Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: If you look at what's happening in a cell, in order for a cell to live or divide, it's far beyond anything that humans engineer. So that same conclusion is justified, I think. Not just that it requires information and intelligence, but it requires, in the case of living things, extraordinary superhuman intelligence.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
You might find this hard to believe, but back in Charles Darwin's day, the cell was thought of as little more than a piece of jelly. Thomas Henry Huxley called it a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm jelly, like those squishy neato squeeze toys that my kids like to play with. But you know, today, thanks to discoveries in molecular biology, we've discovered the cell is something far more astonishing.
And that begs a crucial if the cell is infinitely more than Darwin envisioned, can a Darwinian process really explain its origin or how it came to produce the diversity we see in Life?
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I begin a two part conversation with molecular biologist Dr. Douglas Axe and biochemist Dr. Michael Behe, two experts featured in the new movie the Story of Everything.
Over two episodes, we're going to discuss their participation in the movie and we'll unpack some of the insights they share in the film. I've also got some exclusive clips to share with you guys while we're talking, so that will make things a bit more interesting. Let's jump right in.
Well, welcome gentlemen.
[00:01:39] Speaker A: Great to be here.
[00:01:40] Speaker C: Great to be with you, Andrew.
[00:01:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it's great to speak to one of you, but to have both of you at the same time is a real treat. Now first, in case our audience hasn't heard about the movie, we're going to play a one minute trailer for the Story of Everything just so you can get a taste of what's in store. Here's that. Now, today I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange to you. How in the world did this start?
[00:02:09] Speaker D: Has the universe always been here or is it finite?
[00:02:12] Speaker B: We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to. Here is evidence for what can can
[00:02:19] Speaker D: only be described as a supernatural event turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe. We're dealing with a system of manifold complex design.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: We associate information with a rational intelligence behind it. The universe it bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator. The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences
[00:02:54] Speaker A: the question
[00:02:54] Speaker B: then was, what does one do about it?
That was the short trailer for the Story of Everything, which opens in theaters April 30, 2026.
Well, let me briefly introduce today's guests. Douglas Axe is the Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology at Biola University, the founding director of Biologic Institute, the founding editor of Bio Complexity, and the author of How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life Is Designed. His research, which examines the functional and structural constraints on the evolution of proteins and protein systems, has been featured in many scientific journals.
Michael Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He has authored over 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin's Black Box, which has a special anniversary this year, actually the Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves, which argue that living systems at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of deliberate intelligent design.
Gentlemen, again, welcome to Idea the Future. Well, Doug, I know it's been a while for you and I to talk. Mike, I think we spoke last about your visit to Cornell and the attitudes among college students towards intelligent design. Some hopeful signs that we discussed in that conversation.
Well, let's start the discussion with the Story of Everything. That's what's bringing us together today.
Both of you were featured experts in the movie and as far as you can recall, because, you know, it's been a while since they recorded your interviews, this has been a long journey in the makings. The Story of Everything, it's finally coming to fruition. But what was it like to come together to be interviewed about your expert subject matter? And what did you think of the filmmakers and the whole idea?
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I was a little surprised when I got there and got on set because it was this sort of retro. I didn't know what they were aiming for. And so it was all very retro, as you can see, you'll see when you see the film. And I think they were tapping into like the mid 20th century key discoveries that led to the Big Bang theory and playing that out into all the other discoveries that are. That are pulled out in the film. That pulled out very well. But then the conversation started rolling and it was a lot of fun. And I think we went in lots of different directions. A few of them, I wish, I wish it were featured more heavily in the film, but a few of them are picked up in the film. And I remember it just being very conversational.
[00:05:32] Speaker C: Well, I was really enjoyed all the parties and, and the time on the yachts that the that the film crew took us out.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: You got different cheating than I got.
