[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today we're sharing the second half of a recent conversation with Dr. Casey Luskin from the Truthful Hope podcast.
Casey is critiquing theistic evolution, the view that God used evolutionary mechanisms to create life.
In part one, Cayce reviewed the terms of the debate, including what is meant by the word evolution.
He explains that the main problem with the theistic evolution perspective is that it inherits all the numerous scientific problems that are associated with the standard evolutionary account.
He began reviewing some of those problems by discussing the scientific limitations in explaining the origin of life.
On this episode, he continues by next addressing the inadequacy of natural selection and random mutation to generate biological complexity. Luskin argues that the required complexity of life is so high that blind natural mechanisms are insufficient. He also points out that even non ID scientists have expressed skepticism about the explanatory power of Neo Darwinism.
Let's jump back into the conversation now. Here's Dr. Luskin and his host, Jacob Vasquez.
[00:01:26] Speaker C: The next question though, is, is another biggie, Natural selection and random mutation. I know that's also another huge topic, but you said in your article, arguably the evolution of life is where theistic evolutionists defer the most to orthodox Darwinian thinking.
What is natural selection? And then what are the limits? Because I know there's a lot of, let's call it mysticism to natural selection. So maybe just unpack that for us a little bit.
[00:01:54] Speaker A: Yeah, you will sometimes find theistic evolutionists who will acknowledge that we really have no explanation for the origin of life. And they may even some might even think that there is room for intelligent design and seeing, seeing God's hand in the origin of life.
But when it comes to the evolution of life, you know, after life got started, its subsequent biological evolution, most of your standard theistic evolutionists are going to take the standard evolutionary view.
And so what is natural selection? Well, natural selection is the idea that if you look at a population of organisms, you see variation.
There's differences between individuals and a population, and some individuals are going to be better suited to survive and reproduce than others. And over time, those that are better able to survive and reproduce will tend to do so. They will tend to leave more offspring. And so a species will evolve in the direction of those individuals that are better able to survive and reproduce. I mean, that's natural selection in a nutshell. Basically, you are, there's no intelligent agent that is guiding the process. It's just a natural event that happens that those individuals which tend to leave more offspring will, will do so. And the species will then evolve in their direction. And it's used, as you said, you know, you talked about mysticism. It is sometimes used almost like a magic wand. Okay. And you can see this actually in discourse from origin of life theorists. How did the first cell evolve? Well, they will say, well, once we got a self replicating molecule, we don't need to explain any of that because natural selection, you know, wave the magic wand. My colleague, Dr. Brian Miller, he actually has this Harry Potter wand and he takes it to presentations to show people what they do. They just wave a wand. Natural selection can do it. No details required. No, no, really, you know, detailed explanations are needed.
And so natural selection is seen as this just all powerful force that can do whatever you need it to do. You don't need to fill in the gas. And so that is sort of the quote, unquote, the mysticism that you mentioned. I think that's probably what you're referring to.
There's some problems though, with natural selection, and namely it requires.
Okay, well, let's bracket the efficacy of natural selection to spread helpful traits through a population. There actually is some real problems there, but let's assume it can do that job. Natural selection can only preserve traits that are already there, okay? And according to the standard neo Darwinian view, traits have to evolve one small little mutation at a time, okay? The problem is that we're seeing many traits that require many mutations to be present before you get any selective advantage to help you survive and reproduce. Okay? And so this really is the crux of the problem with natural selection. My colleague, Dr. Douglas Axe, who is associated with this here at the Discovery Institute, he did a population genetic study and he asked the question just how many mutations could arise in the whole history of life on Earth if you had to have a minimal number of mutations present before you get any advantage? Okay, I'm not talking about a situation where every little mutation gives you a successive advantage towards survival and reproduction, okay? When you only need one mutation to give you some advantage towards surviving and reproducing, natural selection generally seems able to get the job done. I mean, there are some constraints. I read one paper that said just fixing one helpful mutation in a population like humans might take 6 million years. Okay? But generally speaking, let's talk about bacteria. One mutation that's needed to give you an advantage that can usually arise and spread in that population. But when you need more than one popul, one More than one mutation before you get any advantage, then the likelihood of you getting both of those mutations and one organism, you know, in one place at what time starts to go down at an exponential rate. Let me give you an analogy to understand why it's so difficult to get multiple mutations coordinated together in one organism when all of them are needed before you get some advantage. Think of the example of a bike thief trying to open a bike lock, okay? And if that bike lock just has, you know, one digit and you just have to guess, you know, Basically, you know, 0 through 9, you can probably get that lock open pretty quickly just by flipping through that one, you know, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. You'll get the right magical, you know, digit pretty quickly. And your chances of getting it by chance would be 1 in 10, right? But let's say now that bike lock has two digits in the combination. Well, now your likelihood of getting the right combo by chance is not one in ten. It's one in ten squared. Right? One in ten times one in ten, which is one in a hundred. So now it's going to take you basically 10 times longer to find that right combination. Now, let's say that you need. You have four digits on that bike lock, and you need to be able to open up.
