Richard Dawkins and long-time rival Denis Noble go head to head on the selfish gene | Who is right?

Do you think Dawkins or Noble are right in their idea of evolution? Let us know in the comments below! To watch the full debate, visit iai.tv/video/the-gene-machine?utm_source=YouTube&u…

Excellent the way these two people accept each other's statements and discuss the outcomes from different points of view. No talking over each other, no rubbishing the opposing view. How refreshing.

It's just nice to see two men having a respectable discussion. No ad-hominem, no journalistic agendas.

I was present at this debate and it was the most impressive debate I have ever had the pleasure to witness - Professors Dawkins and Noble were eloquent, respectful, clear in their positions and at times humorous. I agreed with Professor Dawkins’s position….but thought that he lost the debate, which is a rarity.

I have no idea what they’re talking about but I love it

It's so refreshing to listen to educated people debate objectively and respectfully. It's a fertile ground for growth and understanding. So different from the political and social-media environment.

Really nice talk! As a scientist who has been working on causality for many years, I think Richard may have to relook at the interpretation of association as causality. Judea Pearl has shown in his "The Book of Why" that this should not be the case. Causation would imply correlation; but correlation does not imply causation. A very important reason for this is that causation is NOT merely a statistical relation, but is fundamentally a physical notion. This is also why we are moving from mere causal inferences (which are mainly statistical) to more Physics-based formalisms like entropy-based causation for information flow assessments(in the Shannon sense). On that point, I think Denis makes a very sound argument. Globally averaged causation may look like correlations(this is why Richard's evolutionary argument makes sense), but they are fundamentally not statistical associations. I have really enjoyed this talk. Thanks for sharing.

Kudos to Noble. Never heard of him, and at first look I was querying whether he was alive or not, and then he opened his mouth and spoke with more lucidity and clarity than most people a half or a quarter of his age. As I said... kudos.

Imagine if all debates were this calm, collected and concise. Amazing

It's so refreshing to hear two brilliant men who disagree so much still able to have a civil argument..

You just know that both of these two gentlemen are prepared to change their minds when presented with facts. If only everyone behaved this way.

All debates should be like this

Denis Noble actually looks like a professor, if I had to say what a typical professor looks like he is perfect, even his voice. I think Denis wins the 'Looking like a professor' part of this argument hands down.

Two too old men discussing truths of life with zeal, taking notes and accepting each other's points of view because knowledge is the only guiding light not their egos, this video made me emotional deep down. My respect for both.

They are both right as they are talking about two different things

Honestly, there's no debate here. Basically, each nucleotide has its own phenotypic effect. Unfortunately, this effect is very difficult to describe because it's so heavily dependent on all the other nucleotides. As a result, the nucleotide-centric viewpoint produces a genotype-phenotype map that's far too complicated to really be practical. So in practice, you try to simplify. A good way to do this is by moving to a gene-centric viewpoint. This trick reduces the complexity of the genotype-phenotype map, but at the end of the day, it's an oversimplification, and it'll miss certain phenomena. For example, once you move emphasis from nucleotides to entire genes, the resulting model will have trouble seeing the potential phenotypic effects of a gene jumping from one part of a chromosome to another portion of the same chromosome. That's fine; every oversimplification is going to have some kind of cost, and that's completely okay, because science progresses by working out which simplifications are "largely worth it" and which simplifications are "largely not". In any event, Denis Noble's point is that even once you make the gene-centric simplification, there's still further complexities and non-linearities in the resulting genotype-phenotype map. Personally, I don't think this really undermines Dawkin's point, it just highlights the complexity that remains even once certain simplifications that are built into Dawkin's espoused viewpoint are utilized.

@TheInstituteOfArtAndIdeas, could you please share the name of that music track/artist used at the beginning of this video?

Clocks chime. Bells toll. I feel I've made a valuable contribution here.

Can two brilliant men with differing explanations for naturally occurring phenomena both be correct? This brief conversation suggests the answer is… YES!

Where is the rest of the debate? 🤔