like--

one where you were lying in bed I hope this came from your book I might be really embarrassed if this is from another book uh but you're lying in bed and someone told you that if you get hit by low--

Yeah yeah I got it. Yes, I was gullible. That was in the dormitory actually. In my English school when we'd move back to England. There was a sort of nighttime storyteller who would hold a spellbound with his horror stories. And he told us for example that there was a kind of insect which would leap sideways from the wall, onto your temple, dig a hole in your temple and bury a bag of poison in there. He also told us that, when he was struck by lightning you would know nothing about it for 15 minutes and only after 15 minutes would blood start trickling out of both your ears. And we all believed this. And when there was a big thunderstorm, you're all waiting in terror, timing 15 minutes. So I wasn't always a skeptic.

So you look back now, you’re saying in the book how it's vital to teach kids critical thinking so they wouldn't believe stories and fantasies like that. Not everyone would agree with that. And I know you've gotten in some conversation about, I mean you know if you have a bunch of kids that are playing like, you know, Timmy and Jimmy have these ships going near a black hole and rushing all over and you got a little Poindexter in the corner and say, “you can't do that, you can't go faster than the speed of light.” It's like, whose brain is really firing on all cylinders and more importantly, who would you rather play with.

Yes, I agree. I played spaceships with my friend Jill Jackson and our beds were spaceships and we would make up the fantasy as we went along and she would say “Captain, Captain! The troons! They're attacking on the starboard side!” and I would sort of steer the spaceship away and so on. I think that sort of fantasy is wonderful. I think I probably draw the line at magic--supernatural magic, such as that we're frogs turned into princes and things like that. Because that does, I think, possibly teach a wrong attitude to reality. Reality is so wonderful without supernatural magic and I think I would have benefited from being a bit more skeptical.

Part here you tell the story of when I was fooled by this chap who said he was invisible. I was playing hide-and-seek with him. He was a nice African man. Playing hide-and-seek with him and I looked in a particular hut and he wasn't there. And then I came back later and looked in the same hut and he was there. And he told me that he'd been there all along but had made himself invisible. And I found that a more plausible explanation than that he had simply been lying. I think it would be good if children were a bit more skeptical than that.

Can I ask you one question that’s more for my own personal use? I'm Jewish, my wife is Catholic. What do you do about Santa Claus? Where does that fit in?

Well it's a bit of a mystery because all children believe in Santa Claus and then they learned it's not true. But for some reason, they don't then generalize the principle. My parents have lied to me about this. I don't mind. I don't want to be a killjoy, I don't want to be a scrooge about this. But instead of telling a child there is no Santa Claus, what about saying something like “well let's just work this out, how many chimneys are there in the world?”

But here's the problem. I tried that approach and my wife got furious at me spoiling this wonder of Santa Claus. So I went out, and I got this 99 cent app that showed Santa going around the earth in a very fast spaceship and I could show the kids to re-convince them that Santa Claus was real. But putting that to the side, the curious thing that has happened--and I think this is really the question that I have--it has provided an opportunity, an unexpected opportunity, for that kind of critical thought because we celebrate both Hanukkah and Christmas, these presents come in December, now the Christmas presents come from the North Pole delivered by Santa, and the Jewish Hanukkah presents come from amazon delivered by FedEx. Ultimately the presents all get in one big heap six months later, something breaks and I'm like “oh don't worry about it, we got from Amazon we can just order another” and they're like “You got that at Amazon? You told us it’s Santa.” So really, my son in particular has now gone through a very dedicated analysis, critical thinking where on his own he's coming to this conclusion. It seems better to allow someone to go through that process of having some idea that really doesn't hold water and let them find leaks.

There's a lot of that and I think that's right. I can remember believing that if you prayed for something hard enough, you'd get it.

That’s true.

Hahaha. I tried it experimentally and it didn't work.

But would you say that your own life, looking back now--again you know I'm not trying to be an armchair psychology--looking back through the book, it strikes me that part of your passionate devotion to making sure that people don't hold these false ideas. Does it come from looking back at young Richard and having that sense of a gas? “How could he have believed that?”

No I don't think so--I'm not a good psychologist--uhm no but I do think that you and I both know that reality has a better magic anyway. Yes. And somehow it's demeaning to feed a child with the magic of spells of frogs turning into princes, sleeping beauties, werewolves or ghosts and things like that. Because reality is so much more wonderful. It's so much more magical. And I think it gets in the way but I get kicked around the room whenever I say this once--spoiling the magic of childhood. I want to put better magic into childhood.

Right. There's a judgment call, I guess, as to when a young mind is sort of ready to really appreciate that kind of wonder and when the other kind of magic is preparing them in some way for it.

What may be preparing them, may also be preparing them in a false direction. I mean, I certainly was deep devoted to Dr. Dolittle who could talk to animals and all the plots depend upon his ability to talk to animals. I desperately wanted to be dr. Dolittle. And I thought that if I believed it hard enough I would be able to talk to animals and I would be able to go one better than Dr. Dolittle. I would do it by telepathy and I would have attempted to telepathically attract all the animals to come to where I lived.

I don't think a child should have been brought up in such a way as to believe that just willpower can achieve something when it can't.

Right. You then moved back from Africa to England. How old were you? And what drew your family back?

I was 8. And well my father thought that his career would be in the British colonial service but unexpectedly he was left in the will of an extremely distant cousin. I suppose you could call it the family estate. It was rather reduced to state by the time in 1946 when he got it. I had been in the Dawkins family. It's an English estate since 1723 when Henry Dawkins bought it. And in 1946 it was owned by Major Harry Wood Dawkins who was childless and had no closer relations. And so he left it very unexpectedly to my father who never heard of Harry Wood Dawkins. And suddenly this telegram arrived saying that he'd been left at a farm in England. And even then he thought he'd his career would go on being in Africa, but then the tenant on the English estate unexpectedly died and then my parents then were faced with a decision whether to find a new tenant or whether to forsake their life in Africa, and take up an entirely new life in England. And my father retrained as an English farmer and gave up his colonial pension, gave up his whole career, and we moved to England.

How was that transition for you?

Well I was sorry to leave school. Started in a completely new school which was a rather similar kind of school, actually, in England. It was much colder in England of course, wetter. So I missed Africa in many ways.

Now you go through a quite compelling description--which I won't be able to justice to in the short time we have--of your school years but then it came time to apply to university and oxford was one place that seemed like a natural place for you to try to go because you had a long family history there.

Yes. This was family history. My father and grandfather were both adamant that I should go to paleo College Oxford where I think 11 members of the Dawkins family had been. And it was unthinkable to them that I wouldn't get in but the school didn't think I would get in. They thought I wasn't up to it. And I probably wasn't up to it, actually. I was coached for it by a very very conscientious school teacher Yohan Thomas who although he thought I didn't have a chance--That's like Stanley Kaplan here--he had me at his house for week after week in the evenings, coaching me. And he got me in, thank goodness. That was, if anything, the making of me.

You initially had your sights set on biochemistry and you described in the book--I just give one sentence ‘cause I found it particularly--you noted that “the tutor who interviewed me, the kindly Sandy Oxton, who later became master Trinity, declined--thank goodness--to let me in as a biochemist. Perhaps because he was one himself and would have had to teach me but offered me a place to read zoology.” So what was it about the young applicant Dawkins that made you unsuited to biochemistry but he saw zoology as a natural place?

Maybe he just didn't want to teach me. But uhm, I later recognized that zoology was perfect for me. The system at Oxford is you have to write an essay every week and you're sent into the library and you’re given no textbooks. You're given a reading list of original research literature and you have to go and follow references to the backyard to be a real scholar. And I loved that. I really flourished in that atmosphere. It took me a while to get the hang of it but I really flat flourished. And zoology was perfect for that because the sort of subjects we got asked to write about for our essays were controversial subjects where you had to weigh up the contrary points of view, way up evidence on both sides, come to your own conclusion. I don't think that would have been a crew in biochemistry. I suspect in biochemistry it would have been a lot more learning of lots and lots of facts. I could be doing the substitute and injustice but certainly in zoology we would be given subjects like, is evolution progressive; controversial difficult opinions on both sides; read the literature; become a sort of world authority on the subject.

And with those tutorials, were you challenged in those? Did you read out your essay?

