Start the Week

18/04/2011

Andrew Marr's guests include the neuroscientist and philosopher Sam Harris, who argues that science ought to influence human morality rather than religion; the writer Masha Gessen who describes the extraordinary story of the Russian maths genius Grigori Perelman who solved a mathematical problem that had remained inscrutable for a century but refused to take the credit - or the million dollar prize; Adam Rutherford, geneticist and journalist on decoding the genome and being human and the Revd Lucy Winkett of St James's Piccadilly, London on how the religious sensibility can contribute to the 'good society'.

Producer: Elaine Lester.

Duration:: 42m
Broadcast on:: 18 Apr 2011
Audio Format:: other

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. When you need meal time inspiration, it's worth shopping king supers for thousands of appetizing ingredients that inspire countless mouth-watering meals. And no matter what tasty choice you make, you'll enjoy our everyday low prices. Plus extra ways to save, like digital coupons worth over $600 each week, and up to $1 off per gallon at the pump with points. So you can get big flavors and big savings king supers fresh for everyone. Fuel restrictions apply. Thank you for downloading the start the week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, today we're going to be looking at some of the puzzled puzzles buried in our DNA. How much of our behaviour is really inherited and a story of our junk genes with the geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford. And we'll be talking about an extraordinary man, Gregory Perleman, one of the world's greatest mathematicians, who was the child of a mathematician indeed, and is now a recluse and the subject of a remarkable book by Masha Gessen. But if genetics and maths inhabit a world of objective analysis and even pure truths, we're going to start ahead of Easter in the Madea or at least more contested world of moral truths. Sam Harris is a philosopher and neuroscientist who believes that morality should be governed by science, not the random rules of religions. In his latest book he says that if faith is ever right about anything, it's right by accident. Lucy Winkett, a Christian minister in central London, has a rather different view of the good society. She's recently quoted a former Dean of St Paul's, don't imagine your thinking when you're simply rearranging your prejudices. Sam Harris, let's start by looking at how you think science could reshape morality, because there has been a general view going way, way back, I suppose even to human, the Enlightenment, that there was a proper world of science which was about facts and investigation and a different part of the mind which was about morality and entirely separate from science. Yeah, yeah. I think this is a myth, this split between facts and values. I think it should be clear to us that questions of right and wrong and good and evil have to relate to questions of human and animal well-being. And because human and animal well-being is emerging out of the laws of nature in some way, in our case, to talk about human well-being is to talk about genetics and neurobiology and psychology and sociology and economics. These are facts that science can understand that this is a domain of right and wrong answers. And we can ask a specific moral question. You say, is it right to force women and girls to wear burkas, say, as they do in Afghanistan? Now, to ask this question, any sane answer to this question has to be spelled out in terms of human well-being. You have to have some argument that this improves the relationship between men and women, that it makes more compassionate men, more confident women. And I think we can be sure at this point that the answer to those questions is no, it does not. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And clearly, I mean, we're talking about a... - Already you're putting in values which are not necessarily science-based. - But you can discover what it's like to live your life in a cloth bag under coercion and to be beaten or killed when you try to get out. Afghanistan has a 12% literacy rate for women. They have a life expectancy of 44 years. This is an unlucky place to be born if you're a girl. And the crucial piece is that it is not unscientific to say so, to say that it's to withhold judgment on this practice from the point of view of science is to pretend we know nothing about human well-being. And that's not intellectually honest and it's a failure of compassion. - I would have thought most Christians, almost all Christians, and probably a very large majority of Muslims would agree with you in that point as well as Hinduism. Are there areas where science would propose a different kind of moral thinking which would surprise people? - Yeah, well, but again, I think we should take a step back because it is simply controversial to say that science can form an opinion about what is truly good and what is truly evil or right and wrong. This is generally considered a no-go area for science. Most people think that we are just evolved apes that have certain preferences, certain intuitions of right and wrong that have been drummed into us by evolution. And by virtue of their origins, they leave us with no contact with a reality that where we can make truth claims. And I'm disputing that in my book. - And to be clear, you're also saying in your book, this is not to do with the sort of simplistic argument that we are genetically programmed and that therefore what our genes tell us to do is good. I've spent sort of 700,000 years on the Serengeti behaving in a certain way. I'm programmed to be a hunter who just wants to spread my genes, et cetera. And therefore I can't be blamed for it. That's not what you're saying. - Clearly, that's