Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Welcome, listeners. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Andrew McDermott, your host.
Today we bring you a wide ranging conversation with three of the leading voices in science and academia on the case for Intelligent Design.
Philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, biochemist Michael Behe, and mathematician John Lennox. Peter Robinson and the Hoover Institution have generously permitted us to share their interview. Originally recorded as an episode of Uncommon Knowledge, the trio takes turns pointing out the flaws in Darwin's theory and reports on the latest scientific evidence that points to an intentional design of the physical world.
Enjoy.
[00:00:52] Speaker C: Who's dead, God or Charles Darwin?
Michael Behe, a biochemist. John Lennox, a mathematician. Stephen Meyer, a geophysicist, filming today in Fiesole, Italy. Uncommon Knowledge welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. Michael Behe holds an undergraduate degree from Drexel and a doctorate in biochemistry from Penn. He's the author of a number of books, including Darwin's Black Box.
Emeritus professor of Mathematics at Oxford. John Lennox grew up in Northern Ireland, earned his undergraduate degree from Emanuel College, Cambridge, and then went on to earn not one, but and not two, but three doctorates in an academic career of astounding distinction. Dr. Lennox is the author of many books, including the 2019 volume Can Science Explain Everything?
A former professor of geophysics at Whitworth College, Stephen Meyer is now a fellow at the Discovery Institute. He holds a Doctorate of the Philosophy of science from Cambridge. Dr. Meyer has published again many books, including his 2013 volume on the fossil record, Darwin's Doubt.
Michael, John and Steve, welcome.
First question, Darwin versus Einstein.
Einstein publishes the special theory of relativity in 1905, and in the 12ish decades since that publication, one observation after another has tended to confirm his work. Just a decade ago, scientists found clocks on satellites in elliptical orbits kept time just about as Einstein would have predicted. Over time, to put it crudely, Einstein has become easier and easier to believe.
Darwin publishes on the Origin of the species in 1859.
Briefly, as was true of Einstein, also of Darwin, has he become easier and easier to believe? Michael?
[00:03:08] Speaker D: No, the opposite.
[00:03:09] Speaker C: The opposite, John.
[00:03:11] Speaker E: The exact opposite.
[00:03:13] Speaker C: Stephen.
[00:03:13] Speaker A: Theory has been progressively disconfirmed by multiple observations in multiple sub disciplines of biology.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: All right, all three of you come out swinging.
Gentlemen, you're about to take a layman through three problems with Darwin that the last few decades have turned up.
Problem one. Stephen, this is for you.
Feel free to join in. But this one for Stephen, particularly the fossil record, the Cambrian. Cambrian, how's it pronounced?
[00:03:39] Speaker A: Either Way.
[00:03:40] Speaker C: All right, the Cambrian or the Cambrian Explosion. What was it and why is it a problem for Darwin?
[00:03:46] Speaker A: It was a problem that Darwin himself knew about in 1859. The Cambrian explosion refers to an event in the history of life in which the major groups of animal forms, the new body plans that are exemplified by the largest categories of different types of animals, appear very abruptly in the fossil record, with no discernible connection to ancestral precursors or intermediates in the lower Precambrian strata. And this pattern of abrupt appearance of the major groups of organisms, of biological or morphological innovation, as it's called, recurs up and down the sedimentary rock column. The first winged insects, the first dinosaurs, the first birds, the first mammals, the first flowering plants. There are multiple instances of this type of abrupt appearance. And so the fossil record looks very different than Darwin anticipated that it would look. He depicted the history of life as a great branching tree where the forms of life we see today emerged gradually from one or very few simple forms at the base of the tree, at the trunk of the tree. But instead, what we see, it looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees, where the major groups of organisms appear abruptly without connections to those ancestral precursor forms.