You read it out aloud. Yes, you could be challenged. The practice of reading aloud has rather distraught now. Now the tutor is expected to read it ahead of time which means he chooses even more conscientious. My Uncle Bill who appears in the book a generation earlier was also at Valeo college and he was rather good at rugby and cricket on things and he wasn't quite so conscientious with writing his essays. On one occasion he--I'm sorry to say--copied his essay out of a book. I'm sure he didn't always do that. But anyway he was reading his essay out. And the tutor silently rose from his chair, went over to the bookshelf, selected a book then began following with his finger, and my poor uncle was forced to simply go on reading his essay right through to the end whereupon the tutor snapped the book shot and said “I see you agree with Mr. Sellars sir”

So you enter the undergraduate years there and you stayed at Oxford for graduate as well.

Yes. Well, I joined the research group of Niko Tinbergen who's a very famous scholar of animal behavior. He later won a Nobel Prize and he had a flourishing research group with a wonderful atmosphere. I became a graduate student among other graduate students. It was one of the happiest times of my life. We had Friday evening seminars which stayed with me forever. They lasted two hours but you didn't notice the time flash by and the reason the time flashed by was that we didn't just listen to somebody giving a talk and then have questions. The whole time was interruption, argument, discussion. Nico himself encouraged that. He almost wouldn't let the speaker get the first sentence out before he wouldn't interrupt “yah, yah but what do you mean by--” and then we would be off. That was a formative educational experience for me.

Can I tell you one thing that was interesting when I read it, perhaps even a little surprising? You describe how the gold standard from your perspective and--correct me if I'm reading too much into it--was to not just do qualitative analysis in zoology but to find quantitative results, to find a mathematical formula which you describe one example of, we can actually describe the behavior of these pecking chicks mathematically with precision. And that is my language and I know when I hear something like that, first winter is there a little, you know, PE in here. “Physics Envy” is what we call this because that's after all what our lifeblood is.

Exactly, yes. I'm glad you picked that out. It was my ambition to do that. If you want to know what's going on inside the head of an animal, the neurobiological way, the physiological way is to cut the skull open and look or stick electrodes in and that's bloody, and I didn't like that. An alternative way which appealed to me is to--it’s really Popperian philosophy of science where you think up, you dream up a model by a sort of imagine a model, a theory, a hypothesis of what might be going on inside the animal's head, deduce with algebra, predictions from that model and then test the predictions with as much data as you can in order to get rid of the statistical noise and get accurate predictions. And I really wanted the predictions to be quantitatively precise as you say because it has said any fool can predict that a quantity X would be larger than a quantity Y, but how much larger X should be actually a particular mathematical function of Y and the more data you gather, the more data you pile in, the closer it should approximate to this exact prediction and that's what I found. I couldn't claim that the conclusion I drew about what was going on inside my little birds heads was of any great interest. For me it was rather more to demonstrate the method that you can do that sort of science without actually opening the animal out.

But what would make me nervous as a physicist in that situation is, I look at the physical system and it's so complex. The reason why I do physics is because we study electrons, individual particles that have such a simplicity in context, such a paucity of distinct variables that we think that our mathematics might actually be describing what's going on. I'd be so damn nervous in your situation to try to think mathematically about this. Does that play into it?

Rightly so, I think. I think that's right but biology is so complicated. Biology is a mess in a way, compared to physics. It’s different levels. You're studying balls, really.

Yes that's right.

Either little quantum foreign-owned atoms, or Newton's balls, or billiard balls. And so the mathematics that you do is incredibly precise, I think. Richard Feynman once said the predictions of quantum theories--some of them at least--are out to so many significant figures that it's equivalent to predicting the width of North America to the width of one human hair. That's physics now and biology doesn't even begin to approach that level of precision.

Do you think it will?

No, I don't. I doubt it. But on the other hand the conclusions we try to draw, we can already draw without--you know there are certain things in biology we know are true and we don't have to worry about further, we know we know that evolution is true for example, it is definitely true, nothing's going to change that.

Right. So that was your graduate work. You went off to Berkeley--

I went off to Berkeley as a very very junior assistant professor and spent two years there teaching animal behavior and taking part in riots and demonstrations and things like that.

And then you came back came back to--Oxford in 1970 as a lecturer and fellow of New College Oxford in--1973 three years after you got back there was a fateful strike--

Yes. In the early seventies there was a bad, almost general strike in Britain which led to what was called the three-day weekend. There were power cuts and it was impossible to get on with the lab research so I got out my lecture notes on animal behavior and started to turn portions of them into a book which eventually became The Selfish Gene and I only actually wrote one or two chapters of it before the strike came to an end unfortunately from one point of view and so I went back to my research and put the first two chapters of The Selfish Eden in a drawer, didn't return to them until two or three years later.

Right. But then you did, you wrote The Selfish Gene--

Yes and in a way that was a good love because in the intervening years there were very significant advances in evolutionary theory which I was able to incorporate.

Were you worried? I mean when I wrote my first book I waited till I had tenure and people started to say you're going to get the whole Carl Sagan effect of people sniping at you in the community, it didn't happen to my face, who the heck knows what happens behind your back. Was that a concern because you were, you know, many days ahead?

Well, I don't know. I think the Carl Sagan effect has died away actually--now, yes. you're talking 76 right--yes. No it didn't worry me. Possibly should have done but no I don't think so. I don't think I've suffered from that.

Of course. So from there you've gone on to write a variety of other books expounding the various ideas of evolution and you've of course as we all famously know moved into the position as one of the strong proponents of atheism. I made a joke about it early but if you don't mind, can we spend a few minutes talking about God?

Yeah, sure, of course.

So I'm just wondering. I, too, get asked at many lectures, my view on God. And my typical answer is that sure there could be a god that's behind it all and what we're doing is--physicists, chemists, biologists are working out God's laws and if that's how it is, I am thrilled to be part of that noble journey. I then add by saying “look, there's no evidence for that. I don't see any reason to believe that. And if what we're doing is just working out the laws of physics or chemistry or biology and that's all that you need for a universe, I'm thrilled to be part of that journey. So the bottom line is, you know from a sociological, from historical viewpoint religion is very very interesting but it's kind of profoundly uninteresting to answer the deep questions because I feel like all I’m doing is replacing one mysterious set of words framed scientifically, with another set of equally mysterious words that are framed non scientifically and now I should say after I say that, I always [looks up to the ceiling] “apologize?” because, “I am all for hedging your bets.. I'm not beyond that at all.”

What do you think of that view?

[crowd laughs]

Well, I think that the sort of Newtonian principle--Newton thought that he was working out God's laws and he was demonstrating the glory of God's mind when he worked out the laws of mechanics and so on. I'm not so at ease with that as you seem to be because it does seem to me that if there is a super natural superhuman intelligence that worked it all out, in a way that undermines the entire scientific enterprise because we are--maybe it may be an evolutionary biologist feels this more strongly--the whole enterprise of evolutionary biology is to explain how you get prodigious complexity and design from virtually nothing. I mean we hand over to physicists when we can go beyond the virtually nothing to the absolutely nothing,but if you start from quite an advanced level bacteria and work up to two mammals and humans, we have a working theory which we know is true which explains how you can go from great simplicity to prodigious complexity and finally to the sort of complexity which is capable of designing things, of creating things, of working out how to do things. If you are suddenly going to insert a designing machine, a creator, and intelligence of the root of the universe, you've just undermined your entire enterprise because your entire enterprise has been to explain how you get to something complicated enough to do design.

But even if that being just set in place--the laws--and then stood back?

Even that. Even the deistic god who sets the laws in place and withdraws. If the implication is that those laws were cunningly designed, cunningly crafted as many people think they were so that atoms should come into existence, so that chemistry should come into existence, so that stars should come into existence, so that nuclear reactions in stars could produce the elements so that they didn't explode, and we'd get a suitable chemistry to make life and then the origin of life and so on. If the deistic god thought all that through and set up the laws of physics, then he would have to be damned clever. He would have to be the physicist to end all physicists. I don't care if he then withdraws. He needs an explanation in his own right. And it seems to me that the noble scientific enterprise is to start from as near nothing as you can get.

As finely as I agree with everything that you say, but I have no issue. I’ve never heard it from you but some of your “group” has gotten kind of mad at me, calling me an accommodationist. I have sort of no problem with that really smart God physics guy behind it all--

I don't understand why not. I really don't know. Why doesn't that undermine the whole scientific enterprise?

