Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Hey, welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. In this episode, we're sharing with you the second half of a conversation featuring Dr. Casey Luskin and the host of the Live Life and Motion podcast, Sam Clackley. In this segment, as well as part one of the chat, Dr. Luskin is taking us back to the basics of Intelligent design, which is particularly helpful if you're new to the science yourself or you have friends or family or colleagues who are open to learning more.
In part two, Dr. Luskin begins by discussing the fossil record and the abrupt appearance of new life forms, often referred to as explosions.
Cayce shares his perspective on how the patterns observed in the fossil record don't always align with slow, gradual evolutionary transitions, suggesting instead a rapid and massive infusion of large amounts of information into the biosphere. He discusses the idea that this abrupt appearance of new organisms, from major animal groups to even our own genus Homo, might be better explained by Intelligent Design.
Luskin also tackles the often debated question of the intelligent agent behind this design. Casey clarifies that the Intelligent Design community includes people from diverse backgrounds united by the belief that there is evidence in nature for a designer, a concept that stands apart from specific religious views.
He even mentions examples of atheists and former atheists who find Intelligent Design a compelling idea in the realm of education. Cayce addresses the controversy surrounding teaching evolution and intelligent design in schools. You'll hear the Discovery Institute's view that while Darwin's theory should be taught, students should also learn about the evidence that challenges the evolutionary paradigm.
Cayce also mentions the challenges faced by scientists who question the evolutionary story, highlighting the intolerance sometimes found within the scientific community towards dissenting views.
Again, whether you're familiar with intelligent design or it's a new concept for you, this interview with Casey promises to offer some valuable insight and a different perspective on these fundamental questions.
So let's dive in. Here's Dr. Luskin now as he begins to talk about the abrupt appearance in the fossil record of many groups of organisms.
[00:02:38] Speaker B: We see it in the fossil record. You mentioned dinosaurs. When many groups of organisms appear in the fossil record, we see them appearing abruptly, without direct evolutionary precursors. Paleontologists have a word for this. They call it explosions. I took a lot of paleontology in my geology studies. We see explosions throughout the history of life, okay? In fact, it's the dominant pattern. When new major groups of organisms appear in the fossil record, they appear abruptly, without direct evolutionary precursors. It's True for the first major groups of animals. It's true for the first land plants. It's true for the first flowering plants. It's true for the major types of dinosaurs. It's true for major marine animals, major groups of fish. It's true for birds. It's true for mammals. It's true for our own genus, Homo Homo sapiens. You know, when. When our own genus appears in the fossil record, it appears abruptly, very distinct from our supposed ancestors, which are called the Australopithecines. And so we see this pattern throughout the fossil record that does not document slow, gradual evolutionary transitions. And we would argue that the best explanation for this sort of abrupt appearance is that it's representing a very rapid and massive infusion of large amounts of information into the biosphere. And again, where does information come from? Information comes from intelligence. And so when we see this abrupt appearance of new types of organisms, it's like, you know, when a new kind of technology gets developed, smartphones, and suddenly you get all these new smartphones appearing. Okay, well, the same thing happens in the fossil record. A new kind of organism appears. You see all kinds of new variations of that appearing abruptly without a clear evidence of sort of a gradual evolution from some ancestor. So we think that that pattern is also much better explained by intelligent design than the standard evolutionary paradigm that's out there in the scientific community.
[00:04:32] Speaker A: Would it, in my thinking, is it something, say the first intelligent design could have been an animal, could have been a dinosaur. And then there's another. Another explosion of intelligent design where it could have been some sort of species of humans. And then there's another kind of explosion that kind of continues till we get to. Around where we are.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Well, we try to just take the evidence at face value. And what does it say? And that is what you just said, Sam, really very, very good description of kind of what we see in the history of life. We see one type of organism appearing abruptly. You know, call it, we'd say, you know, dinosaurs, okay? And then later on, we see another type of organism appear abruptly, birds. And we see diverse groups of birds appearing again quite explosively. And then we see the major orders of mammals appearing quite abruptly in a very short period of time, typically without, you know, evidence of some evolutionary, you know, gradual evolutionary pathway being shown from the fossil record. So we do see that pattern throughout the history of life. So, you know, what does this tell you? Well, maybe there were different types of organisms that were progressively designed over the history of life. Maybe Earth was progressively being sort of terraformed and prepared by, you know, an intelligent creator for the. Eventually, you know, the coming of humans or. I don't know. I mean, but it kind of looks like that's kind of what we see going on in, in the history of.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Life is there in the intelligent design community and just, I mean, communities in general that could be just people that believe that this is, you know, how human evolution and the origin of humans started. Is there some sense of, like, what we call the intelligent agent? Is it a God? Is it, you know, where do we, you know, where does that fall in the ID community?
