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[00:00:43] Speaker B: This is one of the reasons why we are so optimistic about the future of ID Where ID is going, we have a strong research program. We have students who are coming up to do ID research and are doing it. So from my advantage as sort of the research director at Discovery Institute, I see the future of ID is looking very bright, and I am very, very excited to see where it goes in the future.
ID the Future, A podcast about evolution and Intelligent design.
[00:01:12] Speaker A: Well, whether you're new to Intelligent Design or you've been following the currents of ID thought for decades, or somewhere in between, you might be wondering, where do things stand right now? What headway is Intelligent Design making in academia or in the public Square? Is the ID research program flourishing? And where is ID heading in the near future?
Welcome to ID of the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott, your host, and today I'm welcoming back Dr. Casey Luskin to the program.
For the few who may not know him yet, Casey is Associate Director of Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg, as well as graduate degrees in science and law, which gives him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools, as well as defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for Intelligent design.
Welcome, Kasey.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Great to be with you, Andrew.
[00:02:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Now, you recently did an interview in Salvo Magazine about where Intelligent Design and the Research Program of Intelligent Design stands, and I thought we could unpack that a little bit.
Can you give us a general overview of what you highlighted in that interview about the exciting trends and ID in recent years?
[00:02:39] Speaker B: Yeah, Andrew, we just kind of finished recording a different podcast about the Dover case, which of course, you know, kind of a little bit of a downer because the judge got so many things wrong about intelligent design. But that doesn't reflect how I kind of feel in my day to day when it comes to id, because overall we are extremely encouraged at Discovery right now and over the last years about how well ID is doing in its research program and seeing how much ID is progressing. So yeah, I was recently did a little interview with Salah magazine and they asked me the question, where have you seen the ID movement, made strides in recent years? And so my answer was sort of multiple different fronts. Number one, we have seen ID making so many good predictions in science and we've talked about this before, but you know, one of my favorite ones is junk DNA. When I was an undergraduate, UC San Diego, talking and debating with evolutionists at the Idea club there, we would always hear people saying, well, the junk DNA in our genome refutes intelligent design. And our response would be, well, no, we don't really know that it's junk. And we're going to predict that. We're going to discover function for the junk DNA. And this is 25 years ago when we knew far less about the genome. And so we've now seen over the last 10 or 15 years what I would call a revolution in thinking and biology where now folks readily acknowledge that the junk DNA is vital and crucial and functional.
And you know, there are other examples of good ID predictions as well. We can talk about that more. But I would say that the successful ID predictions is a very encouraging aspect of ID and actually the one that probably matters the most. Because at the end of the day we want to know if ID is true. And if ID isn't true, then everything else we're doing is pointless. Right? We wouldn't want to be doing this if ID wasn't true. And it's ID's successful predictions.
We talk about them more. Molecular machines, new layers of information being discovered in biology, fine tuning in the laws of the universe. We're discovering more and more evidence for id. As time goes on, predictions are being fulfilled and this encourages us that ID really is correct.
Another area where I would say we're very encouraged, which has been interesting, has been the failure of Neo Darwinism.
And we've seen this sort of in the rise of what is called the Third Way evolution camp. We can talk about this in more detail, but this is a camp of mainstream scientists who don't support ID but also don't support the standard Neo Darwinian view and the ascendancy of third way evolution thinkers is another sign that I think ID's arguments have been on track that evolution has problems, especially the standard evolutionary Darwinian model, which is believed by so many people to be true, taught in schools, assumed to be true by biologists. So we'll talk about this more, I'm sure, but that's another very encouraging place.
And then sort of more in a practical area, just the growth of our community.
The first area of growth would be of students who are interested in intelligent design that represent sort of the next generation of ID thinkers. And we just came off again this interview about the Dover trial. So think back to 20 years ago.
We hadn't even started our summer seminar that began in 2007.
And something like, I don't know what it is, like 17 or so years later of doing the summer seminar, we now have over a thousand graduates of our intelligent design seminars. Okay. And these are, you know, largely students, undergraduates, master's degree students, many PhD students. In fact, you know, when we admit students every year, you know, we look at the number of PhD students that we want to admit. And often after we do that, we don't have a lot of room for undergraduates left in the program. It's actually a problem because these are talented people who we want to admit. But we're getting so many applications from PhD students, very high quality students, that there's not always room. We have to say no every year to quite a few quality people.
