Richard Dawkins has recently released a new set of videos packaged under the title “The Genius of Charles Darwin.” This series features physician Randolph Nesse, who is the author of Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine [1], a book I’ve discussed in previous posts.
This video [2]is the first of a series of five uncut videos featuring Nesse that Dawkins has made available (see Youtube.com for the next four videos). You can also view the entire series straight through from the site of Richard Dawkins [3]. In this video, you’ll hear Dawkins and Nesse discussing “design” (including poor design), randomness (note the example of the jar of only copper coins), Darwinian medicine, the toxic environment we’ve created for ourselves and path dependence. Nesse would like every medical textbook to have an extra paragraph of explanation regarding each human illness or frailty (e.g., back pain): how was it that natural selection left this condition as it did?
In this video, Nesse also explains that the body is not a machine. He comes to this conclusion because the body does not have “blueprints.” There is no such thing as a “normal genome.” A genome is merely a collection of genes that work. Thus, the genome is not a blueprint and the body is thus not a machine. For more on this metaphor, see here [4].
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