I'll get all four digits right. Before the bike lock will open. What will open up? Now? The likelihood of you getting the right combination by chance is 1 in 10 to the fourth power. 1 in 10,000. Okay? So with each digit that you add, with each new, you know, pro new item that you need to get right, your likelihood of getting the right combination in order to open the lock goes down at an exponential rate. Okay? It's the same thing with mutations. Getting one mutation may not be that hard, but with each new mutation that's needed to be present before you get any selective advantage. Again, I'm not talking about a case where each mutation gives you an advantage. I'm saying when you need multiple mutations to be present before you get any advantage, with each mutations that is added, the likelihood of you getting all those mutations in one place and one time by chance goes down at an exponential rate.
And it goes down very quickly. And so, getting back to what Doug Axe calculated, he found that if a trade required just seven or more mutations before giving you an advantage, it could never arise in the history of life, even in a population of bacteria where evolution is supposed to have its best shot. Right? Because bacteria, they have very, very large population sizes, very rapid generation times, very high Mutation rates, your evolution sort of has all of the probabilistic resources in its favor with bacteria to get lots of mutations going, okay? But again, if just seven or more mutations are needed before you get a, an advantage, then what he found in his population genetic study is that you could not produce that trait in the whole history of life on Earth. But when it comes to doing that same kind of thing in animals, where we have much smaller population sizes, much longer generation times, much lower mutation rates, then the likelihood of getting multiple mutations before you get an advantage goes down even more. There was a paper in the journal genetics, published in 2008, that found that if you're talking about, say, a population like humans or hominins, that the likelihood of just getting two mutations, two mutations that have to be present in order to give you some advantage, that that would take over 200 million years to arise in a population of hominids, given, you know, reasonable known population size of hominids, their generation times, their mutation rates, et cetera. So what that, that basically means is that, you know, look at the. The millions of base pair differences between humans and chimps. If just there's, you know, something like 40 to 50 million base pairs that are different just in our single nucleotide variation, if just two of those mutations are necessary to give you some advantage, then they can never arise in the 6 to 8 million years since we supposedly shared our common ancestor with chimpanzees. And this is a problem throughout the evolutionary history of life on Earth, where many, many traits would require many mutations to be present. I'll give one final example of this, and then I'll give it back to you, Jacob. But getting back to Doug Axe, he did research finding that an enzyme of fairly typical complexity called beta lactamase, the likelihood of getting an amino acid sequence to yield a functional fold in a beta lactamase enzyme is 1 in 10 to the 77th power. Okay? What this tells you is that many mutations have to be present before you get a functional beta lactamase enzyme. And this is an enzyme that I would say is a fairly typical complexity. So it's very representative of a lot of enzymes that would be out there in life, okay? If you would need far more than seven mutations to be able to get a funct to be, to be present, already present all at once before you could get a functional beta lactamase enzyme. What this tells you is that evolving the complexity of just your average protein throughout the history of life on Earth, random mutation, natural selection is not going to be able to do the job. This is mathematical modeling. This is empirically based evidence from experiments done on proteins. I think we can say that naturally. You know, under, under other reasonable circumstances, folks would say that, look, yes, random mutation, natural selection, it's good at some things. It can cause antibiotic resistance to happen in bacteria. You know, it can break features very efficiently.
