Casey Luskin on the Core Concepts of Intelligent Design

[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design. [00:00:12] Speaker B: Sometimes it's good to go back to the basics. Whether you're brand new to intelligent design or you're looking for a way to share the basics with a friend or family member, we've got you covered today. Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. You're about to enjoy the first half of a discussion with geologist and attorney Dr. Casey Luskin that originally aired on the Truthful Hope podcast hosted by Jacob Vasquez. In part one, Cayce begins by clarifying terms, a very important first step when you're discussing theories about the origin of life and the universe. He defines Darwinian evolution and intelligent design. He then delves into two core concepts of intelligent design, specified complexity and irreducible complexity. He rounds out the first half of this conversation by reviewing the recent Nature paper that reveals that humans and chimps are approximately 15% genetically different, which blows out of the water the commonly cited 98.8% similarity myth that's often touted to promote a Darwinian narrative of human origins. Here's Casey and Jacob now. [00:01:20] Speaker C: Welcome, everybody, to the Truthful Hope podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Vasquez, and I'm really excited for this episode as we will be tackling one of the most controversial and debated topics, evolution. If you're like me, and I'm sure you are, in public school, you were taught that Darwinian evolution is a scientific fact, and that's that. But is Darwinian evolution really true? What's the evidence for it? And are we merely the byproduct of an unguided process by random mutations over long periods of time? Are there alternative explanations for Darwin's theory? And how has Darwin's theory stood the test of time? My guest today, Dr. Casey Luskin, is here with me to answer these questions and indeed show that there's a rather convincing alternative to Darwin's theory being Intelligent design. Casey, thank you so much for jumping on the show. [00:02:11] Speaker A: Thanks much for having me, Jacob. [00:02:14] Speaker C: Yeah, it's really, it's a. It's a blessing to have you because I was just telling you before we started recording, you and those at Discovery Institute have been super impactful, just showing the truth for intelligent design, pushing back on some of the what is considered brute facts of Darwinian evolution, which we're going to talk about today. So, but, but just for our listeners, just so they're aware of your background briefly, Casey is the associate director of the center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. He earned his undergraduate and graduate Degrees in earth sciences from the University of California in San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively. And he holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg. And I found this really interesting. He earned a law degree from the University of San Diego, where he focused on first amendment law, education law, and environmental law. That is quite the arsenal. Casey, I must say. [00:03:06] Speaker A: Spent too much time in school is what it comes down to. My dad always says I should have been a plumber and would have made a lot more money. And he's probably right about that. [00:03:14] Speaker C: So that's really funny. Briefly, tell me about a little bit about your law degree. [00:03:20] Speaker A: How does. [00:03:20] Speaker C: How does that play into what you're doing at Discovery Institute? [00:03:24] Speaker A: Sure. So, I mean, looking back through, like, the history of one's life, you think about, why did you do X, Y, or Z? At the time I went to law school, I thought I was going to do environmental law. I had a undergraduate and master's degree in earth sciences from UC San Diego, and living in Southern California, kind of an environmental law mecca. I thought, combine those degrees with a law degree and I'd have a job for life. So that was my original plan. But then, right as I was graduating in the meantime, I got very involved with intelligent design activities, started a nonprofit that helped students to start student clubs on intelligent design on their college and high school campuses, and got to know a lot of the folks in the ID world. And so right as I was graduating from law school, got offered a job at Discovery Institute because I'd gotten to know them through my. My ID activities. And initially, my role at Discovery actually was I was advising teachers on how to teach evolution objectively without getting into legal trouble. Most schools today basically require teachers to only teach the pro Darwin only evidence and basically censor any scientific evidence that challenges Darwin. And so we would help whether they were, you know, educators or administrators or policymakers to help them to teach evolution, the evidence for and against Darwin's theory, without getting into legal trouble. So that was my first role at Discovery. And then also I would provide a lot of academic freedom defense for scientists who are being discriminated against because of their views supporting intelligent design. And we saw quite a few cases of those along those lines over the years. These days, I don't necessarily do a lot of practice of law in my job. We do have academic freedom cases that come up sometimes, and there are sort of public education policy issues that come up, and I do work on those. But mostly my role at Discovery Institute these days is I manage our research program. We have A very active research program