“I fear a painful death,” Richard Dawkins said. “As for fearing death itself, I think what I fear is eternity. Eternity is a very frightening concept, and I think it’s even more frightening if you’re going to live through it. I think I want to relieve pain with a general anaesthetic, and I want to relieve eternity with a general anaesthetic, which is exactly what’s going to happen.”
He began by talking about his bestseller The Selfish Gene, conceding that it could easily have been called The Immortal Gene, since it is really the story of how genes live for ever. He addressed some of the more concerning issues around evolutionary biology, including that of altruism. People are, he conceded, more altruistic than pure Darwinian theory would predict, but that is explained by our heritage.
We previously lived in communities which were composed of close relatives, so helping them made them sense because they were more likely to help us. This behaviour is a “rule of thumb” which we retain, despite it no longer making biological sense, Dawkins said.
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