And so the summer seminar is, I think, been a very encouraging area of growth and showing that there's an up and coming generation of ie friendly scientists and scholars that are going to do the next, you know, research that needs to be done for intelligent design. And then finally in the growth of our community, just scientists who have joined our community. I mean, even as we're sitting here doing these podcasts today, I'm emailing with people, scientists and scholars who have reached out to discovery, who want to get to know us, they want to join our community. And I'm setting up zoom meetings. I mean, people ask me what I do for a living and you know what I usually say? I say, I answer emails and I do zooms. Now probably half the world says that's what they do for a living, but it's really true. And we're constantly zooming with new ID friendly scientists and scholars who have reached out to us. Thankfully, some really high profile media appearances from folks like Steve Meyer on the Joe Rogan show have resulted in a very large volume of people Reaching out to us, many of them scientists. And it just means that, like, there's not enough hours in the day. I mean, I can't, we can't keep up literally with the number of people reaching out to us. It's a good problem to have. But, you know, if, if anybody wants to donate large sums of money so we can hire people to help answer emails, that would be great. I would. It would actually help us to keep up with, with the volume of people reaching out to us and all the other projects that we're doing.
[00:07:52] Speaker A: Yeah, it's great that we have the growth. It just takes a lot of resources to adjust to that growth over time. Did you want to mention any others before we talk about evolutionary biology and some of the old problems still unaddressed there?
[00:08:08] Speaker B: Sure, absolutely. I mean, ID makes a number of different predictions. And I've always been somebody who likes to talk about what I call the positive case for design. I've always been a very firm believer that you can make an argument for intelligent design just by looking at the positive predictions that it makes. So prediction number one. I mean, junk DNA is a very fun one to talk about. ID predicts function for junk DNA because in our experience, it intelligent agents make things for a reason, for a purpose. And so we would expect that if, you know, there's all this quote unquote dark matter in our genome that we don't understand.
Evolutionists have by and large assumed that if we don't know what it's doing, it must be doing nothing. That's never a safe assumption in biology. So it turns out that a lot of this junk DNA, we've already discovered specific functions and a lot of it shows evidence at the biochemical level of being functional. And we still got, oh, there's still a lot we don't know. But, you know, there was an article in the journal Bioassays a few years ago that basically says we have seen a cunian paradigm shift over the idea of junk DNA over the last 10 or 15 years. And many other scientists have come out saying, you know, there's been a big shift.
Francis Collins, in his 2006 book the Language of God, he predicted that about 45% of the human genome is repetitive DNA that he called genetic Flotsman Jetson. Well, what is Flotsman Jetsam? That's basically trash floating in the ocean. You know, junk that you don't want.
Well, fast Forward then to 2015 after the ENCODE project comes out. ENCODE in 2012 found that over 80% of our genome shows evidence of biochemical functionality.
And in 2015, Francis Collins, this is paraphrasing him. He's giving a talk at a scientific conference, and he basically says, junk DNA. We don't even like to use that term anymore because it was basically hubris to assume that if we didn't know what something was doing, that therefore it was junk. I mean, that is a radical shift in perspective. To have the head of the Human genome project in 2006 saying 45% of our DNA is trash.
2012, the ENCODE project shows that 80% of the genome is showing evidence of biochemical functionality. And then three years after that, that same head of the Human Genome Project says he doesn't even use the term junk DNA anymore. So we've seen, and this is basically a spectacularly accurate prediction that was fulfilled by intelligent Design, okay, that we did find that the junk DNA is by and large functional. Again, there's still a lot we don't know about the genome. Still plenty more to learn. And I think there's still good reasons. I think the vast majority of this functional. But this has been a very good prediction for id. But I would say to get to the core of what ID predicts is it comes down to information.
Because in our experience, when intelligent agents act, they produce new information.
Steve Meyer always talks about this in his lectures.
And so the question is, what is the kind of information that ID theorists predict? Well, we call it complex and specified information. We've talked about this many, many times. But roughly speaking, something as complex, if it's unlikely, it's specified, if it matches a pattern. Great examples of specified complexity or complex specified information would be language or codes, like when you're doing code breaking or sending an encoded message. These all contain complex and specified information.
And lo and behold, when we look at biology, we find it's called CSI for short. We find CSI everywhere. Doug Axe's research in the Journal of Molecular Biology found that for the B lactamase enzyme, 1 in 10 to the 77th amino acid sequences will give you a functional stable enzyme to perform its function. That right there is complex and specified information. You have a very, very unlikely arrangement of amino acids that matches a very, very precise pattern that is necessary to give you the beta lactamase function. So ID predicts that we will find information in biology and not just in DNA and the proteins, but, but also in other locations. And this, again, has been one of the biggest findings in biology of the last 15 or 20 years, would be epigenetics. There's all Kinds of epigenetic information that is stored inside cells. And that epigenetic information helps regulate how proteins are expressed and how cells use different genes, that helps determine what types of cells cells become. And so we're finding all kinds of information in our bodies. Outside of the DNA. There's epigenetics, there's information that governs RNA splicing, there's a sugar code that shows that there's information in the carbohydrates and sugars that are expressed on the surfaces of cells to allow cells to communicate with the outside world.