[00:05:42] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, so, but actually, yeah, I was surprised. I, I, Doug and I were at a meeting and we were invited to come and talk for a film crew. And I didn't know that, that people had very distant future plans for making a movie about, well, the theory of everything, the story of everything. And, and we just sat down and talked about what we've been talking about for a long time, about how the, the foundation of life, which is what we study, points so strongly to design. That was a lot of fun. The people were professional, the setting was terrific and it seems to come through in the film too.
[00:06:31] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I was right there with you, Doug. A little surprised at, you know, sort of the vintage mid century look. But as you point out, once you realize that all these discoveries that Stephen Meyer mentions in his book and that, that the whole intelligent design research community has been, has been working on, you know, this is just the last century, you know, and not enough people know about this stuff, but it is just the last hundred years that we have really, you know, learned a lot of these key things. And so it was kind of cool that they, they went with that look and yet they still had this sort of timeless quality about the, the film, especially with all the clips that they put together.
So you get kind of both, you know, you get the rooted in the mid century, but you also get the timelessness of space and, and other frontiers. Now in the film, both of you feature in chapter three of the movie. The movie is divided into actually four chapters.
Talks about the beginning of the universe first and all the evidence for that. Then it moves into the fine tuning and you guys appear in chapter three, which is called the Design of Life. And it helps to unpack key arguments about life. The cellular, cellular level. Now, in your interviews for the movie, did you have any difficulty translating the work that you've been doing for years to what would be a film audience rather than a scientific one? Were there any times where they said, oh, sorry, that doesn't work, can you explain that? Or what was that like?
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Yeah, I think probably Mike and I have have done enough writing for popular audiences that we know what words not to use, but I don't recall them stopping me and saying, can you put that in simpler words? So you do, when you've been doing this for a while, learn how to make complex technical things more simple. And analogies are always helpful for this.
You don't know what a ribosome is. But if I talk about Something that reads something and then writes something. Then you know what reading and writing are.
[00:08:33] Speaker B: So.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: And I think that's done well through the film that you hear from cosmologists, astronomers, physicists.
And for the most part, I think they do. The. The film comes. Of course, I'm a scientist, but I'm. I'm trying to listen to and watch the film through the eyes of someone who maybe doesn't have the technical training. And I think it does a pretty good job of putting the cookies on the bottom shelf, as they say.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: Right.
[00:09:00] Speaker B: Yeah. You hear from a lot of PhDs, but you don't need a PhD to grasp what they're communicating. How about you, Mike?
[00:09:08] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I think that the film animates the. The arguments very, very nicely.
But when Doug and I were talking, we're just. We're just gabbing. We're just saying stuff. So we. We didn't have the use of molecular models or anything. But it doesn't matter because, as Doug says, we're. We have a lot of practice in. In, you know, explaining these ideas to a large popular audience.
And I think the key thing is that most of these ideas aren't all that difficult to grasp. And Doug wrote a whole book telling how, you know, you can tell for sure. It's undeniable that when you look at biology, you can trust your judgment. That stuff was designed. I make a couple of analogies that I've made in books before, like a mousetrap to explain the problems for Darwin's theory and things like outboard motors that people are. Are quite used to.
So, yeah, the. While the technical details can, you know, take special, special learning, the overarching ideas are. Are pretty straightforward.
[00:10:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, Mike, did you get consulted about the animations that they produced for molecular machines or the bacterial flagellum? What did you think of those?
[00:10:38] Speaker C: Yeah, they were terrific. No, I didn't.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: They were smart enough to realize that my expertise is not in animation or cinematography or anything like that, but this molecular motor, Motor, the bacterial flagellum, is just such an astonishing thing. And a number of great animations have been produced. And the one in the film is, you know, gets across the. The concept really very nicely.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: There's. There's a degree of artistic license you always have to use in these things because, you know, at the molecular scale, you don't. Things aren't visible the way we're used to seeing things. So you always have to do some sort of crafting to make something that is. That is visible and intelligible. And the speeds are all wrong, but if the speeds were realistic, you wouldn't be able to see anything. It would be a blur.
