Hitting the Brakes on 'Rapid Evolution'

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Eric Anderson, and today I'm pleased to continue our series with members of the intelligent design community talking about their stories, their backgrounds and experiences, why they're involved with intelligent design, some of the challenges they've faced, and the importance of following the evidence, where it leads, in short, why it matters. Today I'm joined by Dr. Scott Minnick, senior fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture and professor of microbiology at the University of Idaho. Minnick is perhaps most well known for his extensive work on the bacterial flagellum. Welcome, Scott. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Well, thank you. It's good to participate. [00:00:47] Speaker B: So when I first got interested in intelligent design, probably, gosh, 20 years ago, I saw this wonderful documentary, unlocking the mystery of life. And remember seeing you talk about this amazing molecular system, the bacterial flagellum. How did you get involved in that project? [00:01:02] Speaker A: It was really interesting. I had done a postdoc at Purdue. It was pretty much applied in molecular, or I had cloned the bacillus thrangiensis delta toxin gene, which is the beachy toxin that was in Monsanto, put into plants, and took a job in industry, but really didn't like it. I had collaborated with a friend at Purdue on detection of eurcenia, and that involved identifying flagellin structures that are pretty unique, that we could use antibodies for. And it kind of intrigued me as I read about the flagellum, just the basic biology of it. [00:01:44] Speaker B: I was fascinated. [00:01:44] Speaker A: So when I was in know, I called up Austin Newton at Princeton, and, you know, I'd like to come and work in your group. It unfolded from there. So I essentially took leave of absence. It was supposed to be for a year, but I ended up staying three years in Princeton, working on flagellum biosynthesis. It was a great. [00:02:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, that sounds great. And then how did you get involved with unlocking the mystery? Did they just contact you somehow and ask you to do an interview? [00:02:16] Speaker A: When I came to Idaho as a faculty position, there was a former chair of physics, Larry Johnston, who'd been in the, you know, came out of Berkeley. He was a student of. He was getting. He was retiring and interested in biology. And so we kind of formed a study group. And he kept saying, what's going on with this intelligent design area? And so I started reading know, looking into that, and found that Steve Meyer was on faculty at Whitworth College up in Spokane. So we made contact, and the documentary came out of that relationship. [00:03:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Great. Well, I want to circle back to your work in a few minutes. But first of all, just wanted to share how much I've appreciated your work over the years and the careful and meticulous approach you've taken as you've addressed key claims, including those from the long term evolutionary experiment. So on behalf of all of us, really appreciate everything you've. [00:03:18] Speaker A: Thanks. Thanks. [00:03:20] Speaker B: So, Scott, take us back to the beginning, as it were. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? [00:03:24] Speaker A: I was born in Honolulu. [00:03:26] Speaker B: Oh, very nice. [00:03:27] Speaker A: Before Hawaii. Somebody's got to do it, right? Before Hawai? Yeah, before Hawai was a state, my father was an air force pilot, West Pointer, the whole nine yards. And so I grew up in the military, and we moved all over time in Europe and east coast, mostly in Virginia. Northern Virginia. [00:03:45] Speaker B: Okay, so this is post World War II two year in Honolulu, or your folks are there? [00:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah, both my brother and I were born in Honolulu. I was born in 52 and stayed six months before he was transferred to the DC area. [00:03:59] Speaker B: Okay. All right. And is your brother older or younger? [00:04:03] Speaker A: He's 18 months older. [00:04:04] Speaker B: Okay. And just the two of you? Right? [00:04:06] Speaker A: I have a younger sister. [00:04:07] Speaker B: Okay. [00:04:08] Speaker A: So she was in microbiology as well, although now she's, I think, kind of retired from that, but. [00:04:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:04:14] Speaker A: Been very active. [00:04:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So when you're growing up, would you say your parents were kind of more religious or more secular in their leanings? What was your kind of. As you. As you grew up? In that sense? [00:04:25] Speaker A: I think they were. I would class them as agnostic. They would take us to church, my brother and I, and they would go sometimes depending on where we were. But I had that history. In fact, for a while in high school, I was the only one in my family that went to church. No one else did. [00:04:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [00:04:45] Speaker A: I was kind of searching. I was searching. I wasn't a believer or I didn't understand what that meant, but we had the history of tradition of the episcopal church. [00:04:54] Speaker B: Okay, great. So as you're in high school and you're kind of growing up, when did you first realize you're fascinated with science, or did that come at a later time? [00:05:05] Speaker A: I mean, I always enjoyed chemistry and biology in high school, but I had planned to go into the military. This was in the. My brother. When I was a sophomore, my brother went to