not the case. There are many things, many propensities that we have based on evolution that we are busily and wisely trying to mitigate or get rid of. Tribal violence and an inclination to rape. I mean, these are things that could have very well had an adaptive advantage in the past. And no one would argue that they're ethical because they simply don't conduce to human well-being. These are, we have flown the perch that has been built for us by evolution. And obviously we have to do this with the brains that we have by virtue of evolution. But we can talk about human well-being and human flourishing in the context of science and not, this is not merely to describe how we got here. This is to describe what are the possibilities of experience given what we are in this moment. - I can see that well-being is a useful concept. Flourishing is a useful concept when you're talking about moral choices. But what about transcendence? What about the spiritual and transcendent values that many religious people would say are at the heart of their morality? - Well, I happen to be very interested in what's called spiritual experience. And I think there are these core experiences for which we historically have only had religious language experiences of self-transcendence and compassion and selfless love, which we should be interested in personally exploring and we should want to understand scientifically. - There seems to be an innate urge to praise as it were or to glory in a beautiful landscape or a relationship or whatever it might be. - Yeah, and I think it can go deeper than that. I think it can be that the spiritual truths that lie at the heart of our contemplative traditions are deeper than loving a beautiful sunset or being in awe or the intelligibility of nature. But one thing I think should be clear is that given that people in all traditions have these experiences, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, and atheists have these experiences, clearly there must be a deeper principle at work. This is a propensity of the human mind. This is this cannot be a matter of Jesus really being the truth in the life and born of a virgin, et cetera. None of these experiences confirm the dogmas and doctrines of the world's religions because they're mutually canceling. If Islam is true, Christianity is false. And if Buddhism is true, both Islam and Christianity bear absolutely no relationship to the nature of reality. And so we need a mature science of the human mind that makes room for a discussion of the most positive end of the spectrum of well-being. When I was reading a book, I was sort of thinking about what areas of morality might be changed radically by science. And I was wondering about, for instance, what science is uncovering about the consciousness, the self-consciousness, the self-awareness of other mammals. For instance, would that be an area that much contested and argued over area of so-called animal rights? Yeah, I think the moment you concede that morality is a matter of mitigating suffering and encouraging well-being. And therefore, it matters to what extent any given creature can experience these states. If we built a computer that we thought was conscious and could suffer, we should have moral concern for it. And if we discovered that pigs suffer our treatment of them much more than cows do, say, if this is a possible discovery we might make, all of a sudden our practices would have to shift or should shift based on compassion for the suffering of fellow sentient beings. One other area that struck me was the question of whether when it comes to a sort of scientific approach to morality, it's actually possible to analyze why we behave morally or we don't behave morally. Because a lot of people say, "Yes, this is all very well, but it's a bit bloodless. It's a bit intellectual." And actually, everybody needs cohorts, groups, communities to discuss morals and to police each other, as it were, or to look at each other. And that's really how we take moral decisions. We're surrounded by groups which may very well be faith groups. There's no question that that's the case. And my main concern is that our challenge now is to figure out how to build a global civilization based on shared values. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life and converge on principles of politics and economics and environmental goals. And to do this, we have to talk about well-being in non-sectarian terms very much in the context of our scientific understanding of the world. And it seems to me that religious denominational language is not the piece of software you want running on your brain in order to do that. But you don't have, as it were, the chaplains and the priests and the organizations to go out there and spread a scientific view of morality. Well, no, but we have a reason and we have the expectations that we use in every other area of our lives for reason discourse and intellectual honesty. And in my other books, I bemoan the fact that this breaks down when we start talking about the most important questions in human life. And people begin to invoke their faith claims. So for instance, the President Obama is against gay marriage. And when asked why, he says, "My faith tells me marriage is between a man and a woman. Full stop. There's no burden on him to ever make an ethical argument about well-being. He doesn't have to have a story about all the suffering occasion by gay marriage. He can just end the conversation with a faith claim." I think that's profoundly intrinsically divisive and at this point in human history, dangerously dysfunctional. Lucie Winkett, if somebody says to you, "I believe in this or because I'm a Christian and it stops there," would you consider that unsatisfactory? And do you think that religious people do have a duty to examine