finding scientists who are looking at the scientific evidence for intelligent design. It's a lot of fun to work with those scientists and help them to investigate the, the evidence for design nature. So I, my, my, my first academic, excuse me, academic love, Jacob was always science. And so this is really what I prefer to be doing. [00:05:37] Speaker C: Yeah, so cool. I, I think it's a, just a really cool. Part of your background is law and science and especially the way you're using it still to this day. I, I know, you know, what I want to do in this podcast here is kind of have three segments and the third segment will include some of your law experience. We will touch into that a little bit. But you know, I think I, I told you this before we started recording. I myself and I'm in science. I'm a bioinformatics scientist. And for me personally, I always believed in Darwinian evolution, but merely because I was taught that, not because I thought it through. When I came across, you know, Behe's book and your writings and Stephen C. Meyer's work, it just blew me away in a good way because it made me see God in the science that I'm doing. So I'm really hoping for our listeners today that's exactly what we can do, is show an intelligent designer in the science that is established. So just as a layout, what I first want to do is go over a basic overview of intelligent design for those who don't know, maybe on a more elementary level so we could get familiar with it. Our listeners can. And then I'm going to push some objections to intelligent design to you from people that I know, from writings that I've seen on the Internet and so forth. And then thirdly, we'll go over some practical tips. And this is straight from some of the youth folks in our local church. And I figured, well, who better to go to about this than Casey Luskin? So I've saved that. Save those for you. So the first question, just to clarify, what is Darwinian evolution? And I know people might be saying, oh, we came from chimps, but there's a little bit more to that. And I just, maybe people haven't heard it since high school. So maybe just rehash what is Darwinian evolution? [00:07:25] Speaker A: Sure, sure. And actually Darwinian evolution doesn't say we came from chimps. It says we share a common ancestor with chimps. I know you know all that, but yeah, so, so, so, yeah, so Darwinian evolution is a scientific view of how new species originates. That basically you have a Population of organisms. And within that population, there's variation. Okay, Some organisms might be able to run faster than others, or some organisms might be camouflaged. And because of those variations, some individuals in a population are better able to survive and reproduce than others. And over time, what will happen? The species will tend to evolve in the direction of those that are better able to survive and reproduce and leave more offspring, because those that leave more offspring, their offspring will dominate the population. So if you're in a population of gazelles and you know there's cheetahs that are trying to attack, you spend a lot of time, you know, in Africa, I've seen a few gazelles, I can tell you that. And you want to run away fast from the cheetahs. Well, guess what? Those gazelles that can run away faster are going to be able to better survive. And then they can then, you know, obviously reproduce and leave offspring of the ones that run slower. So over time, you might see that population evolving towards faster and faster running gazelles. That's the basic idea. Now, that's sort of, you know, very basic Darwinian evolution 101. But when we talk about the term evolution, it can really mean three main things, Jacob, and I'm sure you probably heard this before following Discovery Institute. But the first sort of definition of evolution is just change over time. Okay? We have change over time within a species. You know, look at the human species. We have different hair colors, eye colors, skin colors, body sizes, body types, et cetera. There's lots of variation within the human species, but we're all human beings. You know, you could take people from anywhere on the planet, and if they were to marry and try to have a kid, they could have fertile offspring potentially. So we're all part of the same species. And there's been micro evolution or small scale change within the human species. Nobody disagrees with this kind of evolution. It does not produce fundamentally new types of organisms. Okay? The second type of evolution is what we would call common ancestry. That's the idea that all living organisms are related. So of course you and I are related, Jacob. You go back far enough, we'll find some common ancestor. You can do that with anybody in the human species. We're all related if you go back far enough. But common ancestry goes much further and says not only are all humans related, but all living organisms are related. If you go back far enough, then you would share a common ancestor with your pet cat or dog. Go back a little bit further, you'll share a common ancestor with the grass. That's Growing in your front yard, Go back even further and you will share a common ancestor with the fungus that's growing on the bottom of your foot. Okay, so all living organisms are related. So this idea of common ancestry, it's a part of what we would call macro evolution. The idea that we can have large scale change from one type of organism evolving into another. Then the third definition of evolution is sort of getting to the mechanism of how does that change happen? And this is getting back to, you know, Darwin's theory said that the