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[00:00:43] Speaker B: It reminds us that even the smallest creatures play huge roles in sustaining life.
They pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, and of course, play a fundamental role in the food chain.
They're like tiny engineers elegantly solving complex problems to support ecosystems, Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Bugs. Some of them we enjoy more than others, but there's no denying they're a part of life. And though they're small, they're actually very big examples of engineering and design.
Today I welcome Kate Cavanagh to the podcast. She is Education and Outreach Assistant at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. One of our key educational events on the calendar is ID Education Day, an all day in person event held a couple times a year and designed especially for middle schoolers and high school students in home or private school settings. It's a great field trip opportunity to learn directly from scientists who study intelligent design in life.
And lately the theme has been creepy, crawly complexity, the intelligent design of bugs, and even nasty, gross unpleasant ones. So we're going to get into that today. Kate, welcome to ID the Future.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Thanks for having me back.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. Well, you've been working at Discovery Institute for about a year and a half now. So tell us a little bit about where you got your interest in science and how it became part of your higher education.
[00:02:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I feel very blessed to work at the Discovery Institute in the center for Science and Culture.
I come from a science oriented family. My dad was a doctor, my mom also worked in healthcare, and most of my siblings have studied science or math in college.
So growing up in a family where I was not only homeschooled, but also my parents were very good about making science interesting and relevant to my daily life.
For my high school biology, I read sections of Darwin's Black Box by Michael Behe and in combination with my biology textbook. And for me, the idea of irreducible complexity was absolutely fascinating because I could see how in studying the natural worlds through accepted scientific methods, we can find evidence for a creator and intelligent designer. It's crystal clear. The evidence is right in front of us.
I think due to the way science is taught in the classroom today, where Neo Darunian evolution is deeply woven throughout the curriculum, many students are not going to question what they're taught or think about science differently.
And of course, this affects your worldview.
But as a Catholic, I've always believed there is a God, a creator. But learning about intelligent design changed the way I approach science.
Rather than getting bogged down in the details, the memorization, and the terminology, which can sometimes cause us to lose interest in it, I've learned to stand in awe of it, appreciating the remarkable intricacy and order of the world around us.
And so I majored in biology in college with a focus on human biology. And I wanted to teach science after college through the lens of design because I saw how important and impactful this skill could be.
So intelligent design really played a role in inspiring me to study science in college.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Okay.
That's a cool journey. Yeah. And you mentioned Behe's irreducible complexity as one of your favorite things that you learned along the way. And indeed, that is a powerful argument against Darwinian gradualism, you know, showing that these. These complicated systems that need to be near perfect to function at all demand an answer, you know, and gradualism just cannot bring those things about.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Now, I understand you've also taught a little bit in the classroom. Tell us about that experience.
[00:05:09] Speaker B: Yes. I landed a job at a private high school after college and taught physical science and forensic science. It was a lot of fun.
It's amazing how critical these years are in terms of helping high schoolers get interested and excited about science and also how important it is to provide opportunities for critical thinking in the classroom in the high school years.
Looking back, my experience, teaching was very beneficial for me as I now work with educators in my role at Discovery, providing them with resources for their classrooms. And so, from my teaching experience, that's really helped me in my role. And I also feel like I have a better understanding of how the current generation learns just having taught.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Now, part of your work here at Discovery Institute is working with Daniel Reeves, our director of education and outreach, to organize ID Education days each year. Tell us what those are and what it is you do to help make them a Success.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah. So ID Education Day is definitely one of my favorite events.
It's our annual student event designed to introduce students to the concept of intelligent design and present some of the problems with Neo Darwinian evolution.
The event is geared for middle and high school age students, specifically homeschooled or in private schools.
It's really a special event because we bring in scientists and speakers to present scientific arguments and evidence for intelligent design and give students the opportunity to ask questions to the speakers at the end of the program to encourage critical thinking and open the door to other questions like what are the implications on culture and worldview?
So, and then in addition to three or four talks that are given in the program, there are also lots of fun interactive learning activities and videos that we play throughout the program.
And of course, there are fun prizes. This year we give away resin insects.
And so my role in these conferences is to help execute the conference logistics like registration, promoting the event to local schools, coordinating the bookstore and volunteers.