It can maybe cause different eye colors or hair colors to arise. You want to get a rabbit that has a white fur coat so that it's camouflaged, it might be able to do that. But to produce highly complex features or even features of just average complexity in the history of life on Earth, I think that under normal circumstances, we would look at this mechanism, how inefficient it is. It's basically a blind trial and error process. And you would say this is not the explanation for how these complex features arose. But for some reason, folks really are wedded to random mutation and natural selection and, and they're not willing to question it. If you don't, if you think that, you know, it's just ID people saying this. Lynn Margulis, who was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences until she died a number of years ago, she said neo Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of mutations led to evolutionary change, which led a new species. I believed it until I looked at the evidence. And she said, new mutations don't create new species, they create offspring that are impaired.
So there's some serious problems with the mutation selection mechanism being the driving force to generate the complexity of life on Earth.
[00:12:33] Speaker C: Thank you for unpacking that further. Casey. The other interesting part of your article that I found was what you subtitled Altenberg 16.
I know, before we start recording, you told me there is a more recent event.
Spoiler alert. It's an event.
But this specific One was from 2008. So maybe just unpack what it was and then explain the more recent event that occurred.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah. So the Altenberg 16 was a group where basically 16 scientists from around the world convened in Altenburg, Austria, this is in 2008. And they basically discussed problems with the standard Neo Darwinian model of evolution. And the journal Nature, probably considered the world's top scientific journal, wrote a little story about this Altenberg 16 conference, as it was called. And they quoted very, very top scientists saying things like the modern synthesis. That's the Neo Darwinian model of evolution. The modern synthesis is. Is remarkably good at modeling the survival of the fittest. But not good at modeling the arrival of the fittest. Or they said things like the origin of wings and the invasion of the land are things that evolutionary theory has told us little about. So they were really challenging this basic fundamental ability of the Neo Darwinian model of evolution to explain the origin of new complex biological features. And this is sort of rumblings of something that I would call the, the third way evolutionary camp, which is a group of biologists who reject Neo Darwinism. They don't think that it's been very successful at explaining how new complex features arise, how the tree of life, why the tree of life is such a mess, many other sort of discoveries that modern biology is making. They are still evolutionists. They don't support intelligent design, but they also reject the standard Neo Darwinian model. And this, this viewpoint is actually growing in prominence. And some very interesting thinkers involved with this, folks like Dennis Noble at Oxford University, who I got to actually do a dialogue with last year, and Jim Shapiro, geneticist at University of Chicago. Shapiro wrote an article last year where he said the ID argument has a valid point with regard to the explanatory limits of neo Darwinism, still widely regarded as the only legitimate scientific explanation of evolution. And, and these are some great examples of folks who do not support ID but also reject neo Darwinism.
There was sort of a follow up to the Altenburg 16 conference in 2016 where the Royal Society of London hosted a conference that was basically devoted to looking at problems with the Neo Darwinian synthesis.
And in sort of some of the promotional materials about this conference, they said that they, that they would be looking at developments in evolutionary theory in adjacent fields that have produced calls for revision of the standard theory of evolution. And the opening lecture in that conference was given by an Austrian biologist named Gerd Mueller. And he focused on claims where he said the Neo Germany model does not explain what he called complex levels of evolution, things like the origin of body plans, complex behaviors, complex physiology, development, the origin of novel characters. And he said that the modern synthesis is focused on characters that exist already and their variation and maintenance across populations, but not on how they originate.
And so he went on to then propose kind of like an evo devo take on how body plans arise and new complex features arise. But the bottom line is that what this conference showed is that the Neo Darwinian model, it is being critiqued at the highest levels of the scientific community now. I don't think they have a good replacement model for it yet. In fact, I think that a lot of the third way evolution scientists they're still looking for what I would call a coherent replacement model. Okay, Evo devo is interesting, but it has yet been shown to be able to produce new body plans and sort of that, that key evolutionary, you know, magic bullet that they need to find explaining how fundamentally new types of organisms evolve. They still have not solved the problem that Neo Darwinism was not able to solve. So I wish them the best. I think they've, that some of the third way thinkers are really interesting people with some great ideas and they may actually contribute to our understanding of how life adapts to changes in the environment. I think they've done some really cool work, but they haven't really solved that fundamental problem yet. That remains to be done.