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Sure. So. So before I answer that question, let me just say my own personal view, because I always think it's important just to be very upfront about where you're coming from. I personally am a Christian, and I do believe that the designer is the God of the Bible. So I'm not, you know, I try to be very open and transparent about where I'm coming from. Now, I also have a, you know, scientific background, so I hold my views, you know, due to scientific evidence. It's not just my. It's not like my religious beliefs say that intelligent design has to be true. If intelligent design true turned out to be false, I would. I would still be a Christian. Okay. But I think it's supported by, by the evidence. Now, all that being said, within the ID community, we have a diverse group of people of many different backgrounds. We have folks in the ID community who are of a Jewish background or Muslim backgrounds, people of Eastern religious backgrounds, Hindus, Buddhists. We have people who would call themselves agnostics, and certainly we have many Christians as well. What we're all united around is that there is evidence in nature for a designer, you know, being the best explanation for many features of life in the universe. And so you don't have to commit to some particular religious view or whatever view of who the designer is to see that there's evidence for design in nature. It is a. It is an idea that stands apart from theology or religion. You don't have to have any religious presuppositions to be able to see that there's evidence for design in nature. A great example of this actually is an atheist named Thomas Nagel, who is a very famous intellectual, and he's written books actually defending intelligent design. I don't know if he fully agrees with it, but he says, look, this is an idea worth taking seriously. A few years ago, there was an atheist philosopher named Bradley Montin who wrote a book about intelligent design, and the subtitle was An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. I think that's what it was. Another interesting example, a philosopher named Anthony Flew. If you and I had been alive in the 1950s and 60s, we definitely would have heard of Anthony Flew because he was like the guy. He was almost like the Richard Dawkins of that era, who's going out and debating people like C.S. lewis. Okay. He was a very famous public intellectual atheist who was very critical of religion. Well, in the. In the late 90s, early 2000s, Anthony Flew learned about this new scientific evidence that was coming out that supporting intelligent design. And he went through a major intellectual shift where he actually wrote a book that was titled There is no God, except on the COVID he crossed out the word no and said a, there is a God. And the book was all about his reasons for this intellectual shift. And the evidence for intelligent design was one of the major reasons. He cited the information in our DNA and also looking at the evidence from cosmology for a beginning to the universe and the fine tuning of the laws of nature. And so what he said is basically, look, he. He actually, to my knowledge, never committed to any particular religious belief before he died. But he did convert from atheism to some form of belief in a God. You know, whether it was like a traditional religion, I don't think it was. But he definitely had a major shift. And he came from that strictly from an atheistic perspective. So you don't have to come at the evidence with religious presuppositions to see that there's evidence for design in nature. And the theory of intelligent design tries to restrict what we can learn from a scientific investigation. So it doesn't try to get into larger, you know, religious questions like what is the identity of the designer? Although people are very open about what they believe personally, the theory itself doesn't try to specify, you know, who is the designer, et cetera. Those are more, you know, there's. That's. Those are important questions. They're very interesting and important questions. But I think that the theory of intelligent design is not going to address that. I think that, you know, you have to address that from other fields like philosophy or theology or, or history or those sorts of things.
So I would say that intelligence design as a theory does not address the question of who is the designer, but it certainly does point to the fact that there is an intelligent designer behind life in the universe.