[00:05:01] Speaker C: So the Cambrian explosion was the first that got noticed. As you say, Darwin himself noticed that this was a problem. But this is from my reading. Add to it or correct me. As I've got it, the record shows one abrupt, abrupt meaning a few million years. But in the geologic time, that's the blink of an eye. One abrupt event after another, photosynthesis. Just all of a sudden, it's there. The Avalon explosion, the great Ordovician biodiversification event, whatever that may have been. The Silurian, Devonian terrestrial explosion.
Fish appear, birds appear, dinosaurs appear, mammals appear. Okay, so the obvious objection to this is, well, we've only really been digging since about Darwin's time. The Earth is big, geologic time is essentially endless. There are fossils there. We just haven't found the intermediate forms.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: Right. That's an objection to the claims about fossil discontinuity. That's known as the artifact hypothesis. This idea is that the missing ancestral forms are an artifact either of incomplete sampling or incomplete preservation.
[00:06:09] Speaker C: Right.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: The Cambrian explosion itself presents a very nice test of that artifact hypothesis that the claim with respect to sampling is that we haven't looked long enough over 160 years on now, from the Cambrian or from the publication of the Origin of Species. And the Cambrian explosion, from our point of view, has become even more explosive. There are more New forms of life, more new animal forms known now in that Cambrian explosion event than there were in Darwin's time. And yet with that passage of time, we found no more of the intermediate. So there are more new forms still, all of which are still lacking intermediate forms.
[00:06:51] Speaker C: Instead of our findings regressing to some sort of Darwinian mean, they're departing from Darwin more and more and more. Right, quickly, one last notion here, one last question on this before I turn to my big problem in life maths with John Lennox.
Punctuated equilibrium. Stephen Jay Gould, the late and by all accounts great. He seems to have been a dynamic teacher. He was certainly prolific. The great biologist Stephen Jay Gould, who held. Well, you tell me what punctuated equilibrium held and why it doesn't answer the problem.
[00:07:28] Speaker A: Well, it was a wonderful new idea.
Gould and another paleontologist, Niles Eldridge, for, formulated this theory in the late 1970s. And what they were trying to do is describe the fossil record more accurately and what they saw, and what paleontologists saw then and see now even more distinctly is this pattern of abrupt appearance and what they called stasis, that the basic form of an animal, the basic body plan, will remain constant through long periods of time, either going extinct or continuing to the present day. There would be variation within the constraints of a body plan, but limited variation.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: The crocodile appears, appears and remains and remains.
[00:08:08] Speaker A: All right.
And so what they suggested was that there are these punctuation events where you have this sudden appearance and then this long period of equilibrium of stasis.
But they wanted to maintain that evolution.
[00:08:23] Speaker C: Takes place in fits and starts.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Exactly. Evolution takes place in fits and starts. And so it was a wonderful improvement in our description of the fossil record.
But the problem was that Gould and Eldredge never came up with a mechanism that convinced their colleagues in evolutionary biology that evolution could occur so quickly.
It was a good description of the fossil record without a mechanism to explain how that amount of change could occur.
[00:08:47] Speaker C: In those short meteor smacks the earth, wipes out the dinosaurs and creates an ecological niche. Yes, it creates space for new species to emerge. And so suddenly they do. Well, you said that I'm persuasive. These two are chuckling.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: The problem is you have to build the animal. And this is the second part of the. When I wrote the book at Darwin Stout, I talked about two big mysteries. One is the mystery of the missing fossils, but the second is the mystery of how the evolutionary process generates the new biological form. Because what we know now, as in our computer world, if you want to generate a New form of life, you have to have a lot of new information in the computer world, wanted to get a new program, got to have new code. Same thing is true in life. Where's the code come from? Just opening up the niche doesn't explain the origin of the information necessary to build the new animal form to fill it.
[00:09:33] Speaker C: All right, now we come to maths, the mathematical problem.
Maths was always my weakest subject and I am extremely conscious that I'm speaking to the emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University.
All right, so let me just put in layman's terms as best I can, and I have worked on it, what I take to be the mathematical problem that has emerged in recent decades with Darwin.
We know now something about when life seems to have emerged, something between 4 and 5 billion years ago. We now know quite a lot about the rate at which random genetic mutations take place.
