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Why Some Scientists Are Rethinking Darwin’s Theory of Evolution | Stephen Meyer
01:02:58
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For decades now, we've been told the biggest questions of how life and our universe came to be were settled. But what if they're not?
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The scientific discoveries of the last 100 years and right up to the present are pointing in a very different direction than people thought in the late 19th century.
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Stephen Meyer has spent his career digging into the deepest mysteries of our existence.
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Natural selection does a nice job of explaining that small scale variation, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining the origin of what biologists call morphological innovation. The origin of major new body plans or new form, new organs, new tissues, but especially new body plans in the history of life.
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What if modern biology textbooks leave out the most important part of the story?
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Darwinian evolution functions as a kind of secular religion. The question of the origin of the first life itself. How do you get life going? That's something Darwin never addressed.
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Meyer is a New York Times best selling author and founder of the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. Now, in a new film, the Story of Everything, coming to theaters April 30, he lays out a case that could reshape how we think about life itself. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Jan Kellick. Stephen Meyer, Such a pleasure to have you at American Thought Leaders.
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It's great to be with you, Jan. Thank you for inviting me in such a beautiful studio as well, you know,
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I have to offer you huge congratulations on the Story of Everything. It's a beautiful, marvelous film and I hope it does incredibly well. And at the outset, I'll recommend everybody go see it. But let's start here, okay? Back when I was studying biology in my undergraduate degree, third year in third year biology, something occurred to me, and that was that people would say, I believe in evolution. And I realized as I was studying evolution and continued to study evolutionary biology that when people said that, they meant different things. Okay. And so, for example, what I first thought people were saying was that evolution by natural selection, this kind of specific Darwinian mechanism happens, right? Which I think is true as a concept. Right. Like this, you can see it in viruses, for example.
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Indisputably true.
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Exactly. Indisputably true. However, what struck me was that when people say that often, they would really mean, I believe, that that's where humans come from. There was this kind of quasi religious belief in it, right? Which was just odd to me because it was very obvious to me that there were all these different. Clearly there would have to be all these different mechanisms at play to get the diversity of life. It's like We've been arguing almost at cross purposes around this question. That's where I want to start.
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Yeah, that's a great place to start. Because there's a great deal of equivocation around the term evolution. It can mean many different things. And just initial observation or reaction to what you've said is that there's a huge difference between the idea that natural selection is a real process that takes place and the claim that, that natural selection acting on random variations and mutations has unlimited creative power. It can be a process that is a real part of biological phenomena without necessarily having unlimited creative power. And many leading evolutionary biologists today are now calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize that the mutation natural selection mechanism has limited creative power. Quite limited creative power. I attended a conference in 2016, now, 10 years ago at the Royal Society in London that was convened by a group of biologists and evolutionary biologists who have been calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they realize that the mechanism of mutation and selection has such limited power that it does a nice job of explaining small scale variation and adaptation. All the classic examples that we learn about in the biology textbooks, the same ones that are repeated over and over again, there's a few, fairly limited number of these, but the peppered moths that change coloration from dark to light and dark again. Or maybe it's the other way around. The Galapagos finches with the beaks that get a little bigger, a little smaller and change shape in response to varying food supplies and weather patterns, antibiotic resistance and so forth. Natural selection does a nice job of explaining that small scale variation, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining the origin of what biologists call morphological innovation. The origin of major new body plans or new form, new organs, new tissues, but especially new body plans in the history of life that we find again and again in the fossil record. That kind of morphological innovation occurs very abruptly and the mechanism of natural selection does not explain that well, runs out of capability very quickly. So we can talk more about why that's the case. But the distinction between just the fact of a mechanism that does something and the claim that it can do everything is often overlooked.
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to the adequacy of evolutionary theory and to the creative power of natural selection. So that's.
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Anyway, yeah, no, no, that. And so it's interesting, right? But what I thought when I saw this, because this is kind of like, you know, that the class is kind of, you know, pitchforks and tiki torch becomes like, this kind of thing because people are so emotional somehow, so emotionally invested in this. Right.
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But I have a friendly. Well of blessed memory of a friendly debating partner. Michael Ruse passed away last fall. And he's on the other side of the issue. Obviously, he was, and he was a committed neo Darwinist, but he wrote an important book in which he acknowledged or really spotlighted the fact that for many of his colleagues, Darwinian evolution functions as a kind of secular religion. And you can see why, because it's answering one of the most fundamental questions that any worldview or religion has to answer, which is what? What is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else came? And the neo Darwinian explanation of the origin of new forms of life is part of the answer to that. Really fundamental question, which is not only a scientific question, but a philosophical worldview question. But Ruz's critique of some of his own colleagues was that because it functions like a secular religion, sometimes there's a resistance to a more dispassionate scientific evaluation of its merits.
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It's just like, to me, the eye. Just the eye, right. And we have a complex eye in an octopus, for example, that's different in some foundational ways than a complex eye in a human being. But no one's been able to explain to me how you get an eye with all the lens and all these complex things through a process of natural selection. I actually think you never get an I through the process of natural selection because there's just so many of these intermediate forms. You know, actually, let's do this, because I even think that maybe there's viewers out there who hear about this natural selection evolution. You might not even understand the exact mechanism. So let's just kind of define what it is very quickly and how. I mean, and if I'm wrong, you tell me. Right? But I just don't think you ever get an eye through natural selection.