[00:10:23] Speaker A: Very cool. I think that's a great point of view for it too, because in my own personal experience, I'll go back and forth about is there a God Is there multiple gods? But I do believe there is a God or there's somebody out there, like I don't know personally exactly what it is all the time, but I feel like there is something out there that is higher and above us with, with the debate of it being taught in schools versus Darwin's evolution in schools.
Can you talk me through, is it being taught in schools? Why isn't it being taught in schools if it's not? And then the debate why Darwin is being taught in schools?
[00:11:06] Speaker B: Sure. So I actually deal with this a lot here at Discovery Institute, helping to advise people on what they should teach in public schools. And at Discovery Institute we do think that Darwin's theory should be taught in public schools. It's been very influential in modern biology and there's a lot of interesting and even, you know, in many cases meritorious aspects to Darwin's theory. And the modern theory of Darwin's theory is what we call Neo Darwinism. It basically incorporates our modern knowledge of genetics and DNA into this idea of natural selection. Explains how natural selection can work within, you know, within DNA, within the kinds of, you know, discoveries we now understand a little bit more about how life works, obviously. So I do think that the, the modern theory of evolution should be taught to students in public schools. What we Discovery Institute say, however, is that when it is taught, you should teach students not just the evidence for the, that theory, you should learn about the evidence for evolution, but you should also learn about the evidence that challenges evolution. And we've actually have a list of over, it's now over 1200 PhD scientists who say that they are skeptical of the ability of random mutation and natural selection to explain the complexity of life. And so, you know, there's many scientists in the science community who are very skeptical of the core tenets of the modern theory of Darwin's, the modern version of Darwin's theory. And this is also in the peer reviewed literature. When you look at the peer reviewed scientific literature, you can find technical papers that are saying, look, many of these features do not look like they can be built up by this mechanism of natural selection. Or how do we produce new animal forms, what we call new animal body plans? How do we account for the abrupt appearance of many types of organisms throughout the history of life? These are largely unresolved questions for evolutionary biologists. And you can read that, you know, they recognize these deficiencies in their theories of evolution in the mainstream scientific literature. So we think that if scientists can acknowledge these weaknesses in the modern theory of evolution in the technical literature, then Students should be able to learn about that, especially if they're already learning about the evidence that supports evolutionary theory. So we think that students should learn about the evidence for and against evolution. So evolution is taught almost universally, ubiquitously around the United States. Almost every single public school district is going to be teaching evolution to its students.
There are probably, I would say, somewhere between eight to ten states right now that have statewide policies that either require or permit teachers to teach about the scientific problems of evolution alongside the evidence for evolution. So that's good. This is actually allowing students to learn about all the evidence, to sort of have full disclosure of the evidence so they can make up their own minds. It also allows them to engage in critical thinking, to learn to. To think like scientists, to weigh the evidence on both sides of a question, and then be able to sort of do critical thinking, critical argumentation, and come up with whatever they think the best answer is. And that's how science is supposed to work. So it's teaching them to actually think like scientists. Now, what about intelligent design? So a lot of folks are actually surprised to hear this, but when it comes to public schools, we actually do not support efforts from public schools to push ID into the curriculum. And the reason for that, Sam, is because we found that when ID gets pushed into public schools, it tends to politicize the debate. It tends to result in a lot of controversy and lawsuits. And that politicization actually ends up resulting in increased persecution of pro ID scientists and faculty at the university level. And that persecution ends up actually hindering the ability of those scientists to be able to grow and develop the theory of intelligent design as a science. And that really is our priority with intelligence. We want to see it grow and develop as a science. That's why we're funding research into it. And not just saying we want to push this into public schools. We're not trying to do that. We want to see it grow and develop as a science. And so we've tried to really counsel people. When they come to us, we advise them, don't, you know, go and push ID into the public schools. But you should be teaching evolution objectively. It's already in the curriculum. It's already part of the curriculum. So if you're going to teach it, teach it objectively, teach it accurately, let students use it as an opportunity to gain critical thinking skills and learn how to think like science scientists and, and give them all the evidence so they can make up their own minds with. With all the information that's available.