I also was able to participate in the actual program of the event by doing Q and A with the speakers after each of their talks. Yeah.
To help draw out the main points for the students and just help to achieve our goals of getting the kids excited about science and introducing them to intelligent design. So.
[00:08:06] Speaker A: Yeah. And, you know, Discovery Institute puts on a lot of events, you know, for the general public, geared toward adults who are interested in these important topics. But it's pretty cool that we can put resources into events just for kids, you know, like, wholly designed for their age, their development and their interest, you know?
[00:08:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: So why, why do you think it's important to have events geared just for the kids, you know, just for students?
[00:08:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's very important because many of them are just reaching the age where they might be asking questions like, how did we all get here?
And they're likely going to get answers from the Internet or when they go to college, from their professors that neo Darwinian evolution is the answer and that we are the product of blind random chance. And so it's critical that they learn that they learn about the lack of evidence for Neo Darwinism and about this alternative theory of intelligent design, which is not taught in the public schools or public universities, but is overwhelmingly supported by the scientific research and evidence.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Yeah. And as working in this arena, we are steeped in it, but we have to remember that, you know, students are just not really getting a lot of it in their everyday life. And so we do need to offer that to them. Now, you just got done with an ID Education day. Tell US where it was held, what the theme was, and who spoke there.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So. Well, this year we actually hosted two ID Education days, one in Spokane, Washington and one in Tacoma, Washington, both with a theme, Creepy Crawly Complexity, looking at the intelligent design of organisms within the three major invertebrate, Phyla, nematoda, arthropoda, and Annelita.
And we had the speakers, Paul Nelson, Pedro Mora, and George Damoff for both events.
The March event in Spokane was incredibly successful with over 700 registrants.
And then just a few weeks ago, we hosted the same event in Tacoma and had nearly 500 registered for that event.
In fact, we actually sold out for Tacoma event, which is very exciting, but it's never fun to have to turn people away from an event.
But it's awesome to see that there's a lot of excitement and interest for this event. And so, yeah, if circumstances allow, we hope to continue it and grow it in the years to come.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Creepy Crawly Complexity. That's a great title, a great theme.
You know, I found myself in the pet store the other day, and we passed by the reptiles and insects, you know, where they. Where they kept all those. And I found myself drawn into seeing, I think they call it the. The great African horned millipede or something like that. It's a. It's a very large specimen of millipede, and I was just entranced just watching its little many legs, you know, walking across.
Why is that theme a good one, do you think? Why is it important? Why should anybody, let alone students, care about tiny insects?
[00:11:29] Speaker B: Yeah, the theme of Creepy Crawly Complexity is important for many reasons.
It reminds us that even the smallest creatures play huge roles in sustaining life.
They pollinate plants, recycle nutrients, and of course, play a fundamental role in the food chain.
They're like tiny engineers, elegantly solving complex problems, problems to support ecosystems.
And whether these creepy crawlies realize that or not, their existence and roles are carefully orchestrated to support ecosystems.
The theme is also important because we often think of them as being pest or nuisances and therefore purposeless, which people might associate with being a product of evolution.
But just because a mosquito bites or a fly seems annoying doesn't mean it lacks purpose. And so studying these organisms reveals to us that they are products of intelligent design.
[00:12:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it's interesting that even gross, nasty organisms or those with unpleasant features that we don't like still products of stunning design. And it's tempting to dismiss them as irrelevant or undesirable, but the more they get studied, the more we understand their purpose. And their role, as you're saying, in the larger picture of life. Now, that said, is there something you learned in the, in the last couple of ID education days that you thought, wow, I didn't realize that or know that before?
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, preparing for and attending the events deepened, if not awakened, my appreciation for bugs and insects.
Full disclosure, I was not the kind of girl growing up that would play with worms or spiders for fun.
I liked catching turtles and frogs in the pond behind my house. But if there was a leech on a turtle, that turtle was staying in the pond. Yeah, but, yeah, after learning so much about insects and worms at these events, I truly do not view them the same way. I'm much more hesitant to kill the spider in my kitchen. Just remembering that is also taking care of the fly or mosquito in my house as well. So I might just carefully remove it instead and put it outside.