Because again, I don't think it's true, but if it turned out to be true, I would feel like hey there's this fantastic puzzle that we worked out from this point forward and yeah that being set it all up in motion but it is a great journey to figure out--

oh yeah that’s for sure but aren’t you dissatisfied because you haven't explained? You've explained precisely nothing because it was all there in--

well I guess I would say it's sort of like if you're given one of those brain puzzlers in a book, some smart author has worked out the brain puzzler but damn I still enjoy figuring it all out and it feels very satisfying, I feel like I got somewhere. Now I feel funny saying this because I don't believe what I'm saying is true. But I'm talking more of course--I know you don't believe it but you shouldn't even be satisfied by it. I still do, I still feel satisfied.

Puzzle solving is great, you could enjoy solving crossword puzzles although you know that a human mind set it. But you want to know what gave rise to that mind that set the crossword, and we know that.

I agree, you know, if you can go further back, the further back you can go, the happier I am. Maybe that's a way of saying it. And I might be pretty damn happy to go from a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second after the beginning till today, and if we could fill in that other piece and didn't have to mention a creator, I'd be pretty happy too. But it's not as though we had to--all of a sudden I feel like the whole enterprise was a waste of time.

No you wouldn't feel that.

I guess that's sort of what I'm saying.

Maybe it's because biologists are so--it's our business to explain where brains that are capable of designing come from.

But you don't have to even go anywhere near as far back as I do so I thought since you'd put the wall much further ahead in time, so if I'm satisfied, then by God you should be satisfied!

That's not true. Hahahaha.

Alright. Let me change the question. It’s a pragmatic, even strategic question. You know there are times that people challenge physics. That Einstein's false, Newton's false, all this sort of stuff and typically I don't engage with them because I've never found it satisfying. I never found it fruitful. You on the other hand do engage with people who really go after evolution as saying it's just not true and I was watching an interesting video--again if any of this you don't want to talk about, push us along--but there was a video with this woman Wendy Wright and I found it very interesting to watch. I saw you making all the good arguments, but a good argument will never make headway if the participants don't agree to certain basic rules of engagement. And at some point I was wondering if it was fighting a just losing battle. Did you find that satisfying? That conversation?

Of course not. But in a way. She was purporting to be playing by the same rules because what she kept saying was “Show me the evidence, show me the evidence!”

But you must have known they're going in, right?

Well I kept saying “Okay let's go to the museum I will show you the evidence!”

But you're assuming that if you laid out a logical organelle--I know--she would be convinced?

But that is clearly not. In her case I would not have aspired to change her mind but this was a television program we were making. I was interviewing her for television and so I didn't really haven't had my eye on changing her mind. I had my eye on the two million people who were going to be watching the television.

And what does the data show? That was the other question I have. Has this approach really been effective?

I don't know. I suspect so. My guess is that there are a very large number of people who are sitting on the fence. They have perhaps hardly even realized there was a fence to sit on. And who will see something like my interview with Wendy Wright and will be swayed to think “this is actually quite an interesting subject and I will indeed go and look at the evidence and I'm hoping it’s true.”

And is that better than my approach? Again my approach has always been sort of, and it’s yours too, really, to show people the wonder of science. yeah and get them excited about the power of scientific explanation rather than trying to say “this other stuff makes no sense, don't touch it.” But just show them the wonder of this. It goes back to Santa Claus really. Do you want somebody to discover the power of the scientific approach or do you want to tell them that this other approach doesn't work.

Yeah there's a lot in that and I think we probably need to do it both ways.

Right. Can I go to a related question? An allied question that I have which is, how do you feel about a human being holding irrational or contradictory beliefs at the same time? Let me give you a concrete example. So my father died 27 years ago. I know he's dead. I still talk to him on a regular basis and there are cases when I'll ask him to do things. As a physicist, I know that makes no sense. As a human being, I don't give a shit.

When you hear that, do you say “man you're an idiot”?

[crowd laughs]

No, I think that’s quite normal.

Do you find yourself doing it?

No but I wouldn't be terribly shocked. It wouldn't shock me.

If a plane was going down and you’re on it, do you pray to god?

No I wouldn't.

Would you even invoke God even for a moment?

I might use the word God.

What would you mean by that? Which God? [crowd laughs] which god did you mean?

I certainly do use the word God. It’s part of the language. There are times when one says “oh my god, oh god”. [crowd laughs]

Quick related subject: a question I've always had is, do you think that there are fundamental limits to intelligence? We hear this data--again tell me if my facts and figures are wrong--that we share, say, ninety-eight percent of our DNA with our close cousins, say, chimps. So that two percent difference is supposedly responsible for the differences between us. A question I have is, is that the right way of looking at it? Or is the vast majority of the DNA doing sort of under the radar processes and the real part that we should be looking at, we differ by fifty percent or eighty percent on that?

I think that's right, yes. All mammals actually share the great majority of their genes and the way to think of it is, you know that a computer like a Mac or a PC has a lot of toolbox routines which are under the yard and they're doing things like doing the pulldown menus and the dish shifting the windows and all that sort of stuff, that's why all mac programs look alike because they're all calling the same toolbox routines. And the difference between one program and another, like the difference between Microsoft Word, Mac paint or something, is just the order in which those toolbox routines are called. And so there's a sort of higher order genes which are calling the lower order order genes like the toolbox routines. And the difference between a human and a mouse, not that many genes did different, whether the ones it's the order in which they're called, and you started by saying, limits to human intelligence. The thing that impresses me is that we are African Apes and we are adapted to hunt and gather on the African savannah and you wouldn't think that in order to do that you would need to be able to compose a symphony or write a poem or do physics.

In fact, those who did physics probably got eaten. They should have been looking out there.

Exactly. There seems to be an enormous capacity for emergence in the human brain when you add culture, when you add the remarkably fast process of cultural evolution with no effective genetic change at all. And what we can do, even if you just do what Archimedes did and then go on to what Newton did and then go on to what Einstein did and go into what modern quantum theorists do, it's so far beyond anything that our wild ancestors were ever called upon to do it.

But why can we do it if it were not selected for in a very basic way, why is there?

Think of it this analogy. A computer is called a computer because it's a calculator. It does arithmetic.

Alright then this is like a side benefit?

Yeah I mean once you've got the principle of a programmable computer which originally was built to do mathematics, you suddenly find it can play chess, it can word process, it can do your accounts, it can simulate Vancouver. It doesn't require much additional effort once you've got this idea of a programmable versatile machine. You could make a computer to absolutely become another kind of machine. right it can simulate anything and I think you call that an emergent property and I think that the human brain, accidentally as a by-product because of something about what was necessary in order to survive in the African plains or something, gave us brains which were capable of showing these emergent properties and who knows what the limits are. I mean who would’ve ever predicted that you could get a genius like Einstein? What’s next?

Right. But the flip side of course is, you know, there are other intelligent animals walking around the earth who can't understand certain deep truths that we found right. Dogs don't understand general relativity. Every time I say that, I think the dogs are out there barking “haa you dont know we understand general relativity”. It's sort of putting out to the side, one presumably thinks that we're in the same boat that the deep truths may be right here for the taking but, like the dog, we don't have the gray matter to figure it out.

I think that's perfectly possible. There's a lovely--no, not lovely, rather nasty actually--science fiction story by Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud. There's a superhuman intelligence which we humans get in touch with and at the end of the book the humans start to converse with it about the deep problems, they call them the deep problems, and the superhuman intelligence which is a great big cloud offers to teach them the deep problems. And they die. Their brain just overheats. Smoke comes out. It could be like that. It could be dangerous. But on the other hand, we progressed so far towards the deep problems since our Pleistocene ancestors that it would be a bold person who would predict that we can't go on.

Are you surprised? I mean, we all talk about the great variation of life on Earth, you see these wonderful pictures of deep-sea, it's really rich. But at another level, I'm really wondering, are you surprised at the limited range of life on Earth? When you think about the number of distinct senses that different living organisms have, you can count them on probably 20 hands, right?

Oh, yes. The senses as a physicist you ought to be, all you want to come to that by saying why don't we have such and such a sense--yeah--and I'm not sure you'll be able to do that. I bethought actually we probably do have senses to do most of the things that physics allows us to do. We don't have radio--

yeah I guess other range of the spectrum I guess you could say that we live in a world where the sun's rays are in a certain wavelength and therefore those are the ones that are most useful for us to have but--

when echolocation was discovered, bat sonar-humans had discovered sonar for military purposes before Donald Griffin discovered the bats do it and Griffin has a story that his colleague who worked with him on it Grinnell was reporting on the bat sonar at a conference of I think engineers and one of them was so furious he actually sees Grinnell and shook him because he couldn't believe that bats have had got there millions of years before he was. [brian laughs] but the echolocation, electrolocation in fish is another sense which we're not aware of but which physicists could have predicted. I think that if you sat down as a physicist and said there ought to be an animal that uses such and such a medium--

yes, you’ll find one. So if we find life elsewhere in the universe, you imagine that their senses are going to be pretty similar to ours?