All of these different sources of information, by the way, are fully accepted by mainstream science. And this is exactly what ID would predict, that we will find new layers of information and code in biology. And if you want to take it back to information and proteins in DNA, let's again look at what other research has shown about the rarity of protein sequences.
Brian Miller has often cited a paper by Tian and Best which found that typical protein rarities range between 1 and 10 to the 24th sequences to 1 in 10 to the 26th sequences. What this shows is that Doug Axe's research about CSI and proteins, it's not an anomaly, it's not unusual. There are many other studies that have found that protein sequences are extremely rare, some actually far more rare even than the protein the Doug Axe study. So we're finding that there's complex and specified information all throughout biology. Another area where I would say that ID is making good predictions is in the area of systematics.
Now, how do we make ID predictions, by the way? Well, it starts by looking what intelligent agents can do. And we know what intelligent agents can do both by studying intelligent agents, when they act, when they're designing things, and also studying known designed objects to see what kinds of properties they hold. Okay. And what we find is that intelligent agents tend to reuse parts that work in different designs, and they reuse parts that work according to the functional needs of those systems. What that does is, you know, without getting into the details of it, that gives you some degree of tree like structure. When you're comparing the distribution of parts or traits or coding modules in a group of systems, you can model those distributions to some extent using a tree. However, not always, because an intelligent agent can put things in. An organism can sort of, you know, put ideas and parts and components into a system without there being a material connection to another system. So we see in living organisms, and this has come out in the last 20 or 25 years spectacularly as well, that with the Revolution in sequencing genomes.
We have found that huge portions of organisms, genomes do not fit into a tree like structure. And yet we're finding that they show similarities to other organisms. Okay, so you look, you take different genes and you try to create phylogenetic trees. One tree gives you one version of a phylogenetic tree. Another gene gives you a very different version of a phylogenetic tree. So what you're seeing is that parts are being reused in different organisms, but they're being reused according to functional needs of the organism, not necessarily only according to, you know, phylogenetic patterns or evolutionary ancestry. This, I think, is a very interesting fulfilled prediction of intelligent design showing that ID can help explain the distribution of traits. And Winston Ewart, who's a pro ID computer scientist, has done some great work developing the dependency graph, asking questions like, why is it that echolocation is really only found in bats and whales if they are so distantly separated on the mammalian tree? And nobody thinks that the common ancestor of bats and whales had the ability to echolocate both in terms of their physical phenotypes and also their genes have similarities to allow for this echolocation ability. And so what he's doing is he's using something called a dependency graph. And this is sort of an ID based way of modeling the distribution of traits among organisms, where the distributions are based upon the functional needs of the organism, not necessarily strictly according to evolutionary ancestry. And this leads into another interesting prediction, something called orphan genes. Paul Nelson is a big fan of orphan genes. He's talked about this a lot. But orphan genes are basically genes that are unique and don't resemble any other known genes in other species. There are also taxonomically restricted genes, and those are genes that are restricted to just, you know, some taxonomic, some level of the taxonomic hierarchy, a genus, a family, whatever.
These are very prevalent. In fact, it's been estimated that somewhere between 10 to 30% of an organism's genome might consist of these orphan genes. Um, now, of course, evolutionists said when we first started discovering these orphan genes, this is just an artifact of an incomplete sampling of genomes. And they predicted as we sequence more and more genomes, the number of orphan genes would drop, because you would find that, okay, initially this looked like an orphan gene, but now we sequence this other organism's genome, it has the same gene. So it's no, we know it's not an orphan. Instead, what has happened is many of these orphan genes have persisted and in fact, their numbers have grown. And every time we sequence the new genome of an organism, we're finding More orphan genes. Okay. Or virtually every time. It's very, very common. So this again gets back to ID's predictions. ID predicts that we will find informational patterns and organisms, functional informational patterns that don't necessarily have to match, you know, systems we find in other organisms. Okay. So you can have new information being inputted that has no material connection to any other system. And again, it's there because it suits the need of the organism. Pardon me there.