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Well, natural selection is the idea that the Darwinian process as a whole envisions differential reproduction, that there would be organisms that would reproduce, leave offspring with varying traits, that some of those traits would be more favored in a competition for survival, and that those would be differentially or on a statistical basis, passed on more frequently than those traits that are not as advantageous. And over time, the idea is that there would be an accumulation of the more favorable traits and that the differences that are represented by those genetic or mutational variations that arise in a population would eventually become fixed in the population, and there would be an overall directional change to the organism.
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And if I may.
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So something fundamentally new would arise.
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But let's talk about the. I'll just use quickly to reframe with this example. Right. The Darwin's finch. Okay. The reason you get a finch that has a very, very long beak is because there's some kind of food out there that a long beak can get.
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Yeah. There's been a study of this by a couple called the Grants, and they showed that there were variations in the weather patterns in the Galapagos. And that part of that resulted in, I think there was a series of droughts. And so that there were only very hard nuts left. And so the finches that survived better on average, had a 5% longer, or forgetting the exact figure beak that enabled them to crack through the nuts. And so you got a small scale variation or adaptation of the structure of the beak to permit more effective Galapagos finch foraging.
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But the bottom line is the ones that have the longer beaks, in this case survive more often, which is why over time you get a longer and longer beak. Basically, that's the process, right?
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Well, that's the claim that that process can go on in an unlimited way, producing all forms of life that we see.
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But how do you get an eye with that?
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Let's go more fundamental. The eye, like everything else in the body, depends upon the function of large biomacromolecules called proteins. Proteins do all the important jobs in cells. They catalyze reactions at very fast rates that would not otherwise occur. They build the structural parts of miniature machines. They help process information. And they're part of what are, in the case of the eye, part of what's called a biosynthetic pathway, the vision cascade that allows vision even to get a light sensitive spot. You have to have a whole series of proteins that are interacting with each other in a kind of chain to make make light sensitivity possible. And so if we want to explain the origin of anything novel in life, we have to explain the origin of proteins. Now, we know proteins are built by reference to the information that's stored on the DNA molecule. And that information is stored in essentially a digital form. There's a four character digital code of little subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule that, that function like alphabetic characters in the written text or the zeros and ones in the section of software. Now, we know something from our experience of software, and that is that if you start to change the zeros and ones in the section of software for doing something specific for a specific app or a program or an operating system, and you start to change them very much, you will degrade the function of the code so that the app or the program or the operating system will no longer work long before you will have made enough changes to, to produce something fundamentally new. Okay, so when I ask in talks, I ask, you know, if there are computer programmers there. I'll ask you if you're going to, if you start changing zeros and ones in a section of functioning code, are you going to build something new first or will you degrade what you have first? And they laugh. The answer's obvious. Well, it turns out we've learned the same thing is true of the digital code in the DNA that makes the protein molecules. You can alter it a little bit, and if you do, you can sometimes alter the Function of the existing protein, provided you don't change the overall structure of the protein. That's called a fold. The fold makes possible sometimes multiple functions that are related, but within that structure, but as you accumulate random mutations, and usually between 3 and 5, maybe up to 7%, I mean, maybe it's even 10%, but a very small number of mutations in various proteins or will cause the structural stability of that fold that makes protein function possible at all to simply degrade. There's a loss of what's called thermodynamic and structural stability. The thing unravels. But we've also learned that to build a new fold capable of completely novel set of functions, you have to. The sequence differences between them are on the order of 65 and sometimes as much as 80%. So the same thing holds in the gene protein world that holds in the computer science world, that if you start randomly changing things at the genetic level, and that's what a mutation is, as those accumulate, you're going to inevitably degrade and destroy the possibility of function in what you have long before you will have changed it enough to produce something fundamentally new that will create genetic and morphological novelty. So that's the problem. And that applies not only to the origin of the eye, because the eye depends on all these proteins in what's called the vision cascade, but it applies to virtually every significant biological change that you could imagine. So this is one of a legion of, at least let's call it a suite of fundamental problems with the idea that the mutation selection mechanism is fundamentally creative. It's a real process. People like me who hold to the theory of intelligent design affirm that it's a real process. It's part of what we know about how biology works. But it has very limited creative power.
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And this is actually one of the key arguments you make in the story of everything which I think you develop. It's absolutely fascinating that the scientific discoveries that we've made in the realm of exactly the kinds of things that you talk about actually have given us a lot of information that we didn't have that might have made us overlook that creative power that's somehow in the system but isn't explained by the random.