main mechanism of evolution is natural selection. And then now that we know about DNA, the idea is that natural selection acts upon random mutations in our DNA. And some DNA mutations give organisms the better ability to survive and reproduce. And they will be selected because they leave more offspring. Okay, this is basically the mechanism of Darwin's theory, or neo Darwin, Neo Darwinism, as the modern theory of evolution is called. And it's important to understand this is a strictly blind and unguided mechanism According to evolutionary biology as its taught in textbooks and practiced by evolutionary scientists. There is no intelligent agent who is guiding the evolutionary process. It happens on its own without any intelligent guidance, without any, you know, intelligent being who's overseeing it. It just happens. Okay, so this is supposed to be the magic of neo Darwinism is that all the grand diversity of life can be produced by, without any intelligent design whatsoever, simply by mutations in DNA arising. And then those mutations which are better allowing organisms to survive and reproduce get selected by natural selection. And that is supposed to explain basically, you know, since the first organism, all the grand diversity that we see on life, plus a few other mechanisms like neutral evolution, symbiosis, et cetera. But it's all blind and unguided mechanisms all the way down, random mutation all the way down. There is no intelligent design according to standard evolutionary biology today. [00:12:13] Speaker C: So good. It's super helpful. And I'm glad you made the distinction between the different types of evolution because the most frustrating thing I deal with as a Christian and an apologist at the same time is, well, you don't believe in evolution. I can't believe that. And it's like, well, slow down. It's not that I don't believe evolution, it's the kind of evolution that we're talking about. So I'm really glad you made that distinction. And for our listeners, our Christian listeners, I recommend you do the same in your discussions about evolution because we do all agree in micro evolution that's evident, but it's the macro where it gets complicated. So that's really helpful. Now, since you did that, now can you define Intelligent design for us? Give us an overview what it is? Yeah, just give us an overview of Intelligent Design. [00:12:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Intelligent Design is a scientific theory which says that many features of nature in life and in the universe are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than that sort of undirected mechanism, something like natural selection being an unguided undirected mechanism. And the reason that we say that intelligent design is the best explanation is because we're finding in nature features which have the kind of information and complexity which in our experience always comes from intelligence. Okay, so, so I'll give you some very, very basic examples of this. And Jacob, you're a biologist, so this is going to be very, very simple and basic for you. But if we look at what is at the heart of life, okay, what is at the very essence of the cell, what we see in our DNA is a language based code. We see these nucleotide bases along the backbone of the DNA which are arranged in very precise orders in order to encode all the information necessary to build the proteins in your body. Okay. And many other things in your body. So what we see in our DNA is a language based code that encodes information. Information which is what we would call in the idea world, complex and specified. It's complex meaning that it's an unlikely sequence and it's specified meaning that it matches a pattern. So in our DNA we see an unlikely sequence of these nucleotide bases that matches up the exact pattern that is necessary to produce a functional protein. We've funded research here at Discovery Institute into just how precisely ordered do the nucleotide bases in our DNA have to be to generate functional proteins? And one study found that for a typical. An enzyme of typical complexity that only 1 in every 10 to the 77 sequences of Amino acids will give you a functional protein. Okay? So that's a very unlikely sequence that is specified to match the exact pattern necessary for a protein to work properly. Okay? So again, what we see at the heart of life in our DNA is information stored in a language based code. Now, it's not enough to just have that information in your DNA. Just having a DNA molecule is kind of like just having a DVD. Remember when we used to watch DVDs and before we had streaming and all that? So if you just have a dvd, it's really not good for anything. I mean, maybe you could use as a coffee coaster or as, you know, a Frisbee or something, but you need machinery to read the information on the DVD and give you some kind of a useful output. Well, DNA works exactly the same way. Our DNA literally contains computer like commands and instructions. And your cells have machinery that can read that instruction. They're called molecular machines that can read the instructions in your DNA, interpret those instructions through a form of computer like information processing, and then execute those instructions. And what is the process of this computer like information processing? Well, your cells are producing molecular machines, machines that are literally running around your cells performing all kinds of important functions. So what we see at the heart of life is language based code in our DNA and then computer like information processing that reads and interprets that code to produce machines. But