[00:17:09] Speaker C: That's really helpful to know too because you know, a lot of people think Darwinian Darwinian evolution is just a brute fact. It's always been the same. Darwin's theory remains, but really in the scholarly realm it's.
There's some talk, there's rumors about how to rehash it.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: So it's very much so. I know Very, very much so.
Jake, didn't mean to cut you off there.
[00:17:31] Speaker C: Yeah, no, you're good. That, that's, that's really good for our listeners to know. The last thing I want, if I.
[00:17:37] Speaker A: Could throw one more thing in. One interesting thing about Neo Darwinism is you can find a lot of these mainstream non ID critics of Neo Darwinism have sort of lamented about the fact that they are pressured to not publicly speak out against standard evolutionary theory. Okay, so Jerry Fedor, who's a cognitive scientist, and physicist, Massimo Pietelli Palmerini, they wrote a book called what Darwin Got Wrong. And they said in the book that they are atheists, basically. But then they said this. They said, we've been told that even if Darwin was substantially wrong to claim that natural selection is the mechanism of evolution, nonetheless we shouldn't say so, not anyhow in public. To do that is, however, inadvertently to align oneself with the forces of darkness. And they went on to say that Neo Darwinism is taken as axiomatic. It goes literally unquestioned. A view that looks to contradict it either directly or by implication is ipso factor rejected. Entire departments, journals and research centers work on this principle.
Daniel Hillis, a computer scientist and member of the National Academy of Engineering, he said there's a strong school of thought then one should never question Darwin in public.
Going back to Lynn Margulis, she obviously was a major critic of Neo Darwinism. And she said that honest critics of evolutionary way of thinking are often dismissed as if they were Christian fundamentalists, zealots, or racial bigots. And she said that those who critique neo Darwinism become, quote, Persona non grata in the scientific community. And she was a member of the US National Academy of Sciences. The point is that I think we would see a lot more criticism of neo Darwinism if it were not for some of these pressures, that these are mainstream criticism, non ID evolutionary scientists who are, who are basically materialist atheists who believe in some form of evolution. And they are saying that they feel pressured not to critique Darwin as the neo Darwinian model or, you know, the standard evolutionary view.
I find that very interesting and it shows that I think evolutionary biology is not in a healthy place.
[00:19:45] Speaker C: Yeah, definitely. That's. That's well put.
The last thing I want to talk about is what I find super interesting. And you've done a lot of work on this in your podcast and writing is. And that's junk DNA.
You said this in your article and it's a bit longer of a quote, but I think it's important to. To state for our listeners. He said, theistic evolutionists love to argue that our cells are full of functionless DNA, which many call generic junk. And later on you said, as the argument goes, God would never put. And this is from Francis Collins.
God. Useless. Dn. God will never. Sorry. God would never put useless DNA into our chromosomes. So we must conclude that random mutation and natural selection built our genome. Collins makes these implications clear when he said, unless one is willing to take the position that God has placed shared functionless DNA in these precise positions to confuse and mislead us, the conclusion of a common ancestor for humans and mice is virtually inescapable. That's a really steep claim about God. We'll put that aside. But what is junk DNA? And is there scientific evidence to show that Collins is right or maybe he's wrong? Can you unpack that for us?
[00:21:00] Speaker A: Yeah, great, great question, Jacob. So junk DNA is basically the idea that our genomes are largely full of DNA that doesn't do anything. It's basically evolutionary debris, the result of millions of years of random mutations that have basically bloated our genomes with junk. That's not doing anything for you, the organism. And Francis Collins, you know, very, very smart guy, very eminent scientist, head of the Human Genome Project, former head of the nih, one of the most prominent theistic evolution voices, he said in his book the Language of God that some 45% of the human genome is what he called genetic flotsam. And jetsum. If you're not sure what flotsam and jetsam is, that's basically trash floating in the ocean. Okay, so he's comparing 45% of the human genome to trash. And 45% is actually an estimate that I would say is on the low end. I can quote you from evolutionary scientists saying things that over 90% of our genome is junk DNA. Richard Dawkins once said 95%. I've even seen scientists saying that 98, 99% of our genome is junk DNA. Okay, so you can see people saying that huge proportions of our genome is junk DNA. All right, so is it right? No, it's now known that it's not right. In 2012, there was a huge paper published in Nature from the ENCODE Consortium. This was a project composed of hundreds of scientists around the world who were basically studying these non protein coding DNA elements.