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Yeah, exactly. It's the advance of science that has made us more confident that there is a designing intelligence behind life in the universe. We don't deal a great deal with the question of biological evolution. In the film, we talk a bit about the miniature machines that are present in inside cells and how difficult they are to explain by a step, by Step gradual Darwinian process of natural selection. We look particularly at two machines that I think are really fascinating. One is the bacterial flagellar motor that our colleague Michael Behe has made famous. And the other is the ATP synthase, which is a little turbine. So one's a rotary engine, the other is a turbine, and they're inside cells. This is, you know, we used to, in the 19th century, as you were saying, or alluding to, the view was right after Darwin published the Origin, that the cell was a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. That's a favorite quote of mine from Thomas Henry Huxley. I like it because he was one of the great scientists in the 19th century. And it now seems so ignorant to us because as we've opened up the cell, we found this exquisite realm of digital and digital nanotechnology. And if you look at these machines, they're made of multiple protein parts. And if you have even a large set of those, but not the totality of the parts, then you get no function. Natural selection selects for functional advantage. If the intermediate structures on the way to an eye or on the way to a flagellar motor or an ATP synthase confer no function, then there's nothing there to be preserved and passed on by the process of natural selection. And the evolutionary process will terminate before the. The system ever gets built. So we do have a bit in the film about that. It is a critique of biological evolution, but the film's much more concerned with the question of the origin of the first life itself. How do you get life going? That's something Darwin never addressed.
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Let's go back to third year university. Jan. Yeah, sure, okay. It was a very strange thing for me because it became very clear to me that evolution by natural selection wasn't the only mode. Right. This is actually where my work became looking at alternate models of evolution. Because again, I still am perplexed in a way, unless we're really just talking about ideology.
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Right. And that's very cutting edge because that's where the field has gone. People are saying we need a new theory. There's got to be some other mechanism that provides the creative impulse or the creative power that mutation and selection doesn't provide. What did you find in your studies?
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Well, no, so I mean, I just, I basically started. I started a PhD, ended up finishing it as a master's. My life got kind of thrown a massive curve ball, if you will.
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Sure, sure, but.
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But no, I was looking at the hybridization between two species of lemur, actually.
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Okay.
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And just because I was curious, I had heard about this particular unusual situation and this one reserve in Madagascar where it looked like two species were coming into one. Right. And I was just interested in, again, alternate models. And I was like, oh, this looks exciting. And I get to go to Madagascar.
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I think there was a film about Madagascar with lots of lemurs.
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Well, there was. And in fact, nobody understood what I studied until that film. Until the kids cartoon came to see the cartoon. And then everybody knew. Yeah, exactly. But this is what I came to. And I think when a lot of people say I believe in evolution, what they're saying is that human beings are meat or human beings are meat computers or something like that.
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Right.
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Like, it's just we're not the product. There's no kind of, you know, divine inspiration here. There's no. We're not made in the. In the image of God, as certain faiths would describe. Christianity, notably, and others. And there isn't that significance, you know.
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Well, this gets back to that meaning of evolution. There are three basic meanings of evolution. One is that there has been change over time. And that can refer to small scale adaptation, like the Galapagos finches or the peppered moths. Or it can refer to the idea that life on the planet now is different than it was a long time ago. So if we look in the fossil record, we no longer have trilobites or Triceratops, So the composition of life on the planet is different than it was as recorded in the fossil record a long time ago. So that meaning of evolution, I think, is pretty much indisputable. But then there's a second meaning of evolution. That's the idea that there's been continuous change over time, such that the best way to represent the history of life is a great branching tree which. Where the base of the tree is represented by one or very few simple, presumably one celled organisms. And that we've had a kind of continuous and gradual morphing and changing of those very simple forms into all the forms we see today. But everything is related by common ancestry. That's a more controversial meaning. But then the most controversial meaning is the third meaning. And that has to do with the action of mutation and natural selection. But. But not just the idea that the process occurs, but rather that it occurs. It has sufficient creative power to explain all of the change implied by that tree of life picture of the history of life and also the appearance of design that living organisms manifest. So a big part of the idea of Darwinism of Darwinian evolution was the idea that there is this unguided undirected process that can account for the appearance of design or without the process having been designed or directed in any way. So it's inherently materialistic. And that's where then it helps to underwrite a larger materialistic worldview. Richard Dawkins has famously said Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. Well, why? Because he'd give an account of the appearance of design without there being a designer. An undirected process is doing all the creative work.
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There's this, you know, in preparation for this, we pulled a quote from Darwin from the Origin of the Species. You know, it just appropriate given our discussion right now. But if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
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Yeah, right.
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This is kind of in the sphere, in the context of the eye and the context of the, you know, molecular motors. Molecular motors and you know, kind of end of the creative power that you just described. But let me. No, let's jump to something.
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Can I comment on that just briefly, just to clarify for the audience, because that's a quote that Michael Behe has highlighted because it does establish a standard for the explanatory efficacy or sufficiency of Darwinian theory that Darwin himself. And in the case of, if we look at the bacterial flagellar motor that Michael Behe has made famous, it's got roughly 30 protein parts. It is a tiny rotary engine that sits in the cell membrane of a bacterium and it has a rotor, it has a stator, it has U joints and bushings, it has a long whip like tail that functions like a propeller. It. And if you have only some of those parts, but not all, say if you've got 26 or 25 or 24, whatever it is, the motor will not function. So if you're trying to build a motor through natural selection and random variation, you need to build that successively through a series, as Darwin is saying, a series of incremental steps. And as you add parts, presumably each for it to be, for those, for that combination of parts to be preserved, the motor or that combination must confer some functional advantage on the organism. The problem is if there's no comes when there's no functional advantage until you have all of the parts or a core set of parts that are hard to reach through that gradual process. And that's the mysterious part from a Darwinian point of view of all of these molecular machines. They're multi part functionally integrated systems that require either all of the parts or a very large core set of the parts to function at all. Which means that the intermediate steps would not be preserved and passed on. Which again, natural selection only selects for functional advantage. If there's no functional advantage until you get to a very complex endpoint, you're not going to be able to build it.