Annapolis and I thought I would go to West Point, and it was in the middle of the Vietnam war, and my father came home from the Pentagon when Johnson stopped the bombing in North Vietnam and said, find something else to do. I don't want you going to West Point? And that just threw me for a loop. So I went 180 degrees. I was more interested in history and social science and just the whole culture of the. Got caught up in that. [00:05:47] Speaker B: Okay. Didn't make it out here to Berkeley, did you? [00:05:52] Speaker A: I actually did. I mean, that was kind of a changing point for. And when I was a freshman at Washington State University, there were a group of us that hitchhiked down to San Francisco for an anti war march. [00:06:07] Speaker B: Sounds like you've got some commiserating you could do with Jonathan Wells there and some experiences at Francisco. [00:06:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. [00:06:18] Speaker B: Okay, so you're in. All right. So you decide not going to West Point, you're going to do something else. So what did you study when you. [00:06:27] Speaker A: I was kind of a free agent. I signed up for a 400 level sociology class and black revolution area studies and really enjoyed that. But at the same time, I was required to take chemistry, and I took microbiology my first semester because my roommate was taking it, and I figured I'd just get the notes from him. And that was the embarrassment. The only course I didn't do well in my entire career is intro to microbiology because I never went. Yeah, but I think it was interesting. When I got. I had a 69% in this class. I had A-D-I had straight a's, everything else. I went to the professor and knocked on his door. He was sitting at his desk reading something, and he looked over his glasses and he said, what can I do for you? And I said, well, I'm not a science major. I got a 69% in your class. It's kind of dinged my GPA, what can I do? And he just said, get the hell out of my office. And that made me so mad that I thought, okay, I'll retake this class and I'll do well. I'll go to. I was. By the time I retook it, I had taken the second semester of chemistry, and there was a biochemist by the name of Ralph Yant at WSU that gave a section on molecular biology focused on the lac operon of E. Coli and lambda phage. It was a short introduction to molecular biology, and it blew me away. I thought, man, I want to do that. And so I started looking around, well, how do you work on this stuff? And at the time, E. Coli was a paradigm. And so when I went back into microbiology, I went in off the deep end and never looked back. I was just intrigued by the whole process of organisms, even the simplest organisms, and understanding their physiology and their genetics. And here I am over 50 years later and still intrigued. [00:08:39] Speaker B: What was it that intrigued you? I mean, was it the realization that there's controls or there's a systematic. [00:08:46] Speaker A: That's it. Exactly. [00:08:47] Speaker B: Thing. [00:08:48] Speaker A: Yeah. I enjoyed biology and natural history, but this was decision making on the part. How does a virus decide whether to incorporate into the chromosome of its host or just replicate and get out? And all the control levels and feedbacks that were going on, this was really a biology that you could start parsing apart, make a mute, and see what the effect was. And it really brought it out of a mindset that I had, that biology was just more descriptive. This was mechanistic. Yeah, I think that was the drawing point. [00:09:25] Speaker B: Yes. Sink your teeth in, find out what's actually going on. Yeah. So you're still an undergraduate at this point? [00:09:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:33] Speaker B: Okay. And then you graduated with. What was your degree in? [00:09:35] Speaker A: Ultimately, it was back in the day, it was in bacteriology and public. [00:09:41] Speaker B: Okay, okay. [00:09:43] Speaker A: All right. [00:09:43] Speaker B: And then did you go to work or did you go to. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Nope, I went on to graduate school, did a master's in microbiology, and then went to Iowa State, did a PhD in microbiology and just postdoc, little stint in industry, and then another postdoc and then academia. [00:10:02] Speaker B: Okay, where did you do your postdoc work at both of those? [00:10:05] Speaker A: Well, first one I did at Purdue, and that was a great experience. It was a shift from more applied microbiology than I had been doing to molecular genetics. I was working in art Aaronson's lab. I think he was one of the few postdocs that Francis Crick had, but he just gave us free rein and. Great mentor. I really enjoyed it. [00:10:30] Speaker B: And you're studying bacteriology at that. [00:10:32] Speaker A: We were cloning the Bt toxin gene. That's the one that has been put in plants to control leptodopter and larvae from feeding on the root application. Right. [00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:46] Speaker A: It was really one of the first applications of recombinant dna technology to an applied area in agriculture. [00:10:54] Speaker B: Okay. And this is also the time frame when you started hearing about intelligent design. [00:10:59] Speaker A: It's a little bit before that. I was reading some of the literature. I wasn't too intrigued by the creation institute work, although I followed it. But I thought as a young christian that really, from the template of Romans, nature should speak for itself. We don't have to bring in the religious component. And I just wanted to hear the science aspect of it. And that's what was intriguing about intelligent