Richard Dawkins

It might be that human poetry, epic poems, recitals, singing, is a form of sexual selection, and that humans might have evolved the capacity to advertise to the opposite sex by being virtuoso poets, virtuoso reciters of tribal epic poems, something of that sort.

Like a peacock's tail.

That is true.

The phrase junk DNA is rather overused in different ways, but I think what you're talking about is what are called pseudogenes.

where they're just dead vestiges actually.

It's a little bit different than your dribble.

It's a dead vestige.

And the most interesting example of this, it's kind of fossil, it's gone, is the sense of smell.

As you know, humans have a very poor sense of smell compared to many other mammals.

The interesting thing is that we still have the genes that would make us have that kind of sense of smell.

They've just been turned off.

So we have a whole repertoire of ancient mammal smell genes.

They've just simply been switched off.

They're vestiges.

their pseudo genes, I sort of feel if only they could be turned back on again, we would experience wonderful exotic perfumes that we cannot imagine and I could imagine the,

sort of wine connoisseurs would go far beyond the inklings of lead pencil mixed with blackberry in the satisfying finish, that kind of thing.

I mean, that would go way, way beyond if only we had all these genes turned on.

Have you tried hardle, by the way?

Hardle.

Oh, it's wonderful.