But I think on the whole, they did a good job of translating into something that you can. That's intelligible.
[00:11:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, Doug, you and Steve narrate a portion of the film that unpacks the importance of proteins in life. Were you pleased with how the film team chose to bring that to life cinematically?
[00:11:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it, I think it comes across well. I think also if you have technical understanding, you can go, oh, that's not that I would have done that slightly differently, but I think given artistic license and the fact that they're communicating to, to a broad audience, I think it works. It works really well.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And you know, I would say that often, you know, since Steve Meyer knows your. Both of, of your work so well, I think he was able to, to say, well, that's not quite what we're getting at here, but, but let's shoot for this. You know, I would hear Steve in the next Office, you know, because I've worked closely with them for many years, and I would just hear them having conversation after conversation, you know, working on almost, as Eric Esau points out in my interview with them, almost every frame, you know, just talking back and forth about what it should look like and how best to portray it cinematically. So I think what came out, really, they did the trick well.
So right now, actually, as we mentioned before we began here, it's a good time to be asking the big questions about life in the universe. You know, we just witnessed history in the making with the Artemis 2 mission around the moon. We've got movies coming out like Project Hail Mary and Steven Spielberg's upcoming Disclosure Day that explore the ever intriguing possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.
Now, in your view, why is now a good time to be releasing the story of everything? Let's start with you, Mike.
[00:13:15] Speaker C: Well, it's always a good time, but I think we mentioned a few minutes ago that the untold story of science in the past hundred years or more is how insistently science is pointing towards something beyond the universe to account for what we find in the universe itself. And this is somehow escaped the notice of the journalistic community and filmmakers before now, but we not only is the physics and Big Bang theory and fine tuning, but ever more insistently the biology, what's being discovered at the very foundation of life is, is turning heads again, pointing strongly to design. So it's been a cumulative case of a hundred plus years. And you know, I, I think that science is as quite mature enough to, to make a compelling case now.
[00:14:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Doug, is this a good, good time to be bringing this movie out?
[00:14:29] Speaker A: For sure it is. I think probably anytime is good. But another thing that's current is AI and I think the power of computing and people are constantly being asked to compare that to the power of the human mind. And I think there's a lot of confusion on that. But a lot of the confusion comes from philosophical assumptions. If we are so kind of the big.
The two stories that are put forward as the possible story of everything is one is it's nothing but physics and the other is no God made physics and, and us.
And I think AI invites us to ask that same question because computers are design things, but they operate by physics.
And we have a lot of people claiming that they do everything that we do. And I think that's false. But you have to peel back a layers and look at what is your view of a human. Are we just machines and what is your view of physics in order to understand that no computers, we do things because of what we are, that computers will never be able to do because of what, what they are.
And kind of the groundwork of those basic philosophies comes out really nicely in this film.
[00:15:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that's a great insight. Yeah, it does make it a good time to be exploring these things. Well, let's dive into some of the insights you both discuss in the story of everything. Mike, I'm going to play a clip from the movie. You and Steve are discussing the stunning design of the living cell. The and you unpack Just one of the molecular machines that operate inside the cell happens to be your favorite, the bacterial flagellum. So let's watch it and then I'll come back with a question.
[00:16:09] Speaker E: Back in the middle of the 19th century, the cell was thought to be a little piece of jelly. So it seemed to be pretty simple.
[00:16:17] Speaker D: Thomas Henry Huxley said that the living cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm. It's just a simple enclosure with some jello or goo on the inside.
[00:16:29] Speaker E: But modern science has shown that the cell is an enormously complex nanoscale factory.
And when you study biochemistry, you come across machinery, literally molecular machine.
One of my favorites is the bacterial flagellum.
It is quite literally an outboard motor that bacteria use to swim.
It's got a propeller, this long whip like strand.
And the propeller is attached to the drive shaft by something called the U joint which is attached to the motor.