And so these orphan genes, I think, are again, a very interesting finding that was expected under intelligent design and not expected under evolutionary biology. In fact, when you read the literature about orphan genes, they will often use words like surprising, unexpected, whatever, that kind of language. Whereas under an ID perspective, this certainly is expected. Very much so. I would say that ID has made very good predictions in biology. What about physics and cosmology? Well, here again, ID predicts fine tuning, that we will find immense amounts of, you know, the laws of nature being precisely balanced on a, on a knife's edge to be exactly what life needs to exist. And over time, we're finding more and more fine tuning parameters.
Steve Meyer, in his book Return of the God hypothesis in 2021, recounted the history of finding these fine tuning parameters and how we found more and more of these over time. That the laws of the universe are very precisely designed so that life can exist.
In fact, one of the interesting findings that's come out of the ID camp, this has happened actually, as this new popular idea of the multiverse has come into being.
What ID theorists have found is that actually the mechanisms that are invoked to produce a multiverse, they require fine tuning. So the more you look into physics and cosmology, the more you're finding the need for fine tuning. You can't get away from it, even if you try to invoke the multiverse. So I would say that idea has made a lot of successful predictions. We could spend a lot more time talking about this. But these are some big ones that I like to think about.
[00:19:27] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And, and so you've got the positive case for intelligent design based on what we are learning and what we do know about the nature of information in life. And then you have, on a parallel track, you have the other side of it, which is the structural obstacles to a Darwinian evolutionary process being able to do this. And so you kind of have both. And that's what I love about this, this work and this research. What would you say, just in a nutshell, about evolutionary biology? Have they solved these old problems or do they the problems still remain.
[00:20:02] Speaker B: Yeah, great question, Andrew. And I would say that these old evolutionary problems remain unresolved. Evolutionary biology has still not provided stepwise explanations for irreducibly complex molecular machines, which, by the way, is another positive prediction of intelligent design. In our experience, intelligent agents produce systems that require multiple parts to be present in order for them to function. Those are basically what we mean by irreducibly complex machines, and we find these throughout biology. So irreducibly complex machines are a positive prediction of intelligent design, but also a negative prediction of evolution. This happens sometimes. You find that ID and Darwinian theory make sort of mutually exclusive predictions, but you still don't see in the literature, step by step, evolutionary explanations for these molecular machines. Where are we? You know, 20 years after the Dover trial, there's still no paper that, you know, gives you a step by step explanation for the origin of the bacterial flagellum. It just doesn't exist. And you go down the list of molecular machines and there is not a good explanation for how these things arose. So I would say that, you know, the problem of irreducible complexity is still a big problem. When you look at the technical literature and other problems. The fossil record still shows a pattern of explosions, the opposite prediction of Darwinian evolution.
I was recently doing some research for a paper that I'm working on about the fossil record and I found a quote from a 2025 book published by Springer covering evolutionary biology. New perspectives on its developments from their series on evolutionary biology. Here's what this book says. It says numerous paleontological studies support the notion of abrupt origin of followed by the stability of change, which is subsequently followed by extinction in a similarly punctuated manner. In all these studies, expressions such as sudden appearance, sudden pulse, sudden explosions, very rapid evolution, burst in evolution rapidly, explosively and abruptly are emphasized to indicate the origin of both species and higher taxa. So the problem of sort of this pattern of explosions in the fossil record, where new types of organisms appear abruptly without direct and clear evolutionary precursors, this still remains a problem to the present day. It's in the technical literature and it has not been resolved by evolutionary scientists. They propose things like punctual equilibrium or evo devo. But when you dig down into the details, you don't actually see how you can generate complex novelty very, very rapidly, which is what you have to be able to do. You don't actually see that being explained. So I would say that these problems also remain unresolved.
We talked about the tree of life a few minutes ago with systematics, but you know, this revolution we've had in genome sequencing over the last 25 or 30 years, where we've sequenced more and more genomes of different types of organisms. This has produced huge amounts of DNA data that contradicts this idea of a tree of life. And again, the problem is that you use one gene to construct the tree of life, you get one version of the tree of life. Use another gene to construct the tree of life, you get a very different and conflicting version of the tree of life. And the fundamental problem is that common ancestry is not predicting the distribution of traits like genes or even physical parts like, you know, bone structures or body plants or behavioral patterns. The tree of life is not a good explanation of the distribution of traits. And this goes directly against what Darwin's theory has proposed.
