[00:00:05] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Hello. I am your host today, Jonathan Witt, and I'm pleased to have on the show our newest Discovery Institute Press author, Neil Thomas. Welcome, Neil.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Hello.
[00:00:23] Speaker A: I want to begin just by giving you a little background on Neil Thomas. He is a reader emeritus in the University of Durham, England. A reader in british academic speak is equivalent to a research professor here in the United States. He's a longtime member of the British Rationalist association and is the author of the newly released taking Leave of Darwin. A longtime agnostic discovers the case for design. He studied classical studies and european languages at the universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up his post in the german section of the School of European Languages and Literature at Durham University in 1976. There, his teaching involved a broad spectrum of specialisms, including germanic philosophy, medieval literature, the literature and philosophy of the enlightenment, and modern german history and literature. He also taught modules on the propagandist use of the german language used by both the Nazis and by functionaries of the old German Democratic Republican. We will see as we go a little bit further how that training, that background knowledge actually played an interesting role as he began to study darwinism. He's published over 40 articles in various refereed journals and half a dozen singled authored books. He also edited a number of volumes, including myths and its legacy in european literature and german studies at the millennium. He was the british branch president of the International Arthurian Society and remains a member of a number of learned societies.
Neil, it's exciting to be able to talk directly with you. We've had a couple of conversations as we kind of worked on getting your book ready for print. And then recently we got to chat at the insiders briefing in the greater Seattle area. We came in via Zoom there, so we weren't actually there. You were in reading, England, your home. I was here in Texas. So that was nice, but it was kind of hurried. And so this is going to be a nice opportunity to slow things down, unpack a little bit more of the things we had to hurry through in that conversation. One thing I want to say as we kind of frame and begin this is there's kind of a sense, and I mean this little ironically, of course, that somebody like you isn't really supposed to exist. You're a british academic, you're erudite, you're a polyglot. You were a settled darwinist and rationalist, and you didn't have a burning, as far as I can tell, a burning need to answer, you know, the big questions you weren't God haunted? You weren't, you weren't an angry atheist, as far as I can tell. You were just kind of going on minding your business and then somehow you got drawn into this evolution design issue and you found yourself, by the end of it, on the other side of it. And you say, if I understand right, it started at least at one early stage. There was a nightmare you had. Can you tell us about this, this dream that you had?
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Yes.
Question implies that had some sort of nightmare epiphany, which I suppose is true in a sense, although I do think it was led up to by some experiences I had maybe 20 years ago when I was in post when I heard a female Oxford academic referring to memes, Richard Dawkins's term, where she could have just simply said cultural influences. It seemed to me that we didn't need to bring Richard Dawkins to the feast.
The simplicities and distortions of sociology did not quite cohere with the aims of humanities, it seemed to me, seemed reductionist.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: To you, I suppose?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: Yes, very much so. Very much so.
But I think the occasion you refer to by some sort of telepathy, I certainly didn't tell you this about this nightmare. I did have a more visceral reaction maybe a few years ago, and this concerned, I think, waking up in a sort of panic that. And I felt that something must have caused life to emerge and to develop on earth independently of this kind of magical automatism postulated by Darwinism. And I think it was at maybe you could argue a sub rational level. I mean, most of the important decisions we make in life occur in the subconscious realm where the really important things get adjudicated one and transacted. And so I took this as quite an important pointer and this got me to trying to research what Darwinism was.
I really wasn't satisfied with the explanations given by such as Darwin or Stephen Hawking or Peter Atkins, Christian de Douve, or more recently, Lawrence Krauss, that the world could have sort of self assembled and gone on self assembling, as per Darwin prescriptions, forever in a day. And whether I came to the conclusion that the originator of the world was God or some other force is to some extent a semantic problem, because I felt that something must have accounted for the origin of everything.