Darwin's theory suggests that evolution arises because random genetic mutations take place and natural selection acts on them.
We also know quite a lot about how complicated it is to create proteins that function, proteins, chains of amino acids, a couple of hundred and longer.
And the math simply doesn't work. From the beginning of time to the present, there is some number of mutations that had to have taken place to create the life that we see around us.
And it just doesn't add up. Is that right?
[00:10:55] Speaker E: Roughly, it's much worse than that because I think one of the very important things, and I'm not a biologist, but I do study the biologists as carefully as I can, is that Darwin's theory, whatever it does or doesn't do, says zero about the origin of life. He didn't claim to speak about the origin.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: He always presumes that the pre existence of a form from which other forms evolve.
[00:11:22] Speaker E: But unfortunately, for many years, Richard Dawkins obscured everything, obfuscated the whole situation.
[00:11:29] Speaker C: Dawkins, the Oxford biologist.
[00:11:31] Speaker E: That's right, because he said that natural selection, which Darwin discovered, and he describes us as a blind automatic process, process, is responsible for the existence and variation of all of life. Now, he later admitted, took far too long to do it, that evolution in the Darwinian sense cannot be responsible for the origin of life. For the simple reason is that evolution, whatever it does or doesn't do, presupposes the existence of life.
[00:12:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:12:01] Speaker E: So you have two separate problems here. One is the origin of life, which.
[00:12:06] Speaker C: We'Ll come to that one, I promise.
[00:12:07] Speaker E: Okay. Goes back to the origin of information, as Stephen has mentioned, but the second is just the sheer calculation.
Now, you mentioned things in your questioning that have to do with the origin of life, proteins and so on. And one of my examiners at Cambridge was Sir Fred Hoyle and he came to Cardiff where I was a lecturer many years ago, and he shocked everybody by he just stood up and said to an absolutely packed crowd, because he was famous, he said, life cannot have originated on Earth. And there was a collective gasp and he said I've done the calculations and mathematically it is simply impossible. There isn't enough time. And I actually have a copy of those calculations at home. And he just said it's quite obvious if you do the calculations. And he puts it very simply and pregnantly, you know, rabbits produce rabbits and very little else. And what his mathematics I think showed him was that the innocent aspect of evolution, which we can all accept that is you get minor variations on a theme which Michael here has dealt with so successfully in his book the Edge of Evolution. That's non controversial but once you go beyond that and think of new animals, new body plans, all of that kind.
[00:13:29] Speaker C: Of thing, Darwin's book is the Origin of Species. It's not minor variations within species, the Origin of Species.
[00:13:38] Speaker E: But I think, you know, what cuts all this for me now is not what the mathematicians are saying, but what the mathematically conscious biologists are saying. Now one of my friends in Oxford is a very distinguished biologist, Professor Dennis Noble, and he has just made absolutely clear, he said neo Darwinism, that is the modern synthesis, that standard textbook theory that we all learn natural selection and mutation doesn't need to be improved, it needs to be replaced.
And he almost was quoting someone like Lynn Margulis, another very distinguished person, who said it's dead.
So these are people who know about the calculations, who know about the complexity and saying from that perspective, it's dead.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: All right, so I, Fred Hoyle, we should add, was a very famous mid century, mid last century astronomer.
[00:14:36] Speaker E: Yes, that's right.
[00:14:36] Speaker C: All right, Michael, problem three for this little layman, cellular biology.
Can you just tell us about irreducible, this is your sort of thing, signal concept, irreducible complexity and the story of the mousetrap.
[00:14:55] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:14:56] Speaker D: Well my might be good to start by saying that Darwin and folks in his day didn't know much about the cell. They had crummy microscopes, it looked like a little piece of jelly and they knew nothing about molecules. And we now know that light, tiny.
[00:15:12] Speaker C: And elementary also meant simple to them. So it said biologically simple.
[00:15:16] Speaker D: Yes, that's correct. So like Jell O or jelly, they thought it might just bubble up from the sea.