And the motor is hooked onto the cell membrane by something called the stator.
The stator requires bushing to push up through the membrane of the cell. And altogether there are 30 parts that are needed for it.
[00:17:42] Speaker D: In some species, the flagellar motor is rotating at 100,000 RPM, and it can change direction in a quarter of a turn.
It's an absolutely amazing piece of high technology in a low form of life.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: So, Mike, why is the bacterial flagellum one of your favorite molecular machines? Why is it such a good exhibit of intelligent design?
[00:18:09] Speaker C: Well, it's. It's wonderful because you can see in its structure, its design, it's like. Like looking at a. An outboard motor or an airplane or something. Just from the structure itself, you can see its tail and its motor, and it's.
It looks like some sort of a rocket or a spaceship. And even I'm one of the scientists who first elucidated its structures that more. More than other machine or more than other machines, a flagellum looks like something designed by a human.
So people can apprehend the design just by looking at how its parts fit together. Many other things at the molecular level of life are also intricate and functional and require fine tuning and balancing and all sorts of things to work, but they're not as visual.
So this makes the job easier to getting across to an audience the design of the molecular level of life.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah, And I do encourage people to actually look at real pictures of the bacterial flagellum because you. You see, you know, the actual parts that look like they could be designed to. For human engineered systems, you know, and so, you know, we're not making this stuff up. You know, we talk about artistic license, and there is some, you know, with how it's presented, how fast and all of that, as Doug mentioned. But, you know, it literally is what it is, and it looks like what it is, and it's quite amazing to behold.
[00:19:48] Speaker C: It's interesting that the artistic license actually always simplifies things.
[00:19:53] Speaker A: Yes, for sure. It's more slowly makes it less spectacular. Spectacular than it really is. Yeah, yeah.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: Well, Doug, we could say factory to describe the cell. And you often do hear that word to. To show how different it is from just that globule of protoplasm.
But do you have a better word to describe the scale and the complexity of the molecular goings on in the cell? From your perspective, what are the most astonishing structures that are operating at the cellular level?
[00:20:23] Speaker A: Yeah, I've heard it. I'VE heard the cell lichen and this wasn't from someone who's promoting intelligent design, like complex.
So because you have all these functional subunits, organelles within a complex cell that each have their own task and lots and lots of things going on in order for them to carry out their task. And since I work with proteins and, and Mike does as well, I'm really interested in what are the protein components that make this thing tick and make it do what it, what it does. And there you have proteins that do chemistry. I totally agree with Mike that if you try to show someone something that you think is remarkable because it does remarkable chemistry, you're gonna have to get their heads. Not everyone can get their head around the chemistry. And if you, if you can get your head around the chemistry, Jim Tour, by the way, who is in the film, who talks about this, you would appreciate how remarkable these things are. But it would look like a blob that little things stick in and it does something and the things come out. Whereas to see something with a dry shaft and a, a joint and a stator, a motor that's rotating, you don't have to know anything about chemistry, you don't have to have studied mechanics to see that that's something remarkable. What's interesting that these are, it's interesting the diversity of tasks that by God's design are carried out by folded chains of amino acids, proteins. And who would have thought that you could have 20 little chemical units that you could line up and get them to do all these things. But it's a brilliant idea and it's been brilliantly implementing itself.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and as you're saying, so at the center of all this lies the proteins.
So Doug, let me play a clip here for our audience. This is you and Steve talking about what proteins are and what they do in the cell. Let's watch.
[00:22:25] Speaker F: A cell is filled with proteins that are performing the tasks inside the cells.
[00:22:31] Speaker D: They're like the tools in a toolbox. You have a hammer, a wrench, a saw. Each of those different tools perform different functions because of the different three dimensional shapes that they have.
The same thing is true of proteins.
Proteins catalyze reactions at super fast rates. Those are called enzyme proteins. They build the structural parts of molecular machines and they also help to process information on the DNA molecule.