[00:05:43] Speaker A: And so at some point you got more serious or more focused on investigating this question of evolutionary theory and biological origins. And some time later, here we are all this time later, the result is this book, and I think it's a wonderful book, and we've got some wonderful endorsements and feedback. Just today, one of my colleagues here at Discovery Institute, somebody wrote to him about some other matter, and he said, oh, and by the way, I've just finished the new book by Neil Thomas. What a delight. He was just enthusiastic about it. So it's very gratifying. But I can hear, playing the devil's advocate, I can hear somebody saying, well, this is all very wonderful that this british liberal arts academic had this investigation and eventually flipped and went from being a darwinist to a Darwin skeptic. But, Neil, you're not a biologist. You're not even a scientist. What about your academic training could possibly fit you for assessing the arguments, pro and con, for darwinism?
[00:06:40] Speaker B: Yes, a good question. I'm not a biologist, but I do feel that for over 160 years, the biologists proper have been marking their own homework to an excessive extent, to such an extent that I felt that some kind of independent audit might be properly on the cards. Other people have undertaken the same audit, perhaps not in exactly the same way as I have, but to vary the metaphor a bit. A neighbor asked me about my so called expertise in barges. I said, I don't have an expertise as such.
Imagine me as the foreman of a jury in a particularly naughty legal case who's doing his level best to understand the arguments pro and con and is trying to come up with what he seems to with be the best answer as an honest broker.
[00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that resonates with that analogy to a jury. I mean, we regularly think that if we can get a jury of thoughtful men and women, they don't have to be experts and say, murder forensics to hear the evidence pro and con in a murder trial, of course, we do sometimes get juries that aren't filled with thoughtful people with training. But in your case, of course, you've had extensive training in rhetoric and logic, the use of propaganda, spotting fallacious thinking. In some ways that that was, you know, part of your expertise. So in some ways, you're ideally trained for adjudicating an argument like this.
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Well, as you yourself, as an ex english major, will attest, I mean, one has to respond to verbal texture of any given piece of writing with some sensitivity and discrimination. And. But over and above that, as you say in, in the introduction, I do have an academic background in german, and not only german language, but, of course, the german culture and history.
And one of the things that I did when I was in post was to give courses on the use of nazi propaganda in the Third Reich.
And also, as I think you also mentioned, these sort of sinister continuities between that use of propaganda in the Third Reich and the kind of propaganda used by the communist government of East Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, of course, in 1989, in order to procure a sort of central line on things. And so, yes, I'm familiar with biased and tendentious modes of argumentation.
And in the case of the political arenas that I'm talking about, and especially in the nazi arena, everything was done in order to enforce conformity with the ideological party line.
In German, the word that was used was, which means literally translated, getting into line. In the nazi regime, that was a matter of getting into Lionel Bich shot, you may recall.
[00:09:52] Speaker A: So what the Darwin, are you saying there's a parallel with the darwinist get in line? Well, get in line or be fired is what academics have experienced.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: I'm glad you mentioned that. I wasn't going to mention that overtly. I was just going to let it be implicit. But you're right, I am not in the position myself, gratifyingly, to be strong armed into saying anything, since I'm now a retiree of independent means. And so I can say what I like and I have chosen to say what I think and I hope is the unvarnished truth. Otherwise I wouldn't have had the motivation to do all this writing decades after I said I would never put pen to paper again.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: So just to clarify, because I'm sure somebody might come back and try to twist your words. Oh, you're calling the darwinist Nazis? That's not at all what you're saying. You're saying that there's some of the techniques you saw in your studies of the nazi propaganda machine, the soviet propaganda machine, you saw parallels to that in some of the ways that Darwinists attempt to enforce orthodoxy, to bluff.
[00:11:00] Speaker B: Yes, of course. No, I mean, I think that many Darwinists are self deluding rather than trying to oppress anybody else, to be honest. And all I'm pointing out is the rhetorical continuities which exist between all kinds of writing which try to persuade people, maybe against their own judgment, of something that the persuader wishes to them to take on board.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: And for the record, I think we probably both know some very nice darwinists that we would happily have coffee or tea with. So not calling them all nazis. There is an interesting parallel, though, that with your academic background, you noticed, and as you were researching, you're like, hmm, this seems familiar. This tactic or that tactic. Okay, let's move forward. One myth your book nicely puts to rest is the popular notion that Darwin swam against the tide, bravely defying a creationist culture to advance his theory of evolution. He did face a backlash, of course, some of it from biblical traditionals. But as you detail in the book, he also was borne along by a well established stream of pro evolution thinking, one that reached all the way back to the ancients and that had been reinvigorated in the century leading up to his evolutionary breakthrough. I mean, you talk about David Humb, you mentioned some other names back with ancients and then even closer in time and maybe closer in terms of his family connections mentioned that as well. Let's take those internally. Let's start with the ancients. What in the ancient you talk about greek and latin context. There were some predecessors there that Darwin and evolutionists could draw upon.