I have speculated about this. I think provided that their world has a--a job is going to have to have a star with, right--so there will be light. Light provides an obvious way to make sense of organs because photons travel in dead straight lines, they're reflected in a beautifully geometric way. So I would expect there to be eyes. There are nine different principles of eyes in the animal kingdom.

Principle of eyes meaning…?

..ways of doing optics. All nine of them--I dont think we know of any other kinds-- for example we and many other animals have a camera eye with a lens which focuses an inverted image. Compound eyes are a great big sphere or hemisphere of lots of tubes pointing in different directions and so insofar as an image at all it's not an inverted image, it’s the right way up because if a dragonfly sees a moving target in that tube then it's got to be up there, if it sees it in lap tube it's got to be down there. It's a much cruder form of vision. It is a different principle. The parabolic reflector principle we know about as physicists is used in reflecting telescopes and that's used in certain mollusks. There are other principles that we use. So I would think that if we find life on other planets, I'd stick my neck out of it unless they’ll have eyes.

Before I go to the audience questions that I have here, I have one other quick subject that I'm just wondering. You know there’s this interesting argument by your colleague at Oxford, Nick Bostrom. And I wrote a little bit about this so I got some feedback from people which was a little bit surprising and he argues that the notion of a simulated universe that, you know, the matrix if you will, imagine one day we have these powerful supercomputers and we really with fantastic fidelity can create a universe in silico if you will, which has sentient beings within it that don't know that they are in a simulation. And he goes through an interesting argument with just for brevity of time let me just simplify it, he may be a little irritated with the simplification but it gets to the main point which is that it's so, in principle, easy once you have that technology to create a simulated universe. That there'd be many more simulated universes than real universe. Real universes are hard to create, maybe there's one, maybe there's a few, but it's hard to imagine that you could create them in as great abundance as you could create universes in a computer you come home at night you flick it on, you create a university sort of kick back and you watch what happens. So he argues that, it's therefore much more likely, just based on the statistics, that we are in a simulated universe then that we are not in a simulated universe. So I wrote about this in a book that spoke about various ways in which you can imagine about the universe. What surprised me was that people came back and said to me--and then Nick, I read later, people said to him too--this for them was the most convincing argument for a creator. Because now the Creator was not some mysterious being. It was some futuristic teenage kid with pimples in his garage who just created the universe. So my question to you, what do you think about that?

I can't see how you could refuse it. I can't see how you would actually be sure that we're not.

If a religion were to rise up where people were honoring the teenage kid, would you go around and say “I get it. You can't refute it.”? I'm kind of okay with it.

I wouldn't worship him.

I agree with that. I could have guessed that from the outset. But in that situation where it's less fairies, it's less ghosts, it's less of this crazy ideas, there's actually a logical sequence of words that can be given--yes--meaning where there is a creator to this world, what do you say then?

I'm intrigued by the thought that when you make a simulated world and they have accrued ones like second life, there has to be a physics built into it. When you drop things they fall and when you throw them up and catch them it works. But you can violate that physics. The pimply youth doing the simulation can somehow, or will change the physics and you could suddenly fly as you indeed you can in second life. It's got to be a pretty disciplined pimply youth disease to it.--

As a creator of this world should be--

yeah I would say. But we don't see that. I suppose we don't.

Maybe he wipes our memory clean after playing around with us, right? All these things are possible. Anyway, let me end my questioning with this one which is along those lines. What would it take to convince you that there is a God? Is that even possible? I’ve asked this question as if the clouds open up and some of the “Brian, I'm here, I am real” I’d probably check myself into bellevue. I wouldn't take that as evidence. What about you?

For a long time I've gone around saying of course if there was a great big pull ropes and voice suddenly. But I agree. Just like the man playing hide and seek with me I dig it far more plausible that I was hallucinating or that there was some kind of conjuring trick. So I think it's very hard to imagine what it would even mean to demonstrate something supernatural. If something appeared to be supernatural, my reaction would be well we don't know enough about what's natural, we need to do better science in order to explain it.

But the pimply kid is an interesting case that would really screw things up--he opens up and there's nothing supernatural--yes it’s just kind of strange. Anyway, some of the questions from the audience. Any guess on when the president won't be obligated to end major speeches with “and God bless the United States of America”?

I suspect that President Obama is an atheist. I wouldn't be surprised if presidents Clinton and Kennedy were as well. The interesting question then is when will they dare to say so? When will a president dare to say so? My suspicion is that there may be a certain amount of Emperor's New Clothes going on here and it's widely believed that you cannot get elected in the United States unless you say “in god we trust”, “god bless america”. Maybe it's just not true. Maybe nobody's tried it and maybe we should all be--not we I can't speak for you, but maybe you [pointing at the audience] should all be writing with your Congressman saying you don't just have to suck up to the Catholic lobby and the dis lobby and that lobby and so on. What about the atheist lobby? We exist. We're actually quite numerous. So don't take us for granted and maybe that'll come soon, maybe there'll be a tipping point

..maybe somebody will blink..yeah.

I've noticed a certain niche group of people who follow your work in order to spread your ideas to the general public of looking at things logically. How do you inspire those who are ignorant?

Well we covered that a bit with Wendy Wright.

-------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------------------------------

QUESTIONS FROM THE AUDIENCE

For both of you: how do you think humanity will escape what Carl Sagan called our technological adolescence? What would convince you that we're finally growing up as a species?

I'm not sure where he said that. Do you remember where he said that?

I don't actually. I don't know if the questioner can fill us in or if it matters--adolescent..in Contact the novel?

Okay yes that’s a possibility. Nuclear proliferation. It’s been speculated that there may be a rather brief window in any planetary life form between reaching a sort of advanced technological level where we might get in touch with them, but this is attempting to explain why we haven't actually received any signals from extraterrestrials. It may be that the window between the moment when they reach the technological threshold of being able to send radio signals that far and then wiping themselves out, is a brief little blink. So all over the universe there may be little kind of winking zuv of intelligent life coming into existence and almost immediately by geological standards wiping themselves out.

Could it also be--we spoke a little bit about this but the question asked leads me to ask it further--I suspect you think that life in the universe is possible or maybe even likely. But it’s less obvious whether intelligent life is ubiquitous where, by intelligence I simply mean that they can send out those radios, there were a lot of dinosaurs ruling earth for a long time. It was some happenstance meteor that seemed to have changed the course of biological histories. What if that's a very rare event?

I think there are probably various thresholds that there's a life-form passes through. And producing, in our case, the eukaryotic cell was a kind of threshold. And then maybe language may be another threshold. Radio technology which is capable of deploying the rather large amounts of energy it needed to reach us--I mean obviously we're talking about great distances here--so that it could be that life itself is common enough but the life that's capable of generating something that we can detect, it may be extremely rare.

It could conceivably be unique.

It could be unique. Even life itself could be unique. We don’t know that and that has the interesting corollary since the number of planets in the universe is so enormous. If you want to believe, if anybody here wants to believe that life on this planet is unique, then you're immediately committed to the view that the origin of life on this planet was a staggeringly rare event. So rare that you would be totally wasting your time trying to work out what happened because what we're looking for is not a plausible theory. We're looking for an almost unbelievably implausible theory. Because if it were plausible, the universe would be crawling with life.

But we can find implausible theories with great plausibility. There are physical theories that are highly highly tuned therefore very implausible, but on paper we can write them down. Because that way you said, suggested if we find the explanation for life, that means it's likely to be a commonplace occurrence because the explanation was so straightforward. But I don't know if that's convincing because we're pretty good at finding rare explanations.

Can you speak to why there are no high profile female atheists? Why is it sort of a white man's club?

Well I don't know that it is, I certainly don't think it should be. And I don't have any explanation for that and I hope it's not true.

Are you going to look for an explanation or is that kind of a question that just sort of uhm..?

I don't think there's any difference in the sexes that matters in this respect.

Brian Big Bang Big Crunch Big Bounce or infinitely old universe Richard, to what extent does the notion of the Big Bang rest on mankind's need to know how it all started? Must there be a moment of creation? For me, yes on Big Bang probably no one big crunch Big Bounce seems pretty damn unlikely and infinitely old not in this universe. Richard.