So proteins do all these important jobs, but they do those jobs because they have very specific three dimensional conformations or shapes.
Now that raises the question, how do they acquire those shapes?
Well, they get those precise shapes if and only if the amino acid subunits, the constituent parts out of which they're
[00:23:31] Speaker B: made,
[00:23:34] Speaker D: are arranged in very specific ways.
[00:23:39] Speaker B: So, Doug, why are proteins so crucial to life then? I know you were just touching on it, but can you expound a little bit more?
[00:23:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
If you think about what a living thing does, it takes in, like, we eat food, and we eat food that's very different from us. So if you eat a hamburger, you're eating bits of cow, and you're eating stuff that came from wheat and tomatoes and onions and lettuce, none of which are very much like us.
In order for your body to grow, like from a young child to an adult, from a baby, from an infant, from a fertilized egg to an adult, there's all this remarkable conversion happening where things are taken in that aren't anything like what needs to be produced, what needs to be built. And really all of that is chemistry. It's called metabolism. And there's aspects of catabolic reactions and anabolic reactions, but it comes down to chemistry.
And all of life really requires this exquisite chemistry, not just for growth, but for operation, respiration, your breathing, so that oxygen can be brought into your body, carried around by red blood cells, because all the tissues need oxygen in order for them to do chemistry. And so it's all comes down to chemistry.
And if you ask about what is the precise nature of these chemical reactions, you always end up with something that is carefully regulated, carefully controlled by proteins, often groups of proteins that join together in order to carefully carry out these chemical reactions without side reactions, carry them out at the right time, in the right place, not too fast, not too slow. It's all very highly regulated. And proteins are doing that job at the molecular level.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: And you mentioned that proteins have shapes, and those shapes dictate the functions of those proteins. But the next question would be, what causes them to fold in a certain way and do a certain job?
Now, I have another clip for our audience. This is where you describe what scientists have learned about how DNA directs protein synthesis in the cell. Let's check that out.
[00:25:57] Speaker F: In those stretches of DNA, you have
[00:25:59] Speaker A: very particular sequences of as, Cs, GS
[00:26:02] Speaker F: and Ts that tell cells how to
[00:26:06] Speaker A: make amino acid sequences that fold and become functional proteins.
[00:26:11] Speaker F: And molecular biologists now have a very good understanding of how the information in DNA direct directs the process of protein synthesis.
First, the cell uses a large protein machine called a polymerase to make a copy of the information on the DNA. The polymerase separates the DNA into two strands. One strand serves as A template for creating a complementary RNA copy. The resulting copy, called a messenger RNA transcript, detaches and then approaches and passes through the nuclear pole pore complex.
Then the transcript with the genetic assembly instructions arrives at a two part chemical factory called a ribosome, the site of protein synthesis.
As the messenger RNA transcript passes through the ribosome, a mechanical assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain of amino acids. Using the instructions on the transcript, these amino acids are transported to the ribosome by molecules called transfer RNAs which link specific sequences of bases to corresponding amino acids in accord with the genetic code.
The sequential arrangement of the amino acids determines whether the chain will fold into a functional protein and if so, which type.
Once the chain is folded into a functional protein, it is ready to perform its job inside the cell.
[00:27:52] Speaker B: So, Doug, all this points to the cell being a sophisticated information storage, transmission and processing system.
Can this sort of information arise spontaneously? What do we know about the origin of the information required here?
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Well, the short answer is no, it can't happen spontaneously. I mean, whenever we look at things that, whose origin we know about and they contain levels of information like this, it always required beyond normal intelligence. It's usually genius that puts these things together. So the invention of computer systems, the invention of, the invention of chat GPT, large language models, it's always very smart people spending a lot of time making lots of mistakes, finally getting it right because the idea was right and they implemented it. Well, in life, this is far beyond anything. If you look at what's happening in a cell, in order for a cell to live or divide, it's far beyond anything that humans engineer. So that same conclusion is justified, I think, not just that it requires information and intelligence, but it requires, in the case of living things, extraordinary superhuman intelligence.