well-being and engage at the level that Sam is talking about? Certainly. I think that the difficulty I have with Sam's point, and much that I would agree with, much of the criticism of bad religion, of course, most logically-minded sentient beings would agree with. I don't have any difficulty with that at all. And I think it's the caricature of religion, of bad religion, of all religion, which is something that I would have difficulty with, that if Sam is saying, "We must converge on a set of shared values," I suppose one of my questions would be, "Why?" And is that underlying assumption of progress, moral progress, and underlying assumption to a kind of homogeneity of values? Is that necessarily a good thing? And certainly, as a person who would say, "I am a Christian," I would absolutely not wish to stop there. I would want to engage, I think, Christianity in itself, as with other world religions, has much to say about the nature of well-being, the nature of human flourishing, the nature of what a society might be that we build together. But fundamentally, you would respond to him that there isn't necessarily a single answer to every moral question. It depends where you come from. Well, I wouldn't say that I would want to be absolutely relativist about it, but I would say that if there are some shared values, they would be very few. And it would be very interesting to take one and to see where it got to, because I think the golden rule to one to others is not universal, but it's very, very widely spread. Sure. I mean, there's two versions of it. Either don't do to others what you wouldn't wish that they do to you, so the negative version, or more positively do to others, as you would wish that they would do to you. But from a Christian point of view, for example, there's another step that one would take with that, which is clearly Jesus quoted that, but it was already in existence. Jesus of Nazareth then took it on one stage rather and said, "Do as I have done to you," which is about washing one another's feet, serving one another, and that notion of imaginative sacrifice. And that's one thing that I would want to ask you, Sam, about the kind of notion of sacrifice and beauty and imagination in this moral universe. And are any other areas of human concern permitted at the table of discussing morality other than science? Yeah, good question. I think we should revisit this issue of wellbeing though, because what worries me about religious conceptions of morality is that they seem to separate moral concern from a genuine and intelligent discussion of human wellbeing and human flourishing. So you take, for example, the Catholic Church. This is an institution that is more concerned about stopping contraception than stopping the rape of children. It's an institution that's more concerned about stopping gay marriage than genocide. Now, I say this as a matter of both of its apparent doctrine and as a matter of its attentional energies in recent decades. And when you see that, and when you see people go to sub-Saharan Africa and preach the sinfulness of condom use in villages ravaged by AIDS, or you're preaching this necessity of believing in Jesus in places where that have been war-torn for decades with Christian Muslim conflict, you'll see that the concern of this institution is not tracking human wellbeing. So then they appear to be pseudo-moral concerns. Then to my eye, the Catholic Church appears as wrong about morality as it does about cosmology. You're going to have to jump in and defend Catholic here as an Anglican. Well, I mean, I take the criticism, understand the criticism, but would you say that just because scientific experiments were carried out in the Third Reich in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, therefore, science is no longer permitted to exercise its effect on humankind. Again, you're characterizing bad religion and making it all religion. I hope I can spell out why that's a false analogy, because this is... I'm not pointing to all the bad things that religious people have done as a sign of religion's pathology. I'm pointing to all the bad things that religious people have done and continue to do precisely because of the doctrines they believe in the name of faith. Now, so could you say the same? Sorry. Couldn't you say the same about the scientists in the Nazi scientists? They thought that they were actually conducting experiments, some of which were very useful, but they were conducting experiments on people. They believed weren't people based on completely irrational dogmatic ideology of the German, the purity of German blood and the evils of... I mean, there's no society in human history that has ever suffered because its people became too reasonable, too demanding of evidence, too sensitive to dogmatism. I mean, this is the lifeblood of science and it is not the lifeblood of religion. Right. Before we end this bit of the discussion, I just want to ask you about one of the other areas in the book which fascinated me. Again, I'm trying to search for how would life be different if science governed morality? And one of the areas that you look at later on is the question of truth telling and the notion that although we've got lie detectors at the moment, they're not 100% accurate or anything like it, but that we could, through brain imaging and so on, be quite close to being able to tell pretty much certainly whether somebody was lying or not. And you think public lie detecting in all sorts of situations, I mean, I'm thinking about politics, of course, as well, but this is something that could become acceptable. Oh, yeah. I think when you just sensitize yourself to the cost of not being able to tell whether someone's telling the truth. I mean, there are people who go to, in my country, where we have a death penalty, people