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Let's talk about. So actually again, Speaking of the BioLogos people, I think one of the most compelling arguments for natural selection. Right. Being a major process. Okay. And I'm very curious how you explain it. I think the BioLogos people would point to this. Basically human and chimpanzee genetics are, you know, people say it's 98.8% overlap. That's kind of astonishing. And then there's certain types of gene patterns that people will point to the science has revealed. So people would say, I think that science is real. No, actually there is definitely a common ancestor. And look at like explain to me why the genetics are so similar. Right.
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Well, they're not. Those numbers are dropping fairly precipitously, but there's been so. And the final number when we compare gene sequences I think is yet to be determined, but it's dropping at least into the mid to low 90s and probably going to go lower.
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Okay, but there's a lot of similar. There's a shocking amount of similarity if
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there's no, there's a shocking. A lot of difference between morphologically and behaviorally between chimps and humans. Clearly that cannot be accounted for by 2% of the alleged small 2% of gene differences. But there's a more interesting and more important study that's just come out in the journal Gene and that is that the proteom, the things that the genes make, the proteins, the ensemble of proteins that the genes make are in sequence comparisons running between 45 and between only 45 and 65% similar. And that tells us something very important. How do you account for that? Well, that the information processing systems in the two organisms are profoundly disparate, very different. So the genes are functioning as. The genetic information is functioning as essentially a library that can put together proteins. We also know that the same genes can be read and concatenated differently to produce very different proteins. And so this helps explain a long standing mystery, which is what if our genetics are so similar, then why are we behaviorally, morphologically, anatomically so different? And the answer is that the way that the information is processed, the way it's expressed is very different in the Two organisms. And so if high degrees of similarity point to common ancestry, what do very divergent modes of information processing point to? Perhaps separate ancestry. So I don't think this is at all a closed question. And I think we've kind of been given one little smidgen of the, of the, of what's really going on. When we just analyze the lowest level in the biological hierarchy and say, yeah, there's a lot of genes. You know, for example, we, in both organisms we have a gene for making hemoglobin. Hemoglobin captures molecular oxygen in the blood. There's really no reason for the, the gene for making that protein needs to be very different at all in the two organisms. But to account for higher order anatomical structures and behavioral structures that are grossly different, genetic information is going to have to be expressed and processed very differently. So the genes are functioning as a kind of library. And then there's something that's accessing the information. You can pull this gene and this gene, you can put them together this way or this way, or you might insert something else. So the genetic text can be concatenated and aligned in different ways to produce completely different proteins for completely different biological functions. So there's a great disparity in this information processing system between the two organisms. And that's what accounts for the difference in the so called proteanome. And I think that's much more significant because it's telling us how an animal is actually built is not just the bottom up genesis, it's how the genes are processed and expressed. Something called a developmental gene regulatory network that we probably ought to talk about because it's one of the things that the mutation selection mechanism also can't explain. It's a very important part of body plan development.
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I think this question, right, of why would, for example, mammals, right, and with humans all be so much more similar genetically in terms of the code, right? And then why would vertebrates be much more similar, right? And then why would, you know, we have all this sort of classification of species. And I remember Dennis telling me back in the day, because I think when he did that seminar when the third year three, that he was, I think he was pretty much a creationist at the time. But he changed his mind. And he changed his mind because he said, I looked at the genetic data and I saw these kinds of patterns and that's what made me think that there's sort of, you know, that there's more of a role of evolution by natural selection. And it's not that he stopped being a Christian. He very much stayed being a Christian, but he felt it became a lot more compatible in his mind. And that's indeed what he's been, you know, speaking about over years and so forth. But how does that conceptually, how is that explained in your view?
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Well, there's an assumption of genetic reductionism there, but the genes are the only thing that determines form. Okay. The genes have information for making the small level protein parts, but the proteins have to be arranged into biosynthetic pathways. The pathways characterize different types of cells. Different types of cells have to be arranged into different types of tissues. Organs and different types of tissues have to be organized into different types of body plans. And so the question of macroevolution is about the origin of new form, about the origin of form at the higher level of body plans. So the assumption that led to the conviction of common ancestry on the basis of alleged high degrees of genetic similarity overlooked the importance of all these other layers of organization that have to be accounted for in accounting for the origin of biological form. And we now know that there is information stored at higher levels beyond the genome. And we know that there are processes that are at work that are responsible for differentially expressing that genetic information during the process of animal development. And that's actually one of the. This is, I would love to explain about something called developmental gene regulatory networks, because genetic information alone will not make an animal. Okay. The genetic information has to be processed and expressed in very specific ways.
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And I'll just say one thing before you continue. Right. I mean, there is an explanation as to why things that kind of are somewhat similar in form would have similar genetic codes too. Right. Because you need similar types of proteins.