[00:29:05] Speaker B: Yeah, and Mike, you know, when people look around, they're seeing the effects of intelligence all the time.
Because information comes from intelligence, it comes from a mind.
But why can't they translate that to the biological world? Is it just our Darwinian materialistic conditioning?
Why is it hard to make that switch? For some?
[00:29:25] Speaker C: Well, yes it is. It's just air conditioning.
Especially if you look through the history of science, the history of biology, everybody in the world thought that life was designed, purposefully designed. From Galen, who was a physician in Rome, you know, thousands of years ago, through Van Lenhoek, who invented the first microscope, saw the first single celled creatures, through William Paley, who talked about finding a watch and how you, when you see a watch, you know it's designed because you See how the parts interact and said, well, we say the same thing in organisms.
Everybody in the world apprehended that. When we see this purposeful arrangement of everything in living systems, we can tell that was designed. You know, that, of course, changed when Darwin came along and he proposed his idea of random mutation, natural selection.
But it was just that it was a proposal and everybody at the time knew he didn't have the evidence to back up his proposal. But over time, I, I think scientists got used to the idea that, well, we're going to explain this. You know, these theologians, these philosophers, they can go to other things. Now we're going to, we're going to gather biology under the umbrella of science and we're going to be in charge of explaining it.
And for strange sociological reasons that I am no expert in, apparently this idea took hold and is now kind of widespread. But if you look back at the evidence, we're no longer. We're no further along in explaining things really scientifically than Darwin was or Paley.
So it's, yeah, it's, it's undeniable that there is design in life. And, and, and it's, it's mostly just our mindset that, that stops us from
[00:31:33] Speaker B: concluding that, yeah, supporters of Darwinism, you know, like to say that, that the neo Darwinian synthesis, you know, whatever you want to call it these days, has matured and it's moved way beyond Darwin. And, you know, they fault us for looking back at Darwin and pointing to the inadequacies of his mechanism. And yes, we've added, you know, Mendelian genetics and some other, you know, modern twists to it. But at the end of the day, we're still leaning on Darwin's mechanism, are we not, Doug?
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah, if you press people, I think I do hear this commonly. Oh, you're talking about, you know, an old version of Darwinism. It's moved on. It's moved on beyond even the, the modern synthesis. There's lots of new ideas. But if you press people on this question of information, where do these new things come from? They never have the answer. They can spin up new terms and there's little buzzwords that generate some interest and lots of papers get spun out talking about this, that or the other thing, but they can never seem to actually deliver the goods. And Darwin couldn't deliver the goods. By the goods here, I mean a naturalistic explanation of how living things came to be.
And the tree of life, that's different. So you get people who say, well, this is why we think things are related. But it's the cause that, that we're after. The cause is critical. What, what is a plausible cause for life as we see it? And Darwin did not offer that. He thought he did. And no one since Darwin has offered it in materialistic terms.
[00:33:12] Speaker B: Right. Well, in our next segment together, we're going to continue the conversation. Doug, I'll be asking you more about specified complexity, the type of information that is on display inside the cellular processes that power living things. And Mike will also discuss irreducible complexity and the limits of Darwinian processes. And another point made in the story of Everything is something called the beauty principle, the gratuitous beauty on display in nature and why that's more likely the cause of intelligent design rather than an unguided Darwinian process. So lots more to come, gents. Thanks for your time.
[00:33:47] Speaker C: Our pleasure.
[00:33:49] Speaker B: Well, if you're ready to learn more about the movie and find out where it's showing locally near you, go to the StoryOfEverything film. That's the website to get the details. Thestoryofeverything film. And if you're interested in bringing a group to see the movie, we've got a special website just for you with the details for group tickets and theater buyouts. That's discovery.org story discovery.org story well, for Idea the Future, I'm Andrew McGurman. Thanks for joining us.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