But modern science in the past 70 or so years has shown that the cell is run by molecular machines, real machines made of molecules and really sophisticated ones. There are machines that act as propellers, machines that act as trucks to bring supplies from one side of the cell to the other side of the cell.
[00:15:43] Speaker C: So when you magnify these days, we know enough about cells to know that they're not little blobs of jello.
[00:15:50] Speaker D: That's right.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: You get inside a cell and you're looking at a city.
[00:15:54] Speaker D: Yeah, pretty much, yeah, that's right. It's got electrical apparatus, it's got vehicles, it's got information, it's got all sorts of things. And the problem with irreducible complexity is, if you think about it, machines are made of different parts. Say a lawn mower, it's got a blade, it's got a motor, wheels, stuff like that.
But Darwin always insisted that his theory had to work by numerous successive slight modifications, had to be very, very gradual. But if you try to build a machine like a lawnmower or a mousetrap.
[00:16:34] Speaker C: I like the mousetrap because that's so simple even I can get it in my hand.
[00:16:37] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. Just think of a mechanical mousetrap. It's got a number of different pieces. Now if you wanted to build something like that slowly and have each part or each intermediate work, you've got a big problem because it needs all of the parts to work. It needs a spring of wooden base, a couple other metal parts.
And just to capture that concept, I invented the phrase irreducible complexity. Because it's complex, can't reduce it or.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: Take away one piece and it just doesn't work.
[00:17:10] Speaker D: And the mousetrap doesn't work.
[00:17:12] Speaker C: Therefore it could not, the mousetrap, take away one piece from one of these fantastically complicated machines in a cell.
It doesn't function and therefore could not have conferred an adaptive advantage.
[00:17:23] Speaker D: Right. And it could not be built gradually and improving each step of the way.
[00:17:29] Speaker A: Intermediate stages confer no functional advantage. Therefore there's nothing for natural selection to select on the way from the simple to the complex.
[00:17:37] Speaker E: Michael does that.
What interests me greatly about that is the gradual building up is a stepwise ascent.
Whereas am I right in saying that contemporary biologists like Dennis Noble, whom I mentioned, are saying, but look, you have to take the wholesale into consideration that this is top down causation and that would frustrate any concept of building things up anyway by numerous slight accretion. Is that fair to say that if.
[00:18:08] Speaker D: You go that way Then you have left Darwin far behind.
You've left randomness far behind.
[00:18:14] Speaker E: But they are doing that. They're leaving it far behind.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: But top down is actually a metaphor for the action of an agent in arranging things with a plan in mind.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: You see, John Lennox just swats Darwin aside for the two of you. It's a much more agonizing process. You try very hard to be fair to the man. Two quotations, Michael. Two quotations.
Charles Darwin in the Origin. If Darwin himself writes this, 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. Close quote. That's Darwin. He puts the test right there in 1859.
Here's Michael Behe. The question then becomes, are there irreducibly complex systems in the cell?
Yes, there are many.
[00:19:07] Speaker D: Absolutely. As I said, the cell is chock full of machines. Machines need many parts. They can't be built by numerous successive slight modifications. But let me draw attention to one little sneaky trick that Darwin put into that quotation. He says, if it could be demonstrated that something couldn't possibly happen. So he's putting a burden on his opponents to prove a negative, which science cannot do and never has. No theory has ruled out all rival theories to be accepted, but we have great evidence that it can't. And we have absolutely no evidence that natural selection acting on random mutation could build much of anything.
[00:19:54] Speaker C: So here's the objection.
The objection. I say this as if I know enough to be authoritative. Here's an objection. And the objection runs, all right.
It's very hard to see how you evolve a mousetrap beginning with a little wooden platform. And true, it can't work until all the pieces are in place.
On the other hand, suppose you do evolve it in two or three pieces and they sit around for centuries. They don't confer any advantage on the organism, but they don't harm it either.