[00:15:33] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what we Say, yeah, I think that's great. Like point of view of like they're just trying to get all the information so they can use it to think critically, to make up their own mind. Is there a way? Is there a reason? Is it because of a religious reason? Or why does it get politicized when it does try to get into public schools in a way? Like, what's the pushback? Is there what, who's pushing back on it?
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Well, we have seen this over and over again, Sam, over the last few decades of being involved in this debate. And this is actually something that goes. Is really unfortunate. It's a much broader problem now than just intelligent design. But we have seen that by and large the scientific community is highly intolerant of scientists who are challenging the evolutionary paradigm. Okay. I mean, I've worked on cases where scientists were denied tenure or denied a job, or students were kicked out of graduate programs, or scientists lost their lab space or their funding because of their support for intelligent design. And unfortunately, we want to think that science is totally open minded and always open to new ideas. And I'm not saying all scientists are like this. I think a lot of scientists are open to hearing new ideas and are open minded. But unfortunately, what the history of science shows, this actually goes back to Thomas Kuhn, a very famous historian of science at the University of Chicago. And he said that if you look at the sociology and the history of science, he. He actually said scientists are typically intolerant of new ideas. And so this, what I'm saying right now is actually pretty well accepted in sort of the world, the field of sociology, of science and the history of science. And we have really seen this and experienced it. So what we have said in the ID movement is that we were getting canceled before cancellation was even cool, before it was even a thing. They kind of honed their cancellation methods on us. And I don't know if any of you, if you have seen or heard of a documentary called Expelled with Ben Stein, it came out in 2008, but it actually tells the stories of a number of scientists who face discrimination and persecution because of their views on Darwinian evolution and their support for intelligent design. And this is very real. I mean, I've seen very good people get all kinds of terrible things happening to them because of their not towing the consensus, quote unquote, consensus view on Darwinian evolution, on evolution. So what happens with the schools is that as soon as you want to, let's just not even talk about hellish design. This happens when we just want to Bring in say, peer reviewed criticisms of the standard evolutionary paradigm that contradict what students are also going to learn. They should also learn the evidence for evolution, but they contradict sort of the pro evolution arguments. What happens is all the local university professors, not all, but we often have some that come out supporting what we want to do. But you get the local community college biologists and the local university biology department heads coming out and saying, oh well, this is not science. There's no disagreement on evolution. There is no conflict. I think that was a line from Darth Vader and Empire Strikes Back. There is no conflict over evolution and science is settled and we can't have any discussion over this among students. I remember once a leading activist who, we call them part of the Darwin lobby, she said that there are no weaknesses in the theory of evolution. So I mean, you get these really bold dogmatic statements and this sounds like I'm sort of being a little bit harsh on them. I'm actually giving you like direct quotes from the kind of rhetoric that we regularly experience when we see, we've seen these debates occur on school boards. And what we do is we say, well look, they can say whatever they want. They have every right to be pro evolution. But we're going to present you with, you know, a hundred peer reviewed papers that challenge core tenets of the modern theory of evolution and show you that there is a real debate here. And so we're not saying that evolution should be taken out of the schools. We're not even saying that students shouldn't learn. The view of the community college professor, that the evolution is correct, his view should be taught. We don't disagree with that. But what we're saying is that you should also teach that there are scientific criticisms of these views. Let students have access to all the evidence. Don't censor. It's really censorship. Don't censor for them. So this problem, Sam has, this problem has become very ubiquitous in science over the last few years. This being closed off to new ideas and the politicization of science. It's not just on the evolution topic, although I think that it was, it kind of got in some ways got really started or kind of really metastasized within this issue that we work in. But now it's grown well beyond the cancer has grown well beyond. And there are many people who now have seen over the last few years the politicization of science, the, the lack of openness to dissenting views, to trying to shut down and marginalize views that disagree with whatever is declared to be the quote, unquote consensus of the day. All these things, it's, and look, I'm a scientist, right? I got a PhD in geology. I've done a lot of, spent a lot of hours in the lab, seen a lot of suns come up in the lab. And I think science is a great thing. I think science is a great tool for learning about the world. So it pains me to see this happening because I think science is really being damaged by this politicization and it's not good. It's not a healthy state for science to be in. And I hope that scientists of goodwill, whatever their views, happen to be that scientists of goodwill will stand against this and stand for freedom of inquiry, freedom of research, freedom of thought, all these things. It's vital right now that this happens in the scientific community.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's wild how you describe that. And it just reminds me of, I feel like so many things going on in the world today where we, we just, I wish we could just all get more information and let people have all, all the information that's out there, then let them make up their mind for themselves.