That's part of what ENCODE stood for. And what they looked at is basically, is there evidence that the non protein coding parts of our genome are biochemically active? And the answer is not only yes, it's yes in spades. They found evidence that over 80% of the human genome shows evidence of biochemical functionality. Okay, this is from a 2012 Nature paper. And what's really interesting is that after that paper came out, Collins actually changed his sort of lingo that he uses about junk DNA. This is actually what he said. This is quoted from, from a conference speech that Collins gave in January of 2015. So this was over two. Between two to three years after that huge ENCODE paper came out. He said, I would say in terms of junk DNA, we don't use that term anymore because I think it was pretty much a case of hubris to imagine that we could dispense with any part of the genome as if we knew enough to say it wasn't functional. There will be parts of the genome that are just, you know, random collections of repeats like alu's. Like that's problem with what he's saying there too. But he says that most of the genome that we used to think was there for Spacer turns out to be doing stuff that. And most of that stuff is about regulation and that's where the epigenome gets involved and it's teaching us a lot. So, wow, Colin's saying now he doesn't use the term junk DNA, but yet in this quote, he's still saying that repeat DNA like alu's, that he says it's probably not doing anything. Well, we know now that, that's not true either. In fact, every time that evolutionists start to say that, okay, this is a piece of junk, we know it's not doing anything, lo and behold, we discover functions for that type of DNA. I'm in a dialogue right now with all these scientists that are saying that all the repeat sequences that are different between humans and chimps can be ignored as just genetic junk because they don't do anything. But yet there's papers in the literature that say that the different, the DNA that's different between humans and chimps is functional. So what we see over and over again. And by the way, most of the people arguing this are theistic evolutionists. For some reason. They love this junk DNA argument. They love to see our genomes as cobbled together, the result of random mutations, not intelligently designed for a purpose. I don't know why. Because they believe in a, in a, an intelligent being, a creator God, who could do this, you know, who could create a very, you know, highly functional genome. But for some reason they consistently will miss the literature that is showing function throughout our genome. And they will just go with the standard evolutionary assumption that if you don't know what it's doing, it's probably junk. Seen this more times than I can count over the years. It's very, very interesting.
And I don't, I don't know what's behind it, but it's very unusual. Yeah.
[00:25:15] Speaker C: So interesting, the walk back from Francis Collins from junk DNA. I was kind of stunned when you said that.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: You know, he walks it back. But then in the same quote, he's still holding onto it because he wants to say, well, these repeat sequences are junk. So it's, it's just, it's not following the evidence. Go ahead. I'm sorry.
[00:25:33] Speaker C: No, you're good. I've had, you know, friends who subscribe to theistic evolution come to me and say, well, it shows God's more powerful. It shows God's power if he's doing that. And you know, there's theological reasons why that's not the case. But even if it were the case, you can't do, you can't get the nature of God from your expectation. You have to get the nature of God from his effect or else you're doing it the wrong way because then it's your imagination really.