where in our experience do things like language based code come from, computer information processing come from or machine like structures? And all of our experience these things come only from intelligence. So this kind of gets back to what I said earlier. What we see in nature is the kind of information and complexity which in our experience always comes from intelligence. And so that's why we would say that intelligent design is, is the best explanation for what we see at the heart of life. [00:16:35] Speaker C: So good. And you know that you mentioned my biology background and earlier I said how intelligent design has helped me see God in the science and it's exactly that, the coding behind it, you know. And in my line of work, I'm a bioinformatics scientist. So we literally all day we spend coding and looking at probability metrics and we're applying mathematics to the biological realm. To me it's fascinating because if it were unguided and chaotic, I would find it very hard to get any reliable output. But we're getting really great significant results that prove to be significant when the patient is treated for cancer or whatever it may be. So it's really intelligent design. The whole field is incredible. I think it's needed and necessary and that's why we're having this conversation to get it out there even more. Um, but I want you to, if you can differentiate intelligent design with creationism, because I think too many times the two get conflated. [00:17:35] Speaker A: Sure. So creationism is a religious viewpoint that starts with some particular interpretation of the Bible, for example, and then tries to say this is how you fit the Bible with science. And creationism always will explicitly refer to, you know, basically God, the God of the Bible, or some supernatural divine being as the, as the creator, you know, of everything. It will explicitly identify the designer as God, Yahweh, Allah, whoever you might think the designer is. But it's getting into those kinds of very religious Questions about who the designer is. So that's different from Intelligent design. Intelligent Design doesn't start with a religious text. It starts with the evidence that we see in nature. What can we learn from the scientific evidence? And do we see evidence for an intelligent designer being responsible for many aspects of life in the universe? And then Intelligent design doesn't try as a science, it doesn't try to speculate about some of those larger religious questions like well, what is the identity of the designer? We have supporters in the intelligence community who are Christians, of course, but also folks who are Muslims or Jews or folks from a Hindu persuasion or folks who maybe are agnostic about who the designer is. We have folks from many different diverse backgrounds in the ID world. And that's because intelligent Design as a science doesn't get into some of those larger religious questions about who the designer is. It's simply saying, look, we can see from the scientific evidence that there is a need for an intelligent cause, a mind to be responsible for many of the things that we see. These things don't come about through blind, unguided, chance based mechanisms. You require an intelligence to basically design and make these features, these complex features we're seeing. So Intelligent design is not necessarily against creationism. And there's different forms of creationism of course. The most common view would be the interpretation of Genesis which says that God created everything about 6 to 10,000 years ago in six 24 hour days. That's young earth creationism. Then there's old earth creationism which would say that yes again they believe that Genesis is the word of God and that God created everything in six maybe periods of time or something like that. Different ways of interpreting the book of Genesis and they would allow for basically a very ancient, maybe billions of year old Earth. Both views are different ways that Christians and actually Jews as well and other people who believe in the Bible will interpret the book of Genesis and try to reconcile science and the Bible. Intelligent Design has no problem with people trying to do that. I mean, if you want to try to figure out the best way to fit the Bible with science, that's fine. I mean, I'm a Christian myself and I've had to wrestle with these things. Intelligent Design is just focused on a different project. It's not so much asking how do we fit the Bible with science, but whether there is scientific evidence that points using intelligent cause. Sorry, points using intelligent scientific evidence to an intelligent cause being responsible for what we see in nature. So kind of very different approaches. Creationism starts with the Bible, id, intelligent Science starts with the scientific data. Creationism ends with religious conclusions. ID ends with scientific conclusions. So just a different, different approach. [00:20:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I love that. And I think, you know, if Christianity were true, it should line up with the scientific evidence. Now the scientific evidence can be flawed and there's some, you know, discernment that we have to make there. But I think there's no, you know, the, the, the strong creationist might say, oh, but you're leaving out the Bible. But it's more like a natural theology, like Thomas Aquinas said that we're doing. We're looking at the net, the general revelation of God to point back to a creator. We're looking at the effect point back to the cause. [00:21:22] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, I'm a Christian. I don't ever try