The late Francis Crick, one of Britain's most famous scientists, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. He is best known for his discovery, jointly with James Watson and Maurice Wilkins, of the double helix structure of DNA, though he also made important contributions in understanding the genetic code and was exploring the basis of consciousness in the years leading up to his death in 2004.
Well, I think there are two reasons for religions. I mean, there are a number of reasons. One is that people do have a curiosity about the world, and they like to understand, you know, how did it start, where does it come from, why are we here, how far back in time does it go? All those sort of questions on the one hand. And also, the religions also have a moral say, they say that say you should not do this or you should do that, often for rather arbitrary reasons, when you look into it. But some of these are founded on, well, on quite deep biological reactions, and some of them are rather arbitrary, like particular food habits or something like that always strike one as rather arbitrary. And you have to ask why it is, what’s their value because they wouldn't have- there has to be something in-built in man that is- has some selective advantage otherwise religions wouldn’t have- wouldn't have prospered the way they’ve done. And one reason is that it gives solidity to a society. A shared set of beliefs binds people together, and there’s a lot of- in our early evolutionary histories when we’re hunter-gatherers and later on when we became agriculturalists and so on - there was much, really, warfare between one lot of tribe and another tribe. And anything that- anything that consolidated the acting together of members of the tribe probably gave them survival value. Now these things are not known for sure, they’re only speculations, but there has to be an explanation in the long run. If it turns out that most of these religious ideas are really false, there has to be an explanation as to why they appeal to people so much. And it must be an explanation in terms of natural selection and what the selection advantage is. Now I don’t say what I’ve just said is the explanation, but it may be somewhere along that sort of lines.
Title: Reasons for religion
Listeners:
Christopher Sykes
Christopher Sykes is an independent documentary producer who has made a number of films about science and scientists for BBC TV, Channel Four, and PBS.
In 1993 he and his wife, Lotte, made a series for BBC2 called 'Seven
Wonders of the World', in which outstanding scientists were invited to
talk about themselves and their own seven wonders... Francis Crick
declined to play this particular game (on the basis that 'everything is
wonderful'), but he did agree to spend a couple of hours talking about
his life and and work. The footage did not appear in the 'Seven
Wonders' series, and has never been publicly shown. When Crick died in the summer of 2004, BBC TV kindly gave permission for it to be included in 'Peoples Archive'.
Technical note: the videotapes from which the Peoples Archive streaming version has been prepared had timecode-in-vision in the lower third of the picture. We have reframed the material to exclude this timecode because it is distracting, although this does mean that the image is sometimes a more extreme close-up than either director or cameraman ever intended!
Duration:
1 minute, 51 seconds
Date story recorded/uploaded:
1993
Date story went live:
08 January 2010
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