[00:26:00] Speaker A: Well, you just said, I've seen that too. People think that God should create this hyper smart, efficient universe that can build life using purely natural mechanisms. And yeah, God could do that if he wanted. God could do Anything. Okay, the question is, what does the evidence say? Does the evidence suggest that this is in fact the way God did it? And the answer is no. We don't see information rich code, molecular machines, computer like information processing, things that are at the heart of life. We don't see that in our universe doesn't seem to be able to produce those kinds of things through blind natural laws. Okay, so we need some other mechanism. And for me as a Christian theist, you know, I can see very good theological reasons why maybe God would not want to just use blind natural mechanisms in the Bible I'm speaking right now, I'm putting my hat on that I'm a Christian. This is not science. But in the Bible we see many examples where God will do really cool things that nature doesn't do in order to let people know that he's there. Okay, we see this like when Elijah poured a bunch of water on the altar just to make it really clear that when, you know, fire came down from heaven and it lit it on fire, this was not a just a natural event, okay? This was God at work. And what happens after he does that? All these prophets of BAAL go around screaming, oh my gosh, the Lord is God. Because God revealed himself in this totally non natural way. So there is good. And look at Jesus rising from the dead. That's where God actually, you know, Paul says that God gave proof that we need to repent of our sins and turn to Jesus because God raised Jesus from the dead. A totally non natural event to let us know that something really important is happening here. We need to pay attention to it. God is at work. Okay? So there is ample precedent from the Bible of God revealing himself by doing non natural things. Sometimes, very often, God uses natural causes. I fully believe, I'm not saying that God doesn't use natural causes. And I'm not saying that when God does use natural causes that somehow God is theologically absent. We get accused of that. No, no, no, no, no. Never, never in a million years is any Christian theist who supports ID saying that, oh, if God works through natural mechanisms, that somehow God is, you know, theologically absent in some cosmic sense. Not at all. God can use natural mechanisms, but he's not bound to only do that. We, as I think the way I like to approach it as a scientist is let's follow the evidence where it leads. If natural causes are the best explanation, let's go with that. But if an intelligent cause is the best explanation, we can use the scientific method to go with that too. We talked about that last time. So I think we shouldn't constrain our science by theological assumptions about how God has to act. Because if you are a Christian, you have ample reasons to believe that God could use natural causes or might not use natural causes. And again, to put my Christian hat back on again, why wouldn't God potentially want to reveal Himself in the creation of life on earth? After all, Romans 1:20 says that God is clearly seen in what has been made. So we might have an expectation that God would reveal Himself in the creation of life on earth and do something really interesting that just doesn't come about by natural mechanisms to show that he is behind it all. He is behind you and me and life on earth. So there's no theological problem with that view either. God could do it however he wants, right? He could have made a universe, a clockwork universe to create life. Some folks call that like deistic design or, sorry, deistic evolution rather than theistic evolution.
Or he could miraculously intervene, or he could do any number of other ways to get life going where we might be able to detect design. The bottom line is I want to not assume what God did or did not do or could or could not do. I want to follow the evidence where it leads. God has freedom to act as he wishes. And for me, as a Christian, that means when I want to become a scientist, I can just go and see what the evidence says. And this is what the early scientists thought they were doing. They were literally thinking God's thoughts after him, that God had freedom to create the world as he wished, and we can go and discover how he did it. And so that means that as a scientist, I don't have to let theology dictate what my answers have to be. I can follow the evidence where it leads. And I think that theistic evolutionists, sometimes, they don't do that when they tell themselves that God had to use only blind natural mechanisms. They're not really. They're letting theology dictate their science. And I don't think that's a good way to do science.
Right.
[00:30:35] Speaker C: It's almost limiting in a way, and it's not letting the evidence lead you where it, where it's pointing. And that's what you exactly said before. We should look at the evidence, to look back to the effects, to look back to the cause. And that's natural theology at the heart of it. So to our theistic evolution friends, I hope this was helpful.
I hope it shed some light on some of the beliefs you have. And you know. If you disagree, leave some comments. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to further the discussion.
But Kasey, it was really great having you on again. It's just so insightful listening to you talk about these things. So I really appreciate your time.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: Thank you Jacob. A lot of fun and I appreciate your great questions.
[00:31:13] Speaker C: Awesome. Well, thank you guys for joining and God bless.
[00:31:22] Speaker B: That was Casey Luskin in the second half of a conversation critiquing Theistic Evolution on the Truthful Hope podcast with Jacob Vasquez.
Don't miss the first half in a separate episode where Casey clarifies the definitions of evolution and explains some of the problems Neo Darwinism has in explaining the origin of the first life.
We hope you found this discussion informative and helpful. If you have any questions or a suggestion perhaps for a future episode or an interview, if you get in touch, you can reach me anytime by email. AndrewD the future.com that's AndrewD the future.com for the podcast. This is Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:32:05] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