to hide that. In fact, everybody in the ID community that I know has been very open about their personal theological views, whether they're a Christian. We have Christians, we have Jews, we have folks who are Muslims, we have agnostics. Everybody to a man or a woman is very open about, you know, their own views on those bigger questions. They just make it clear that these, you know, my view that the God of the Bible is the designer does not come from intelligent design, comes from any other, you know, good apologetic arguments that go beyond intelligent design or apart from that. And also my own personal experience. But as a Christian, what I would cite, you know, getting to what you just said, Jacob verses like Romans 1:20, which say that God is clearly seen in what has been made. So, you know, from my Christian perspective, the Bible actually predicts that we will see evidence in nature for a creator, for an intelligent being that made everything okay. Now that is obviously a religious verse that's predicting that. But lo and behold, I can go out and do science and, and come to the same conclusion. And so I think that intelligent design is very consistent with, you know, a biblical view of Romans 1:20, which says we'll find evidence for a designer and a divine creator even behind nature. [00:22:34] Speaker C: Absolutely. It's really pushing back against that naturalistic, you could even say materialistic mindset that really has been on the onset since like the scientific revolution. So it's needed, especially in the scientific realm. There's so many materialist, though I will say there's a lot of New Agers, I'm seeing a lot in the scientific realm. So that's a little interesting twist. But what I want to dive into now is the evidence within ID. So intelligent design, ID. I know there's irreducible Complexity and specified complexity. Can you break those two down? [00:23:07] Speaker A: Sure. Maybe we could start with specified complexity. We talked about this a little bit earlier. Specified complexity, also called complex and specified information is the kind of information which in our experience always comes from an intelligent mind. Okay, so what does that mean? So something is complex if it's unlikely and it's specified if it matches an independent pattern. Okay? So right now, the vibrations that are coming out of my voice box and that you're hearing through the microphone, it's a very, very unlikely movement of air molecules. Okay? So it's very, very complex, yet it matches a pattern that you immediately recognize as conforming to the English language. So this would be a form of specified and something that's both specified and complex. But let's think about having a. Just a bag of dirt, okay? You go to, you go out in your front yard, you pick up a bag of dirt, okay? There's a lot of different kinds of things in that bag, all right? There's a lot of very, very unusual molecules, broken down minerals, plant bits, probably, you know, bits of DNA from animals and droppings and all kinds of stuff that's in that bag of dirt. Okay. And you know, from a geologist perspective, all kinds of broken down rock bits in that dirt. It's a very, very complex mixture of dirt. Very, very unlikely to get that exact mixture in that bag. All right, but what's the pattern? There's no pattern there. Right? It's just a sort of random mixture. You're not going to say, oh, this bag of dirt was intelligently designed. No. You just went into your yard and you picked up a bag of dirt. You didn't. Nobody designed it to be exactly what's in that bag. And so you're not going to detect design. It's complex, but it's not specified. Okay. Or think of a salt crystal, okay? A salt crystal, it, like sodium chloride, it has a long repeating NaCl, NaCl. Sodium chlorine. Sodium chlorine. Sequence of atoms. Think back to your high school chemistry class. My wife teaches high school chemistry. So, you know, we talk about these kinds of things. So a salt crystal has a pattern, okay? There is a repeating pattern of sodium chloride over and over again. You know, millions of these atoms over and over again, repeating. But it's not complex. It's not actually an unlikely feature. If you have the right chemicals and you have them under the right conditions, you will form a sodium chloride salt crystal, okay? It's guaranteed to happen because of the laws of nature and the ways that chemical Bonding work. Okay, so it's not a complex or unlikely feature. It's specified, but it's not complex. So again, we don't detect design just because we found a solid crystal. This happens naturally on its own. Doesn't need an intelligent designer. So intelligent design is looking for things that are both complex and specified. And in our experience, when we find complex, specified information, it's designed. I'll give you one last example, okay? Think of going to a mountain. My favorite mountain around the Seattle area where we live is Mount Rainier. Huge, big volcano. Hiked up there many, many times over the years. Beautiful mountain. And when we fly out of Seattle, a lot of times the pilots will, if they're going that direction, they will give you a little buzz. Tour Mount Rainier, and you get a nice photograph of it from the plane. So it has a very unlikely shape. All right? The likelihood of Mount Rainier having the exact shape that it does, all the contours and everything, is very, very low. But again, it's not specified to match a pattern. But what if you go to Mount Rushmore? Mount Rushmore also has a very unlikely shape, but it matches a pattern. The faces of four famous times president. So he immediately can recognize that