Richard Dawkins: The Importance of Doing Useless Things
From poetry and ballet to mathematics and being clever, life is laden with frivolous pursuits that hold no bearing on our ability to survive. However, Dawkins explains that the ability to perform...
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There are many things that humans do that have nothing to do with contributing to the survival of the individual, at least nothing obvious to do with it. So when we do mathematics and when we do poetry and when we do ballet dancing and all the things that make life worth living, it's very hard to make the case that this contributes to individual survival; it clearly doesn't. What you can make a case for is that the possession of the kind of brain that's capable of doing those things contributed to individual survival in our ancestral past. So it's not the mathematics itself; it's not that doing algebra helps anybody to survive. But having the kind of big brain that incidentally proves itself capable of doing algebra -- having that k...
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There are many things that humans do that have nothing to do with contributing to the survival of the individual, at least nothing obvious to do with it. So when we do mathematics and when we do poetry and when we do ballet dancing and all the things that make life worth living, it's very hard to make the case that this contributes to individual survival; it clearly doesn't. What you can make a case for is that the possession of the kind of brain that's capable of doing those things contributed to individual survival in our ancestral past. So it's not the mathematics itself; it's not that doing algebra helps anybody to survive. But having the kind of big brain that incidentally proves itself capable of doing algebra -- having that k...
