Growing Up in the Universe

To start off part one, Dawkins discusses the amazing capabilities of the human body and contrasts these with the limited capabilities of computers and other man-made machines. He uses a small totem pole (which is used in ancestor worship) to illustrate the importance of studying our ancestors to understand how we've evolved. To contrast ease of reproduction with the difficulty of becoming an ancestor, Dawkins uses the example of paper folding to explain exponential growth. Dawkins then tells the audience that exponential growth does not generally happen in the real world - natural factors come into play which control the population numbers, meaning that only an elite group of organisms will actually become distant ancestors. To be in this elite group, the organism must "have what it takes" to survive and pass on their genes to offspring.

Dawkins' second lecture of the series examines the problem of design. He presents the audience with a number of simple objects, such as rocks and crystals, and notes that these objects have been formed by simple laws of physics and are therefore not designed. He then examines some designed objects - including a microscope, an electronic calculator, a pocket watch, and a clay pot - and notes that none of these objects could have possibly come about by sheer luck. Dawkins then discusses what he calls "designoid objects", which are complex objects that are neither simple, nor designed. Not only are they complex on the outside, they are also complex on the inside - perhaps billions of times more complex than a designed object such as a microscope.

Dawkins starts the lecture coming in with a stick insect on his hand. He describes with how much details such a being imitates its environment, its almost like a key that fits a lock. He then shows another insect, namely a Leaf Insect, which basically looks exactly like a dead leaf. He gives some more examples for this amazing imitation of the surrounding, e.g. a Potoo, which looks like a branch of tree and a thorn bug, which gains protection by looking like a rose thorn.

Dawkins begins by relating the story of asking a little girl "what she thought flowers were 'for'." Her response is anthropocentric, that flowers are there for our benefit. Dawkins points out that many people throughout history have thought that the natural world existed for our benefit, with examples from Genesis and other literature. Author Douglas Adams, who is sitting in the audience, is called to read a relevant passage from his novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Dawkins then asks his audience to put off the idea that the natural world exists for our benefit. He considers the question of flowers seen through the eyes of bees and other pollinators, and performs a series of demonstrations which use ultraviolet light to excite fluorescence in various substances.

Dawkins opens by talking how organisms “grow up” to understand the universe around them, which requires certain apparatus, such as a brain. But before brains can become large enough to model the universe they must develop from intermediate forms. Dawkins then discusses the digger wasp and the set of experiments conducted by Nikolaas Tinbergen of how the digger wasp models the local geography around its nest. He then talks about the limitations of the digger wasps’ brain and concludes that only the human brain is sufficiently developed to model large-scale phenomena about the world. He then shows a MRI scan of a human brain (later revealed to be his own brain) and describes how an image develops from the eye onto the visual cortex.