Mount Rushmore was designed. So this is complex and specified information. The more you think about it, the more you won't be able to stop thinking about it. And you'll realize it's. It's a really useful way to understand. We. We use this method of reasoning, looking for complexity and specification to detect design all the time, every day, without even thinking about it. And I'm. I don't. Don't let me go on for too long here, Jacob, but let's say you're driving down a road and you see some paint on the road, okay? And that paint spells out the words railroad X ing crossing. Okay? Without even thinking about it, you realize that that is, that that was put there by an intelligent agent to send you a message to stop at those railroad tracks, okay? So you make a design inference, you stop, and that may be important to save your life from a train going by. But why did you see that? Well, you saw those, the paint on the ground. Without even thinking about it, you intuitively realized this is unlikely, okay? That this would happen by chance. And it matches a pattern that I recognize. So I can see that an intelligent agent is responsible for this. Now, what if you went down the road and you saw a very, very weirdly shaped splotch of white paint? All right? You would say, you might think, okay, that's an unlikely splotch of paint, but doesn't mean anything. There's no pattern there. So you're probably going to think that some poor, you know, painter was driving down the road and a can of paint fell off his truck or her truck and blew up on the ground and just left a big splotch of paint. Okay? So you did not detect design without even thinking about it. You thought, okay, unlikely, but no pattern here. Nothing for me to think there's a designer trying to send me a message or communicate something. So I'm just going to keep on driving so you don't stop. Hopefully there's no railroad track and hopefully you don't die, you know, but. So we make design differences like this using this kind of method of reasoning all the time, and we don't even realize it. So that's specified complexity. You also asked about iridescent plasticity in biology. Getting back to proteins, okay? When we have that very, very unlikely sequence of nucleotides, that is just the exactly right pattern to give you a functional protein that specified complexity. Because again, unlikely sequence matches the pattern needed for a functional protein. So we see very high complex and specified information throughout our DNA. Now, irreducible complexity. Irreducible complexity is actually kind of a special set, a special type of specified complexity. And this was an idea that was coined by Michael Behe. You mentioned the book Darwin's Black Box, Jacob, that actually you and I have this in common. That was actually the book that got me into intelligent design. Okay. I read that book after my freshman year of college. I've been taking all these courses in evolutionary biology and I was thinking, okay, how do all these complex features evolve? And I wasn't really like my freshman year, rudimentary way of thinking hadn't really figured very much out yet. But I read that book after my freshman year and I felt like Michael B. Was putting into words what my brain was trying to wrap its head around, that there were just no explanations for how these complex features evolve in living organisms. So Michael Behe coined the term irreducible complexity. And it's basically a system that is composed of many well matched parts where if you remove any one part from that system, then it no longer works. So if you reduce the complexity, it stops functioning. So the complexity is irreducible. Okay? And what Behe argues in that book is that there are many natural structures in biology, things like molecular machines, biochemical pathways that are irreducibly complex. If you take away one enzyme from that biochemical pathway, it stops working. If you take away one part from this molecular machine in a cell, it no longer functions. And so what Behe would argue is that these molecular machines that are irreversibly complex, they require a certain core level of complexity to be present before they will even function, to give you some advantage in surviving and reproducing. Okay, so Darwin's theory says that you have to evolve features one tiny little mutational step at a time. Okay. I think there's. There's this famous quote in Origin of Species where he says that if any feature cannot. If any organ cannot be formed by. By numerous successive, slight modifications, then my theory would absolutely break down. And Michael Behe would argue that these irreversibly complex features that we see in biology, they cannot be formed by numerous successive slight modifications. They're kind of like an all or nothing game. Either at least some, you know, minimal threshold of complexity is there and it works, or it's not there and it doesn't work. If it doesn't work, the natural selection has no reason to preserve that structure and to help that thing to evolve. So it's basically too unlikely for a complex, an irreversibly complex feature to evolve by getting all those parts there all at once that are necessary for it to function. And so Behe would cite examples like molecular machines like the bacterial flagellum. We can do. The bacterial flagellum is a molecular machine that bacteria use to swim around. It's kind of like an outboard motor with its little tail or propeller that spins to help them swim around in a liquid medium to find food. Behe would argue, and I think that there's good evidence from genetic knockout experiments that the flagellum requires at