Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: There's no such thing as selection by nature. Nature is dumb.
Nature cannot choose to do things.
What nature can do is work on the mutations which might have occurred here, there and everywhere, and maybe modified the forward march of certain groups.
But it's more likely to have harmed them, one must say.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:37] Speaker C: Did Charles Darwin settle the question of biological design once and for all? That's certainly the impression given by some of his modern defenders, including Mr. Richard Dawkins. But the actual history of Darwin's theory and the way it was received tells a different story about the dominant theory of biological origins and why it fails to explain the complexity and and specificity that we have found in life. Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I am delighted to continue a conversation with author and scholar Neil Thomas. Thomas is a reader emeritus in the University of Durham in England and a longtime member of the British Rationalist Association. He studied classical studies in European languages at the Universities of Oxford, Munich and Cardiff before taking up a post in the School of European Languages and Literatures at Durham University in 1976.
In his books Taking Leave of Darwin and False Messiah, Thomas examines the intellectual influences behind Darwin's theory, the objections raised by his contemporaries, and the larger philosophical assumptions that have shaped modern evolutionary thinking.
Now in this second conversation, we'll explore what Darwin really accomplished, what questions his theory left unanswered, and why the debate over design continues today.
Welcome to the podcast, Neil.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:02:02] Speaker C: So in our previous conversation we discussed a dust up in the pages of British newspaper the Daily Telegraph between philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer and biologist and author and journalist Richard Dawkins. For those who didn't catch that yet, let's briefly touch on it. Meier argued that the new atheism has lost some of its cultural momentum and that recent scientific discoveries have strengthened the case for design.
Dawkins, on the other hand, he offered a strident defense of Darwinism and atheism, announcing that 20 years after the publication of his book the God Delusion, he still stands by what he wrote in that. Now you wrote about this for science and culture today. What did you make of the exchange in the Telegraph?
[00:02:45] Speaker A: I found Dawkins attitude archaic and eccentric and anachronistic in the sense that so much scientific water has flown under the bridge, that the arguments that he's defending cannot really be defended terribly well these days because of the greater amount of knowledge we have of the knowledge of the cell, of how much information is compressed into each Cell how? Nanotechnology, the technology, the very small, informs all our limbs by hands, everything.
And you have to be able to have some kind of position on how such miracles, I'll call them miracles, I won't be shy how such miracles could have occurred in the first place.
I mean, it's all very well saying, oh well, yeah, this is all a material mush which came about by happenstance. But I don't think that convinces me and I'm very surprised that it convinces anybody, to be honest.
[00:04:12] Speaker C: Yeah, so something he's clinging to rather than being open to other ideas.
And perhaps that's why he, you know, doesn't want to get on the same debate stage or even in the same interview room as Dr. Stephen Meyer. Well,
[00:04:28] Speaker A: yeah, I mean, another very strange thing occurred to me very late in life, 2019, I got interested in this and I, as you said, I was a member of the Rationalist association and I wrote a letter to the Rationalist association about Darwinism, criticizing Darwinism.
And after hanging onto it from messing me around for about 10 months, they wrote back and said, we have submitted your article to our expert team, especially our biological expert team, and they have decided to decline it. Well, of course they've decided to decline it because they're part of the people who are defending Darwin.
I was challenging Darwin. What on earth has happened to British free speech that they wouldn't just let this short article go in and maybe have a fruitful discussion? But anyway, that's just an anecdote
[00:05:39] Speaker C: and a good one. Yeah, I mean, if nothing else, it promotes discussion and you know, it's good for an organization to promote discussion within its members. But I mean, look at the second word of the, the name of the organization, the British Rationalist Association. You were using your rational powers to assess Darwinism and you wouldn't even allow that viewpoint.
[00:06:00] Speaker A: I couldn't have put it better myself. Yes.
[00:06:02] Speaker C: Yeah.
So tell me, are you, are you still paying dues to the British Rationalist Association? Are you still a card carrying member or.
[00:06:12] Speaker A: Actually, many years ago, 40 years ago, I paid the risible amount of £150 to be a lifetime member from then until the day I die. I mean, £150 probably meant it was probably like 950 in those days when I.
But, but it's so risible that I've kept it going because there are some articles in it which are worth reading, my wife reads it and so on.
But I'm certainly not as wedded to its basic message as I was 40 years ago.
[00:07:00] Speaker C: Yeah. And would you say the science has been a big part of that and especially you getting to where you can now say you know something about the science without fear of reprisal?
[00:07:11] Speaker A: Yeah, I think so. And I think also that when, when you're a younger man, you have this sense of entitlement and power and you don't realize that the limitations of yourself.
And I realized that I am not omniscient.
So to pretend to be a rationalist, which is a halo kind of word to use, I don't use it now because I think it does too much honor.
I've given that up and I just look at the evidence where it falls now.
[00:07:59] Speaker C: Okay, well, in his response to Meyer's article, Dawkins's subtitle claims that Darwin demolished the so called argument from design. That's a direct quote. Now, to help us assess that claim, I thought I'd ask you to give us some historical perspective on Darwin and his theory as you've done in your books Taking Leave of Darwin and False Messiah. So let's go back to Darwin himself. What was the prevailing understanding that of biological design before Darwin published his famous book in 1859?
[00:08:31] Speaker A: Well, I mean it was varies depending on whether you were affiliated to Christianity or not.
I mean, special creation was the official line of Christianity. But there were ancient philosophers, Epicurus for instance, being one of them, who said that we came together as a collocation of random atoms and somehow formed meaningful human beings on the basis of that. Which seems to me the most wacky and balmy idea I've ever heard. But I bet that that was one of them.