As a result, we see that evolutionary biologists have come up with all these sort of ad hoc explanations, I sometimes call them epicycles, to explain away why the data does not fit with this standard tree of life view that's been the bedrock of evolutionary biology since Darwin's time. And they have all these epicycles, you know, convergent evolution, incomplete lineage sorting, different rates of evolution, rapid evolution, blah, blah. I mean, we could talk about all these, but each of these are basically exercises in explaining or horizontal gene transfer is another one explaining away data and explaining away why the data does not fit the tree of life, rather than explaining why the data does fit your model. And so the tree of life has been highly criticized even by mainstream biologists over the last, you know, 15, 20 years. And I think this is again, a major shift in biological thinking that ID would have predicted and that the evolutionary perspective would not have predicted.
And I think most, you know, we can talk about all these, but the most important fundamental problem with evolution is its inability to explain new, complex biological features. Yes, I'm talking about molecular machines or the information to produce new proteins, but I'm also talking about things like body plans or complex traits like eyes or ears or wings or feathers. Many of these important features which, you know, the whole point of evolutionary theory is to explain the origin of complex biological systems, to explain where biological systems come from. And we've seen many evolutionary biologists speaking out about how the neo Darwinian model has failed to explain this fundamental aspect of evolution and namely, the origin of new, complex biological features. Now, of course, again, you see folks trying to come up with alternative models like evo devo. Well, you dig into the details of evo devo and you don't actually see these miracle Mutations that they've long promised us. They're somehow generating new body plans with reasonable amounts of mutations. It just is not happening.
So I think that the origin of complex biological features remains unresolved, whether we're talking about the standard Neo Darwinian model or even some of these newer evo devo type models or other models. And so these failures of Neo Darwinism have led to the emergence of a new group of scientists called Third Way evolutionists. We can talk about them later. But I think that they sort of reflect the fact that the Neo Darwinian model has so many unresolved problems that people are just giving up on it. Hmm.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And that was actually going to be my next question. You know, you've got even mainstream evolutionary biologists who are looking for another explanation.
So in your Salvo interview, you do cite the rise of the Third Way evolution camp as an encouraging trend. Why do you say this?
[00:26:23] Speaker B: Yeah, so all these failures of Neo Darwinism that we've been talking about over the last 10 or 15 years have led to the emergence of a new camp called the Third Way evolution camp. And they're basically a group of mainstream evolutionary scientists who don't support id, but they do recognize the need for new evolutionary models. In fact, some Third Way proponents even acknowledge that there is teleology and purpose in living systems and that we need to have biology taking these sort of teleological trends in biology very seriously. So I would say that the rise of the Third Way camp is a major step in the right direction. But for biology to give you idea of some of the things they're saying. A University of Oxford physiologist named Dennis Noble, he's one of the leaders of the Third Way camp. He has said numerous times that Neo Darwinism is dead. And one of his sort of lead partners is University of Chicago geneticist James Shapiro. And he wrote an article in 2024 which said the ID argument has a valid point with regard to the explanatory limits of. Of Neo Darwinism, still widely regarded as the only legitimate scientific explanation of evolution. Now, it's important to point out neither Noble nor Shapiro are supporters of id.
What they're showing is that there's more than just ID when it comes to sort of a critical mass of credible scientific dissent from the standard Neo Darwinian model. And there's a lot more scientists who are joining their camp and are expressing dissatisfaction with Neo Darwinism. So the fact this is happening, Andrew, Hearkens a major trend in evolutionary biology today that is being willing to actually, you know, point out that Neo Darwinism is seriously flawed. And this, of course, I think is just fully supportive of what we've been saying in the ID world for a long time and makes us feel like, okay, we probably were on the right track.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's very encouraging to hear those on the other side who, who don't subscribe to ID saying, hey, these guys have a point over here, you know.
Now you also, in the Salvo interview talk about the growth of the ID scientific community.
So maybe we can just spend a few minutes talking about that growth.
One of the areas you see that growth is of course, our summer seminars. Can you tell us a little bit about the seminars? How many students have gone through them? What are they doing now? How are they contributing to ID research?
[00:28:44] Speaker B: Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, we have now had our summer seminar going since 2007 and we've had over a thousand students go through our summer seminar. And what's really exciting is that many of them went through our program when they were undergraduates or PhD students and they have since gone on to get their PhDs, do their postdocs and now they've got their own faculty positions and they are doing ID research and they're getting involved with the research community and publishing peer reviewed papers. So this is exactly what we want. We want to have sort of this, you know, undergraduate to tenured faculty doing ID research pipeline. And it's absolutely happening. It's very, very exciting. And these folks are the next generation of ID theorists and we've, we've basically created a very vibrant and growing community of ID friendly scientists. I don't want to give too many names here because some of these folks are still untenured or undercover and we do, we do fund their research. But what is some of the research that they're doing?