who go to their deaths in prison for crimes they didn't commit. And, you know, DNA evidence has been exculpatory in hundreds of cases, but it's often too late. And then there are obviously people who can bluff their way out of war crimes trials based on successful lines. So to be able to tell whether someone is representing their beliefs honestly would be a huge boon to us. And I think non-invasive ways of doing this are coming. And so I think our expectations of truth telling when the truth really matters, when the lives of millions depend on getting really straight about whether- Well, I think the fact that you'd be absolutely fascinating to put everybody had something strapped to their head and you knew when they were lying. It's a magic question. I want to ask you about the mathematics of scientific morality. History is full of examples of people making themselves and others unhappy in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number of people. And I say this as somebody who grew up in the USSR. How will we count this up in a world of scientific morality? Well, it's a good question. I would distinguish between answers in practice and answers in principle. So what I'm arguing for in my book is that there are answers in principle to questions of human flourishing, whether we can always get the answers in practice. And this is true in any domain of truth that we acknowledge is a domain of truth. They're an infinite number of questions we can't answer, but we know have simple answers. So how many birds are in flight over the surface of the earth at this moment? We don't know. We're never going to know. In any case, it just changed. But yet there's a simple number that answers that question. So it could be like economics. Economics is scarcely a science now. So the economic systems are so complicated, you can get Nobel laureates on either side of a question, disagreeing about how to respond to a banking crisis. They all the economists in the world end to end and they still wouldn't reach a conclusion that somebody once said. And yet no one doubts that they're right and wrong ways to respond or better and worse ways to respond that are constrained by the dynamics of the system we're discussing. So we're talking about brains, we're talking about the way events in the world affect them, how we affect one another through culture and conversation. And all of this is realized at the level of biology. Well, the level of biology takes us to genetics and Adam Rutherford. So we're going to talk about that a little for a moment or two. Before we do though, I'm just reflecting on the fact that Easter is coming up. In St James's Piccadilly, which is your church, you have a great parade outside with the donkeys and all the rest of it. But parading up and down outside your church, you also have, you've seen the backwash, I suppose, of the the credit crunch because you're as an area with lots of hedge fund managers and bankers and so on. And more latterly, protesters swirling around. So any reflections from that particular eerie because you've got a very, very good vantage point. I mean, you're referring to Palm Sunday, which is actually yesterday, we're in Holy Week. And I think the kind of, I suppose what we witnessed with that particular march was, in some senses, a secular ritual. And how do you express what you believe about the society that you're living in? This was a mass protest about a particular aspect of government policy. And clearly, there was a small kind of writer on the side of that. The anti-cuts march, we could say, rather than Palm Sunday, yes. Quite. And you know, there are ways in which it seems to me that human beings need not just desire ritual. And that's where I would come back to the point I was making before about imagination. I mean, it may seem ridiculous to walk up and down Piccadilly with a donkey. And clearly, you know, there's some, there is some kind of element of humour in that, and certainly some of the tourists were astonished at what we were doing. At the same time, those of us who were intentionally taking part in that ritual found meaning in that ritual. It looks useless and it looks silly to some degree, but there is something counter-cultural about it. And that is the point that a lot of religious people would make about the importance of there being a physical community, a series of plastic rituals, objects and colours and so on to back moral instinct. Yes, exactly. And I don't think there's anything wrong with valuing ambiguity, for example. I don't think that that means that there is something dishonest about a person who is of a religious sensibility. It simply means that there is an element of humility in what we're doing, because we simply don't know, ultimately, we can't nail it down to the last degree. Adam Rutherford, you're on the scientific side of the divide, if there is a complete divide, but you went through the alpha course, didn't you? A Christian course, too. I suppose to see whether you would be affected or converted by it. I didn't really suspect that I was going to be converted, because I am a fairly strong atheist, but it was more to try and understand a very successful movement in modern Christianity to convert people. I believe from one type of Christian into another. So yes, I did this 10-week course. It took up a huge amount of time, and at the end of it, I did come to the conclusion that the alpha course itself is a pernicious thing, but that Christianity itself inherently isn't. So alpha represents a particular-- Well, it went over a little bit, if not to its particular system. But what about the argument, then, that in practical terms to actually engage in the world in a moral way, having a community, a group around you, as faith groups do and scientific atheists, very rarely do, is it