design, which does not owe allegiance to any scripture or position of faith? It's just asking the question, can the natural processes of physics and chemistry produce. Know the question of origins and the diversity that we've seen as a. [00:11:48] Speaker B: Right, right. Okay. And then where was your second postdoc at? [00:11:51] Speaker A: That was at Princeton. So that's when I switched to flagellum biosynthesis. And again, kind of molecular genetics. Microbial molecular genetics. [00:12:01] Speaker B: Okay, so you're at Princeton, then you come out to University of Idaho. Is that where you came next? [00:12:06] Speaker A: I did a year at Tulane as a faculty member. I had grown up a lot in the south, but my wife hadn't. She just didn't care for New Orleans. It was a pretty rough city back then, and so I think I owed it to know if she wasn't happy. Then she followed me all over. She wanted to get back to the northwest. [00:12:29] Speaker B: Right. [00:12:30] Speaker A: Okay. [00:12:31] Speaker B: Snow and the sleet and the enjoyable weather. Right. Instead of New Orleans. Right. Okay, awesome. So we kind of skipped that part. Where did you meet your wife at? And how did you guys. [00:12:43] Speaker A: We actually met in high school in northern Virginia. Okay. So I think we were 14. She grew up in the military, too. [00:12:55] Speaker B: Were you kind of interested at that point, or did you come back together later? [00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah, we were interested. I would save up money, and her father was transferred out to Colorado at Fort Carson, and I'd save up money and go out, know skiing. And then she was transferred to Germany, and my father was transferred to Germany again. So we just kind of danced around the continents. [00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so you actually saw her in Germany when you were. Wow. [00:13:25] Speaker A: Wow. [00:13:25] Speaker B: Okay, well, it sounds like it was meant to be somebody trying to bring you together over and over. So do you guys have any children? We do. [00:13:34] Speaker A: We have four, and we got married in 73. Our first child was born in 77, so they're scattered all over. One in Dallas, one in daughter in CDC in Atlanta. I have a son in Seattle, and our youngest daughter's in Mexico City. [00:13:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. So you move out to Moscow, you get acquainted with Steve? Steve Meyer. And did you guys actually meet or just talk over the phone? [00:14:03] Speaker A: We met. I actually invited him down to give a. And, you know, that was a big mistake because he really ruffled a few feathers. And I think there are still people on campus that won't look at me when opening that door on our campus. [00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, Steve's such an abrasive course, it's hard to find a nicer person. But, yeah. So you got some flak from your colleagues there at campus for even having him come and. [00:14:42] Speaker A: But. [00:14:42] Speaker B: But you decided. Sorry, go ahead. [00:14:45] Speaker A: I was going to say, in my department in microbiology, molecular biology and biochemistry, there were some people that were upset about it, kind of intrigued, but biological sciences, which is more evolution oriented, they were pretty upset. [00:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, so when did you have, if I can ask it this way, maybe sort of a defining moment when you said, you know what? I need to spend some time on this. I need to be involved with intelligent design. I'm willing to speak out, so to speak, put my head above the parapet. [00:15:17] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good question. Our oldest daughter was taking a 100 level kind of seminar biology course here at the University of Idaho. And it was really organized where faculty in biological sciences would come down. I think it was a Friday afternoon at lunch and just talk an hour about their research, which was great. I mean, the students got an idea of who their faculty were, what they were working on. But one faculty, young faculty, really used his lectern kind of as a pulpit. It was pretty disparaging and pushing his worldview on the students. And my daughter told me about this, and I was pretty surprised. So I actually went and talked to this faculty member. I knew him, and I said, I think you're kind of out of bounds and using nature as a template in terms of how we should behave. And I think that's kind of dangerous territory. But we had a good discussion. But it was at that point where I thought my daughter was pretty vulnerable. Her friends, some of her friends in the class were and were being challenged, which was really good, but I felt that I needed to counter that. [00:16:37] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's good to be challenged as long as you have an opportunity to hear both sides and to speak up and not fear that your grade is at risk or anything like that. [00:16:47] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:16:49] Speaker B: All right. So then you decide to get involved. At the time, did you have any particular thoughts about evolution or the capacity of, say, mutation selection, or when did you first start to have doubts about. [00:17:01] Speaker A: Oh, I think from the beginning, that really wasn't a problem for me. And I remember even at Princeton, a lot of friends I had were postdocs in plasma physics out at the forestall center, and they were intrigued about evolution and what I thought as a Christian, in terms of its limitations. And I use a flagellum as an example. This is back in probably 80, 86. Look at the elegance of this machine and