[00:12:39] Speaker B: There certainly were. And I think this is possibly something that people have referred to. I mean, there was a book, I think by Benjamin Weicker some time ago who talked about the influence of Epicurus and Lucretius. Anyway, to start at the beginning, I would say, and this might seem controversial to some that I've come to see Darwinism as more of a sub branch of ancient philosophy than I regard it as a science in and of itself and per se.
Now, what I mean by this is that in the ancient world of Greece and Rome where all the best ideas, many say, were hatched, there were basically two theories about the natural world. The most influential one was the idea of Aristotle and Plato on Cicero and the early physician Galen that there was a design to nature which must have had a first cause. This first cause is what the christian centuries called God.
And it's an idea that supported and underpinned western civilization for 2000 years, quite happily.
But it was also at the same time in antiquity a more off the wall theory authored by the greek philosopher Epicurus and his roman disciple Lucretius who claimed that the whole natural world had come about by chance, by a random jostling of atoms, to be precise. Hence in them the term atomism which is often used to describe this philosophy.
Can things come about by chance? Well, not in the world I inhabit, not very often, anyway. For me, chance has very little causal power whatsoever, even given eons to affect its so called aims. But anyway, this was the idea. And for long centuries it was more or less cold shouldered not surprisingly, given the advent of the highly teleological Christianity and so on. But what happened was in the late 18th century the scottish philosopher David Hume got hold of this idea I mean, that there had been texts which had preceded, come to light in the, in the Renaissance period. But anyway, he brought this idea to the fore again.
But he too, despite his brilliance in as, despite his all his intellectual firepower, which nobody doubts, was cold shouldered as well. The first time that David Hume got any chance of being taken seriously, paradoxically, was when Darwin came on the scene. Darwin, who was totally innocent of philosophy himself and who was all too ready to admit that he was of a mediocre intellectual standard. He really did say this, I'm not being scurrilers.
It was really on the back of Darwin that Epicurus Lucretius and David Hume came to prominence.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah. So there were predecessors to Darwin. We don't want to ignore those. You also talk about his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, you talk about Robert Chambers, who wrote a pro evolutionary book. But it was Darwin and a lot of people were getting into that and excited about it. But then it was Darwin that provided this mechanism of natural selection and random variation that created a kind of plausible garb to reinvigorate this idea of evolution, at least initially plausible or superficially plausible. You, as you studied it, found it ultimately not very plausible, but plausible because.
[00:16:34] Speaker B: It was wholly naturalistic.
[00:16:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it was naturalistic and it kind of broke it up. Seemed to be able to break up the miracle into little steps.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Well, that's what Darwin said. Yes.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: Yeah. It's like we'll swallow the elephant, you know, one tiny bite at a time.
[00:16:48] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, I would say that Darwinism gave to ancient atomism a kind of pseudo scientific veneer or cover from which it could prosper in the thinking of men and women in the western world, whether rightly or wrongly, in fact. I mean, I convinced in my own mind that there is no known reference in the real world for the kind of mimicking a designer which Darwin and his later acolyte Richard Dawkins favor. And for me, I find it a very strange conjecture indeed. I mean, the analogy that I thought of is it's as if a cadre of theologians had decided in 1860 to throw out the four gospels of the New Testament, which had been chosen for by all sorts of careful early christian councils of the patristic era, and then said, no, we won't have them. We can have some of these bonkers, apocryphal gospels which have been rejected for almost 2000 years. It is to me, and I know hyperbole is intended here, very surprising that such a vault fast should have taken place.