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B
Exactly. The lower level parts, of course, are going to be very similar. Okay. It's the way the lower level parts, the lower level protein parts and cells are organized into very different kinds of. We'll talk about animals for the present. So something called the developmental gene regulatory network. It's absolutely crucial to building a new form of animal, to building an animal form, an animal body plan. The idea is that as cells go through their division from you have a fertilized egg, then it divides into 2 and then into 4 cells and then the 8, 16. There's this geometric expansion in the number of cells. And at different points along the way, different parts of the genome are expressed to produce very specific proteins to service very specific types of cells as they are differentiating one from another. So you have bone cells or nerve cells or muscle cells and different types of proteins that are being built at just the right time so that those cells are being differentiated, say, if it's a bone cell from a muscle cell. And what a developmental gene regulatory network does, what it is is a mapping of the genetic information in the genome and the different gene products, the proteins, and also something called regulatory RNAs that regulate in turn. So you have a gene produces a regulatory rna, and that regulatory RNA will then either turn on or turn off other parts of the genome in different cells at just the right time, so that the right proteins are built in the right cell to create, to allow for the differentiation of cells as the animal is developing. And this is all beautifully choreographed. Everything turns on and off at just the right time. Now, as scientists have mapped this, in particular, one scientist at Caltech with colleagues, scientist Eric Davidson, last passed away just a few years ago. As they mapped this and map the functional relationships involved, what they came back with was something like a beautiful integrated circuit where you see all these one to many and many to one functional relationships. But instead of being a circuit that is describing the flow of electricity, it's essentially describing the flow of information and the way the information is controlling the animal development. So that's just a fascinating piece of science that's just extraordinary. Now, here's the rub here for macroevolutionary theory, the idea that the mutation selection mechanism can generate large scale changes, changes sufficient to account for the change of one body plan into another, Where a body plan is a unique organization of body parts and tissues. Okay, so what Davidson and colleagues found was that as you start to alter, by random means or otherwise, you start to alter any of the core elements of these gene regulatory networks, the whole process of animal development shuts down before you get to the termination point of a fully developed animal form. But that creates a problem for evolutionary theory, because if you wanted to change body plan A, some animal form, maybe an arthropod of some kind, into body plan B, some other kind of animal form, what we know is you got to have a gene regulatory network, a new gene regulatory network that's coordinating the expression of all that genetic information in a different way.
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Little step by little step, you can't get it.
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Little step by step, you can't change it at all. I mean, very modest changes are allowed, but very little. So if you can't change the body, the developmental gene regulatory network, into a fundamentally different one, you will never be able to change the body plan into a fundamentally different one. So this creates a huge problem for the origin of animal Body plans and the animal body plans arise abruptly in the fossil record. We know. I wrote a whole book about this called Darwin Stout, a book about what's called the Cambrian Explosion. And so there are really profound mysteries. Now this is a problem not only for neo Darwinian evolutionary theory, but any theory of evolution, because evolution is fundamentally about major change. If you can't change the developmental gene regulatory networks in a significant way, you will not be able to change body plans in a significant way. So this is really a fundamental challenge to all forms of macroevolution, and it underscores what we've been talking about, that the most important aspect of morphological development and in turn evolutionary transformation is not going to happen just at the genetic level. It's going to happen at the level of the processing of that information. And that's where things are highly constrained. It's actually, if you think of when you look at that, called a dgrn, a developmental gene regulatory network, it looks like an integrated circuit. And it's also subject to the constraints problem of engineering. And that is the more functionally integrated a system, the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defect to the whole. And that applies to human integrated circuits, it applies to this genetic integrated circuit that's responsible for body plan development. And if you can't change it much, you're not gonna get a new body plan.
- [38:08]
A
If you, you know, even with a watch, right, you take a part away, you add a part, the system stops working.
- [38:14]
B
That's right. That's right.
- [38:16]
A
I mean, why the hostility? Incredible hostility towards the idea that there's some kind of creative force. There seems to be this, you know, deep disinterest in exploring, you know, that there's some kind of creative force here.
- [38:36]
B
Well, I don't think there's that much hostility to the idea of a creative force, more to the idea of a creative intelligence. Well, okay, so yes, again, it doesn't have to be the Christian.
- [38:46]
A
Thank you for correcting that.
- [38:47]
B
Well, the creative force would put you more in a pantheistic frame where, you know, maybe people wouldn't be quite so hostile to that, but we are. The underlying ideology that has really governed modern science since the late 19th century is one of materialism. There's a materialistic worldview that many scientists have in a sense bolted onto science and said that science equals materialism. Or more precisely, there's been a convention that's arisen that says if you're going to explain something scientifically, you must explain it by reference to Strictly materialistic processes, matter and energy, natural processes. No creative intelligence is allowed as a possible feature in your explanation.
- [39:34]
A
And that itself is a kind of faith system we're talking about.