least 20 plus protein parts to be present or it won't work. So by definition, it is irreducibly complex. Another example that he cites is the blood clotting cascade. You know, you prick your finger and you start to bleed, but lo and behold, a couple minutes go by and it stops. Hopefully, if you don't have hemophilia. Right. So it turns out that actually we can come back to that. It turns out that blood clotting requires a certain core number of enzymes to be there in order for it to work. And you can do knockout experiments. In fact, hemophiliacs have a disorder with one of their clotting factors which prevents their blood from clotting properly. And you can do knockouts on mice or other organisms. And if they don't have these necessary clotting factors, you know, the certain Core parts of this blood clotting pathway present, then they can't clot blood and they will die if they get cut or something like that. So. Or something bad will happen to them. So blood clotting is another example of irreversible complexity. So yeah, so there's many examples of this. And Michael Behe would argue that not only is irreducible complexity. Now I'd agree with this. Is it a challenge to the neo Darwinian mechanism of random mutation and natural selection. It also is positive evidence for intelligent design because where in our experience do we see these purposeful arrangement of parts coming together to produce machines? And of all of our experience, when we see a bunch of parts coming together towards some goal to form a machine, that it always traces back to a mind or an intelligence. So we see intelligent design in irreducible complexity. So yeah, I'm glad you're asking these very, very basic questions, but these are really foundational to how we detect design and how we think about intelligent design. So really, really great questions, Jacob. [00:34:08] Speaker C: Yeah, well I'm happy to share these with our listeners because I think irreducible complexity and specified complexity are two that really blew me away because you're right, it's intuitive. I mean you see things on the street, you see signs and you see that's, that's a person, someone intelligent put that there. It's kind of like looking for life outside of the universe or in different planets and we get these like slight sounds or repetitive vibrations and we say, oh, that's sign of intelligence. So we're doing the same thing. We're looking for specified complexity. The follow up question that came to mind as you were speaking on both irreducible and specified complexity would be did Darwin himself have this type of knowledge when he was coming up with this theory, or is it something that came after and maybe, maybe needs some type of revision for the Darwinian, Darwinian evolution theory? [00:34:57] Speaker A: Great question, Jacob. In, in fairness to Darwin, you know, in his day they did not understand the complexity of the cell. I mean, I don't, I can only, we can only speculate what Darwin would have said if he knew about the complexity of the cell that we understand today. So I'm not going to even go there. But we do know that in Darwin's day there were contemporaries of Darwin who thought that the cell was kind of like a little simple glob of protoplasm. They didn't really think that it had all these complexities. So what Michael Behe in his book, why did he call his book, Darwin's Black Box. Because he said, look, for Darwin, the cell was like a black box. He did not understand that there were all these molecular machines, enzymes, protein, DNA, carrying information. You know, that cells are like miniature factories taking information from DNA, building proteins. They have all kinds of other organelles that make them almost like a miniature city. There are waste disposal systems, there are recycling systems, There are energy production systems. There are information processing systems. There are gates and smart, active gates to keep bad things out and let good things in. It's like a miniature city with factories inside, but far, far more complex. I mean, I. I think it's pretty safe to say, Jacob, that the most complicated human technology ever devised really isn't even. Doesn't even compare to the simplest bacterial cell. Okay? We don't. I mean, there's stuff going on in the simplest cell that we don't even understand. So the cell is extremely complex. Now, Darwin did understand that it would have been possible in principle for biological features to exist that his theory couldn't produce. And that's why that quote about. He said if an organ cannot be produced by numerous successive, slight modifications, then his theory would absolutely break down. Now, Darwin went on to say that he knew of no such case. All right? He didn't know of any organ that sort of met his challenge. But that was in 1859 or whatever, right? So. So science come a long way since then. And Michael Behe would say that now that we have opened up the black box of the cell, we realize that it's full of these molecular machines, miniaturized factories, you know, smart, intelligently operating, you know, logic circuits that control how things operate. He would say that, no, this is definitely the kind of complexity that Darwin said could not evolve by his mechanism. So that's what Id would argue that we have met. We have more than met Darwin's challenge. And today the complexity we understand in the cell cannot evolve by Darwinian mechanisms. [00:37:30] Speaker C: Yeah, it's. It reminds me of kind of what Jonathan Wells. I know you guys at Discovery Institute have talked about him a lot. He passed recently. But, you know, his work on the icon of Darwin, is