So, yeah, just a great work.
[00:13:55] Speaker A: But you're contributing to that larger picture of life, right, Once you get an appreciation for it.
Although I would say around my house, you know, I have three daughters and, and they get kind of freaked out about spiders. So I had to implement a no spiders in the house, period, you know, sort of policy.
Outside, they can roam around freely, but once they get in, their lives are in danger. But yeah, even I might reconsider that after today.
Well, let's share just a few highlights from the most recent ID Education day. First, philosopher of biology, Paul Nelson, a wonderful speaker and great with students. He gave two talks. Tell us what he discussed.
[00:14:37] Speaker B: Yeah, Paul Nelson gave a talk on the miracle of butterfly metamorphosis as an example of irreducible complexity and the product of foresight and intelligent design.
He talks about how a caterpillar dissolves itself inside the chrysalis through apoptosis and autophagy, so programmed cell death and cellular recycling. So to become a butterfly, from an evolutionary perspective, this doesn't make any sense because why would an organism dismantle itself unless it knew where it was going and knew that it would become a butterfly, which is the stage at which it is capable of reproduction.
So how this process evolved through natural selection and random chance.
And so metamorphosis is a striking example of a process that requires foresight and intelligent design.
And then he also gave a talk on Phylum nematoda, specifically the rounder, see Elegans.
And so he discussed how the nematode is one of the best understood organisms in the scientific community.
It, despite being made up of only around a thousand cells, which you might think to be a fairly simple organism, building the nematode requires the single fertilized egg cell at the beginning to contain all the instructions for forming every part of the body, intestine, reproductive system.
And then with each cell division, you have to have cell differentiation or specialization happen with precise foresight.
You can't just have random cell differentiation or trial and error even for a simple organism, because there's far too many things that have to go exactly right for it to survive.
And so the nematode is significant because if neo Darwinian evolution can't explain the origin of an organism made up of only a thousand cells, also a very well studied organism, it raises even bigger questions for more complex organisms like humans.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And that is the beauty of starting with something, you know, seemingly so simple, showing the complexity involved there. And then, you know, you can extrapolate beyond that and say, wow, like look at the bigger organisms and, and all the, the problems with Darwinian evolution coming about or bringing those about, you know. Yeah, it's a great approach.
Now, there were two other speakers at the most recent event. What did they share with students?
[00:17:19] Speaker B: Yeah, we had Pedro Mora. He's a high school science teacher and also summer seminar alumnus. He gave a very helpful overview of the three major invertebrate phyla, Nematoda, Arthropoda, and Annelida, highlighting their abundance, diversity and ecological importance.
So some highlights from his talks.
From his talk. Nematoda. There are over 28,000 described species in this phylum. Nematodes play an essential role in allowing ecosystems to function by recycling matter, carbon and enhancing the quality of our soil.
Arthropods, which includes insects, spiders, crustaceans and others, they make up roughly 80% of all animal species. That's huge percentage. And they play roles in decomposing organic matter, pollinating plants, and serving as food sources to many predators.
And then the annelids are the segmented worms, which includes earthworms, also play essential roles in maintaining healthy ecosystems. And so Pedro really highlighted that the organisms from these three phyla are astonishingly abundant.
Apparently good farmland can harbor billions of nematodes per acre.
Yeah, you don't even see it. Right.
And he also emphasized that their diversity in body plans cannot be understated or explained as being the result of blind chance. And the intelligent design offers the strongest explanation for the explosion of genetic information needed to generate the wide variety of animal body plans. And then George Damoff spoke. His talk was called Our Earthworms Baroque.
So he's, it's spelled B A R O. Q, U, E, which means like ornate or detailed. And so there's a little play on words there.
George Damoff is a mega geologist that is a scientist who stands studies earthworms. And so, yeah, he highlighted the baroque nature of the earthworm's role in the ecosystems.
And the earthworms really go above and beyond just survival and reproduction.
He argues that earthworms exhibit intelligent design at an ecological level because of their critical roles in food webs, soil health, and ecosystem communication systems within the ecosystem.
And so, yeah, earthworms are very nutrient and protein rich. He calls them tube steaks.