not any good thing but a necessary thing? That may well be true, and certainly in being in church, witnessing the alpha course unfold. I did see how people come together and begin to discuss issues which they consider to be important to them. You're right in saying that there isn't an equivalent atheist or secular group, but Sam is CEO of Project Reason, which in some ways answers that call. Let me say, I don't dispute for a moment that we need ritual or at least highly value ritual. We need sacred language. We need things to say when people die or get married that are not ordinary. We need a-- There's profundity in life that has to be marked by special occasions, and it's a problem that the only language we have for this at the moment is language that is redolent with untruths about the universe. We have to pretend either not to notice what these rituals actually mean, or we have to endorse things that I think we can't honestly endorse. I think that your mistaking religious language for scientific language though, I think religious language is poetic language. It's expressing truth in a different way. But not merely so. You can say I'm caricaturing religion, but 50% of Americans think Jesus will return to earth to judge the living and the dead probably sometime in the next 50 years and hurl sinners into a lake of fire. Now, if you're going to say that that's not your Christianity, Christianity, that's great, but this is not a caricature. This is vast numbers of subscribers. I'm beginning to think we're not going to come to a fully consensual position on this. I think let's move on to Adam Rutherford's programs, the gene code on BBC4. This is explaining to people some of the puzzles and the secrets inside our genes. And one of the things that you focus on early on is our connection with the very, very earliest sort of muddy sproges of life on the planet, and the fact that we actually share genes with some of the unimaginably sort of simple things bubbling in rock pools, which are as like to the early beginnings of life as anything we know. That's exactly right. When Charles Darwin came up with the theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859, he expounded this idea, which we believe to be correct, is shown by evidence to be correct that all living things are connected. Now, he had no knowledge of genetics. He had no knowledge of cells. He had no knowledge of the mechanisms by which inheritance actually works. Now, the really huge revelation that occurred during the 80s and 90s and the first decade of this century is that genetics, the study of DNA, has really shown exactly that he was right in the absence of this knowledge about DNA. And so one of the things that we wanted to do is to look at some of the oldest life forms on earth, which are called archaea, they're very similar to bacteria, and look at the fact that humans share around 200 basic genes with these bugs that live in hot springs in Iceland, which is a staggering fact. And complicated life started because an archaea gobbled a bacteria or vice versa. I can never remember which. That's what we think. So for the first billion years or so, starting about 3.9 billion years ago, we just have single-celled creatures like archaea, like bacteria. And then suddenly, there's this enormous cataclysmic event, which is, as you say, one very small microbe being absorbed by another one. And this is the hallmark of all complex life animals' plants, everything apart from bacteria and archaea. And what it is, is that we have these power cells inside our cells, which is called mitochondria, and they allowed the growth, the sudden flourishing, of much more complex beings. Does that extraordinary explosion of complexity, which you discuss in one of the films, does that allow any area for religious amazement? Wow. Well, it is a true revelation, if that's what you're asking. But I think the key thing is that it shows that evolution doesn't just work in this very slow, incremental process where we're just changing things very subtly. There are many huge cataclysmic explosions, for example, one cell being absorbed by another, or huge doublings, or quadruplings of our genomes, which are really significant events in propelling the variety of life. Another area is fascinating in the films is the question of junk genes, that such a large proportion of our DNA code has just been pushed to one side as useless. Yeah, although we're rapidly finding out that it's not useless. So I was a genetics undergraduate in the 90s, and even then we were referring to areas of the genome, which don't contain genes as junk DNA, and that is a sort of word that has continued and perpetrates through the language of genetics. We're rapidly finding out that it's really not the case. If you look at the big revelation of the human genome project was that if you look at the three billion letters of genetic code that we have, only about two or 3% of it actually encodes genes. So you've got this huge sections of DNA, which like a vast, vast book, only small parts of which are relevant will make sense. Exactly, and when we look at the bits that don't contain genes, the fact of the matter is we don't really know what's going on there, and for a long time it was referred to as junk because it didn't have genes in it, but what we've found out in the last few years is that mutations within them can cause disease, for example, or that we have huge bits of these non-coding regions, no genes in there, that are shared with mice and with chickens, and if they're shared, then it indicates that you've got a historical record of a kind? Absolutely, absolutely. In fact, all every genome is a historical record because we have this shared origin which goes back to the first organism's 3.9 million years ago. And the other area which will take us on to