What was my question?

your question was: to what extent does the notion of the Big Bang rest on mankind's need to know how it all started? Must there be a moment of creation?

Must there be a moment of creation? Well, no. Because the steady-state theory which is now unfashionable postulated no moment of creation. The universe was with us forever and matter was created spontaneously between galaxies. As it happens, physics doesn't support that nowadays. So Big Bang rests on physical evidence, not on [hu]man's need for anything.

Which do you believe will have the greatest most transformative impact in the next 50 years? Genomics, AI or Robotics?

I take it AI means artificial intelligence not artificial insemination. [crowd laughs] I come from a farming family who understand. I think they kind of go together because genomics is advancing at a great speed because of Moore's law which is the empirical law which I don't think anybody's ever fully explained that computer power measured in various ways increases at a pretty fixed exponential rate. I don't think anybody knows quite why that is but it's been true for a long time now. Genomics is so computer dependent that it also advances at an exponential rate and this you could actually demonstrate by looking at the either the dollar cost of sequencing a genome all the time it takes to sequence a genome. It also seems to be exponential over the time that genomes have been sequenced.

Right. What do you think of the recent-ish discoveries that one person may hold multiple copies of genes? Does that affect the current model of natural selection?

I don't see why that would affect the current model of natural selection. It complicates the genomics but the model of natural selection which says that natural selection is the differential survival of genes in gene pools. It doesn't matter if they're multiple copies, it still works.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THE BEAUTIFUL OUTRO

Back to a couple of questions that I have as we reach the end of the time here, at the end of the book you began to muse and you describe how “as a man looks back on his life so far how much of what he has achieved or failed to achieve could have been predicted from his childhood,” you write. “How much can be attributed to measurable quantities to the interest and pastime of his parents to his genes to his happening to meet a particularly influential teacher or happening to go to summer camp?” Why do those questions matter to you?

I'm intrigued by the extraordinary luck of the happenstance that gives rise to each one of us and to really everything in the world. I dramatized this by saying, what if a particular dinosaur had sneezed at a particular moment and thereby changed whether or not it caught? if it hadn't sneezed, it was just about to eat a little shrew-like animal which was to be the ancestor of all the mammals, there was such an animal, there was one individual shrew-like mammal which was the ancestor of all modern mammals. This dinosaur was about to eat it when it sneezed and so the little shrew-like animal got away. So not only our lives but the existence of all the mammals hangs on that sneeze. Of course I don't know that that particular story is true but I'm absolutely sure that some similar story is true. Not just one such story, but many many stories. All of us owe our existence to their happenstance of one particular sperm hitting one particular egg at a particular day. Not only in our parents generation, our grandparents generation, our great grandparents generation.

Aldous Huxley said:

“A million million spermatozoa

All of them alive;

Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah

Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one

Might have chanced to be

Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne--

But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,

Taking ark while the others remained outside!

Better for all of us, froward Homunculus,

If you'd quietly died!”

We all of us are incredibly lucky to be here. Once you've been born, once you've been conceived, indeed, then the probability that you're going to go on becomes much much higher, of course. Before you were conceived the chance of your existing was all but zero, once you were conceived, it then becomes kind of measurable. And then other things like when you went to a certain school you met a particular teacher, you went to summer camp, these things also very probably have a dramatic effect upon your subsequent life. But I also speculate that maybe once your life has got going like that, if you go down one particular path, maybe there's a kind of magnetic pull that pulls you back to where you would have been anyway. So I sort of imagined, suppose my parents hadn't come back to England from Africa and I'd gone on at school in Africa, would I ever have met Niko Tinbergen and become and joined the Animal Behavior Research Group and written in the books that I've written? Would there have been a magnetic pull back to the same pathway despite the fact that there was this diversion early in life? This is a question--it’s of no great interest for my life, but we can all of us ask that very question.

That’s also completely untestable, that idea.

Yes it is almost completely untestable--

makes one wonder if it is something that, when I read that I have to say in your book I found an interesting idea and I sort of knew what you meant but the same time as I was like aw that's curious that you would invoke this kind of force, this magnetic force when you kind of can't exist really…?

Well no I wouldn't want to look at it that way. It's very strictly a metaphor but it could be that--

that I guess yeah [audience laughs]

it could be, I suppose, that one has certain aptitudes if, say, Mozart had not been given music lessons by his father. Mozart’s musical genius would probably have pushed him into a musical career anyway. That's all what I think I really meant by that. You can set, to some extent, tease out the genetic component by looking at identical twins because they do have the same genes and there are a few dozen known cases of identical twins who for accidental reasons happen to be reared apart. And so they have been rather intensively started to see to what extent they do right end up doing the same kinds of things.

Right. So we're just about out of time. Before we actually do wrap it up, you know you are famous for this wonderful phrase that “science is the poetry of reality”, right? And in this book you have a lot of poems and a lot of snippets of songs, it seems like that has sort of been a constant theme throughout your life and as we just had a brief conversation earlier about this event we thought it might be interesting to end it a little bit differently where each of us would kind of pick a poem that we think is kind of relevant to the conversation tonight. So Richard do you have--

you give us, you’ll go first.

I'm happy to do that. This is a poem that actually I learned about from my sister by chance. It's from a book called Keys to the Door by Robin Robertson:

“I love your age of wonder, your third and fourth and fifth year spent astonished widening your eyes at each new trick of the world and me standing there solemnly explaining how it was done. The moon and stars, rainbows, photographs, gravity, the birds in the air, the difference between blood and water. In true life, you would say, looking up and I would nod like some broken hearted sage knowing there would be no answer soon to all the big questions that were left, to cruelty and fear, to age and grief and death and no words either. And you, like me, will sit and shake your head in true life: yes, my sweet strong daughter. I'm afraid there is all this as well and this is it, true life.”

Thank you.

I'll try a short poem by WB Yeats who was very much not a scientist. He was a mystic. But this, to me, carries a sort of message of scientific wonder:

“Be you still, be you still, trembling heart;

Remember the wisdom out of the old days:

Him who trembles before the flame and the flood,

And the winds that blow through the starry ways,

Let the starry winds and the flame and the flood

Cover over and hide, for he has no part

With the lonely, majestical multitude.”

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AN HOUR CONVERSATION WITH RICHARD DAWKINS & BRIAN GREENE: TRANSCRIPTED, EDITED, CURATED BY WOONY BIN.

0 notes

whatdoyouthinkmyjobis · 7 years

Text

Hunters on the Hellmouth

masterlist

first chapter

previous chapter

AN: More gory than typical canon. Torture. Takes place a week after chapter 30 and GND 11.

Chapter 31: Christmas on the Hellmouth

Dean pushed the cracked door open and caught Sam lying in bed reading A History of Slayers, Volume I. How the Slayer came to be and what fueled her was his latest obsession ever since he learned she was a vessel.

Dean didn’t like this track at all. They’d argued about it weeks before. “God dammit, Sammy! Why won’t you let me be happy for once?”

“I’m just curious, Dean! This has nothing to do with you and Buffy.”

“And if something stinks, what then?”

But it was Christmas Eve, and Dean didn’t want to have that fight again. He pulled the bedroom door closed and knocked so Sam could pretend he was reading something else.

“Come in.” Now Sam held one of the battered Goodwill paperbacks he kept stacked on his dresser.

“Can I grab one of your extra blankets? Dawn’s cold.”

“Sure, go ahead.” Sam’s girlfriend, Jada, was always freezing, and had filled his bedroom with what Dean estimated to be a hundred different blankets, each for a very specific temperature.

Dawn, who had been livid when her sister said she was spending Christmas Eve at their apartment, was nested on the Winchester’s couch staring at the small Christmas tree on the coffee table. “I still can’t believe you decorated,” she said, adding the purple fuzzy blanket to her pile.

Dean leaned against the arm of the couch, shifting his weight off his broken ankle. The tree, small and squat with little red balls and enough light to speckle the walls with stars, was very pretty. “Jada decorated before she headed north. She thought it would cheer us up.”

“I’m glad. I didn’t think I’d get a tree this year.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. Santa ain’t leavin’ any goodies under there.”

Dawn rolled her eyes. Buffy, an expert-level eye-roller herself, found this annoying and disrespectful, but he delighted in getting a rise out of the girl. “Dean, I’m sixteen. I don’t believe in Santa.”