[00:18:04] Speaker A: So, yeah, you're replacing this rich philosophical tradition that gave us the scientific revolution, that gave us the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And then also now we're going to switch over to putting our flag with these materialists from ancient times. And here Darwin's figured out a way to dress it up and make it digestible, and it just seems like a bizarre fork to take. Is that what you're kind of saying?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: It is. I don't think that. I don't know. I doubt whether Darwin's schooling would have had it such that he would have known Epicurus and Lucretius, let alone in the original tongues. And of course, the lurber dual editions of classical texts have not hit the market by that time. But all I'm saying is there is sort of philosophical consanguinity between what Darwin said in the biological sphere and what Epicurus and other atomists were saying in regard to the sort of cosmological existential sphere.
[00:19:05] Speaker A: And he may have gotten his second or third hand through, you know, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. I don't know.
[00:19:10] Speaker B: I think you'll.
[00:19:10] Speaker A: Robert Chambers, possibly, yes.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: I mean, I think probably more from Erasmus. He never really admitted his debt to his grandfather sufficiently or with sufficient courtesy, it seems to me. But I think that Erasmus Darwin, even though he was a highly speculative person, was an educated man. He was on the keyview also with regard to continental philosophy. And he would have known of the so called philosophe, the french philosophers, who were also saying something of the semblance of the transmutation of species or transformisme as they would have known it in their own country. Yes.
[00:19:51] Speaker A: I can't remember if it was you that mentioned this, or I read it somewhere else, but CS Lewis mentioned another influence was just that as technology was progressing fairly dramatically and noticeably by the 19th century, even in the 18 hundreds, people made a kind of analogy from evolving human technology and evolving human civilization technologically to the broader world, and said, well, maybe everything's evolving. And so not a particularly logical jump, but it just kind of made the idea of evolutionary progress more palatable to the western european anglosphere mind.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: I think that the 19th century was an age of optimism, a belief in progress, which the 20th century has more or less lost as a result of two world wars. And in some ways, I think, yes, the idea of industrial progress might have meshed with submerged ideas of christian providence, that there was a progressionist momentum to things rough hew them how we will, and that this speaks to the idea of an awareness that some divine agent may be maybe shaping our ends.
[00:21:03] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting often the Darwinists will play both sides. They'll present unguided evolutionary theory as moving us to toward higher and higher mountain peaks. And then other times they'll kind of be more honest with what the theory's really saying. It's purposeless, it's pointless, it's not heading higher. It's just survival of the fittest. And HG Wells, in his pulp science fiction novel the Time Machine, he was more honest about this. I don't know if you recall that book, but by the end, everything's just petering out and the human race has not moved on to become anything particularly exalted. Then the man in the time machine goes further and things are even more bleak. And so he's conveying this, ultimately, when you go down the path of darwinian materialism, you don't end up in the age of Aquarius, that hokey sixties song. You just end up in a meaningless, pointless universe. So credit, I guess, to Wells for at least honestly facing the full implications of darwinian materialism.
Let's jump on for here. We'll circle back and we're going to have you back, but I want to, before we get off here, I want to talk a little about your discussion in the book about the origin of life. Because Darwin, even though his book, his first big book, didn't touch on the origin of life, he kind of left that to the side. His origin of species was about basically evolution. After you get the first life, he did. In a private letter to Joseph Hooker, he presented a naturalistic explanation for how you would get first life. And the explanatory task was suddenly tougher than it had been even 15 years before, because just almost at the same time that Darwin came out with origin of species, Louis Pasteur did an experiment that kind of put the final nail in the coffin of this idea of spontaneous generation that had been kind of widely believed that you could get living things from nonliving things. And it happened all the time. There have been some other experiments, as you mentioned before this, but Louis Pasteur has really gained some public traction and really put it to rest. But Darwin didn't say, okay, well, I guess you can't have life come from non life naturalistic. I guess God did that. He privately didn't even want to let God in the door there. And so he comes up with an explanation to Joseph Hooker, and it basically goes like this. I'm summarizing, it basically goes, okay, so it's not easy to get life from non life as we may have thought before it's not an everyday occurrence, but it only needed to happen once and it wouldn't have had any other life forms to compete against. When that first living cell popped into existence in that warm little pond, as he referred to it in his letter, then the process of replication and evolution by random variation and natural selection would be off and running to his mind. How hard could it be for chemicals to randomly assemble into the very simplest of life forms? It may have been tough, but it only had to happen once. You just needed one freak winning of the lottery and then evolution would be off and running with that first self reproducing cell. As you know, Neil, neither in Darwin nor anyone else at that time had a clue just how mind bogglingly sophisticated even the simplest cell is. Michael Denton, the australian geneticist and biologist, he refers to even the simplest cell as a micro miniaturized factory without parallel in human technology.