all the control points. And I questioned whether we could get to this by a stepwise mutation selection pathway, because we know that if we knock out any know, you lose the system. So what do you have to select? And that was kind of a precursor, I think. Of course, Mike Behe was much more elegant in his argument when he formalized it in terms of irreducible complexity, but that just gelled when his book came out. [00:17:59] Speaker B: Yeah. So I was going to ask about that. So did you have any conversations with Mike before he published his book, or did you guys kind of come to this independently? [00:18:07] Speaker A: I think independently. Again, I don't think I was sophisticated or had the time to spend in terms of formulating my arguments, but I was certainly tracking when his book came out that, yeah, this is what I think as well. When his book came out, I actually emailed him because we were stumbling upon the type three secretion system and Eosnea in its relationship with the flagellum. And I thought we may have a precursor. I don't know if that was the first indication that he had. That there was a competitor for development of the flagellum. [00:18:49] Speaker B: Right. Okay. That's when you guys first got in contact, was. [00:18:53] Speaker A: Right. [00:18:54] Speaker B: Early ninety s. Yeah, I think most of our listeners know, but just tell us briefly, how did that shake out with the claims of the type three secretary system as a precursor to the flagellum? [00:19:08] Speaker A: Oh, man, there was a whole Dover trial. Flagellum was kind of on trial. I think Judge Jones kind of bought Ken Miller's argument that the type three secretion system was a precursor, although I was saying it can't be the mutational density of these components. The type three are shallower than the flagellum. If anything, it's a degradation product of the flagellum that's been co opted, but not the other way around. But that was satisfactory to even some of my colleagues here at the university who were teaching in their biology classes, that the type three secretion system was a precursor of the flagellum, which we know is wrong. And there was a review article by Sunichi Azawa. He published in 2009. So this was four years after the trial, actually, I have a copy of it. Let me read this excerpt from the introduction. And he's a leader in biophysics of the flagellum, works with a good friend of mine, Kelly Hughes. And they're looking at irreducible complexity, so they're challenging Mike's assertion. But he says in the introduction that suggests that the assembly mechanism for the flagellar structure is universal and that the flagellar machine is essentially the same in all species. Then he goes on to say, since the flagellum is so well designed, his word and beautifully constructed by an ordered assembly pathway. Even I, who am not a creationist, get an awe inspiring feeling from its divine beauty. However, if the flagellum has evolved from a primitive form, where are the remnants of its ancestors? Why don't we see any intermediate or simpler forms of flagella than what they are today? How is it possible that the flagella has evolved without leaving traces in history? I mean, that's the question right there. And it wasn't solved in 2005 at the trial, wasn't solved in 2009 according to Sinichi, and we still don't know. [00:21:14] Speaker B: Yeah, but pretty well. You think pretty definitively that if anything, the flagellum is more ancient than the type three. [00:21:23] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, yeah. The type three secretion systems you find in a narrow group of gram negative bacteria. And the flagella is across all bacterial phylum. [00:21:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:34] Speaker A: So it's well conserved. [00:21:36] Speaker B: So the question that Mike raised in his book in 96 and the question that you were talking about with your colleagues ten years earlier in 86, still very much on the table. [00:21:46] Speaker A: Right. [00:21:47] Speaker B: Okay. So when you got involved with intelligent design and started to spend some time and some energy and effort on this, were your family supportive? Were they kind of skeptical or where were they at in both your family that you grew up with as well as your wife and kids? [00:22:02] Speaker A: It was mixed. I think my mother and sister thought I was taking too much risk. My wife was worried to a degree because she was hearing what had happened to other faculty members across the nation. [00:22:17] Speaker B: Right. [00:22:18] Speaker A: But I don't know, I think it just seemed right. Can I tell you one incident? [00:22:26] Speaker B: Sure. [00:22:27] Speaker A: And this kind of solidified it for me. So in the mid ninety s, the biology department here at Idaho invited Robert Pinnock out to give a talk. He had just published a new book titled the Tower of Babel, the New Creationists. And so it was kind of an attack against intelligent design. And he gave a seminar and he had my picture up in this PowerPoint, essentially alerting faculty there's a problem at the University of Idaho. And he finished his seminar and I raised my hand to ask a question and boy, he went right on the offensive and said, oh, you're here. I didn't think you would come. Why don't you tell us how you take the position you do that's counter to the very foundation of your discipline. I mean, here's 300 people in the audience. And I said, well, that's a good question. I'm sure other people are wondering too. But what I find interesting is you ended your seminar with the famous quote, by Dobchanski. Nothing in biology makes sense outside the light of evolution. I happen to be in the most productive