[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Hello, I am Andrew McDermott. Are life and the universe a mindless accident, the blind outworking of laws governing cosmic, chemical, and biological evolution? That's the official story. Many of us were taught somewhere along the way, but what does the science actually say? Today I'm speaking with Robert Walzer, professor and chair of the department of biology at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. He also served as co chair of the History and philosophy of Science section at the Mississippi Academy of Sciences and received his PhD in anatomy with a focus on neuroanatomy from Ohio State University.
Walter is co author of a new book published by Discovery Institute Press called Evolution and Intelligent Design. In a nutshell, Rob, welcome to the show.
[00:01:02] Speaker C: It's good to be here, Andrew.
[00:01:05] Speaker B: So tell us about the chapter you wrote for this book. It's called irreducible complexity and evolution. And what role does it play in the larger theme of the book?
[00:01:15] Speaker C: Sure. When I began writing this chapter, my task was to kind of lay out evolution and some of the issues related to biology. The previous three chapters dealt with some larger issues, such as the origin of the universe and the origin of life. But now, once we have living forms, then evolution is a relevant topic. And as it stands, evolution kind of is in opposition to intelligent design in many ways, because the features that we see in living organisms are more consistent with the designing intelligence as their source and not consistent with unguided processes such as evolution. And so how does one address these issues of evolution? Well, that's something that I tried to get at in my chapter.
[00:02:03] Speaker B: Okay. And what are some of the issues related to evolution that you explore?
[00:02:08] Speaker C: Sure. So evolution is really the dominant view of mainstream science.
In some ways, it's kind of domineering, and those looking at it can kind of get intimidated by it. If one wants to bring up the issues of intelligent design, they could get shut down by the evolutionists. So what's that person to do? Well, so we want to just look behind the curtain a little bit on evolution and see what is really behind it. And what I found helpful is to define some terms that are important related to evolution and then kind of tease apart their relative contributions. And by doing that, the overwhelming aspect of evolution and its domineering kind of position may be knocked down a notch or two. These terms are change over time, common descent, natural selection, and micro and macro evolution.
[00:03:07] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, I really appreciate that you start there in your chapter, because as we all know, evolution is a loaded word, and it depends what people mean when they talk about it. So you talk about the fact that it can mean change over time, common descent, natural selection, and even micro versus macro evolution, all very important terms to look at. And I think by now, the idea of the future audience is fairly familiar with them. What do you see as the importance of clarifying these terms in this book?
[00:03:40] Speaker C: Well, the problem comes when an evolutionist tries to use one term and conflates it with another. That's equivocation. Maybe there's evidence for one thing and not evidence for something else. And by equivocating, by making them equal, then you sort of imply that there's evidence for something which really doesn't have much evidence. So, for instance, if we take Darwin's finches, Darwin's finches had specific kinds of beaks. Some of them were long and thin for getting insects. Some of them were short and stout for getting seeds. And the production of these differences could be ascribed to microevolution, which is small changes. Now, there's also this term, macroevolution. The idea held by mainstream scientists is that multiple small changes occurring over long periods of time can eventually accumulate and lead to large changes.
But the problem is that there really isn't evidence for that. And that is, there's really not evidence for macroevolution for these big changes, but there is evidence for micro. And so very often micro is conflated with macro. It's stated if micro is true, then macro is true, but that actually is not the case. That's conflation, that's equivocation, and it just doesn't follow. It isn't valid.
Another example is selection. When we consider artificial selection versus natural selection, artificial selection is essentially breeding. This process involves intelligence. Someone is doing selective breeding to cause certain traits to be enhanced.
Now, natural selection is an unguided or accidental process.
Artificial selection, while it can produce some changes, those changes are limited. Natural selection is viewed as mediating all of evolution from the early forms of life to the present day. And that's a big jump, to use artificial selection, which is very limited, to prove natural selection, which is much more encompassing. And in fact, there really isn't evidence for this broad natural selection leading to all these different forms of life, but there is evidence for artificial selection. So when you conflate one with the other and say, if one's true, then the other's true, then all of a sudden you're making a much broader claim about what the evidence actually is able to demonstrate.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. When Darwin labeled his theory natural selection, he was looking at artificial selection, it was similar. He was using it as an analogy. But the two don't equate and can often lead to confusion. Well, most of our audience knows that evolution is strongly held by the mainstream scientific community. Why is this a problem?
[00:06:37] Speaker C: Well, the science of evolution is essentially a historical science, and that's different than a science that you can do in the present day laboratory setting. You can't repeat an experiment in history. You can't even really observe it. Exactly. So the statements that they're able to make are much more limited about its validity or truth. So I think it would be helpful if they had just a little bit more humility and were more open to alternatives, such as intelligent design.
And the problem with them not being open to alternatives is that maybe they get stuck in a rut and they're going down the wrong path, and they don't have any way to correct that because they're not open to any alternatives. So, for instance, if we consider the issue of how closely species are related to one another, the similarity of their features, this has been used to build common descent, that is, that all the present day organisms evolved from common ancestors all the way back to the earliest forms of life.
But that's not the only explanation that one could consider in seeing this relatedness. One could also consider common design, that a designer made these organisms with those similarities because they worked, because they were efficient for the environment that the organisms found themselves in. And this is something that we're familiar with. Designers choose to use features all the time, as we see in human designers. So why not the designer of life do the same thing?
[00:08:16] Speaker B: Some great points there. Well, tell us a little bit about your experience interacting with evolutionists.