what Masha Gessen is talking about as well is the question of heritability because it's an endless, and in some respects, pointless argument, how much of what we do is inherited and how much is caused by nurture and education and background and so on. But your conclusion is much more is inherited than we have traditionally thought. Well, genetics is saying that, but there is a sort of problem, a conundrum within modern genetics, which has only really emerged in the last few years and in the program we were really trying to update with ultra up-to-date research about what genetics is saying. The problem is this, that we see when you look at people's genomes and you compare them across populations, you look at traits like height or diseases which are complex like diabetes. And what you see is that only a very small proportion of the in the heritability of those traits can be determined by looking at genes. And so there was this emerging problem, the case of the missing heritability is what it's been labeled as. It's not mystical, it's not magical, we just don't know where it is yet, so if you take a trait like height, it's obvious that it's heritable, tall parents give birth to tall children. But when we looked at populations and we looked at the genes involved in that, what we saw is that only a very small proportion of the genes that we could see could measure actually contributed to height. And we don't really know the answer to that, it all relates back to that 97, 98 percent of the genome which doesn't contain genes. Sam Harith. One of the fascinating moments in your documentary was when you went to India and you looked at the influence of the caste system on the genetic stratification of the population, I've been to India probably eight times and it never occurred to me what a natural experiment was being performed there. And it was really brilliant, I was wondering if you wanted to talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I agree with that. I thought it was a really staggering revelation there. But because of caste, which is a marriage only within a social group, they have conducted, as Sam says, this experiment for thousands of generations which is effectively inbreeding. And it's what scientists do with mice and fruit flies in the lab all the time. But I think uniquely on earth, the Indian population because of caste has these experiments going on. What conclusion do you draw from what you know so far? Well, there is a danger in it which is that you maintain diseases which are recessive, which are normally outbred. And we do measure that within the Indian population, within the subcontinental population. There was one particular incident which we thought was very interesting, which was that within one particular caste, the vice-year, a mutation occurred. We now know probably 3,000 years ago, many generations ago, which for 98% of the history of that caste had absolutely no effect. And then in the 90s, some doctors noticed that vice-years when they went under an aesthetic for major surgery, they didn't recover from a specific anesthetic for a long time, which normally only last five minutes. And geneticists noticed this and they sequenced the gene that was interacting with the anesthetic. And what they found out was that vice-years have this mutation which has no effect until the advent of modern medicine, until the application of this anesthetic. So now the first question they ask vice-years when they go in for elective surgery is, are you a vice-year? Fascinating. Well, let's return to the question of heritability because Masha Gessen's latest subject is the Russian mathematician Grigory Perman, who won a huge international acclaim for solving a conjecture or a problem. We'll come on to that in a moment. But Masha, this is a man who born like yourself in the Soviet Union, the old Soviet Union, where maths is a sort of a secret world, almost, a place in which people who are otherwise outcasts in some respects, because they're Jewish or intellectuals or whatever, can allow their minds to roam as freely as their minds can roam. And this guy's mother was also a mathematician. There is an element of which mathematicians produce mathematicians, whether for cultural or genetic reasons, I don't know. Right. I think that I actually say in the book that he was born to be a mathematician, because his mother was a very promising young mathematician. She was invited to stay on a graduate school, which for a Jewish woman in the 60s was an extremely unusual event. And she said, "No, thank you. I'm going to start a family." Showed up at her professor's door step 12 years later and said, "I now have an 11-year-old son who is good at mathematics, do something." And the professor fixed him up with a tutor who took him really through the rest of his mathematical career. He trained him to participate in international mathematics. Olympics, he really arranged his career. So this was almost a designer baby of mathematics. One thing that I also find fascinating about what he inherited, his behavior has been very odd, and that's part of why he's drawn so much attention to himself, because at this point he's a total recluse. He lives with his mother on the outskirts of St Petersburg on his mother's pension, because he's turned down all the international prizes, including a million dollars. That was awarded him for solving the Poincare conjecture. And the famous field medal as well. And the field medal. The Nobel Prize of Math, he just refused to take it. He's pretty much turned down every prize that was ever offered to him, and he's been offered all the mathematical prizes and progression. And one thing that his mother is also an unusual person, but not quite as unusual as he is. And you know, as Adam, you surely know James Watson, the discoverer of the Double