Well, they're looking at irreducible complexity. We're actually funding research into, you know, basically testing for molecular machines, whether they are actually irreducibly complex.
We are looking at the ability of bacteria to adapt to changing conditions and whether or not they can actually weed out deleterious mutations, or whether some intelligent agent needs to be responsible for making sure that the information in a population is remaining intact.
So these are very interesting questions we're asking.
We are looking at cancer. We have multiple projects actually that are showing that ID has utility in fighting disease.
One of our ID 3.0 projects is actually developing nanomachines that can kill antibiotic resistant bacteria and also cancer cells. And this is being headed up by Jim Tor at Rice University and also Richard Ganesekerra, biochemistry professor at Biola University. And what they're showing is that these nanomachines require intelligent intervention at every stage of producing them. And if that's the case, there's no way that you can produce these molecular machines that are required for the origin of life through an unguided process on the early Earth. If somebody like Jim Tour is struggling to produce these complex nanomachines, how are unguided, blind, dumb evolutionary mechanisms going to be able to do this in the first life? But they're producing these nanomachines and they actually could have very practical medical benefits to help target antibiotic resistant bacteria or targeting cancer cells, maybe even targeting viruses.
Other cancer research that's being done in our community is showing that Michael Bee's thesis of Darwin devolves actually applies very well to cancer research.
One of our researchers in our community, his name is Carl Krueger and he spent most of his career as a very high level manager of cancer research at the nih. And Carl, a few years ago read Michael Behe's book Darwin Evolves, where Behe actually came up with this idea that when Darwinian evolution is acting at the biochemical level, what it's doing is it's actually breaking features. It's either diminishing function or breaking function at the molecular level. This makes sense. There are far more ways to break something. There are to make it work better, better. And Darwinian evolution is going to tend to take the path of least resistance. So this is kind of like, you know, you want to make your cargo faster. You have options. You could either rebuild the engine and give it more cylinders, or you could maybe just get rid of the back seat, rip off the rear view mirrors, reduce drag, reduce weight. Well, Darwinian evolution finds it is much easier to do the ladder, to reduce drag, reduce rate, to break things that are maybe in the way of some immediate need that you have.
And so it turns out that when cancer develops, it evolves in much the same way. Some folks have cited cancer as the supposed evidence of the power of Darwinian evolution, but really what cancer shows is it's the breakage of molecular mechanisms that are supposed to prevent out of control cell growth. And so Carl Krueger has published a couple of papers in mainstream cancer journals showing that when you look at the actual molecular mechanisms that are causing cancer to happen, it's the breakage of molecular mechanisms. And then lastly, a very exciting innovation is that recently the ID research community published a paper in the Journal Scientific Reports, this again was headed up by Richard Ginesicara at Rice University. Scientific Reports, of course, is from the Nature family of journals. And this paper basically shows that there are certain plant molecules that are very effective at killing cancer cells. So what Richard has asked is why should that be? Why should it be that organisms that are far removed from human beings on the tree of life have certain molecules that are very effective in, at treating human diseases? In a design world you might expect that, you know, the biosphere is basically designed to allow there to be therapeutic benefits among organisms that are otherwise very, very distantly related from one another. But Richard Ganese Cara, under his sort of ID perspective, he thought that he would be able to find therapeutic benefits from these plant molecules. And that's in fact what he found. And again, I'm not saying that other non ID researchers haven't done similar research. But what's interesting about Richard is that he's an ID theorist and he was able to predict and justify the findings of his research through his intelligent design perspective. And this kind of led him to do that kind of research.
Other research that we are doing is we are looking at design and systematics. We talked about this earlier, looking at basically dependency graphs and whether or not they can better explain how traits are distributed across different organisms than the idea of common descent. But for me, one of the most interesting projects that our research program has is what is called the Engineering Research Group. This is a consortium of over 100 engineers and biologists who are working together under the assumption that when we view biological systems as if they are engineered, then we can make better progress in understanding how they operate and how they function.
And so this Engineering Research Group has done studies on the bacterial flagellum using sort of an engineering approach to understanding the design of the flagellum and also the bacterial chemotaxis system. And then also it's looked at glycolysis. There was a paper published by Emily Reeves and an ID friendly engineer, Jerry Fudge, in an IEEE journal last year where they basically found that the reason why glycolysis, its basic pathways reused in so many diverse types of organisms, is not necessarily just because of universal common ancestry, but because it's a very, very effective design and it's a very efficient design. It both is generating parts we need as well as energy. It uses recycling. It's a very, very efficient biochemical pathway and that's why it's reused in some different organisms.