- [39:37]
B
It's a presupposition. It's become a kind of normative convention within science. And it reflects an underlying commitment to not just a methodological convention, but to a metaphysical commitment in materialism. And that's where I think my late friend Michael Ruse's insight comes in, is that if evolutionary theory, if neo Darwinian or some other materialistic evolutionary theory is being challenged, many people will sense in that a challenge not just to the, the science that they hold, but also to the deeper worldview commitments or metaphysical commitments that they have. And like all of us, if our deep metaphysical or religious beliefs are being challenged, we can easily respond emotionally or less than objectively. And so I think, you know, the debate gets very hot and I think less so in the last five or 10 years. I think there's a lot more acceptance that first of all, neo Darwinism is not an adequate evolutionary theory. We need a new one if we're going to operate within the framework of materialistic evolutionary biology. But an increasing number of scientists are now aligning with our work on intelligent design. They're using it to make new discoveries. They think it's a useful framework for understanding life. And there's a compelling argument for intelligent design as part of the explanation for how things got here.
- [41:07]
A
So great. You've set up a very important question that I want to ask you. You come in, you're someone that believes in God. What should we, as viewers of the show or what should I understand about your suppositions and how you came to research and believe what you do and explore this?
- [41:26]
B
Yeah, sure, it might be good just to define the theory. First of all, the theory of intelligent design holds that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained as a product of a designing intelligence, creative intelligence, rather than a strictly undirected physical or material process, such as in the biological realm, natural selection acting on random mutations. And the kinds of features we're talking about are things like the digital code that's stored in the DNA molecule, the complex information processing system that not only takes that stored. That takes that stored information and processes and expresses it in the construction of proteins and protein machines, the presence of nanomachinery inside life, certain patterns in the fossil record. All these things are things that we think would be, are best explained because a creative intelligence has played a role in the origin and history of life. In the realm of physics, we have phenomena like the fine tuning of the initial arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe and the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics. The basic parameters of physics fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances, outside of which not only life but even basic chemistry would be impossible. Many physicists have come to the conclusion that that fine tuning is the result of a fine tuner, of a transcendent physics.
- [42:50]
A
And if I may, you make that argument beautifully in the Story of Everything.
- [42:56]
B
It's one of the three things we look at in the film. We look at the evidence for the beginning of the universe and with it the very real possibility that we're looking at evidence of a creation event. We also look at the discovery of the fine tuning and we look at the interior of the cell and the discoveries of the miniature machinery and the digital code that makes the proteins that make the machines and make everything else inside living cells. But as far as the theory of intelligent design, I attend a conference early in my scientific career. I am working as a geophysicist for an oil company doing digital signal processing of seismic data. It's an early form of information technology. I attend a conference in which there is a very intense debate about the origin of the first life. A new book has come out at the time called the Mystery of Life's Origin. And at the conference, one of the leading chemical evolutionary theorists, someone who had formulated a very popular theory about how the non living chemicals in the so called prebiotic soup or environment had arranged themselves into the first living cells. That scientist named Dean Kenyon at the conference repudiated his own work and said that he thought it was time for the philosophers and the theologians to reopen what he called the natural theological question. And that is the idea of whether the question of whether what we're seeing in nature is actually pointing to the existence of a creative intelligence, of a creator.
- [44:27]
A
So he just told you, and you're like, wow, that's interesting.
- [44:31]
B
No, it was shocking. It was a shocking sort of about face from a leading evolutionary biologist. He worked on the theory of chemical evolution, how you get from chemistry to the first living cells. And both he and these other authors were intrigued with the idea that what we were looking at inside the cell was evidence of what they called an intelligent cause. Because the crucial feature that had not been explained about the origin of life was the origin of the information that was stored in the DNA molecule. 1953. Watson and Crick elucidate the structure of DNA as a double helix. In 1958, Crick realizes that the chemical subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like the digital characters in a section of. In a machine code. And so this puts the whole question of biological origins in a completely different frame. The scientists were able to fairly quickly to figure out what the information on the DNA strand did, where the information resides. But the question of where it came from has been unanswered from within an evolutionary framework. And yet we know that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form, always arises from a mind. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created. Richard Dawkins has acknowledged it's like machine code. Well, we know that computer code comes from a programmer. And we know that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we're talking about information in a book or information in a hieroglyphic inscription or information we're transmitting as we speak to each other, information transmitted over a wire always arises first in a mind, in an intelligence. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life, I've argued, is a powerful indicator of the activity of a master programmer or intelligence in the origin of life. And interestingly, the method of reasoning that I use to come to that conclusion, it has a name. It's a scientific method. It's either called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation is the very same method that Darwin used in the Origin of Species. We're using standard methods of what are called historical scientific reasoning or forensic scientific reasoning to come to the conclusion that intelligent design must have played an important causal role in the origin of life, as evolutionary biologists use in their own work. So we're not. There's no special pleading here. There's not a special kind of science. We're using the same scientific methods, but we're just coming to a different conclusion because we're taking the fact of information as a foundational feature of living systems very seriously and saying that has to be explained, and it has to be explained by reference to the same types of cause and effect processes that we see at work all around us. We know that it takes a mind to generate information. So when we find it at the foundation of life, the most logical thing to conclude is that a mind did in fact produce it.
- [47:34]
A
One of the things that I've heard most often in people sort of dismissing intelligent design is they'll just say, oh, there's this amazing diversity. It's all fantastic, but you just want to make it fit into this.