[00:21:20] Speaker B: I mean big, big tech is involved right now, right? You Google something and you get a disclaimer warning saying this is not the consensus view. Well, okay, fine, that's actually okay to know. Like we should take the consensus very seriously. But the, and the consensus can be right, but, but the consensus can also be wrong. In fact, every single scientific revolution that ever took place happened because someone was allowed to challenge the consensus. So if you're not allowed to ask hard questions and sort of promote minority scientific views, science can never progress. This is very, very dangerous to the health of science.
[00:21:52] Speaker A: Yeah, so true with Darwin's evolution. I kept reading about a fossil, I think it was called Lucy. What's the, what's, what's the intelligent design perspective or thought on their findings of Lucy the fossil?
[00:22:09] Speaker B: So let me be clear about one thing. So within the intelligent community, there are some people who accept that humans have common ancestry with apes. And there are some people who are skeptical of that. Okay, we all, I think, would agree that if you're just to produce. I don't know about all, but I think many folks on both sides of that question of common ancestry would agree that, that to produce the differences between us and sort of an ape like ancestor that lived 4 to 8 million years ago would require so many changes to produce a human that it could not have occurred through standard, blind, unguided evolutionary mechanisms that there's not enough time in the fossil record to produce the many millions of DNA differences between us and a chimpanzee in just say 4 to 6 million years since we supposedly shared a common ancestor. I think right now, the best estimates, I would say, show that there's, there's upwards of 100 million base pair differences between us and a chimpanzee. Okay? And so if, just according to some of the papers that have come out studying the mathematics of evolution, a field we call population genetics, if just two of those, you know, many, many millions of mutations, if just two of them were required in order to give us some advantage, you wouldn't get any advantage until those two mutations were present. Then the mathematics of evolution or population genetics suggest that it would take over 200 million years for a trait like that to arise in a population of organisms like hominids, like primates, sort of our supposed ancestors, okay? But yet there's only been about 4 to 6, maybe 8 million years since we shared a common ancestor with chimps. According to the standard view. You can see there's a time problem there. There's not enough time in the fossil record to allow for all the complex differences between us and a chimpanzee to be able to arise in just a short few million years in the fossil record, okay? So what I would say is, whatever is the case, whether we share a common ancestor with apes or not, the origin of humanity was not an unguided sort of blind evolutionary process. There had to be some intelligence that was guiding it. Now, I personally am a skeptic of human ape common ancestry. And when I look at the Australopithecines, I see an ape like species that had many differences from humans. Lucy probably spent most of her time in the trees.