Another one of my favorite papers to come out of the Engineering Research Group was done by the ID friendly engineer, Stuart Burgess. He took on that sort of famous vertebrate limb icon of evolution. And again, the argument that we've heard is that the reason why so many different vertebrates use the same basic skeletal structure in their limbs is because of common ancestry. There's no functional reason why the same skeletal pattern should be reused, say for whales that need flippers, or birds that need wings, or human beings that need arms, or horses that need, you know, front legs, et cetera, et cetera. Well, what Stuart Burgess did is he's, he's an engineer. He designs things for a living. He understands how things need to be made in order for them to work. And he did an engineering analysis of the vertebrate limb published in a mainstream engineering journal, Biomimetics Journal, and basically found that the vertebrate limb skeletal pattern is exceptionally well suited for all these different types of organisms, all these different types of designs, sort of the bone structure of one bone, two, you can't see my one bone, two bone, lots of bones in the wrist and then digits in the hand or the pest. He's found that this is a very, very well suited limb structure for all kinds of different uses within vertebrates. And actually there are good functional reasons for why this design is being reused. It's not simply because of common ancestry. We can explain it because of the functional design needs. So these are just some of the papers that are coming out of the engineering research group which has made great progress in understanding biology when we assume that it was engineered.
A couple other projects we can talk about. One is called the Waiting Times Project.
This is basically a project which is looking out the amount of time that is available for the fossil record to produce new complex features.
They're looking right now at actually, and actually I'm part of this project as well, the origin of whales and whether or not there's enough time in the fossil record to convert a fully terrestrial land mammal into a fully aquatic whale.
And that's a very interesting question. Or is there some other source that is necessary to generate the information that we're seeing in biology?
One of our last really fascinating projects, Andrew, in the ID 3.0 research program is being done by Michael Egnor, who of course is a neurosurgeon at Stony Brook University.
And he has sought to understand how our physiology allows blood to flow smoothly through the brain. One of the problems is that when our heart pulses blood throughout our body, our capillaries in the brain are extremely fragile. And if that blood flow and that pulse of the heartbeat is not carefully controlled and modulated. That would actually burst the fragile capillaries in our brain. What Egmore found is that capillary, capillary brain blood flow is controlled by something called a band stop filter and cerebrospinal fluid is controlled by something called a band pass filter. Now these are both ideas from the world of electrical engineering. So basically, human design technology is helping us to unlock how brain, how blood flow is controlled as it goes through the brain. And so this shows that sort of an engineering perspective, again helps us understand how biology operates and how biology is elegantly designed. We have many other projects that we're funding right now in the ID 3.0 research program. And many of these projects, by the way, are being worked on by summer seminar graduates. The point of this, however, is that we have a vibrant research program. We have a vibrant group of students who are coming up to form the next generation of ID theorists and they are publishing this research in mainstream scientific journals. The ID research program has been published in many, many different peer reviewed journals, including journals like Nature, ACS Nano, acs, Applied Materials Interfaces, Nature Nanotechnology, the Journal of Bacteriology, Scientific Reports, Frontiers in Microbiology, Frontiers in Genetics, Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, Biosystems, BMC Evolutionary Biology, BMC Genomics, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Springer Proceedings in Mathematics and Statistics, plos One, Journal of Theoretical Biology and many, many others. So the point of all this is ID has matured into a full fledged research program. So I know we're running short on time here, but this is one of the reasons why we are so optimistic about the future of id. Where ID is going, we have a strong research program, we have students who are coming up to do ID research and are doing it. So from my vantage as sort of the research director at Discovery Institute, I see the future of ID is looking very bright and I am very, very excited to see where it goes in the future.
[00:40:36] Speaker A: Yeah, so many fruitful avenues of research there that you've laid out. And that's just the stuff we can talk about now if people want to follow, you know, get updated on the latest ID research in this program. Where would they turn?
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Well, we have a lot of this listed on Discovery Institute's website. Go to discovery.org id and you can find links to our research homepage. We also have a homepage that lists many of the peer reviewed papers that have been published out of our scientific community at the, in the ID community. Now it's important to note, as you just said, we can't even talk about all of the research projects we're funding or all the research papers that have been published out of the ID research community. Why is that? Well, many of our researchers are actually still undercover, and if we were to talk about their research, the papers they're publishing, we would actually be jeopardizing their careers. So there's still a serious problem in terms of, you know, the ID research community still needing to be someone undercover, someone behind the scenes, someone in the closet. Hopefully, over time, more and more of this research can be talked about. But right now, this is where we're at. So what we posted on our website is basically the material that can be publicly disclosed where it wouldn't jeopardize somebody's career.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Well, science and culture today is a good, good source for reporting on these different projects as they near completion or get to a milestone. So we can look out for details there.