So they're just these strange accretions on which natural selection is neutral. It doesn't select for them, but it doesn't select against them. And then after eons and eons, we worry about the maths. Later, after eons and eons, the final piece drops into place and suddenly it functions. Plausible.
[00:20:47] Speaker D: No, that's ridiculous.
I mean, realistically, would you.
[00:20:52] Speaker C: He's being very careful of Darma, but he's swatting me aside.
[00:20:57] Speaker D: No, if you think, suppose you didn't have a mousetrap. So you say, well, what can I do? I'll just go into my garage and pick out a few pieces that would function as a mousetrap. And you say, well, I need a spring. Well, here's one in this grandfather clock I have. You wind up, I'll just use that. And I need a hammer to squash the mouse. I'll use this crowbar over here. But the pieces aren't adjusted to each other. You can't just take random pieces and put them together.
And natural selection, which, as Darwin said is constantly scrutinizing life, would not be expected to make things in the shape that they would need to be for some future use.
They would hone them for what they were doing right now.
[00:21:46] Speaker A: All right, can I weigh in on that?
[00:21:47] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:21:47] Speaker A: Because there's a connection between what Mike's talking about and the mathematical problems that John was alluding to, and that is that in these actual systems, these nanomachines that Mike has made famous through his work, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor or the ATP synthase, one's a, One's a rotary.
[00:22:04] Speaker C: Has made the flagellar motor a rock star.
[00:22:07] Speaker A: Well, he kind of has. He kind of has. But it's, you know, it's a 30 part rotary engine. The ATP synthase is a turbine with multiple parts, but the parts are made of proteins.
And proteins are, in essence, the toolbox of the cell.
They perform specific functions in view of their three dimensional shapes. So they make the parts of molecular machines. They function as enzymes to catalyze reactions at super fast rates. They help process information.
But if you were to build a system like the flagellar motor, you need 30 proteins that fit together in an integrated fashion. But that requires genetic code. Each one of those proteins requires a long stretch of genetic information to build the protein. And so what you're talking about is not just some bent hammer or something sitting around doing nothing. You're talking about a need for genetic information that is sufficient to overcome these long odds against building the protein in the first place. So it'd be like, to change the metaphor slightly, a gigantic haystack the size of the North American continent, and you're only allowed to search 1 10, 37 of the continent, maybe a tiny little square of Southern California.
If that's the case, are you more likely or less likely to find the needle? To find the needle. And the answer is you're overwhelmingly more likely not to find the needle than to find it. Which is to say the mutation selection mechanism lacks the creative power to generate new biological information.
[00:23:40] Speaker C: Close to the creative.
[00:23:41] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:23:41] Speaker C: And that's for one protein, one protein out of 13 proteins necessary to make the waving little tail, which is only one machine.
[00:23:49] Speaker E: That, in a sense is. Before you said anything about the fact that the information required is linguistic.
And linguistic. Language is not produced by random processes. And this is a hugely important.
[00:24:04] Speaker C: You've got to explain what you mean by that. It's linguistic in the way the DNA human genome.
[00:24:09] Speaker E: Exactly. Yes. The human genome is the longest word we've ever discovered. And we can call it a word because it's written in a chemical language of four letters. And all those letters strung out like a computer program have got to be in the right order, otherwise it breaks down. I mean, most programs, if you change a letter, that's the end of the program. So we're deep with something absolutely gigantic in terms of probabilities before we even think of the extra complexity that arises through the folding of the proteins and all the epigenetic information that's been discovered.
[00:24:53] Speaker A: In recent years, that information beyond DNA that controls the lower level information, bewildering.
[00:24:59] Speaker E: In its complexity and therefore it becomes a huge stress. And my own simplistic view is to say I prefer an explanation that makes sense to one that doesn't make sense.
[00:25:13] Speaker D: All right, if I could add just a little something. We're talking about this ultra complex machine, the bacterial flagellum, and saying that Darwinian processes are laughably inadequate to explain it. But I want to point out that it can't explain things a whole lot more simple than a bacterial flagellum. We talked about how many amino acids these things have, and there's 30 proteins and 400amino acids and so 12,000 ish or so.