She probably was capable of knuckle walking. She probably had some capability to do upright walking, what we call bipedalism. But the upright walking that she had was very well suited for probably walking on tree limbs, okay? It was not a form of bipedalism where she could run and walk like we do. Additionally, Lucy's brain size is basically about the same size as a chimpanzee. Okay? So she had a very small brain. Her mode of walking, her mode of locomotion was very different from that of modern humans. And when you look at the technical literature, you can find actually that the mainstream paleoanthropology literature acknowledges that there is a large unbridged gap between the earliest members of our genus, Homo, which are very human like, by the way, and these australopithecine apes. And there is not fossils that sort of bridge an evolutionary transition between the australopithecine apes and the earliest members of the genus Homo. There's a large unbridged gap there. That's the kind of language that we see from leading scientists talking about this. So I really don't think that we see good fossil evidence of human, ape common ancestry. You want to talk about the genetics? We sometimes hear that humans and apes have genomes that are only, that are 99% the same, you know, only 1% different. That statistic is false. It's been debunked by modern studies of genetics. At the very least, our genomes are somewhere between 4 and, and probably 16% different from our supposed most closest relative, the chimpanzee. All right, but the point is this. Even if we were 99% same as a chimp, so what? All right, well, all that shows is that we were built upon a common blueprint. All right? And I think that common design and we're not 99% the same as a chimp, by the way. At best it's like 96%. And some of the studies suggest perhaps as low is 84% similar. This is actually an open question because we don't have good versions of the chimp genome. And the versions we do have use the human genome as a scaffolding. So they are more human like than they ought to be. But that's a whole nother question, a whole other topic. But you know, whatever the percent similarity happens to be between humans and chimps, those functional genetic similarities could easily represent us being built upon a common blueprint. Kind of like getting back to computer programming. When computer programmers write a new program, they will often borrow code from pre existing programs to write that program. Okay, I used to do that all the time. I would borrow code from me, or I would Google stuff, you know, and figure out how to make the code work. I would, you know, computer programmers do this all the time. Microsoft Windows is just, you know, borrowing the previous version of Windows and then hopefully improving it. Usually it gets better with each iteration. Not always, but you know, I'm a Windows user, so I can say that. But, you know, that is what computer programmers do, they borrow code. So why couldn't an intelligent agent use a very similar principle of reusing programming modules in our DNA to build new types of organisms? And so we see sort of this common design, this reusage of programming modules in different types of organisms. So the fact that organisms have similar DNA, that could be pointing to Common design just as much as it is pointing to common descent. And then of course, there's our minds. All right, the human mind is totally different from the mind of an ape. I mean, yes, apes are very intelligent. In some cases, they actually can do things that they have very good memories. For example, they can sometimes beat us. Beat a 4 year old on a memory test. Okay, so fine, apes are smart, right? But at the end of the day, I mean, they don't have complex language, they are not building complex technology, they don't compose sonnets, they don't compose. They don't, they don't interact with religion, they don't create literature. We're the ones that write scientific papers about apes, not the other way around. So there's a huge, massive gulf in the intellectual and cognitive capabilities between a human and our supposed nearest relative, the chimpanzee.
What's interesting also, you get this field called evolutionary psychology, which tries to explain the origin of the human mind in evolutionary terms. And according to that field, you know, every human behavior should be tied back to helping our ancestors to survive and reproduce. So everything that you do, Sam, you know, the, the type of, the way you like to have your bacon cooked, the reason that you love your spouse, the, the reason that you like the blue jays over the Dodgers. I have no idea. If you're a baseball fan, you know, whatever it is that you like to do, you do it because of evolutionary psych. Evolutionary reasons that are tied to forces that caused your ancestors to pass on their genes. Okay? And this is called evolutionary psychology. The problem is that there are many human behaviors that seem to far outstrip the requirements of evolutionary psychology. That our ancestors, all they had to do was just pass on their genes, say on the African plains a million years ago. If that's all we had to do, why does every single human civilization compose this amazing thing called music? Why do we create beautiful art universally? Why do we all compose literature? Why are we all doing mathematics? Why is every human civilization engaging in, you know, this religious devotion to deities? Why do we build cathedrals? Why are we creating science to study the deep mysteries of the universe? Almost all of humanity's most cherished behaviors would be totally unnecessary if all you had to do was survive and reproduce on the, on the, you know, the grassland plains of Africa a million years ago. All right, There is no reason why you predict all of these complex behaviors that humanity does today. So I think that's very interesting. I think it shows that humanity was designed for purposes that are higher. We were designed for Purposes that are higher than mere survival and reproduction. Okay. And it points to the design of our species for higher purposes than just passing on your genes, which is what evolutionary psychology says. At the end of the day, that is the ultimate explanation for everything you do is just to pass on your genes. Why do we love. Why do. Why does Oscar Schindler risk his life to save all these Jews, you know, during World War II who weren't even part of his clan or his family? It's very difficult for evolutionary psychology to explain many of the most beautiful, cherished human behaviors. Why did a guy die on the cross, die on a cross 2000 years ago? You know, saying that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? You know, these are. And these are universally held values among all human cultures as the most. The highest form of human reality. But it goes totally against what you would expect if all our ancestors had to do was just pass on their genes on the African plains a million years ago. Okay. So I think that evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology in general fails to explain the origin of the human body, human genetics, and the human mind. And I think that intelligent design is a much better explanation.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, because it's so complex, like, you can't. You can't figure it out. Just, I feel like, from natural selection or some, you know, evolution throughout the years.