You make another point, too. So if they had known how complicated even a simple cell was, they would have realized the problem of getting life from non life was quite daunting. And then you go on and point out another issue. Even in the wake of Pasteur's experiment, there were cultural resources in the air to make this mistake. You argued, it's a mistake to think it's easy to get life from non life easily. She said, to make that mistake. They were encouraged by some cultural influences that I found very interesting. You're not going to read in a kind of straight science id book, and one of those you talk about is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Can you talk about that book and just some of the other cultural influences floating around in the late 19th on into the 20th, that would lead a sober scientist think, hey, maybe with just the right spark, hey, we can all suddenly have life from non life.
[00:25:10] Speaker B: Yes, yes, I agree with the way you put it there. And I think it's an important point that's often left out of these discussions that, oh, Darwin sort of said, well, yes, he did sort of fantasize about this in letter to hooker, but it implied that this was not really important for what he was writing about in the origin of species. Well, in course it was important. It was absolutely basic to what he was talking about, because without that abiogenetic moment, the whole story of evolution falls flat. And it's not just me who's pointed this out. This is pointed out years ago by some german scientific colleagues with whom Darwin was in correspondence.
One german scientist said, well, you can't just leave out the story of the first cell, because if the chemical self assembly of the first living cell could not be established, then what on earth was natural selection going to go to work on?
If Darwin, Parchont was saying, said the german scientist, that the origins of life were implanted by God, then what on earth was all this fuss being made about naturalistic selection? Surely it would be more proper to throw in the towel and say the whole shebang was the result of theistic evolution. Only life can give rise to life. In fact, you mentioned Louis Pasteur. Well, of course, it wasn't just Pasteur. I mean, long before Pasteur came on the scene, there'd been Sir William Harvey, the Englishman who discovered blood circulation, and the italian Francesco Reddy. So that you could say that the idea of not being able to produce life from chemicals, it had a triple lock on it, that, logically speaking, from the point of view of a scientific witness, such a thing was impossible in nature.
[00:27:15] Speaker A: Right. But then you get people even into, like, the 1930s and forties. You describe this bizarre experiment, this somebody was trying to do in the forties.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Can you briefly. Briefly, I mean, tell us about that?
[00:27:28] Speaker B: Of course.
I mean, I think everybody is aware of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein of 1818, which, in a sense, can be read. And I would read it actually, in retrospect, as a kind of critique of overweening scientism, the idea that you can equal the most high to give it miltonic tones.
And also, of course, there was the 1931 film starring Boris Karloff, which had considerable resonance in his time.
But this, of course, was essentially a popular reception of the idea. But, as you say, even in the 1940s, there were people who were pinning some sort of faith in being able to raise the dead or create life or recreate life in some way. I mean, there was this really bizarre experiment which was going to be carried out in the University of California in 1947 by one Robert Cornish, who had the California laboratory all ready to try to revivify the corpse of an executed criminal whom he'd had transported there for the purpose. The only reason he didn't go through with, presumably, giving all sorts of electrical impulses a la Frankenstein was that, sensibly, the University of California authorities stepped in to stop the experiment.
So, yes, there's a kind of wishful thinking that something could be the case versus a more sober estimation of what is actually possible in human terms.