that what he termed it as? [00:37:43] Speaker A: Or icon of evolution? Icons. [00:37:45] Speaker C: Evolution, yeah, Icon of evolution. Because they stick with this Darwinian, Darwinian theory when really it's. It's somewhat outdated to what we know about biology in the cell, but it's still firmly stated and believed and taught. And it's. It's a. It's a weird commitment, I think, that is afraid to revise and look back on. So that, that's really, it's good to know for our listeners. This is kind of thrown in there because it's kind of more recent. It came about recently. But before we get to the objections to id, typically, you know, the pro, pro evolution argument that we learned in school, that Bill Nye the science guy would always tell me on TV and whatnot, is that we share approximately 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees and a difference of about 1.2%. I've heard you, I've read your articles, I listened to your podcast. But I think it needs to be said for our listeners, this new study that came out pretty much refuting that. So can you detail what this study said and showed? [00:38:47] Speaker A: Sure. So, yeah, exactly. Jacob, I'm sure that your listeners have heard many times that, that our genomes are 99 or 98% similar to those of chimps. And I actually don't really think that the percent genetic similarity that we have to chimps really is all that important for determining questions about common ancestry or evolution. You know, it could be common ancestor, whatever the percent similarity is, whether it's, you know, people say we're 50% banana. Okay, fine, whatever. That's not, I don't think that's true. But, you know, it could be the result of common ancestry, but it could also be the result of common design where designers will reuse parts that work in different designs. I mean, human designers do this all the time. We will. Human designers will reuse wheels on both cars and airplanes, or reuse keyboards on both cell phones and tablets, or programmers will reuse code in different programs they're writing. So it's not weird that we share functional DNA, a lot of it with chimpanzees. It just shows we're built upon a common blueprint through common design. Okay, fine. But nonetheless, evolutionists have really used this 98 point or 98.8% statistic that we're 98.8% genetically similar to a chimp as an argument for common ancestry. You mentioned Bill Nye. He's argued that Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington, D.C. it uses the argument that we're 98.8% similar to chimps, genetically speaking, as an argument for common ancestry. We've all heard this. Okay, so they're making this argument so clearly, for them it's a big deal. Our percent genetic similarity, it's an icon of evolution. So this paper came out in Nature last month, in April of 2025, that for the first time sequenced the complete ape genomes. Okay. And what they basically showed is that there are many sections of the chimp and human genomes that just don't align because they are too different. Okay. There might be different copies of RePet, different numbers of copies of repetitive DNA, or the sequences are just completely different, or you might have just single nucleotides that are different as you move along the chromosomes. And what if you add up the different types of differences that they found in this study, it adds up to about 85 to 86% genetically similar between humans and chimps. So basically we'll call that 14 to 15% different, genetically speaking, between humans and chimps. So that's more than an order of magnitude greater a difference than that 1% statistic that we're commonly told that we're only 1.1.2. Whatever percentage different from a chimpanzee. You're just basically a barely modified chimp. No, that's not true. The DNA, this, this new Nature paper that did the complete sequence of the, of the ape genomes, chimps, orangutans and gorillas found that compared to chimps, we are. We are basically about 15% genetically different. So this is a huge story, and I think it's very important for people to know, you know, that what they've been taught maybe, maybe isn't true. Yeah. [00:41:52] Speaker C: And, you know, if, if the pro evolutionist is going to bank so heavily on the percentage of shared DNA and as you mentioned, that we don't have to even refute that because we could say that it could be common design. And I think that's fantastic. It's quick and easy. But if they're going to add that much weight to it to show common ancestry, then this should really be problematic to them because now you can't just fall back on it and say, oh, it never really mattered to begin with. Now you have to come up with an explanation as to why we're seeing different results. So I think it does put the ball in their court. I'm excited to see if they haven't already, what they come up with in response to this study. [00:42:29] Speaker B: That was Dr. Casey Luskin taking us back to the basics of intelligent design in the first half of a conversation. We're grateful to Jacob Vasquez at the Truthful Hope podcast for allowing us to share the discussion here. Look for the second half in a separate episode. And if you haven't yet, please subscribe to our new ID the Future YouTube channel and be among the first to see my latest video interviews, commentaries and more. Hop on to YouTube.com dthefuture or simply type in d the future in the YouTube app to subscribe and like the content that you find there. Help us spread the word. YouTube.com d the future I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening. [00:43:15] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.