But in order to develop resistance to the antimalarial drug chloroquine, it took trillions and trillions of malarial cells, plasmodium falciparum, to get two crummy mutations. Two. And we're talking about 12,000 for the flagellum now. Trillions. And for each extra mutation, it goes up exponentially.
Steve was talking in exponential language. But that's another factor of a trillion for another one and another factor of a trillion for the next one, too.
So this is truly, truly even Much, much simpler things than we've been talking about are beyond Darwinian processes. I just want to add one little cute thing is that these days scientists can do evolution in the laboratory, grow bacterial cultures for a long time and see what happens.
And a man named Richard Lensky, a biologist at Michigan, did this for a bacterium called E. Coli, and one of the first mutations that he saw that really helped the bacteria grow faster was when it deleted the genes, got rid of the genes for the bacterial flagellum, dropping it. Exactly. And that's something we haven't touched on yet. But it's oftentimes a whole lot faster and easier to get rid of stuff and improve a species chance to survive and prosper than to.
[00:27:25] Speaker C: But you can't get a new species by dropping out information by becoming stupider.
[00:27:30] Speaker D: That's correct.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Adding new capabilities requires new proteins, which requires solving this combinatorial problem.
Search for those exceedingly rare sequences among the vast number of gibberish sequences that don't do anything useful.
[00:27:46] Speaker C: Okay, a little parenthesis.
[00:27:47] Speaker A: So again, back to the needle in the haystack problem.
[00:27:49] Speaker C: This is the layman struggling to understand this again.
Copernicus says the Earth revolves around the sun.
Had he had access to telescopes that would be developed not that many decades later, let alone to the instruments we have for searching the heavens today, he would have understood immediately that that suggestion was ridiculous. Right, and so what we're talking about here is.
[00:28:17] Speaker D: You think. You mean.
[00:28:18] Speaker C: Excuse me, I've got it the other way around. I've got it the other way around.
Copernicus is the one who correct the old Ptolemaic system. Right, okay, so the Ptolemaic system, which persists until what?
I don't want to get Galileo mixed in all this, but we get this into the 16th century telescope which Copernicus. Copernicus figures out that that's partly because of the technology. He can see what they couldn't see before.
All right, so Darwin's a little 170 some years ago, and it was plausible that the little tiny cell was a blob of Jello in the old days. But now, thanks to Behe here we can look into that cell and we have the same experience going into smaller and smaller dimensions that telescopes had going into the larger and larger dimension, which is every time we look, it becomes more complicated, deeper, richer, more mind boggling. Is that roughly correct?
[00:29:17] Speaker A: That's roughly right. And it starts back in the.
[00:29:19] Speaker E: Importantly correct.
[00:29:20] Speaker A: Yeah, it starts back in the 1950s, you know, with Watson and Crick and what historians of science now call the molecular biological revolution.
They of course elucidated the double helix structure of the molecule.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: They discovered the language.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Exactly. They discovered the structure of the molecule in 1953. But it's Crick who makes the important breakthrough in 1958. He was a code breaker in World War II and he formulates something called the sequence hypothesis. And he proposes that the four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the DNA molecule, they're called nucleotide bases or just bases. He proposes that they are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like, for example, the zeros and ones in a section of software today. That is to say, they perform a function as a group, not in virtue of any of their physical properties, but in virtue of their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code. And over the ensuing seven or eight years, Crick's sequence hypothesis was confirmed by a series of experiments on both sides of the Atlantic. And that gave us this new informational understanding. The information revolution came to biology because what we realized is that inside the cell we have a complex information storage, transmission and processing system. And to explain the origin of life, you've got to explain that. And to explain any new form of life, you've got to explain how you can take a section of code, randomly change it, and hope to come up with another section of code without destroying the function of the code you started with.
