[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome to id the future. I'm Casey Luskin and we have a very interesting podcast for you today with two scientists who have published multiple peer reviewed papers that are critical of neo darwinism and even sympathetic, potentially, to intelligent design arguments. So I'd like to welcome professors Olin Brown and David Hollander to the show. Olin and David, great to have you guys with us.
[00:00:34] Speaker C: Thank you. It's good to be here.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Olin Brown holds a PhD in microbiology from the University of Oklahoma, Norman. He is professor emeritus of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri, with appointments including the John M. Dalton Cardiovascular Research center, the graduate school, and the School of Medicine. He's done research on the chemistry, biology, and medical uses of oxygen and free radical mechanisms of toxicity and oxidant stress, physiology and biological defense mechanisms. He's been a fellow of the American Chemical Institute, the National Certification Commission, the American Institute of Chemists, and the American Board of Forensic Examiners. David Hollander holds a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, and he is professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, Arlington, where he has worked for over five decades. Some of his areas of research have dealt with inertial navigation in the defense and aerospace industries. He's also worked on modeling and simulation of fluids, including studying blood pressure and blood flow. I know that you both have had very long and prestigious careers doing a lot of scientific research and teaching of students, and I'm sure that you have many stories to tell, but I'd like to ask you is what sort of got you interested or involved in the scientific debate over evolution and intelligent design and kind of what is your basic take on the issue?
[00:02:00] Speaker D: Well, I'll go first. I grew up in a household and attending a church and in the community where this issue really didn't come up. When I was growing up, my first real confrontation with the idea of evolution, other than simple statements that you had to answer as a biology student, didn't occur until I had graduated, actually, from college. So evolution was not really something that impacted my research, and I found that to be true later in life. What I believed or what I thought about the theories which I considered as theories of evolution really never came up when I did experiments or when I wrote grants or when I wrote papers. And that situation continued for a number of years. The first noticeable impact on my science career and my personal life didn't happen until there was a debate, a debate that I moderated. And as a result of moderating that debate, I became aware of some extreme points of view on both sides. And over the years, then I developed my own feelings, and those culminated later in life when I decided to write. I have written four books.
One of them reflects my science and my religion. I do not believe that they are in conflict. And so I wrote a book. The title of that book is miracles.
And in that book, I do talk about religion and I do talk about science. But I agree very much with Max Planck, if I may say so. Max Planck had some important things to say that religion and science should not and were not in conflict. So that's sort of the introduction of how I got interested, because I felt that concepts that were being taught really did present issues for which there was not adequate evidence. And I'll put it that way.
[00:04:18] Speaker C: Okay, well, let me. My background is growing up in a christian home, and I had always heard about evolution and I theories about where the humans came from and all of that, but I never really gave it a lot of thought. I just was always amazed at the complexity of the human body and the brain. And as I, during my education, started working with computers and memory and all of that, and knowing how things have to work, it always amazed me to even. I couldn't imagine how the brain and the human body could possibly just occur randomly and be able to do what it does. But I never really gave any serious thought about trying to understand it or to even understand what really has to happen from a biology standpoint of what has to happen. And, in fact, I wasn't involved in this until Olin reached out to me and wanted assistance with formulating some equations and statistical calculations.
And it was kind of like, assume that this can happen, whether you understand why it happens or not, but assume this can happen.
This has got to also happen, and this has got to also. What can you give me some probabilities associated with actually a species even beginning to evolve.
And at that point in time, I kind of went from just general thoughts about it to some actual, concrete, detailed calculations.
[00:06:22] Speaker B: Well, that's great. Thank you both for telling a bit about your own personal stories.
Obviously, I got to know who you are through some papers that you published that have been very critical of neo darwinian evolution, and they've been very interesting papers. And, in fact, the first paper that I read was a 2022 paper you published in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology titled neodarwinism must mutate to survive. A very catchy title, I have to say. And in that paper, you both wrote that there has been limited progress to the modern synthesis. The central focus of this perspective is to provide evidence to document that selection based on survival of the fittest is insufficient for other than micro evolution. So why do you argue in this paper that darwinian evolution basically cannot produce macro evolution? It can only essentially achieve micro evolutionary changes?
[00:07:19] Speaker D: Well, one probable reason that is, I think, sufficient is that there's never been observed. So as empirical scientists, that's a starting point for me. Now, you can argue about that a little bit, but not effectively. I, and I believe David shares this, have been very critical of the idea that survival of the fittest is really a scientifically meaningful statement for macroevolution. It explains small changes adequately. But to get the more than 8 million known species that have been named, or perhaps, and perhaps the. The evolutionist number of maybe that's only 1% of the species that have ever existed, to say that they occurred by random processes that got converted and given direction by something called survival of the fittest, selection based on that is a little thin, to say the least. As a scientist, I like the idea of irreducible complexity. That is a statement that says a lot to me. As a scientist, we have contributed to that idea in, I think, at least two ways. One way involves David very much, and that is to try to put some numbers on this, rather than just make language or statements, to try to assess it and look at it from a mathematical standpoint.
