Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker engage in a thought-provoking discussion on topics such as the evolution of pain, fear, and language. They explore evolutionary explanations for human behavior, the genetic basis of language, and the roots of fears and phobias. The conversation also touches on animal communication, learning processes in children, and the enriching experience of conversations between like-minded individuals.
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Children Are Wired For Grammar
Children acquire grammar rapidly using innate abstract mechanisms, not memorization.
Universal grammar is schematic and helps organize diverse languages from limited input.
question_answer ANECDOTE
How Proto-Indo-European Spread
Proto-Indo-European likely spread due to a cultural advantage like farming or horse domestication.
That ancestral language then radiated and replaced many local tongues across Europe.
insights INSIGHT
Language’s Many Genetic Roots
Language evolved gradually and depends on many genes, not a single 'language gene.'
Disorders reveal a complex genetic basis and long evolutionary history for language.
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There’s a kind of conventional wisdom among broadcasters that an interview has to be adversarial. The interviewer must probe in a critical kind of way. You must have arguments. This was brought home to me some years ago when I had a conversation on stage in London, a very large audience with Steven Pinker, and it went very well. The audience liked it, and the BBC, who weren’t there, got wind of it and decided they’d like to have a reprise of it later in the evening, in the News Night programme. So they asked us whether we would do it, and we agreed. Then the BBC producer rang me up and she said to me, “What’s the nature of your disagreement with Dr. Pinker?” I said, “Well, I don’t think there is a disagreement. I think we agree about most things.” She said, “No disagreement?” The interview was promptly cancelled.
That’s just an illustration, and it came to mind again when I did an interview with Steve Pinker in Boston, at Harvard. It was part of the programme I did for Channel Four in 1998 called The Genius of Charles Darwin. We had a very long conversation lasting about an hour, I suppose, and we agreed about just about everything. But I think it is illuminating. I think it’s one of the best interviews I’ve ever done. It’s two people who pretty much agree about everything we discussed, and it’s as though one person was having a conversation with himself. But it’s somehow better than that. I think that when you have two people who agree with each other in that kind of way, each one raises the game of the other. Let’s see if you agree, listen to this conversation between me and Steve Pinker.
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The Poetry of Reality with Richard Dawkins 