[00:30:48] Speaker C: So the three of you. I want to get to the way Science Capital S is responding to people such as the three of you. But the three of you are not some sort of throwbacks saying you're attacking all that civilization stood for. What you're saying is, wait, we know more than they did. Look at the newest information.
You are champions for the latest science, not for some sort of retrograde worldview. Is that fair?
[00:31:19] Speaker E: I think it is fair. I think it's worth saying you accused me of swiping Darwin aside. I don't swipe him aside.
He observed some very interesting and useful things.
[00:31:31] Speaker C: He was a good writer, too, but he was.
[00:31:34] Speaker E: But he was limited by his time.
And we also have an addition, something that we haven't discussed at all, and that is that ideas that were perhaps crystallized by Darwin had existed a long time before where there was nothing of what is called science. Lucretius had them. In fact, if you read De Rerum Natura Lucretius book on the nature of life, he gets almost everything Darwin does, except for the transmutation of species. And he deduces it from materialistic philosophy. Because one of the things that give me a century. Yes, I can.
[00:32:17] Speaker C: What century is Lucretius?
[00:32:19] Speaker E: Oh, he's back in the first century, but he was building on stuff even earlier, going back to the early Greeks of Democritus. And the point of that is important.
There's a worldview dimension to all of this. You See, if I put on my atheist hat, which I do with some difficulty, but I try to do it, and you say to me, write me an account of the origin of life.
I will come up with an evolutionary theory immediately, because that is the only possibility allowed by the naturalistic worldview. So we're competing with that as well. And of course, Darwinism as such appealed massively to the atheists and increasingly so, as we know, through Richard Dawkins. So you have to remember that once you start raising the kind of question these two gentlemen have been raising, and that is that there's information, there's code, and the looming specter of the possibility of a coder, that raises a crucial problem.
[00:33:26] Speaker C: Out of bounds.
[00:33:28] Speaker E: That's out of bounds.
[00:33:29] Speaker D: That's not science.
[00:33:30] Speaker E: Yes.
That means that we have to broaden the discussion as to how science is defined.
[00:33:37] Speaker A: And of course.
[00:33:39] Speaker C: Well, I just want to get to. Because I promised John that we would come to this.
And that is the origin of life itself.
As I understand it from your work, Stephen, life emerges pretty quickly after the conditions for the emergence of life themselves emerge. It's there from the get go.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Geologically speaking, 3.85 billion years is the accepted time.
The cessation of a meteorite bombardment of the Earth occurred at most 50 million years before that. A blink of the eye. Geologically, we get from simple chemicals to a complex, functionally integrated cell with information processing systems and miniature machines.
[00:34:23] Speaker C: Okay, so here's what I was taught when I was going through school. There was the famous Yuri experiment, 1952. I looked it up where if you put in a chamber all the chemicals that were supposed to have been present when Earth was at the moment when life arose and introduced, I seem to remember from textbooks the idea that there was some terrible thunderstorm. So you mix it all up with electricity.
And a couple of scientists, Yuri at the University of Chicago, tried this and lo and behold, somehow or other they managed to form a few amino acids. They didn't form life.
But that's because you have to run the experiment a lot of times.
And as I understand it now, again, to the extent that we understand you couldn't. The more we try to run better experiments than Yuri was able to in 1952, the farther we are from actually creating anything that could be recognized as life. Is that roughly correct?
[00:35:22] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:35:23] Speaker C: So once again we have this understanding which is receding from us rather than finding ourselves approaching it. What does that mean?
[00:35:30] Speaker E: Well, it means that we're understanding more the complexity that was not realized at the time they Thought, I think that it was just enough to get a few amino acids and hey presto, it would happen. They knew nothing of the linguistic structure. And so what has happened subsequently is it has receded, as you say, because we've discovered more and more about the sheer sophistication about what life is. And by the way, nobody really knows what life is.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Huge irony is that 1953 you have the Miller Urey experiment, big flash in the media, but you also have the Watson and Crick discovery. And the two things have run counter to each other ever since. Miller And Urey produced two or three protein forming amino acids out of the ensemble of 20 that you would need to build a whole protein. But more importantly, they didn't show how you could sequence the amino acids properly to get them to fold into proteins. To do that you need instructions. And those instructions were found on the DNA molecule. And it's the origin of the code that has presented the most acute problem for origin of life research. Because chemistry simply doesn't move in the direction of informational complexity, it moves in other directions. One other origin you can't get from chemistry to code. That's the problem.