- [47:46]
B
I love responding to arguments like that because they're transparently fallacious. Right? That's an argument from personal motivations. It's a form of ad hominem argument. That same accusation can be leveled at people who are developing Darwinian explanations. As you've already pointed out, there's a kind of religious fervor around this. And I think the motivations of the proponents have to be set aside and we have to evaluate the arguments on the basis of the merits because there is this fervor.
- [48:18]
A
This is my point.
- [48:18]
B
This is what we notice. It can exist on both sides. Of course, Christians would like. Like to see evidence of a creator. And yes, materialists would like to be able to explain things without reference to such a creator. I mean, after all, as Dawkins says, that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. And you can hear the sigh of relief in his voice as he says this. In the film, we have a quote for him where he says that science has now emancipated us from the idea that that design points to a designer. What's this idea of emancipation that sounds like you're looking for? So everybody has motivations, right? The great thing about training in philosophy, and I'm a philosopher of science, is that it teaches you to say, okay, there are motivations, but let's set that aside now. Let's evaluate the propositions, let's evaluate the evidence, let's evaluate the competing explanations and see which provide the best explanatory power. And there's a key criterion of explanatory success that is part of the method of reasoning that I used to develop the case for intelligent design. And it was the same method that Darwin used. It's the idea of causal adequacy. If you want to explain something, you want to posit a cause which is known to produce the effect in question. Charles Lyell, who was Darwin's, One of Darwin's mentors, the great geologist, had a. In his book Principles of Geology, there was a long subtitle. It said, the changes on the earth's surface by reference to causes now in operation. And the idea is that the explanation that's best is the one that's going to be. That's positing a cause which is known to have the power to produce the effect in question. When I came across this, when I was thinking about whether or not there was the information in DNA that's inside the cell provided evidence for intelligent design. Is there a scientific argument, a rigorous scientific argument that could be made to support that conclusion? And I asked myself the question, what is the cause now in operation that produces functional digital information? And we know of one. It's an intelligence. One of the early scientist who applied the information sciences to analyzing molecular biology was a man named Henry Quassler. And he was quoted as saying, the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. That's what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It takes a mind, a conscious intelligence to generate information. And that's what we have at the foundation of life. And that, by the way, is one of the key stories in the film the Watson and Crick discovery. The realization that we not only have. We now have a beautiful double helix molecule, but inside the molecule is this information. And then it's the question, where does that come from? If you want to explain the origin of life, you got to explain the origin of these large biomacromolecules that make life work, especially the ones that are chock full of the information that build all the important structures inside the cell.
- [51:32]
A
Yeah, and just to be clear, we're talking about structured information, not like the information that a shotgun spatter.
- [51:40]
B
Yeah, that's actually a very crucial distinction that there is in the field of engineering. And there's a mathematical definition of information that was formulated by really a great scientist in the late 1940s named Claude Shannon. And in Shannon's idea. Shannon's idea of information is about essentially, it's a measure of the improbability of a sequence in an information carrying, or the information carrying capacity, or the improbability of a sequence in a channel of communication. And the kind of information we're talking about in the DNA molecule or in a section of computer code or in a human language. Is that you.
- [52:22]
A
Wildly improbable?
- [52:24]
B
It's wildly improbable, but there's something else as well, and that is that there's a specificity of arrangement of the characters that allow them to perform a communication function. So you can have Shannon information without the sequence being functional or communicative. You can have a sequence that's highly improbable, that doesn't have any meaning in it, or that performs no communication function. When Crick talked about the information in DNA, he was very careful to distinguish the kind of information that was present in DNA from mere Shannon information. He said, we're Talking about the specificity of the sequence. So it's the difference in a simple example that I use. What we use in the film is the difference between what the monkeys might type at the typewriter, which would have a calculable amount of Shannon information, but not be meaningful or functional, versus a line of poetry like Time and Tide Wait for no Man. The specificity of the arrangement of the characters gives that second symbol, string, something that's not present in the first, which is the ability to convey meaning or to perform a communication function. And DNA performs the function of instructing the cellular machinery as to how to build the proteins and protein machines. A good analogy for younger audiences in particular might be something like a 3D printer, a digital printer that we have digital information that produces a three dimensional structure. Or engineers would know about what's called CAD cam, computer Assisted Design and engineering, where an engineer will sit at console, write some code, it'll go down a wire, it'll be translated into another machine code that can be read at a manufacturing apparatus. And then that manufacturing apparatus, for example, if you're at the Boeing plant in Seattle, where we are, might put the use that information to put rivets on the airplane wing at exactly the right place. So you've got digital information producing a three dimensional mechanical structure. That's what's going on inside cells. That is the kind of technology that we have encountered in the interior of what used to be thought of a simple homogeneous globule of plasm. So that. And to explain the origin of life, you've got to explain those complex inner workings and those inner workings, I think scream design.
- [54:44]
A
Yeah, no, it's. I mean, it's fascinating. We've really, as we've been talking here, we really covered, you know, a little bit more in depth or a lot. I mean, the substance of the interview has been about this, the third part, which is the life aspect, the biological part. Right. As opposed to like, you know, kind of the origin itself, which, you know, everybody's now familiar with the Big Bang and, you know, but not the nuance. I mean, again, fascinating. I love, I also love the. The graphics that you've kind of created to sort of build the story.