Now, just very briefly, where, where do you see things going in the coming years? Do you see a paradigm shift on the horizon given all of this fruitful research and, and the way things are going with evolutionary biology right now?
[00:42:19] Speaker B: So, look, I, I'm in this for the long haul, Andrew. I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know how long it's going to take for ID to become the dominant paradigm in biology. I would like to think that if the, if the, that the truth wins out in the end. So I would like to think that, you know, maybe 100 years from now or 50 years from now, it will be in a very different place. Right now, the ID research program, I kind of compare it to a snowball, snowball start very small, but over time, they pick up steam and they get bigger and bigger and bigger. Right now, the ID research program has, you know, it did start off small, like when, you know, when the Dover trial happened, it was there, it existed, but it was still, you know, in its early stages, but not that it didn't exist, and it did. But ID has grown in its research program. The snowball is starting to grow in size. This, again, is why we don't sleep very much. And again, this is why we need support to keep up with all the growth of our research program, our scientific community. And it's a good problem to have. But I need sleep, and folks in my team need sleep sometimes. And so we're growing at a rate that is sometimes very hard to keep up with. So. So again, great problems to have.
I've never been somebody who was saying, you know, When I first got involved with ID in the late 2000s, early 2000s, I would never saying, oh, we're going to see a paradigm shift in five or ten years. Okay? I don't know. I honestly don't know how long it's going to take. I do know that things are progressing in the right direction. How do I know that? Look at the growth of the Third Way Evolution camp. Not only are they now openly stating serious criticisms of the Neo Darwinian paradigm, and even like Jim Shapiro, not an ID scientist, is saying that, you know, many of their criticisms are the same ones that idea has been using. So we're seeing ID's criticisms of Neo Darwinism going mainstream at the same time. Or the other side of that coin is that the Third Way evolution camp is actually saying that we need to take teleology and purpose more seriously in biology. Now, this is exactly what IDEA has been saying. They don't necessarily think that this teleology comes from a mind that is outside the biosphere. Okay? So they think that, you know, this is sort of a different form of teleology, but nonetheless they're acknowledging that teleology is real and it needs to be taken more seriously. So, Andrew, I think that we see trends in biology today that are exactly where ID would want biology to be going and are that are leading in the direction of id.
How long is it going to take for it to get there? I don't know. What we've seen in the last 10 or 15 years is the growth of what is called the extended evolutionary synthesis. This is sort of a smorgasbord of new ideas that are supposed to either amend and reform or in some cases even replace the standard Neo Darwinian model. Now, these extended evolutionary synthesis models, they are still materialistic models of evolution. And I think it might take some time to before mainstream biology realizes that the whole attempt and project to get materialistic models is just not going to work. And you need to come up with a different type of looking at a different way of looking at biology, different approach, and that would involve intelligent causation. What we're trying to show in the ID community is that ID has great explanatory value. It's making positive predictions that can help us better understand how biology works. It can be used as a guide or a heuristic to do research. And this is seen in all the great research projects that are coming out of the ID research community. Go to our research homepage and read all about a lot of what we're doing. Okay? So ID is a useful scientific paradigm. It's a fruitful scientific theory. It makes good predictions. It can be used to do good science and to guide science. So what we want is we want more and more scientists to see this, even if they aren't persuaded ID is correct, at least to help them realize that ID is a player and that it deserves a place at the table in the conversation if that can happen. And I think that as time goes on, we'll see id, you know, gaining more and more prominence and gaining more and more acceptance in the scientific community. But it is happening. It's already happening. ID is being taken more seriously and it's being published in more and more journals. So I'm very excited about the direction.
[00:46:23] Speaker A: That things are going in exciting times indeed. Now, Kasey, thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to give us sort of a state of the union on where things stand with Intelligent design and the ID research community. Very helpful and very encouraging. So sure.
[00:46:39] Speaker B: Andrew.
I'm literally late right now for another Zoom with one of our research teams that's looking at function for pseudo genes. So I have to go. That's another project we're funding, so I have to go leave right now and join that group. I have them postpone the Zoom by an hour just so I could do this podcast with you. So gotta run.
[00:46:57] Speaker A: Yeah, no worries. Thanks for your time, Casey.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: Thanks, Andrew.
[00:47:01] Speaker A: Well, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for tuning in today. We'll see you next time on ID the Future.
[00:47:07] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
