[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Welcome back to id the future. This is Jeff Simmons. I'm one of the fellows with Discovery Institute, and I've been talking to doctor David Galloway from Scotland. He has a book called Design Dissected. I find it very interesting. As a physician, I think his examples of the book are great. He also talks a lot about the arguments against Darwin and or at least explaining Darwin's fallacies. So we'll proceed from where we left off. Welcome back, Doctor Galloway.
[00:00:40] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you. Thank you.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: I was telling Doctor Galloway in the beginning, when we were off tape, that I used childbirth as an example of intelligent design and irreducible complexity. And so I think it'd be good to start off with that again. Would you tell us about why that can't happen in any other way?
[00:00:58] Speaker C: Sure. Well, I mean, the whole idea, of course, of irreducible complexity is something that was popularized by Mike Behe back in the nineties.
And the notion typically he uses molecular machinery and the complex configuration of multiple proteins involved in a system, indicating that unless there was some particular selective benefit to each step in the process, which there clearly isn't, then there is no way that a gradualistic approach to building a system like that could work. So I began to think about physiological examples and anatomical examples, and I think if you look at the circulation in a human fetus as it develops, that's a great example of what amounts to an irreducibly complex system. Just think about it for a second, because the baby has no means other than via the mother to obtain its life giving oxygen. And so the placenta is the source of that oxygen. And what I've described in the book is just utterly fascinating, because that blood returning from the placenta, which is rich in oxygen, has to get back into the baby's circulation, and it does it through a series of vessels and in particular, a series of shunts. And there are perhaps three, at least three important shunts that allow that oxygen rich blood to get to the target organs, you know, the brain, the kidneys, the heart, and so on. The difficulty, of course, is that that blood has to mix with the rest of the blood coming back in the baby's circulation. And so you would think it would be turbulent flow, and it's likely to be diluted. And one of the amazing elements of the configuration of the circulation is that, in fact, there's almost a. A pure streaming effect, such that the blood returning from the placenta, the oxygen rich blood, isn't in any sense significantly diluted. By the oxygen depleted blood with which it comes into apposition because of the configuration of the vessels. And in fact, the oxygen rich blood is then directed right through the shunt in the atria of the heart in order that that oxygen can then be delivered to the rest of the circulation. And it's an incredibly elegant system.
But perhaps even more amazing is what happens at the moment of childbirth, because if you imagine that these, I've mentioned three haven't enumerated all the shunts that are involved, but if these shunts, these openings, these holes in the heart and so on, were to remain open after birth, the baby would be in a very compromised situation. But what has to happen, of course, is that the, the lungs have to suddenly come into operation, because once the placenta is no longer active, the cord has been clamped, the oxygen delivery is switched off, the nutrient supply is switched off, the baby is almost certainly likely to be hypothermic, unless something is done about that. But the oxygen is the critical thing. Unless that oxygen delivery can be preserved, then that baby is in deeply dangerous territory. So what happens, of course, is that the lungs inflate, the baby cries, everyone in the delivery room relaxes because we've got a live infant. But the actual engineering that's going on in the heart and in the circulation, all the sensing, the signalling, the closing of shunts, all of that has to happen. So this is a complex, integrated, balanced system, all of which has to work right out of the box. And so it's, it's not just analogous to an irreducibly complex system, it is irreducibly complex in exactly the same way that molecular machines can be shown to be irreducibly complex. If that doesn't work, and there's no prospect of it building up gradually, gradually, you can't have one shunt that sometimes works or works in the history of life for part of it, and then all of a sudden it's not active. It just doesn't make sense. The whole thing has to work as an integrated design system. And I think that is perhaps one of the most compelling evidences that there's real design here and not some kind of gradualistic evolutionary process. The mechanism of a gradualistic system just doesn't meet what we actually observe.
[00:05:19] Speaker B: This could not have been successive steps, as Darwin said, that his theory would fail if it didn't happen that way. The only thing I can argue the contrary on the design of childbirth is how slippery that baby is. Try catching one. And so they don't come with handles and they pretty slippery, but it doesn't refute your argument at all. It just talks from experience. You mentioned molecular machines. Can you go back to that?
[00:05:47] Speaker C: Sure. Well, I mean, you can choose any number of molecular machines.
