[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. We have two professors in the sciences back with us on the show today, professors Olin Brown and David Hollander, who are going to talk about some of their scientific papers, peer reviewed papers that have been challenging to darwinian evolution and even supportive of intelligent design. We had another podcast with them recently, but to give them another introduction here. Olin Brown holds a PhD in microbiology from the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and he's professor emeritus of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri, where he's worked in the John M. Dalton Cardiovascular Research center, the graduate school, and the School of Medicine. And he's done research on the chemistry, biology, and medical uses of oxygen free radical mechanisms of toxicity, oxidant stress physiology, and biological defense mechanisms. David Hollander holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, and for over five decades, he has been a faculty member at the University of Texas, Arlington, where he is a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Some of his research has dealt with inertial navigation in the defense and aerospace industries, and he's done research on modeling the simulation of fluids, including studying blood flow and blood pressure. So, professors Brown and Hollander, thank you both for coming back on the show again.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: It's welcome to be back.
[00:01:33] Speaker D: Thank you. I enjoyed it very much.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Okay, well, let's continue with our conversation.
Now, in your paper, you quote Max Planck saying, we must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter. So I'd like to ask you, do you think that there could be a mind behind life in the universe?
[00:01:56] Speaker D: Yes, I do think that Max Planck believed that he got a free pass, pretty much, about his religious beliefs. He won the Nobel in 1918.
And so his ability to think clearly and to think in new ways is pretty, pretty dramatically shown by his position in physics.
He is fundamentally responsible for starting the quantum theory.
And so I think we should take him seriously. It's interesting that he did write about the nature of matter in a paper, so he was more than a physicist. He was interested in, in integrating physics with biology, and I really applaud that. I think we need physicists talking today with biologists. I think when they do, they come off second best.
I think that not all physicists are.
[00:03:04] Speaker C: Willing to say there's a bio, the.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Biologists come off second best, or the physicists come off second best.
[00:03:09] Speaker D: The biologist.
[00:03:10] Speaker B: Okay. All right.
[00:03:12] Speaker D: Yes, yes. Excuse me for not being clear.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: We just offended all of our biologists in the audience. But keep going. Keep going.
[00:03:21] Speaker D: There's a fundamental difference between how physicists go about their problem. Their problem is different than the problem that a biologist has. I recognize that. And sometimes they err as well. You know, some of the physicists who got involved in biological evolution wanted to put it off to another planet, and they wanted to say the solution to the fact that spontaneous generation is not a very scientific idea was to put it off and say, well, it didn't happen here, but it probably happened and came in on a hot comet. They have their problems as well. They are in difficulty today talking about, we don't have enough matter to explain, and this gets us far afield from our discussion today. But they're willing to accept things that are unimaginable, the expansion of space, the time frame, ideas about symmetrical impermanence of matter. There's no thought process that is politicized as being out of bounds. You have to produce, you have to be logical, you have to. And fundamentally, you have to come to some experimental data and some mathematical interpretations. And that's where I find my biological colleagues missing. They don't insist on empirical data, and they say, well, it's hard, and I agree, but where I leave them is that they accept solutions for this magical transmission transformation. Actually, I don't know if I've said this already, but Wal used the word magic, that a miracle, excuse me, close to magic as necessary to explain this. And he said, there's no other choice other than spontaneous generation. Spontaneous generation was put to get rest by Pasteur, a microbiologist, the founder, one of the co founders of my discipline. He did not believe he won a prize. He won some money for disproving it. And I think every day we disprove spontaneous generation. We are told not to buy and open and consume canned food if the can is bulging, because that proves that has been contaminated. We don't think the opposite, that there was spontaneous generation in that can of new life. We don't even entertain that thought. But if we make it a fairy story, fairy tale, and say long ago and far away, things were different, and spontaneous generation created life. And that's all you know and all you need to know. They kind of leave science at that point for me.
[00:06:18] Speaker B: David, any comments on whether there is a mind behind life in the universe?
[00:06:23] Speaker C: Well, if you tried to convince me that there's not intelligent design in creating the species and human beings, and knowing what I know about probabilities now that happening, otherwise I would like.
You'd have a tough argument, because there's no way I would buy into it.
This is what I was talking about before, understanding what goes on, what the human body is capable and the brain is capable of doing. It's like the thought that that could have evolve and by a random sequence events and there not be intelligent design involved in that. There's just no way, absolutely no way.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough. So you also published a paper, very interesting paper, that came out just a few months ago, which argues that artificial intelligence should be used to evaluate which parts of evolution are viable and which are not. And I thought this was a very innovative idea you guys came up with. So I wanted to ask, what was your inspiration for writing this paper?
[00:07:46] Speaker D: Well, from my standpoint, being a scientist, I've written a number of reviews, I've written a number of grant proposals. I've done supervision of research in the laboratory where you need to formulate ideas or hypotheses and test them. That results in confronting a large body of literature that is currently going on and that previously went on in your field. It becomes impossible to know everything. And when I learned about AI, it seemed like it was a marvelous device that could take all the information that exists and that is accumulating. And if it were smart enough, it could function somewhat like a brain. That's exciting.
If you have a new theory about how to cure cancer, you would want to go to the scientists and physicians who know the most, who are most energetically involved in the current status of the field, and who are brightest, and who could come up with some new ideas and thoughts. Now, I'm not good enough with my knowledge of what AI is capable of, and I'm not sure anyone is, but we do know that it can take all the literature and can at the same time have it all available to it. Now, the problem comes in at this point, we have to function as the intelligence behind it. We have to give it the problems, we have to give it the parameters, we have to put constraints on it. I don't remember what his three laws of robotics were, but Isaac Asimov, back 40, 50 years ago, confronted part of this problem in a book he talked about. To control robots, we needed to have laws that they could not disobey. The first law I do remember was that they can do no harm to a human. Now, that's a pretty good law to have. Now, what kind of laws are we going to establish to give direction to something that has access to all literature, which I can't do. How are we going to phrase the question? The question may contain the answer in ways that we don't want. We've got to get politics out of science if we're going to use AI to assist us.