[00:08:22] Speaker C: Sure. So I'm thinking of one experience in particular. I had lots of them over the years, but one of them in particular, there was a local scientific organization, and I wanted to give a presentation on intelligent design and the problems with evolution. But I realized that I might run into problems. So just went directly to the organizers, and I just directly asked them permission. Can I give a talk on this kind of subject? Their answer was, there wasn't a venue to do that in, but they would create a new division and allow me to give the presentation in that division.
But they gave me two conditions. They said that I had to leave time for questions. And they also said that when I answer the questions, I have to really answer the questions. I can't duck. I can't hide behind religion. I can't avoid them. I have to be honest in my attempt to answer them. So I think that they just assume that I just had a very weak position that would be easily defeated under their sophisticated scientists, and that they would humor me, they would let me give my talk, and then I would get shot down and I would kind of go away and it would all be over. But in fact, that didn't happen. I kind of held my own, and the organizers were a little upset. And one in particular didn't even want to talk to me after it was over. But then later on, he kind of thought about it, and he came up to me and said, you know what? I can't complain. You followed the conditions that we gave you, and your views held up to scrutiny. So now that section still exists, I continue to give presentations in it, as do others. And it kind of started a new thing in this scientific organization.
[00:10:08] Speaker B: Huh. Well, that's a story with a good ending. Getting back to the chapter you just mentioned, how mainstream scientists should be open to alternative views. Do you have any examples of how this might play out in ongoing scientific work?
[00:10:24] Speaker C: Yeah, there's a topic referred to as junk DNA. When we look at DNA, it can be divided into two kinds of components. One is coding and the other is non coding. And when we say coding, what we mean is that it contains instructions for proteins. Well, surprisingly, the majority of the DNA is actually not coding. It doesn't contain instructions for making the protein. And so scientists, as they observed this, they thought, mainstream scientists, they thought, hmm, this must be just useless junk left over from evolution. And so they called it junk DNA, and they figured that it was nonfunctional and that there were mistakes in it, and the mistakes really didn't matter. It's kind of like a junkyard. Things just deteriorate. There were even remnants of things that used to be functional. But id theorists looked at it in a very different way.
They actually predicted that it would have function, because a designer making this DNA would not just make wasteful, useless components.
As it turned out, the research over the years has backed up the id theorist views, and they're finding more and more functions for junk DNA, even so much that the term junk DNA has fallen out of favor. And it's usually referred to more often as non coding DNA.
[00:11:47] Speaker B: I remember when the encode project results came out, it really validated some of those predictions that came from the intelligent design theorists. And they're still discovering more?
[00:11:59] Speaker C: Oh, yes.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: They actually have reasons to be there.
[00:12:03] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, actually, this is kind of off topic a little bit, but really, DNA is just one of the sources of information in the cell. And it may be that those non coding components have information that we haven't figured out how it impacts the DNA and causes the DNA to be expressed.
[00:12:24] Speaker B: Well, what test did Darwin present that he claimed would cause his theory to break down?
[00:12:29] Speaker C: Darwin said that if it could be found that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. It's interesting that he put this forward because the whole idea of darwinism is that it works by gradualism. Small changes accumulate over long periods, and as they accumulate, each change produces some improvement or adaptation, which allows the organism to survive better.
But in this case, if you needed a lot of changes to happen, but individually they didn't provide any benefit, you needed whole clusters of changes to happen all at once. Well, then that would be a problem for darwinism. But I think when we look at biological systems, we see that they have multiple components and lots of changes would have been needed to produce all those components at the same time so that the structure works and does a useful function.
[00:13:42] Speaker B: Right. Well, so here we have, in Darwin's own thinking, a challenge, a way to falsify his theory, if you will. I want to get to the heart of your chapter. Now, we are going to talk about this in a second episode, too, but we're just going to start the discussion now. Tell us about irreducible complexity and how that could cause Darwin's theory to break down.
[00:14:06] Speaker C: Well, I think our audience is fairly familiar with irreducible complexity. The idea that a system that does a certain function has multiple parts, they all have to be present, they all have to be in the proper arrangement, and they all have to be working for that system to function the way it's supposed to. So a system that has, that is considered irreducibly complex.
Now, natural selection only operates on working or functional systems. That is, for something to lead to an adaptation or improvement, that structure that does the function has to do something useful. If it doesn't do anything, then it won't get selected for and it won't provide any benefit to the organism.
What it seems is going on in irreducible complexity is that it's not functional until it has all its parts arranged in the proper way and all functioning to do the overall functioning of the system.
There's really no way to account for how a series of useless parts would accumulate over long periods of time and eventually all assemble and get arranged and be functional to carry out the overall function of the entire system.
[00:15:30] Speaker B: A hard problem for darwinian evolution.
Mike Behe has written a lot about this in his books and in your chapter for the nutshell book, you do break it down in an easy to understand fashion. We're going to get into that a little bit more, but that's all the time we have for now. You'll be back in a second episode to talk more about irreducible complexity and the problems it causes for winning evolutionary theory.
[00:15:55] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:15:56] Speaker B: Well, thanks for your time today, Rob.
[00:15:58] Speaker C: Sure. Glad to do it.
[00:16:00] Speaker B: You can get a copy of evolution and intelligent design in a nutshell, in paperback or ebook format at online retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Enjoy more
[email protected] or on your podcast platform of choice until we connect again for id the future. Andrew im Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
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[00:17:23] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit intelligentdesign.org and idthefuture.com.