I think my favorite examples, the examples I've written about in the book would be the motor proteins and perhaps machines like Kinesin or the machines involved in the replication of DNA are just the most spectacular. If you ever see a video of a car factory with all the robotic components at work, when you see an animation of what's going on in DNA replication, where the helicase is unwinding the two strands and the polymerase is then replicating the strands, and because of the way that they're orientated, some of them have to be spun out into big loops and so on. And then there's the error correction. It's just, again, it's one of these incredible completed, fully engineered, integrated, balanced systems that you cannot build. By definition, you cannot build step by gradual step, because each step would have to have a selectable advantage to survival. And that is just a preposterous idea. So the whole thing has to work out of the box. And of course, the other thing about that is the big dilemma. Number one, where does the information come from? And number two, what was it that came first? Was it the protein machinery that's required to replicate the DNA, or the DNA template that's required to construct the protein machinery? And that's an enigma that's never really been properly solved. And certainly when you think about it, it just points to an intelligent cause. It doesn't in any sense look like it's something that could possibly have happened spontaneously or naturally.
[00:07:27] Speaker B: Yeah, I think the DNA system is like the book of life. I mean, all the recipes, all the instructions are all in the DNA. Interesting. Recently there's a study showing that the DNA not only codes reading from right to left, but a lot of it can be reading to left or right over the same chemical system. Different information going forward and backward. It's just crazy. Yeah, the information system and the DNA system is very, very interesting, and I strongly suggest there's design involved. Do you believe that things are designed for a purpose?
[00:08:03] Speaker C: Well, I mean, whenever you see anything that looks like design, then that's the inevitable implication. These systems that we've been talking about are clearly purpose driven systems. They are goal directed systems. When you have anything that speaks of purpose or foresight or intentionality, it seems to me that a naturalistic idea is dead in the water. It just cannot account for any purpose or any intentionality. And what we see, for example, in the fetal circulation as it switches to an adult style circulation, or what we see with molecular machinery, is material that's clearly designed for a purpose. It has intentionality, even the DNA itself. You think about DNA as a code. That code speaks of something beyond itself.
You know, it's almost like an abstract idea. I mean, that's what a code is. And you never get a language or a code without a mind behind it. And again, that just adds weight to the whole conclusion that I try to draw in the book, to be honest, that the design is genuine, Shirley, is.
[00:09:13] Speaker B: Very, very suspect, and alternative explanations don't fit. You spoke about the mind brain problem, thinking about thinking, and you even had a quote in there from Leibniz saying, if we could expand consciousness and put somebody in that room, they still couldn't find the brain. Rather, you couldn't find consciousness.
How do you think that fits in?
[00:09:37] Speaker C: It's almost entertaining to listen to the sort of neuroscience take on the origin of consciousness. Neuroscience is very good at mapping elements of brain function and trying to determine what different parts of the brain subtend as a function.
But what they can't get close to are the kind of immaterial qualities, the real mental qualities, ideas or thoughts or even memories to a certain extent, although that's maybe an arguable example. But the intellect, the emotion, the will desire all of these things, to imagine that that is just the result of some kind of neuronal firing. And somehow the movie that's going on in your mind that only you have first person access to is something which is the result of neurotransmitters being released. And signals firing in neurons just doesn't seem to make any sense. And it's never been mapped. So no one really quite knows how to address what's been known as the hard problem, consciousness. These qualia, these mental qualities that are so difficult to pin down and appear to be immaterial. And so that's the great challenge for the neuroscientists. And, of course, genuine specific neuroscience generally doesn't really begin to address that, because it's just. I mean, it's more a discipline of philosophy that gets into the mind brain issue rather than sort of basic mapping of neuroscience.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: I find it interesting sometimes I ask questions of lecturers, I ask who's talking to who inside the brain.
I mean, you can list Freud, you can go body and soul, but we can't find where those voices are coming from. Truly, the Adam's apple doesn't move. We're not talking something else going on. In fact, you can be singing in there and talking at the same time. It's most peculiar. Split brains in particular can do that. How about something like foresight? I think foresight tells us a lot about. There's a designer.
[00:11:46] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I agree. Absolutely.