And I would say my favorite commentary on this whole fantasy of life from non life was the film made by Mel Brooks in 1974 called Young Frankenstein, which is one of the funniest films I have seen. I mean, it's where the inimitable gene Wilder plays a younger descendant of the notorious Baron Frankenstein, and he is trying to put a considerable distance between himself and his ancestor, whom he says, famously before of his class, of his students, that his ancestor was a cook. He even americanizes his name to Frankenstein quite deliberately to put distance between himself and the discreditable past. But then, of course, the story, the intrigue of the film is the way that he falls back into the trap of trying to create life and non life in, you know, the dead monster and so on. Everyone knows that story.
[00:30:20] Speaker A: Yes. Like some sort of genetic determinism or family.
[00:30:24] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:30:25] Speaker A: Obsession. Yes. It's a hilarious movie. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of poking fun at this whole naive notion that you could somehow bring life from non life easily with just a little electricity and.
[00:30:38] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Quiet. Yeah. I mean, Mel Brooks was interviewed in a biography of 2019, which came out in New York. And he said, yes, my films are a lot of goonery and slapstick and farce, but there was a serious intention behind this, and that was to satirize those who would play God very similar terms to those that they reported him as having. Having said in his interview, yeah, you.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Have some, and we're going to leave that to the side and just kind of invite people to read the book. You have a nice thread about this tendency among scientific materialists to play God. Ty some of the commentary back to Mary Shelley's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had some tendencies that way to celebrate this kind of thing with his Prometheus unbound. Yes, but rather than go down that, I just want to kind of put that out as a teaser to readers. Neil has some fascinating additional commentary along those lines here. I want to jump to the Miller Urey experiment. You argue that, okay, this is a much less silly and ridiculous type of science, much more rigorous than this whole revivifying dead bodies kind of thing. But there was. But there was a little bleed over, a little naive optimism about getting life from. From non life, that you think, you argue bleeds over into the optimism that surrounded that experiment. You say that the hype surrounding the results of that experiment were badly overblown.
How so? Talk to that a little bit.
[00:32:14] Speaker B: Well, I think that in the course of the Miller Euro experiment of 1953, there were. There were some signs that some chemical reactions were going on and that these chemical reactions could. Could be classed as preparatory to life, but by no means adequate to producing an organic cell. And so it was a matter of complete faith whether you thought that this was a success or a failure. And many people, I think, would say that it was a failure inasmuch as it didn't actually step up to the bar of providing what it had claimed to be able to provide, which was something tangible, living, organic before people's eyes. That's the whole point of an experiment, that you have a tangible result.
So in one way, if I were a tabloid editor, I would say that the result of the Miller Urie experiment was that it indirectly gave game, set and match to the theistic viewpoint, proving the existence of God. I would say, if I were a tabloid editor, rather than saying, oh, well, it had some qualified success, but that was by no means enough. I mean, people at the time were overjoyed that these were going to be the first signs.
[00:33:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that they'd managed to create a few amino acids, which is, of course, light years from having a cell or even a viable strand of DNA or a folded protein. And of course, there was all kinds of intelligently designed interference in the experiment. So they're not mimicking the early earth in that way. Later. Turns out their notions of what the early earth atmosphere was like is probably wrong. So at multiple levels, it really argued quite the opposite, that you can put very clever scientists to work and they're not going to get anywhere near to creating life. And they're intelligent, they're engineering and creating all these processes and all these interventions, and they can't do it. The next 65, 70 years have just continued to corroborate that view because we've had more and more clever scientists and better technology, and they're still light years from being able to create life from non life, even with all their intelligence. So, fascinating discussion there in the book and kind of boils it down. We've had some excellent books on the origin of life come out from the ID community. The signature in the cell. There's a recent, a revised edition of the Mystery of Life origin. But if you want just a kind of short take on it, along with some interesting cultural background about how people could develop such inflated, hyper optimistic view of the possibility of getting life from non life, Neil Thomas new book, taking Leave of Darwin, is a great place to start. And Neil, I'd love to have you back. We're short on time now, but I'd love to have you back. And us get a little more into the biological evolution side of things and talk about a couple more of the philosophical threads that you discuss in the book.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: Will do.
[00:35:34] Speaker A: This is Jonathan Witt, and thank you for tuning in. And for next time. This has been id the future.
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