“Got everything you need?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

Dean hobbled back to his room, already fantasizing about finding a naughty Mrs. Claus in his bed. Not that he was in any condition for sex. Moving from his bed to the bathroom meant the agonizing choice of putting pressure on his foot or his ribs. Moving his arms hurt. Laying flat hurt. Broken bones on top of Buffy’s busyness with the Potentials meant their sizzling sex life had started to fizzle.

Dawn called after him, “Hey, thanks for letting me come! Buffy was just a big wall of no.”

“You’re family, kid. Why wouldn’t you be here for Christmas?”

A flush rose to her cheeks, and she pulled the blankets up to her shocked eyes.

Waiting on his bed was something better than a vixen in red lingerie. Buffy, with a smile on her lips and sleep creeping into her eyes, had made herself comfortable in his red plaid shirt and nothing else. By her side, was a green box topped with a white bow.

“That took longer than I thought,” she said.

“Your sister wanted another blanket.”

Buffy rolled her eyes. “You have a broken ankle! I could have gotten it for her.”

Crawling into bed beside her, he planted a quick kiss on her cheek. “You said no presents.” The phrase boyfriend test flashed in his mind, but she didn’t look at him like he’d failed.

“No presents. Not really. This isn’t for you to keep. I just thought bows were festive, and I sort of need the distraction.”

His lingerie dream revived, he unwrapped his not-present. “A book?” It was burgundy with a stamped gold trim.

Buffy removed it from the box as he leaned against his pillow pile. “I ask you to tell me stories all the time, so I thought I’d tell you some of mine.”

It was a photo album. On the first page, an orange-tinged Polaroid of a young woman with large, deep set eyes and blonde, deflated Farrah hair in a hospital holding a baby. Beneath it Baby Girl Jan 19, ‘81. “My parents fought over what to name me, but the hospital wouldn’t let them leave until they decided. Dad wanted Jennifer, but mom said I was too special to have the same name as every girl on the block. Mom got Buffy on my birth certificate while Dad was out celebrating.”

“Smart woman.”

“She was.” Buffy grinned. “She would have liked you.”

Dean had been caught off guard when Buffy said she loved him, but the idea that her mother would have liked him was shocking. With his heavy drinking, gambling, scars and tattoos, he didn’t think of himself as the take-home-to-mom type; but then, he’d never been a there-in-the-morning guy before Buffy either.

The next few pages were a blur of a blonde baby, usually smiling, often in ruffle-butted tights. Dean secretly loved babies. They were innocent and joyful. The end of the world meant being hungry or needing a change. Suit their needs, and they’re laughing again. He tried to suppress the now familiar blonde-haired, green-eyed girl who met him in his dreams.

The baby gave way to a toddler. In every picture, she gazed at her father with complete adoration. Soon, little Buffy was ice skating and dancing. Blowing out birthday candles, heading off to school, and holding a baby sister. The Summers family went to Disneyland, had barbeques, and stuffed presents under the Christmas tree until it overflowed. Once the round-cheeked, homecoming queen version of the Buffy he knew appeared, the album ended.

“We, uh, moved to Sunnydale a little after that.” That’s when monsters became real.

“What do you think Buffy Anne Summers would be doing if she hadn’t moved to Sunnydale?” he asked.

“I don’t know. She’d be entering her last semester of college. Probably would have spent too much time partying. Sorority for sure. She’d probably be dating some popular guy because he was popular and everyone said they were cute together.”

“Doesn’t sound like you,” he said, knowing how much brushes with the supernatural changed a person.

“Popularity is a strong drug,” she said.

Burning down her high school’s gym had no doubt ousted her from her typical social circles. Much as Dean hated Buffy being tied to the Slayer until it killed her, he was grateful it had put her in his path.

“And what would Dean Winchester be doing out of Sunnydale?”

He rubbed her leg, not wanting to confess that had Cas never brought him here, he’d be drunk and scared in a no-tell motel trying to plan a Hail Mary against Heaven and Hell. “You know me, darlin’. I’m gonna be hunting evil sons a bitches wherever I am.”

“I guess you didn’t have a lot of time before...” Her voice trailed off.

“I remember a few things,” Dean said. “I played t-ball. Dad coached. We lost every game. I was pretty obsessed with rocket ships and war games. Dad always made me the general and he was a sergeant.”

“Sounds tough,” she said through a smile.

“Tough as nails. I mean, I fell down, didn’t even cry until I got home.”

He opened his nightstand and pulled out a brown, leather book. Tucked under the journal’s jacket was Dean’s entire collection of family photos, creased and foxed from being touched so often.

“This is before the fire. I think Sammy was only a month old,” he said, holding up a small picture of four happy Winchesters in front of their blue house in Lawrence.

Buffy stared at the picture, hovering her fingers over Mary. “Your mom was very pretty.”

“Yeah, she was. Sweet woman. Total badass.”

“That’s your dad?” John smiled in the picture, his arms encircling Mary and Dean, nothing on his mind but family. “I think you take after your mom.”

He only had a few pictures from his childhood. Some with his mother. Some with his father. A couple with Bobby. All of them with Sam.

“Whatever happened to those pictures we took in San Francisco?” Buffy asked.

“They’re still on my phone.”

She blushed. “Not the sexy pictures. The other ones.”

The disposable camera was in his dresser, images of the two of them enjoying themselves still trapped inside. “I haven’t gotten them developed yet. It’s been a few years since that was a thing.”

“You should. We need more happy pictures.”

Christmas evening, most of the Potentials were piled among their pillows and blankets, watching It’s a Wonderful Life on a small television while self-appointed snack-fetcher Andrew popped a third batch of popcorn.

Dani leaned against the kitchen counter and tapped Willow’s foot with hers. “Wanna join us? It’s a Christmas tradition, and what’s more traditional than a couple of lesbians heckling Jimmy Stewart?”

“Rain check,” Willow said, taking another wet cup from Buffy. “We officially have more people in the house than dishes.”

“Your loss,” she said, biting her lip and walking away.

“She’s friendly,” Buffy teased.

“Yeah, she is. But this has already been my most Christmasy Christmas. Don’t feel like topping it off with more festive,” said Willow as she refilled the cabinet with cups.

“Sorry!” Buffy cringed. The madness from The First had started in the middle of Hanukkah.

“It’s okay. My parents went out of town to visit old college buddies anyway, and Xander even lit the candles for me while my eyes were covered. I just tell myself everything’s closed because it’s Anti-Capitalism Day, not the celebration of Santa’s birth.”

“That’s festive?”

But the look on Willow’s face as she stared at water droplets on the tumblers was anything but celebratory. Last year for Winter Solstice, she and Tara had celebrated by holding hands in the pitch black house and willing the hundreds of tealights they’d spread around to spring into dancing flames. It was beautiful, like the floor was covered in stars. This December, she’d been in and out of the hospital with her own injuries and those of friends, close to losing her best friend less than a year after losing her girlfriend.

“How are you doing, non-holiday wise?” Buffy asked.

Willow rested her head on Buffy’s shoulder. “The other day, I caught myself longing for a simple vampire patrol, like how we used to with just you, me and Xander. It seemed downright quaint, and vampire patrol quaint? I’ve gotten so nostalgic for not-now that you could sprinkle a little snow on a fresh corpse and I’d find it all Norman Rockwell.”

“Picturesque. Why aren’t you making the decisions about holiday stamps?”

“I know!”

Squabbling rose in the living room.

“They can’t stay here forever,” sighed Buffy. “Either we all die horribly, or we save the day and have a dance party at The Bronze, the three of us, like old times, less the high school drama.”

“I’ll take high school drama. Getting shoved in locker is majorly preferable to nearly being blinded by an ancient evil.”

Buffy dried her hands and drew her friend in for an embrace. Willow wasn’t alone in wishing for simpler days, and time with friends -- the close friends a person could be quiet with for hours -- was sorely needed.

They released each other as a clamor of footsteps filled the house. Molly, Andrew, and Vi, a spacey redhead in a perpetual beanie who’d arrived the prior morning, searched the kitchen for snacks. “Why are all the good Christmas movies so depressing?” Vi asked. “Jimmy Stewart’s trying to kill himself. Then there’s the one with the mountain goblin invading everyone’s homes and robbing them blind. Don’t get me started on Rudolph--”

Buffy’s cell phone rang. Since everyone but the Winchesters was at her house, she headed toward her room, hoping to hear Dean’s deep voice on the other end asking what she was wearing.

Instead Dean screamed, “Buffy! Sam! They took Sam!”

Giles sped toward the Winchesters’ apartment, as Buffy called out directions. “Turn left!” she cried, causing him to squeal around a corner.