David probably knows much more about AI and what its limitations might be.
[00:10:32] Speaker C: Well, I don't know that I know much more about it. I just, over my career I have written thousands of computer algorithms, and one of the things that is very clear, and I agree with 100%, if garbage in, you get garbage out. And because the computer does not have the intelligence to, it only knows what it's been told. And my opinion and thoughts on AI is that it is a.
It is a very efficient means of searching and looking for information and tying information together to reach conclusions, but it can't do that without that information being there.
And if any of the information is incorrect that's been provided to the computer in the way of data, it's going to be, like I said, garbage in, garbage out. I think someone that's not familiar with computer algorithms just needs to know that the computer does what you tell it and it can reach conclusions based on information that's been provided, but doesn't mean the conclusions are correct, because it relies on the information that's been provided. It's just an efficient way of pulling things together to reach conclusions.
[00:12:15] Speaker B: Yeah, you guys make some interesting points here, and I've dabbled in computer programming quite a bit as well. And I'm familiar with the way that AI works at a very basic level. So obviously, as you said, David, AI takes the inputs it's given and gives you an output. Garbage in would lead to garbage outdoor. So could there be a concern here that AI might be inaccurate or basically reflect the biases of human programmers? So if you're asking AI to critically evaluate evolution, would it perhaps reflect the biases of people out there who tell you that evolution is fact, fact? And is it going to be able to answer these questions objectively, or could it give us an objective answer? Maybe the AI is actually going to be more objective than a human being, because it's not going to have, you know, when you actually ask it to crunch some numbers, it's going to. It's going to be able to tell you, ok, this cannot happen without the bias of the human programmer. So I don't know, what do you think would be the outcome here? Would we get an objective outcome or a non objective outcome?
[00:13:29] Speaker C: Well, it's just like we've been talking about today on what is required.
We were talking earlier about the papers that assumed that we had a living cell and it was going to mutate and it was going to produce an enzyme, the intelligent level would increase, it would be improved. If you tell the computer that you have that and you tell it what has to happen, then the computer can can arrive at conclusions of whether something can happen or not unless you give it the wrong information. And one of the basic things, and I don't want to get off the subject here, that has mystified me and has led to some research that we're doing now, it's like, well, how did we ever have this living cell that we've done all these calculations with? Because what's required to ever get to that point before you could even start mutating to produce a new species. And when you if you look at, as Olin has explained to me and demonstrated, of what is required for a cell to be a living cell and where that would have had to have come from, the only way the computer could ever get come to a conclusion is if it takes into consideration all the facts that must be there and all of the details that must be there. I agree. You give it garbage, you can get garbage out. And to keep things from being biased by political opinions or agendas, it's tough, and I'm not sure we know how to prevent that.
[00:15:20] Speaker B: So okay, then, if we were to ask AI to critically evaluate the modern theory of evolution and it did an objective analysis, what do you think it would tell us?
[00:15:33] Speaker D: Well, I've actually argued with it a little bit in its baby form. Chat GPT I've had some interesting conversations, and actually you can get it to spill back something which you anticipate, that it would be a freshman understanding of biology and evolution, and you can challenge it and it will back off and it will approach it from a different way. I've never been able to argue it down with respect to evolution. Now, I think that the AI that I'm talking about is much better than the chat GPT that I could get for free. I think I'm reminded of something in an old western movie where they're talking to some indian, native American, excuse me, who was wise, and they're asking him, what's going to happen in the future to the native population, what's going to happen with Buffalo, what's going to happen with our way of life?
And he said, well, I'm not sure, but one thing is certain, there will be change. So AI is here, it's going to be here. I think as biologists we'd be smart to begin to have committees, scientists get together, talk about these issues, say what do we mean? Are we going to get the smartest computer? Are we going to get one that's even smarter than that before we begin? No, I think we should begin to exchange information with it. Now, not that we're going to do what it says, necessarily, or believe what it says, but it can help us. You know, I saw a device the other day that was a mechanical thing that you could put on a soldier, and it would increase his mobility, it would increase his strength, and it was strapped on him. Now, that's a physical thing that I would like to have if I were young enough to be a soldier and was going to have to face the enemy. The same thing is true here of a scientist. Don't I want to use the brightest students in my lab? Don't I want to go to committee or to seminars and listen to other people and take their brightest thoughts? But do I agree with everything they say? Does that make it wrong? No, that's what science is about. More is better. Let's have more opportunity. But we've got to stay in control until maybe someday we will say, oh, well, you're so far above us, I just say, whatever you say, I will do. We're not there, but that's not a reason not to use it.
[00:18:17] Speaker B: Jeff? Yeah, we definitely need to maintain control of AI, but at the same time, it can be useful tools. So I think that you both have put out a challenge to the scientific community, which is very interesting. What would happen if we used AI to critically evaluate evolution? I think it's a question worth asking, and I hope that folks will take up your challenge. Well, Olin Brown and David Hollander, both of you, very long careers in the scientific community and esteemed professors. It's really wonderful to have you on the show sharing your knowledge and your, and your experience and your ideas and your wisdom with us. So thank you so much for joining us.
[00:18:52] Speaker D: Thank you. Glad to be here. Thank you. Appreciate the questions.
[00:18:56] Speaker B: It was a great conversation. I'm Casey Glaskin with id the future. Thanks for listening.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Visit
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