I think all of these systems that we've spoken about, where you've got balance and integration, where you've got feedback systems such as. I've tried to describe some basic elements of that in the human endocrine system in the book, for example. So all of that looks to me to be engineered. And again, isn't the kind of thing that could be built on a gradualistic system such as the kind of default modern synthesis seems to suggest. So the implication really is that you have to postulate a designer, although the naturalist will try to rule that out of court, just like they did with Semmelweis. He was right. I suspect this is right. It certainly comports with the evidence. And so it looks to me as though what we have here is purpose. Where there's purpose intentionality, it speaks of foresight. And so if there's foresight intentionality, the materialist naturalist idea falls apart. It just can't get to that point of explanation.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: You know, I find foresight at several different levels. When I give my lectures, I sometimes talk about vomiting, hiccups, sneezing. Those are put in there with foresight. There's a whole book on foresight, that is by one of our fellows, and I think that strongly suggests design, just as you said. What if Darwin were to come out with his book right now, this year? What do you think? It'd be rejected or what would happen?
[00:13:23] Speaker C: Good question. Well, of course, Darwin didn't really have any clear understanding of genetics or genetic code or any of that. He was basing his arguments on such issues as the fossil record and so on. It's very interesting even to see the slight concerns he had about the nature of the fossil record, where there would have to be almost indistinguishable changes between the species and so on. And, of course, when you speak to paleontologists about this, then what you get is a very different sort of pattern altogether. So I think Darwin. Darwin would not be pushing that particular theory. The modern synthesis. Of course, the modern synthesis goes back in its origin to the 1920s and thirties, so it's not very modern in any event. Now, it certainly predates the central dogma of biology, but I think Darwin's ideas would need to be considerably changed. Now, people have tried to do that, of course. They're well known, very famous biologists who would be Darwin disciples and would want to push his particular theory and support the modern synthesis. The reality is that so many of their colleagues, and this is what's not so widely spoken about, but so many of colleagues in evolutionary biology and the other life sciences are deeply suspicious about the inadequacies of Darwin's theory. But I don't think the basic synthesis as we understand it, is currently something that can be supported by today's observable evidence. Not at all. So I think it would be ruled out.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: No, I agree. I mean, Darwin came from a time where frogs came out of mud and that's where they were produced. And, you know, birds nested in the water somewhere, frozen for winters rather than going south. There was so many things that were wrong and he only had very limited things that he studied. So maybe he was an honest man and did his best, but there's so many things wrong. So we're coming to the end of this talk, regrettably, because there's lots and lots to talk about. But is there anything that you would like to add in conclusion or something that I didn't ask you that you would like to, you know, add in?
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I think there are so, so many examples that you could choose almost everywhere you look, biological systems. And I focus mainly on human anatomy and physiology in what I've written, because that's my. And that's our area of interest and expertise. But it's just hard to avoid the conclusion. I mean, the one thing I kind of conclude the book with the implications of all of this, and this might be a good point on which to round up. We mentioned at the beginning of our first interview, one of the things I do is play a bit of golf, and I do, and on the golf course you get lots of opportunities to explore all sorts of things. I've got a chapter in the book called the Golfers questions. And the golfers questions essentially come down to where do we come from and what are we here for? These are the golfers questions. When you begin to analyse that, when you think about the background that we have in terms of scientific understanding about what life is and what the origin of life might be, then when you accept that there may well be genuine design in the process, foresight, intentionality, purpose, then it opens a whole new vista to properly understand that argument. And it becomes clear that this is a worldview issue. This is not an argument that we have with evolutionary biologists on the basis of science. This ultimately is a worldview question. Either there is some kind of explanation behind the universe to account for the foresight that we've been talking about, or it all just happened. When you look at the evidence, it just does not stack up that it could be a bottom up process. It has to have involved some kind of genuine design. If there's genuine design, it points to a genuine designer. So for me, it adds considerable weight to a theistic understanding of the world in which we live. And I think that's where the design hypothesis gets us. It doesn't get you to a christian position or to an islamic position, or to, or to any particular religious position, but it certainly points to the possibility, the likelihood of God being behind all of this, or at least a designer. You can style it whatever way you will, but it seems to me that it comports very well with a christian theist position, which is a position that I would hold.
[00:18:01] Speaker B: That's excellent. I've enjoyed this enormously. I wish we could stop and go get a drink together or some coffee and talk more. We're going to finish up here. I hope this was interesting to people, and maybe we can talk about this at another time. This is Doctor Jeff Simmons signing off for id the future, and thank you, doctor Galloway.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: Visit
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