What about if somebody's interested in learning more? You know, they've listened to this podcast or they're just in general curious. Where could they find more information?
[00:31:55] Speaker B: Sure. So please feel free to check out our websites. We've got. I think one of our best ones is just intelligentdesign.org, sort of a gateway portal to learn a lot about our stuff. You can also go to our main news site, which is evolutionnews.org, we've got daily articles there, evolutionnews.org and then we have a podcast that's idthefuture.com. so, not trying to compete with you, but if you really, if you want to dig even deeper into this kind of stuff, check out ID the future. You're not going to get the diversity I'm sure that people get on your podcast, Sam, but if they want to dive deep on id, check out ID the future dot com.
[00:32:30] Speaker A: No, totally. I actually have it pulled up right in front of me with. With Casey. Where do you see. Casey, where do you see this going in the next hundred years? Do you know, do you see it eventually being more of an accepted theory?
[00:32:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's really Interesting, interesting. Sam, what we have seen over the last 10 or 20 years are increasing numbers of papers in the mainstream technical literature that are criticizing the standard evolutionary paradigm. Okay? So it's becoming more and more kosher in evolutionary biology to criticize the standard neo Darwinian model. Okay? Now folks are not ready to give up on purely material, you know, just basically, you know, you're purely natural, unguided evolutionary models. So they're coming up with now what they call post Darwinian models. There are other models of evolution like what we call the extended synthesis. It's a sort of a new Wild west version of evolution where there's supposed to be all these other forces that can possibly help explain how new features arise. When we look at these new models of evolution, we see that actually, in many cases they're actually even worse than the old Darwinian paradigm, the old neo Darwinian paradigm at explaining the origin of new complex structures. So I think it's going to take some time, maybe a couple, I don't know, a generation or two, I don't know, but it's going to take some time for evolutionary biologists to realize that, yeah, neo Darwinism doesn't work. But also many of these post Darwinian models of evolution don't really get the job done either. They're not totally wrong. I mean, each one is giving us a little piece of the puzzle, but they're not answering these fundamental questions like where do new complex features come from? I think for that, I mean, I think already we see the intelligent design movement and community growing. We see our research program growing. So I think that we're going to continue to grow. We have a summer program where we have students come from all over the world every summer to learn about intelligent design from our top scientists. And many of them are going on now to get graduate degrees, getting faculty positions. And there's sort of, now there's this community of new up and coming generation of scientists who are very friendly to intelligent design. They haven't just been hearing the caricatures that were being taught by their college professors. They've learned about ID straight from the scientists who are developing this idea. And they really are, you know, the ones who are going to carry the torch for ID in the future. So I'm very bullish on the long term future of id, But I think it's going to take some time for, for sort of mainstream biology to give up on purely materialistic, naturalistic models. And once they get to that point, I think they're going to be willing to consider intelligent design, but it could take some time to get there.
[00:35:14] Speaker A: Well, Casey, thank you so much for joining me. Man, this has been incredible. You've educated me to a new level, I think, in my own thinking and understanding of it. So thank you for joining me. Thank you for taking time out of your first day back from vacation.
I really appreciate it. But for real, thank you for coming on.
[00:35:33] Speaker B: Thank you so much, Sam. Appreciate your time and appreciate the great questions.
[00:35:37] Speaker C: That was the concluding half of a conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin on the basics of Intelligent design. Be sure to go back and listen to part one if you haven't yet. In Part one, Cayce talks about the historical roots and modern resurgence of intelligent design, and he lays out some of the evidence for the design hypothesis at the cellular level in life as well as in the fine tuning of the universe.
We're grateful to Sam Clackley and his Live Life in Motion podcast for permission to share this exchange on ID the Future.
You can check out more from Live Life in Motion wherever you listen to your podcasts.
For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:36:20] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