I'm reminded that Darwin himself said that he wasn't much of a mathematician, and he kind of regretted that. I believe he expressed statements, and maybe David later could tell us what this means. I'm not sure, but he supposedly said and wrote, as a mathematician, I only believed in the theory of three. So I'll leave that there because I kind of agree with him. I'm not much of a mathematician. I was forced to take calculus and physical chemistry, unlike some of my colleagues, and I felt they were more fortunate than me getting their doctorate without having to do that. But it comes down to me. To me is the idea that things in biology, the closer we look, the more we look, the more detail, the more impossible they seem to appear. So simple explanations which bridge the gap in Darwin's day don't suffice. Now, I'm saying that evolution, biological evolution, the people who study it have done a lot of good work, but most of it hasn't solved or hasn't moved them off of this stage, where they rely on a simple statement, which is a tautology.
In simple words, it's, you know, what survives the fittest, what is most fit? That which survives. Well, sure, I can agree with that, and it works. And we can perhaps talk about this in more detail if it becomes important for microevolution for Darwin's finches on the island. I'm perfectly happy that their beaks got bigger and smaller with time and that they can happen by chance processes. The last thing I'd like to say on this issue is that I believe our biggest contribution has been that we have taken the idea of irreducible complexity and added something that I think is significant.
We've talked about the necessary requirement in evolution for co origination.
You cannot have a living thing without it having enzymes. We can hopefully talk about that process. Enzymes don't create new reactions, but they change rates. They change rates astronomically, and also they create great specificity. Rapidity and specificity of chemical reactions is certainly required, and that gets us into the irreducible complexity idea.
But perhaps we can talk about that now. I would say that I felt it necessary to bring someone like David aboard because we were talking about, we wanted to talk about things more than with general language. So that gets us into probability. What's the likelihood that this can occur?
And so that's a long answer. But darwinian evolution cannot occur by macro evolution, in my view, because it's too complex, too specific, and it's a tautomer, a tautological.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Excuse me, David, anything you'd like to add to that?
[00:12:40] Speaker C: I have very limited knowledge in biology, but when Olin first contacted me on this and was asking me to work with him, I really didn't understand the significance of the issue until he told me that one of the theories on probability associated with evolution is the fact that we are here means that it's probable and it's like 100% probable. And that would be like flipping a coin and the heads come up and you say, okay, we have a heads. So the probability of getting heads is 100%. Well, the problem with that thinking was, is that you're looking at what has happened instead of what the probability, which deals with what's going to happen or can happen, and looking at what's required to make it happen. So I basically just said, okay, Olin, tell me what to assume. I don't understand why, but tell me what to assume is required, for example, for a mutation to produce an enzyme and to gain intelligence.
And then if we're going to achieve, move towards a species, what else has to happen and what else has to happen? And what else else has to happen? And that led to some formulations and equations. And so I don't really understand it. I just. If you tell me what to assume, I can come up with a formula for it and do some calculations.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: So it sounds like Olin sort of brought the understanding of the biological evolution questions. And David, you sort of brought the mathematical firepower to this duo that you guys have formed here. So I want to ask you a question, David, I know that in your paper, neodaroism must mutate to survive. You performed some probability calculations about the likelihood of producing the enzymes necessary for the Krebs cycle. What were your findings when you guys did that probability calculation?
[00:15:08] Speaker C: We got, the results were like numbers on the order of ten to the -50 probability that you could actually do that. And these were kind of like minimum probabilities. And, you know, I hadn't really ever thought about numbers like ten to the -50 and.
But when you, when I actually started looking at thinking about it, in fact, most people probably don't even think about powers of ten. But if I told you the probability of an event was one chance in a trillion, you would conclude, well, that's probably not going to happen. Well, that's only ten to the minus twelve. Imagine the probability of something if you're talking about orders of magnitude ten to the -50 and so that's kind of the kind of results that I was, conclusions I was coming to.
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Very interesting. That's obviously a very low probability that I think would pose a serious barrier to darwinian evolution. So you published another paper titled, and this is obviously another peer reviewed paper in a scientific journal titled Biological Evolution requires an emergent self organizing principle. What is the basic problem with our winning evolution that you guys identified in this paper?
[00:16:33] Speaker D: Two things David has spoken very eloquently about. The probabilities are absurd. Now, I believe the first person to actually use the word absurd in relation to probability calculations was eigen.
He was a believer in evolution, and we could talk a lot about his work, which I think is marvelous in many ways, but I found it lacking that there is a sufficient way to either logically or empirically make that transition from things that are happening by chance.