department in terms of grant awards and publications. We're in the heart of modern biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and we don't even have a course of evolution as a requirement nor as an elective in our curriculum. So when you say nothing in biology makes sense outside of evolution, then I would differ. We do great biology and it's not part of our course content. I mean, there are students will ask about it and it's brought up in courses, but it's not formally taught. And in the department that invited you, the formal evolution course is 400 level, so there's a disconnect there. And I have canvassed all the faculty in my department, and none of us ever took a course in evolution during our training. And we come out of the best universities, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Harvard, MIT. And I'm the only person with one other in the department that's ever read Darwin. So I beg to differ with you on your know, but it was true. I had asked to take a course in evolution when I was a graduate student, and my mentor said, you don't have time for that. [00:24:55] Speaker B: You got to do biology. [00:24:58] Speaker A: Right? [00:24:58] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. So that brings me to what you were talking about a little bit earlier, Scott, which is at some point you had invited Steve down to give this talk and got some escante looks from your colleagues thereafter. So if you don't mind sharing, in addition to this experience with panic, what kind of experiences have you had where you've been challenged or maybe even attacked personally or in your professional career due to your support of intelligent design? [00:25:29] Speaker A: It's been off and on. I think when I participated in the Dover trial, that really rankled my colleagues, and I was actually censored by the university president White at the time, where he went public and said that intelligent design will not be taught in the physical biological sciences. If it is addressed, it'll only be in the sociology and the philosophy courses. And afterwards he made this assertion. Apparently faculty on campus went to the president and complained that I was participating in this trial. And I just said, I'm not teaching this in my course. Coming back to that point, I know the difference between a pulpit and a lectern, and I'm not crossing that balance, but my colleagues are. They're teaching against this viewpoint and there's an imbalance there. But that was tough. And they even went know I had an affiliate position at the University of Washington since I teach first year medical students, and they went to the dean College of Medicine and complained, and I had to assure them that I wasn't teaching intelligent design in my infectious disease. [00:26:42] Speaker B: Right. Okay. [00:26:44] Speaker A: And there have been other instances, too, but it comes with a territory. [00:26:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, why have you kept at it? I mean, why does it matter to you to continue voicing your thoughts and your understanding, even in the face of some of these kinds of challenges? [00:26:59] Speaker A: Because I think this is the big question. Evolution is important. Don't get me wrong. Mutation selection happens and organisms can adapt. It's just a question of what is the limit? And I think it is limited. I think you fluctuate around a mean, but you're not generative. It's a preservative mechanism. It's not generative. And so then the question comes, how did this come about? I mean, if you look at DNA, this is the most sophisticated digital information storage readout system that we know of, and it's got analog information built into it as well. And it's not an arbitrary code. It's a bias code that ensures that if you have a point mutation, a single change in the code, that you're going to get either the same amino acid or one that's in the same chemical family. How did this happen? And we know from experience that where you have codes, language, musical scales, mathematical symbols, there's mind behind it. And this is a mother of all codes. It is just mind blowing. And it's optimized to minimize mutations, the effect of mutations. And that's got to cause you to stop and wonder. Right. It's such an elegant system. [00:28:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a great irony, I think, in there, Scott, because not only the code, but all of the error correction mechanisms and the proofreading and the quality control that goes on is geared toward minimizing, in many, many cases. Right. Minimizing the effects of this mutational process. But on the other hand, evolutionists are kind of speaking out of the other side of their mouth and saying, but all of these remarkable systems that help prevent mutations came about because of mutation. I mean, it's just a very ironic sort of state of. [00:29:03] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:29:04] Speaker B: That was the first half of my conversation with Dr. Scott Minnick about his journey to intelligent design and why it matters to him to continue sharing the evidence for design in the world. Join us next time. As we continue our conversation, Dr. Minnick will share how he became involved in reviewing the results of the famous long term evolutionary experiment, and how he and his colleagues conclusively demonstrated that the implications of this important experiment were not, as the supporters of darwinian evolution had claimed. For id the future. I'm Eric Anderson. Thanks for listening. [00:29:35] Speaker A: Visit [email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright discovery institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.