So they support countless predators and then they improve soil by bringing organic matter down into the soil along with microbes, bacteria and viruses.
And then he also mentioned that there's new research which shows that earthworms facilitate communication amongst other organisms within the soil, which is really cool.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:20:34] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:20:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Sort of like the invisible inner workings of a designed system and in this case, and a whole ecosystem. That's great detail.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: Yes, Very cool.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Now, tell me, I'm curious, how did the students respond all of this? Did we get any sense of how they were impacted by ID education day?
[00:20:55] Speaker B: Yeah, the students responded very positively, and I really think they learned a lot.
It was amazing to see how well they were doing in the slido quizzes we were playing during the program.
And also really exciting to see the kinds of questions they were asking. At the end.
We had some students from one of the schools write papers on their experience after the event. And so, yeah, I'd like to just share a few quotes from those.
One student said, Paul Nelson's speech about butterflies most fascinates me. When he first started talking about the amazing creatures, I thought, oh, I know quite a bit about butterflies. I've studied them before.
I was mistakenly wrong. Every word he said about them, I was learning something new.
Butterflies are amazing creatures and should be more studied. And science is truly incredible. It's even inspired me to one day become a scientist.
Very cool. And then another student said, this is another butterfly. I think the kids liked the butterfly talk as colorful. Yeah.
The most convincing argument I learned today in favor of intelligent design was how the butterflies cannot be an indirect process such as natural selection. Their life cycle seems too complex to just be a small accident that happened over time.
And then this last quote is kind of funny. He just said, bugs are very complicated. They couldn't just be made with chemicals.
[00:22:27] Speaker A: So, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, those are. Those are some great, great quotes that sort of show that the students really grasp hold Of. Of the importance of what you guys were trying to communicate?
[00:22:41] Speaker B: I think so. Yeah.
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
That's awesome.
[00:22:45] Speaker B: Yeah, that's very exciting.
[00:22:47] Speaker A: Can you wrap this up for us, if you would, Kate? I mean, why focus on something as insignificant as bugs at, you know, an event? I mean, what's the value for students and by extension, us? You know, we're listening, watching this. Why should we care again about little things? You know, I know we've. We've started making that point, but can you drive it home for us?
[00:23:08] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely.
Yeah. These creatures are far from irrelevant.
They pollinate plants, maintain soil health, and form critical links and food webs, amongst other responsibilities.
Studying them through the lens of design helps students see that what might seem like minor or even unpleasant life forms are actually integral to the balance of ecosystems.
By understanding their roles, we also see that these organisms aren't acts of, but rather were intelligently designed with a bigger picture and bigger purpose in mind.
[00:23:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And an event like this, as you read the quotes, you know, it made me think that it's doing a lot of things at once. You know, it's. It's giving students an appreciation for these insects that they might not have had before, but it's also inspiring them to science, you know, in general, to study it more.
And it's also giving them a first taste of how the Darwinian, you know, paradigm or story isn't all it's cracked up to be. So. Yeah, you're achieving lots of things, you know, in just one event.
[00:24:17] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Those are pretty much like the three goals that we were hoping to achieve through this event. So. Yeah. Thank you for summarizing that. Oh, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:27] Speaker A: Cool. Well, how can those listening and watching today know when the next ID Education Day is coming and if they can perhaps participate?
[00:24:36] Speaker B: Yeah. So our next idea, Education Day, will be on March 26, 2026, in Spokane, Washington.
So to keep updated on when these events are happening, make sure you're subscribed to the Notabene newsletter and keep an eye on discovery.org events.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So we have the Notabena newsletter that goes out once a week by email, and that'll keep you informed as well as discovery.org events.
[00:25:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:25:04] Speaker A: Okay. Thanks for taking the time to share with us today about ID Education Day and bugs. You know, the intelligent design of bugs. It's definitely something that's not on everybody's mind, but we can do ourselves a favor and think about it more.
[00:25:19] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:25:22] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Let me just repeat one more time how to stay updated on when the next events are coming.
You can subscribe to NOLA Benny. It's our weekly email newsletter. You can get
[email protected] subscribe and of course, we have an events page too that will show you what's coming, including ID Education Days. And that'
[email protected] events well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:25:51] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