[00:36:47] Speaker D: If I could just hop in just for a second, I'd just add that the, the process you described that people were hopeful in the early 50s and the more they worked, the more difficult they saw the problem to be.
That means you're barking up the wrong tree. That's the signature of a wrong idea. Because if you have the right idea, you expect future results to haste to support it.
[00:37:15] Speaker C: Again, like Einstein.
[00:37:16] Speaker D: Exactly. But on the other hand, Darwin thought the cell was a little glob of jello. But the more and more we find, the more and more and more sophisticated genetic code, splicing of DNA, molecular machinery and so on.
That's for an intelligent design proponent. That looks like you're barking up the right tree.
[00:37:42] Speaker C: All right.
[00:37:43] Speaker E: There's another irony about all this because much more recently I think it's Jeremy England dug out the test tubes that were used in the Miller Urey experiment and discovered on examination that there were more amino acids in them than Miller and Urey had originally discovered.
And Dan Brown, the novelist of that time division code man, picked this up in a book that he entitles origin and used this to develop his theory of the origin of life. To which the scientist, Jeremy England, who'd done this work to great exception and I think Stephen being the historian, you probably explained exactly what happened.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Well, I mean again, the big problem is not making amino acids. It's sequencing them properly. It's like getting a bag of Scrabble letters and thinking you've got a triple word score. You've got to arrange the letters in the right way and put them on the board in the right place for them to actually convey information.
[00:38:45] Speaker C: One more sudden emergence man.
The anthropologist John Hawks.
I can't remember whose work I read this in. Maybe yours. Maybe yours. Anyway, probably not mine. John Hawks is an anthropologist, and he argues that about 2 million years ago, our genus Homo just appears, quoting Hawkes. No gradual series of changes in earlier australopithecine populations clearly leads to the new species. And no, australopithecine species is obviously transitional. Close quote.
Well, we don't seem to have descended from apes, or at least if we did, it ain't in the fossil record.
What does that tell us? It's one thing to say, well, where did the dinosaurs come from?
But we have this notion from textbooks in school on humankind arising from.
[00:39:46] Speaker A: We've all seen the artwork, right?
[00:39:48] Speaker C: Also in the artwork. So what does this tell us?
[00:39:51] Speaker A: Well, it's another example of an abrupt appearance of morphological innovation in the history of life.
And there are two such big bursts of innovation in the history of mankind. The first is the sudden emergence of the genus Homo. The second is what's sometimes called the cultural big bang, the evidence of higher cognitive capabilities that occurred within the last roughly 40,000 years.
[00:40:16] Speaker C: Homo is 2 million years ago.
[00:40:17] Speaker A: Right? You get Homo erectus, but in the.
[00:40:20] Speaker C: Last few years, Homo would include Neanderthal.
[00:40:22] Speaker A: Sure, okay, yeah. But within the last 40,000 years, you get the first agriculture, you get the first cities, you get the first written language, you get the first representational art.
And so this is another big bang of innovation. Suddenly.
The cultural revolution also occurs very suddenly.
[00:40:43] Speaker C: Okay, is it a problem for Darwin that Bach lived? What series of adaptative advantages could possibly have produced all those cantatas?
[00:40:54] Speaker D: Well.
[00:40:57] Speaker A: Or language. The origin of language. Completely unexplained on Darwinian grounds.
[00:41:02] Speaker B: That was Stephen Meyer speaking with John Lennox, Michael Behe, and Uncommon Knowledge host Peter Robinson.
Stay tuned for part two of the conversation in our next episode.
For ID the Future, this is Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:41:19] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