They took Sam. Dean had said nothing else before disappearing from the phone. She had no idea who took Sam or if they’d taken Dean too. He’d just stopped talking. Buffy’s heart was trying to climb out her throat.

“Stop!” she screamed, opening the door before Giles could slam on the breaks a few blocks from the apartment. On the sidewalk, a bloody, nearly naked Dean stumbled away from them.

“Dean, I’m here!”

Not seeming to see or hear her, he pressed on.

Buffy stood in front of him and shook him by his blood-slick arms. He was sweating yet cold to the touch. The gashes on his arms looked painful, but survivable. The gushing stab wounds on his shoulder and stomach made her dizzy with worry. “Dean, stop!”

He kept walking. Staring at something on the ground, he muttered, “Took him. They took him. Gotta get him back.”

“Leave that to me, okay? You’re going to freeze to death!”

He kept walking, his gait uneven with his cast foot. Losing Sam was Dean’s biggest nightmare. As with other times when he couldn’t shake his nightmares, Buffy drew back and slapped him.

Dean looked at her with tear-filled, frightened eyes. “They took him, Buffy. The Bringers broke in and took Sammy.”

He didn’t resist as Giles placed his jacket over his shoulders and directed Dean to the idling car.

“I was in my room, and I heard this big bang. Before I could even get up, Bringers were crashing through my door and window. I could hear Sam screaming. Oh God, Buffy, he was screaming and fighting, and I couldn’t get to him. I could-I couldn’t--”

“Shh! I will get Sam back. Let’s get you stitched up first.”

They retraced Dean’s bloody footsteps to find his apartment door in splinters. A dead Bringer lay nearby, a broken bookcase on top of him. By Sam’s bedroom door, another Bringer, pieces of its head blasted against the wall. As she escorted Dean to the bathroom to sew up his wounds, she glimpsed two more bodies in his bedroom.

“How many of them were there?” she asked as she wiped the blood off his chest.

“Seven? Eight? I think Sam was sleeping. Hard to stay awake on all those drugs.”

“What would they want with him?”

Dean shook his head.

“Babe, I think we need to take you to the hospital. These stab woun--”

“No! Fuck! We have to get Sam!”

Buffy had seen people in the throes of loss, but this was the first time she’d seen someone out of his mind with grief.

“One of them is alive!” Giles called.

Dean bolted from the bathroom. The Bringer under the bookcase was still twitching. Dean yanked him from under the rubble and slammed him against the wall. “Listen up you filthy fuck, you’re gonna tell me where my brother is, or I’m gonna cut it out of you.”

The Bringer coughed, spraying Dean with blood. It smiled a twisted red grin.

Scooping a dagger off the floor, Dean dug it into the Bringer’s shoulder, letting its weight hang on the blade. As it opened its mouth to scream, they saw its tongue had been cut out.

The wound in Dean’s own shoulder gushed. His eyes were dark with hate, a snarl on his lips. He looked like a stranger.

Buffy tugged on Dean’s arm. “We’re not going to get anything out of him,” she said softly.

With one swipe across the neck, Dean finished the Bringer. He stumbled back, slipped in a smear of blood, and crashed to the floor with a cry. Pale and sweaty, he began to shiver.

“Call 911,” Buffy barked at Giles.

“God dammit, Cas! Where the fuck are you?” Dean muttered.

“He’s stuck at the wrong airport. Travel’s a bitch.” A handsome middle aged man with black hair just starting to grey stood by the kitchen, a know-it-all smirk on his face. “Hell, I don’t think I could have snuck over to this fun new playground if it wasn’t for you two, always leading the blind, doomed charge.”

“Who--?” Giles didn’t need to finish his question.

Though she knew it was pointless, Buffy scanned the room for weapons. The man in front of her was dead, memorialized in Dean’s tattoos, which meant the man was The First, who they still didn’t know how to hurt.

Dean’s breathing turned short and sharp. “Dad?”

The apparition scowled. “Don’t blame me for your existence. I wanted all you muck-monkeys wiped out.”

Dean’s eyes went wide with fear. “You!”

“Finally!” The First said with a clap as Dean tried to crawl away. “You know, I’m surprised little Sammy hadn’t figured it out yet. You? Well, everyone knows you’re an idiot skating by on good looks and charm.”

Dean’s eyes rolled back in his head and he passed out. She couldn’t do anything about The First, but Buffy wasn’t going to lose the man she loved. Wrapping Dean in a purple blanket from the couch, she picked him up and started to head downstairs.

“This is adorable, by the way,” said The First. “Never thought I’d see Dean Winchester in puppy love. So cute. I’d root for you two kids if I wasn’t planning on torturing and killing you. For his sake, it would be kinder to let him die now.”

“No one’s dying today, asshole.”

“Dirty mouth! I see why he likes you. Well, I have go try on my new suit. You keep vainly trying to save everyone,” He raised his hands in a mock gun and fired at her with a smile, “and I’ll keep knocking them down.”

After finishing his interview with the police, Giles rubbed his temples and joined Willow, Xander, and Dawn in the hospital waiting room. He opened his eyes at a rattling sound. Willow handed him a bottle of aspirin. “Can I use the entire bottle?”

“Save some for the rest of us,” said Xander.

They looked about the room blankly, needing to focus on something other than the reality of being in the hospital again, of nearly losing Dean again, of being attacked again.

The faint sounds of Buffy arguing with a nurse drifted down the hall. Despite her insistence, the doctor wasn’t going to let anyone see Dean for a few more hours. He had a collapsed lung, and had nearly bled to death. As soon as those pressing concerns were attended to, the doctors wanted more x-rays to determine if they would need to put pins in his ankle.

“Merry Christmas,” said Dawn.

Pouring himself a cup of spoon-eroding tar from the waiting room coffee stand, Giles downed four aspirin and mulled over the situation. First Spike, now Sam. The former had been The First’s pawn. Abducting him may have been a simple matter of keeping him quiet, though he didn’t doubt Spike was being used for more nefarious purposes. But Sam? Other than their fight over a week ago, he should have been unknown to The First. And why would the Bringers take only one brother, when It had left a bloody message about both? Judging from his desire to flee, Dean recognized The First as something beyond the image of his father. How did It know their father?

“What does The First want with Sam Winchester?” Giles asked.

They turned their tired stares to him.

“I’ve not been around them enough to earn their confidence, but there is something about the Winchesters they aren’t telling us. Have they disclosed anything about their more bizarre interactions with the supernatural?”

Xander, his unsure eyes darting to the girls, started, “One time there was this cursed rabbit’s foot--”

“No, that’s not it.”

“Okay, another time a ghost just wanted someone to come to his birthday party-- ”

“Dear God, what have they been filling your head with?” Giles asked.

“In defense of all the guy-folk, we were usually pretty tipsy when these stories came out, so I may be hazy on the details.”

Buffy, her coat still smeared with blood, stormed into the waiting room. “Give someone a medical degree, and they think they know everything.”

The pounding of her pacing punished Giles’ throbbing head. “Please, sit down.”

“I can’t! I hate waiting like this! I need to either be with Dean or out saving Sam, but I don’t even know where to start!”

They didn’t know how to save Sam either, so they surrounded their friend with hugs. The edge in Buffy’s countenance softened as she drew strength from her friends.

Unfortunately, Giles could not spare her the moment of relaxation. “Would you like some coffee?”

She shook her head and slumped into a chair beside Willow.

“We were just sharing stories about the Winchesters,” Xander explained.

“Like how they’re wonderful and have made my life a thousand times easier?” Buffy pouted.

“Heaven sent, you could say,” Giles encouraged.

“Well, yeah, an angel brought them here,” said Dawn.

“And an angel brought Dean back from the brink of death.” He took another sip of his coffee. “Does no one find it odd that angels are so interested in them, and yet offered no protection against this attack?”

“Mysterious ways sure are gosh darn mysterious,” Xander said, clueless as to what Giles was driving at.

“It’s not just angels.” Willow’s eyes darted between Buffy and Giles. “I, um, I had a spell go wrong a few months back. It let me see in people, and there was something weird in Sam. Inside, he looked almost like Spike, a soul wrestling a demon. When I confronted him about it, he said the demon that killed their mom was, uh, it was feeding Sam demon blood.”

This was news. This was progress. Giles leaned forward. “Feeding demon blood to a baby. That could only be for a ritual of some kind.”

“That’s what I said, but he didn’t know anything else.”

“He doesn’t have voices tell him to do bad things, does he?” Xander asked. All three of the girls glared at him.