- [55:16]
B
The producers did a great job with that with the production values. There's 400 visual effects in the film, there's gorgeous cinematography that takes you deep out into galactic space. And then the animations take people deep inside the cell where you can actually see these amazing processes. And that's where I would really commend the film because one picture, if one picture is worth a thousand words, 400 moving visual effects really are worth a lot more than we can convey in an interview. Because you see the evidence of design in front of you. And I think that's what for many people has given them an epiphany. Watching the film.
- [55:58]
A
I mean, this is. This has been quite some time in the making for you. I mean, you've written quite a number of books, you know, that kind of all point in this direction right into. And now it's the story of everything.
- [56:12]
B
Everything. Well, it's a bit of a. We admit it's a little bit pretentious title, but by every. But it's literally true. We're talking about the universe, right. It's the story of where the universe came from, where its finely tuned structure came from, how that arose and then how life arose within the universe. And those are the three big questions we look at. And in each case, the scientific discoveries of the last 100 years and right up to the present are pointing in a very different direction than people thought in the late 19th century. Not towards the idea of a self existing, self creating, self organizing universe that can account for everything as a consequence of slow, gradual, undirected processes, but rather something that bears the hallmarks of a mind. And information is a hallmark of mind. That kind of tight functional integration that we see in circuits or in. In the eye. If we find the kinds of features that we find in living systems or in the fine tuning of the universe, in any other realm of experience, we would immediately conclude that they were the product of a creative intelligence. And yet we're finding them in parts of nature that we know we did not create. So that implies there was a creative intelligence that preceded us.
- [57:31]
A
So what an amazing film you've put together. Again, I want to encourage everyone to go see it and you know, especially kind of this. Another one of the parts that we didn't talk at all about is the kind of, you know, the unique set of variables that you call it the fine tuning of the universe to get the very specific elements. This is something I almost knew nothing about. And you know, fascinating, compelling arguments you make in the film. Yeah. A final thought as we finish up.
- [57:59]
B
Well, I appreciated the deep dive that you've elicited on biology. I forgot that you had such an extensive biology background. So you. So we talked quite a bit more about even the question of biological evolution. We went probably deeper on that here in the conversation that we do in the film. In the film we do quite a bit on the question of the origin of the first life. And then I'll tell you what I like about the film because it's an adaptation of the third of my three books, the Return of the God Hypothesis. And I think the producers did a fabulous job. It weaves together a very compelling argument. And into that argument, stories of the discoveries of these three different classes of evidence that we think have theistic implications. The evidence that the universe had a beginning, that it was, as you say, finely tuned from the beginning to make life possible. And then the discoveries about the inner complexity and the informational complexity of the cell. But additionally, it tells some really great stories. The stories of the scientists who discovered those different things, but also how those discoveries affected them at not just a scientific level, but at a deeper personal level. How many of them shifted their overall worldview away from the strict materialism that they had started with to something that was sympathetic to the idea that there was a designing intelligence behind the universe. Some even had full blown religious conversions. So we tell the stories of the scientists and then the film is visually very beautiful with the animations, the cinematography. So for people who are believers in God, I think this is one of those films you can bring friends to without feeling you're going to be embarrassed. Just the opposite. I think it will inspire some really great after party discussions.
- [59:56]
A
Absolutely. You know, I do have one more question.
- [59:58]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [59:59]
A
And that is when you, as you're framing out, for example, these developmental pathways, the protein developmental pathways and so forth, and the integrated circuit analogy, I was thinking to myself, the people that believe that we live in a simulation, this probably all makes a lot of sense to them. So is that what you're arguing?
- [60:23]
B
We have a little nod to the simulation theory. And the first thing to say about the simulation theory, which has become very popular with a lot of tech people, is that that's a theory of intelligent design. It implies that there was a master programmer. But it also goes beyond that to suggest that somehow our reality is simulative of real reality, that we're not really. There's something illusory about what we're experiencing. And there I repair to one of the classical arguments in philosophy from Descartes, where he also dealt with this idea that maybe we were the product of some kind of evil demon that was deceiving us into thinking that we existed. But then he argued, well, if we've been deceived into thinking we exist, and we're thinking conscious agents thinking that we exist, having this, this false thought, the very fact that we're having thought. And that we're consciously aware of something, even if it's allegedly deceptive, means that we're actually alive and aware and therefore we do exist. I think, therefore I am. So I kind of think that this simulation idea, it's a way of talking about intelligent design without going all the way to thinking about God. But it does imply a master programmer. And I think the idea that our, our experience is in some way an illusion is itself a self defeating proposition. So we refute it much more simply in the film with David Berlinski saying something very dismissive and quite funny about it. So for people who are fans of Berlinski, you'll definitely want to see that.
- [61:59]
A
Well, Stephen Meyer, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
- [62:02]
B
It's been a great conversation. Jan, thank you very much.
- [62:06]
A
Thank you all for joining Stephen Meyer and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janje Kellogg.
- [62:13]
B
Has the universe always been here or is it finite? Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. The universe. It bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator. And surprisingly, it is science that has revealed this. We are dealing with a system of manifold complex design. The concept of is a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences. The question then was, what does one do about it?