Helix, has been fascinated with, has been obsessed, I think, with the heritability of Asperger's and autism for about the last 20 years. And that seems very much in play here. Earlier on you mentioned words like training and tutoring and Olympics in relation to maths. And one of the points you make in the book is that maths is more like a sport in the sense of tennis, training up the superstars with intensive rigor and coaching and so on, than it is like an intellectual pursuit where you sit quietly by yourself in the library. Not exactly. Actually, competitive maths is very much like a sport. There's actually very little overlap between competitive maths and real maths. Very few of the kids who go through the Olympic system end up being research mathematicians. Most of them end up being applied mathematicians or not doing mathematics at all. Parliament is very unusual in that he went through the Olympic system, and he's probably the greatest problem solver the Olympic system ever saw, and ended up being a research mathematician. The world of the maths clubs that you describe in the book is not only a place where people can go and do something pure, which allows them to kind of hide away from part of this obvious system. But it's also very strange what sort of almost kind of homoerotic male world where people idolise their tutors and go off hiking and so on. Right. It was started, I mean, the foundation of the mathematics schools and the mathematics subculture goes back to a very particular man named Andrei Kolmagotov, who is probably the greatest Russian mathematician of the 20th century and one of the greatest mathematicians in the world of the 20th century. Oddly, he was more or less openly gay living in the Soviet Union with his partner 50 years, who's also a mathematician, and he brought to the system of children education that he created a very particular sensibility. It was sort of built on the ancient Greek model. There was a great emphasis. Germanic hiking goes on a lot. Hiking and all sorts of physical culture, all sorts of exercise, wrestling. And at the same time, there was a great emphasis on music, on studying the history of antiquity and mathematics. There was very much a boys club. So, Grigory in this boys club gets more and more advanced and famous and so on and eventually goes off by himself to solve the Poincare conjecture. Are we going to try to explain what the Poincare conjecture is? No, we're not even going to try to explain. It's quite right. But it's about the placing of points in a complex system, placing of objects in a comp. No, it's not. Okay, let's just, but anyway, it's jolly difficult. And he and he sold it and he posted his solution on the internet and astonished everybody. And since then has withdrawn and probably withdrawn from mathematics, never mind in a, never mind society. Right. I think and this is what much of the book is about. The way that Pearlman's mind works is that he expects the universe and everything to function as rigidly, as clearly, as well as mathematics does. And whenever he encounters a part of the world that doesn't function as he thinks it should, he sort of cuts it off. So, it's not surprising in a sense that he's progressively cut off everything in life, except for himself and his mother. And he hasn't spoken to you. He doesn't give in to you. So you've had to do all of this through friends and so on. In a way, that made the project more interesting and more liberating because when one writes a biography of a willing subject, one has always beholden of the person's view of him or herself, which is not always the most interesting or the most accurate view. Sam, did you get a sense in doing your research, what percentage of great mathematicians kind of segregate on the Asperger end of the spectrum? Well, Simon Baron Kahn, who's the world's leading expert on Asperger's, has done that research and he's found that in a disproportionate number of mathematics students falls on the Asperger end of the spectrum? Yeah, it's interesting to consider whether there are trade-offs between things that we genuinely value. I mean, obviously, you don't want Asperger's all things being equal, but if the utility of being pushed in that direction is the only way to disclose that kind of mathematical talent, it's an interesting case of... Well, that's one of the points that Simon Baron Kahn makes and I hope we'll be discussing this later in the series of these programs, Adam. I'm interested in the notion that he maybe had a mother who was very good at maths, but was effectively hot-housed into being the maths genius that you describe, because there in a nutshell is whether he was predisposed to being good at maths, or whether it was a facet of him being hot-house, which do you think? I think it's both. I think it's nature and nurture plain. We're now told we can't say nature versus nurture. We have to say nature via nurture, which seems to me to remove the entire excitement of the argument anyway. Scientists haven't really said nature versus nurture since the '70s when it became apparent that the interaction between DNA and the environment was very dynamic. That's me well put in my place, just the right moment, because we have come to the end of our time. Thank you to all my guests. Masha Gessen's book Perfect Riga is out now, so is Sam Harris's book The Moral Landscape. Adam Rutherford's series The Gene Code is on BBC4 Tonight at 9 o'clock. Thanks as well to Lucy Winkett, busy during Holy Week. She is rector of St James's Parish in Piccadilly. Next week, we have got Greg Doran, who has recreated or helped recreate Shakespeare's lost play. Neil Astley and Nicola Schulman on the power of poetry and reviewing all of them with a critical I clear arm instead, but for now, thank you and goodbye.

Producer: Elaine Lester.