Stochastic processes that you have to work with, how can that be transformed into what happens in a living cell? In a living cell? You have to focus on the idea that the processes that are like magic in many ways involve enzymes. Enzymes are proteins, proteins are specified by the genetic code.
But that does not solve the problem.
We have to deal with what we call self organization. We have to, in one time and in one place for origin of life to occur, we cannot accumulate by survival of the fittest processes which ultimately result in life. We must have a time when some things that are purely abiotic chemistry can happen in a warm little pond somewhere. The transition from there to first life involves processes.
Let me just say it this way.
George Wald is an evolutionist. He's a very smart man. He had a Nobel Prize.
I was fortunate as a young scientist to get to hear him speak, and at that time, I was not that involved with his evolutionary thoughts. Let me put it this way. Walt said about something very critical to what we're talking about here. He said, spontaneous generation of an organism is impossible. Now, I think that's pretty much true, but he went on to say, yet we are here. So that cancels out the first statement. His next statement was that time works the miracle. Given us enough time, we overcome the impossible. And he actually said, the impossible becomes possible. The possible becomes probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. Now, if you can manipulate the language to that degree, or if you're required to do so to explain origin of life and its evolution, then I think you've violated some principles that I can't join you in.
I don't think you can say the impossible becomes possible and retain any meaning for either work.
[00:19:56] Speaker B: I agree with you. When you're trying to make the impossible possible, something is wrong with your model. In this paper you talk about, you both talk about some examples of features which you believe would require what you call complex changes that cannot evolve by a blind process like darwinian evolution. Can you give a couple examples of some of the features that you think would be very difficult to evolve?
[00:20:21] Speaker D: Well, we have several orders here. Obviously, during what's been described as the cambrian explosion, over a relatively short period of time, evolutionarily speaking, using their time frames, all of the major body plans evolved. One of the things that Darwin was very concerned about when he was waiting to publish his paper, his book, excuse me, was that there wasn't enough time. And he spoke with geologists, and he kept wanting a geologist to give him more time, because these processes, if they're random, not only do you have to wait for one to occur, but you have to have co origination of events, and that multiplies the changes, the probability from too absurdly in probability. So I'm going on too long here, but I come back to the point that evolution, it's highly improbable, and you cannot, there's no mechanism.
Darwin didn't have one and when we discovered mutations, they were thought to be a solution.
Mutations create as many problems as they solve, one. For one thing, mutations are likely to be lethal. If you have some good things going on inside a genome and the lethal mutation occurs, you have a big eraser that removes that from your gene pool. So you have to start over again. And perhaps David could speak to the issue that we have concerned ourselves with. What happens if you model a system that must start over again compared to a system that can slowly accumulate things until they become a recognizable shift to a new species, a new kind of process we talked about. This is state one and state two.
Maybe David could explain a little bit here for us on probabilities.
[00:22:38] Speaker C: Okay, well, this.
When this was proposed, what it meant was conditional probabilities had to come into play in the formulations. And the conditional probabilities mean that if you have to start all over, that means one thing, because now you're back to ground zero, and you got to go through all of it again. Or if you make the assumption, which is my understanding, is the reality of what must happen. But if you're going to assume that you can have non or lethal mutations or non enzyme producing mutations that don't have an effect of erasing anything or causing problems, but if you'll just wait long enough in time, then the probability formula comes out totally different. And just to give you an example, that once we brought in the OR, once Olin told me what to assume about the number of enzymes and cofactors of all these things that had to. Had to occur, now, instead of talking about numbers like ten to the 50 or ten to the -51 we're talking about numbers like ten to the -484 but if you. If. I mean, so you can see that it really does become what was absurd. This is absolutely more absurd. But if you're going to say, okay, you can wait, if you bring into the formulation this conditional probability doesn't have to happen, you can just wait it out, and there won't be anything that will be lethal or. Cause you'd have to start over, well, the numbers change from ten to the -484 down to ten to the -245 so even if you're willing to wait, the probability of all that happening, it isn't going to happen.
And so to say that if you wait long enough for it to happen is fine. But when you look at what must happen, it's like, well, even then, it's so improbable to make the assumption that it happened, and then to assume that that would happen with all of the species, millions of different species, not just one that we're talking about. It's kind of like, are you kidding me? I mean, who would believe this? Understanding the complexity?
[00:25:24] Speaker B: No, I think you guys are right. I think that once you appreciate the complexity of these systems, the odds become astronomical against them arising by blind mechanisms you talk about in your paper, spider silk ribosomes, oxidative phosphorylation enzymes and ATP synthase. I just want the listeners to get a sense for some of the different systems that you tackle and look at the unlikelihood of those arising. Okay, well, this is a very fascinating conversation, but unfortunately, we're running out of time for the first podcast, so we're going to come back with professors Olin Brown and David Hollander to discuss more about some of their scientific papers that have challenged our winning evolution. I'm Casey Luskin with id the future. Thanks for listening.
[00:26:11] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