A chess board formed in Giles’ mind. On opposite sides, Sam and Dean, one moved by the forces of Hell, the other the forces of Heaven. Whatever the game was, it was still in play. “Buffy, I need to know the circumstances surrounding Dean and Sam’s deaths.”

“I told you: it’s private.”

“Dammit, Buffy! This isn’t about betraying privacy. It’s about saving Sam,” Giles snapped.

“How could anything that happened over there matter over here?”

“Because I think whatever was after them, followed them.”

Buffy fixated on Giles, her loyalties wrestling inside her. Finally, she whispered, “Sam was murdered right in front of Dean. Stabbed. He died in his arms...”

Dean kept his eyes closed and took stock of his body. A dull throbbing in his ankle. A stronger pain in his side. It didn’t feel like his body. It was distant, like it was floating slightly to his left. Someone was rubbing small circles on the back of his hand with their thumb. He squeezed the hand and tried to open his eyes, only catching a flash of blonde before closing them again.

Sam. Sam surrounded by men in robes. Sam screaming, the bandage on his stomach blooming red.

A far away voice. “Hey Dean, your Girly’s here.”

The Bringers. A flurry of knives. He still slept with his .45. Shot the one who broke through the window.

The voice again. It was sweet, familiar. “I’m going to fix everything.”

Another one burst through the door. Took two bullets to the chest before going down. Sam was screaming. A crash. Sam was fighting back.

“Baby, I need your help. What’s after you?”

In the living room, he saw them carrying his brother out. Couldn’t shoot or he’d hit Sammy. White hot pain. He threw a Bringer off his back. More pain ripping through his body. Head shot. Quiet. Sam was gone.

Dean could barely keep his eyes open, but he knew he was in a bed. He couldn’t save Sam from bed. He tried to get up, but something pulled at his chest. Two hands pushed his shoulders back into the mattress.

“Dean, you can’t get up, okay? You need to rest.”

“Gotta get Sammy.”

“I know.”

He tried to get up again. Buffy shoved him back into the bed. He glared at her.

“Saving Sam is my number one priority right now, or don’t you think I can do it?” Buffy asked.

He knew she couldn’t. She could kill any beast Hell threw at her, but this wasn’t a hellbeast.

“You recognized The First, didn’t you? I need you to tell me how to kill it.”

They’d broken up, in part, because of lying. Since getting back together, they’d tried to be as upfront as two monster hunters could, but there were parts of his world too crazy to share. Rather than lie, he avoided them. Steered her away whenever she got close. The questions now sat under a glaring spotlight, and he couldn’t get away. “You think I’m keeping secrets.”

She looked away, biting her lip until it turned white. “It’s what you do.”

Buffy’s eyes usually sparkled with curiosity and fire when asking him questions. Not now.

“Go get Giles,” Dean said. “I only want to say this once.”

As Dean sipped his water, Giles examined him, looking as annoyed as Buffy did concerned. “Just say it,” Dean said.

“Who are you, and how do you know The First?” Giles demanded.

All of Dean’s anti-authority snark rose up. Were Giles a cop, he’d delight in giving him the run around. But he wasn’t. He was someone who also cared about Buffy, and they were both in harm’s way because of him. “Back home, we’re going through the Apocalypse. Not one of your generic baddies trying to end the world apocalypses, a bonafide four horsemen, seal-breaking war against Heaven and Hell.”

“Revelation?” said Giles in shock.

“Bingo. It’s just skirmishes now. But when the players are big enough, skirmishes wipe out cities. The angels ain’t doin’ so hot. I think they bit off more than they could chew when they triggered the whole thing.”

“The angels started the Apocalypse? I thought they were supposed to be on our side.” Buffy so wanted allies. After his miraculous healing, she’d asked Dean daily questions about Castiel.

“With a few exceptions, angels only care about angels. Right now, Heaven’s biggest concern is bringing God back.”

Everyone’s eyes went wide. “God?”

“Story is, he went awol after Lucifer tricked Eve. Left the archangel Michael in charge.”

Giles removed his glasses and slipped into a nearby chair, his face buried in his hands.

“Thing is, they can’t really settle the fight until Michael and his brother Lucifer have a brawl.”

“Lucifer, like, the devil?” Buffy asked. “We’re talking about a red, horned guy with bad facial hair?”

“Lucifer, as in the fallen archangel with a grudge against humanity,” Dean grumbled.

Giles took a deep breath. Part of Dean thrilled at seeing the Watcher so spun by the news. “What happens if this ‘brawl,’ as you call it, takes place?”

“If Michael wins, the angels are guessing half the planet dies. If Lucifer wins…” Dean shrugged, confident they could imagine that outcome.

“What’s stopping them? They’re archangels. Can’t they do whatever they want?”

Dean set his cup back on the side table and tapped his fingers before continuing. “Remember what I told you about demon possession where we’re from? To carry out any work on Earth, angels need to possess someone, but angels are different than demons. I mean, these are beings you can’t even see without losing your eyes, and that’s just the bottom rung. They can’t possess just anyone or they’ll blow their vessel.”

“Vessel?”

“The person they’re possessing. So only a few people fit, and those people have to give the angel permission.

“Archangels have an even rougher time finding someone who’ll fit. Essentially, they have to use the Cupids--”

“Cu-cupids?” sputtered Giles. “You mean with the,” he mimed a bow and arrow.

“I mean fat naked guys who trick people into falling in love, yeah. See, they get two people who can be possessed by angels to have a baby, then make their kid fall in love with other possible angel vessels until they breed an ultra strong, dishwasher-safe, microwavable kid to keep on standby in case they want to sully their holy feet with Earth muck.

“Heaven was patting itself on the back, ‘cause they got two vessels for Michael.”

Buffy, her eyes unfocused, silently dropped into the other chair.

“Dear God,” muttered Giles.

“Only Hell wanted a vessel for Lucifer.” Unable to bear Buffy’s response, Dean stared at his hands. “They snuck into Sam’s nursery. Fed him demon blood. Claimed him and several dozen other kids for Hell. But they took a special interest in Sam. Couldn't resist the whole brother versus brother angle.

“Whatever Cas did to get us here left enough room for the Devil to squeeze through. So I gotta save Sam as soon as possible. Who knows what hell they’ll put him through to get him to say yes.”

“Wake up! Wake up! WAKE UP, SAMMY!” Cold and stiff, Sam opened his eyes to see Dean standing over him. Sam was lying on the stone floor of a fire-lit chapel, his feet and hands in shackles.

“Dean, where are we?” he whispered as he tugged at his bonds.

Unbound, Dean crouched beside him, a satisfied grin on his face. “We’re in my playroom, little brother.” Then Dean shoved his hand into Sam’s chest, setting of a small, painful series of shocks to his heart.

Trembling, Sam pushed himself away, but his irons prevented him from a comfortable distance.

Dean’s warm, familiar face -- the face that had calmed Sam’s fears his entire life -- morphed into a man with deep set eyes and blistered skin.

“Lucifer!”

“I would say, ‘In the flesh,’ but I’m having a teensy problem there, Sammy. See, this world, whatever it is, is short of even inadequate vessels. All I can do is appear as the dead, which ironically includes you and your brother. I’ve had to recruit minions.”

Lucifer whistled, and two Bringers dragged in a barely conscious Spike leaving a trail of dark blood from the stump at his knee. Following close behind, was a Turok-Han. The Bringers dropped Spike at his feet and bowed before leaving.

“It’s nice to find people who share your vision for ending the world. This one,” he said as the Turok-Han kicked Spike in the ribs, “was the first creature I found here. He was stumbling through the street whining about his soul. I offered him purpose. I offered him his heart’s desires, and he didn’t deliver. He is the only creature I’ve found here that I could use, and he refused to be my vessel. Couldn’t kill your brother or the little souped-up whore he’s fucking. Spike’s still useful though.” One by one, the Turok-Han bit off Spike’s fingers while his screams filled the cave.

“Either of you say ‘yes’ and it stops.” Lucifer grinned.

Spike laughed, spending a spray of blood from his lips. “My exes are better at torture.”

“Isn’t it hilarious?” Lucifer said. “As long as we keep his head attached, the parts just grow back. He’s like an etch-a-sketch of pain. Get comfy and soak in the show, Sammy, because when my pet is finished learning the vampire’s limits, it’s your turn.”

Yes, Amends. Addressed in a future chapter.

Read Giles’ dossiers on: Dani Molly Vi

next chapter

46 notes · View notes