And this was taken up by none other than Erasmus Darwin, Darwin's grandfather, and also by various French philosophes like Diderot and so on.
And so people were in the dark, but they were flailing around to find something, some form of words that could bypass God or any prime mover.
I'm not terribly happy with the word God because I think the word God has been abused many times and God has been used to justify the most horrible atrocities.
Therefore, I prefer a more neutral word like primover.
Just to explain to you why I'm a little bit shy of the word God.
[00:10:18] Speaker C: Sure, yeah.
Now, most people associate evolutionary theory almost exclusively with Darwin, but you're mentioning that, you know, the ideas were there before he came along. But basically he jumped on that bandwagon and said, look, look everyone, I have this, this mechanism.
Do you think that changed everything overnight or was it sort of moving slowly towards that to begin with
[00:10:44] Speaker A: for a start. I don't think it's a mechanism.
Because a mechanism by definition has the ability to move things forward, to progress things.
The natural selection is a misnomer.
There's no such thing as selection by nature. Nature is dumb.
Nature cannot choose to do things.
What nature can do is work on the mutations which might have occurred here, there and everywhere and maybe modified the forward march of certain groups, but is more likely to have harmed them, one must say.
So I have very little patience with the word natural selection. And not only that, but this was pointed out very pointedly by Sir Charles Lyell, the foremost.
Geologist of Great Britain in 1860.
And not only that, but Alfred Russel Wallace came round to Lyle's position afterwards and Wallace did 180 degree turn and he became a quasi theist certainly as far as our mental functions are concerned.
So I think far too much is made of.
I rather resent it when people use the word natural selection because it is what linguists term an empty signifier. An empty signifier. It doesn't mean a damn thing.
[00:12:59] Speaker C: Yeah, I remember I was talking about this when we discussed your books in previous episodes.
[00:13:04] Speaker A: Oh yeah,
[00:13:05] Speaker C: you mentioned that, that concept, the empty signifier. Yeah.
And yet that's what propelled Darwinism to, to prominence. That and, and defenders, right?
[00:13:18] Speaker A: Indeed.
But actually I, I, I've made a note here. I, I, I don't want to read things out because I know it's a bit boring for viewers, but a chap called David Brown wrote a book called Incarnation and Neo Darwinism. He's not a top scientist, I think he's a liberal arts professor somewhere in the north of England and he said I quote it because it is so clear and it'll make it clear to each one of your listeners Natural selection is not a real phenomenon.
It does not do anything. It is more in the nature of post hoch observation of different survival rates of which individuals survive, which don't being teleologically neutral, it cannot initiate the production of anything new.
Strictly speaking it is a misnomer since it can operate only on what has been preselected by the initial faulty genetics.
Even the late Michael Ruse, who spent his whole lifetime studying Darwin said it.
Natural selection is a bit like the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
It gives you a report on what's going on. It doesn't cause anything, just reports it.
Why I consider myself somebody of middling intelligence, not brilliant.
Why is it that so many people with so many more scientific smarts than I have, why can they not see that simple point.
[00:15:16] Speaker C: Yeah,
[00:15:17] Speaker A: I have said.
[00:15:19] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. They, they hold on to this reductionist bottom up approach to life.
[00:15:26] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:15:27] Speaker C: Clinging to it, you know, as it were, just, just to avoid anything else.
But, but why they think has explanatory power is beyond me as well.
And it's getting harder to stand by it as we, as we go year after year,
[00:15:43] Speaker A: I'm glad to say so. Yeah, I'm glad to hear you say so. Yes, yes,
[00:15:48] Speaker C: yeah. And Darwin himself recognized some difficulty with his theory. What were some of the most significant problems he acknowledged and how do you think those compare with the difficulties evolutionary biologists face today?
[00:16:03] Speaker A: Well, I think that one of his bump bears was that he was hoping to see much more fossil evidence, wasn't he? Intermediate forms which would then feed into his idea of a gradual upward progression of animals and so on.
And that didn't happen.
But then because Darwin himself, not my words, Darwin himself called himself a master wriggler, he said, oh well, I think you will find in the decades that follow, even after, after my death, that there will be plenty of intermediate fossil evidence that will bear me out.
So far very little tangible has been found.
So I think that was one of the main things.
But he did have a separate chapter on difficulty.
What do you think, rather bizarrely called difficulties on the theory as opposed to of the theory and which he, one has to grant him the grace to have done that, to have said. Well I'm not absolutely certain. He wasn't like his grandfather Erasmus who was so cocksure of things that he, he even had an inscription on his couch called a conscious omnia. Everything comes from seashells, you know, those slimy objects from the sea. I mean he wasn't like that.
But in later life he said, well I suppose you could call me a theist. And he capitalized the T on theist.
So he was a bit of a mixed up kid to be honest, in popular parlance.
And had the grace to at least acknowledge that.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: Yeah.
Which is more than we can say for our contemporary friend Richard Dawkins.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Oh, very much so, very much so.
The thing about Dawkins is scientists are supposed to be open minded.
They're supposed to depend on empirical science.
You don't go in and say what the result is before you've even looked at the evidence in a way.
So he's, he's an interesting man. He adds to the gaiety of nations, to use that old phrase. You know, I think to some extent he's made a bit of a fool of himself in some ways, but it doesn't seem to bother him too much.
[00:19:20] Speaker C: Yeah, he's developed a thick skin perhaps. Well, so we have Darwin releasing his theory. We now he got a lot of pushback initially right from, from folks in the field at the time.
But at what point did his theory sort of rise to prominence and people just sort of accepted it? Did that happen in the 20th century or was it late 19th?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: That is a very subtle question because there is no, there's no one and there's no easy way of answering it because even before the Origin of Species was published in November 1859, there had been a pre publication experience in London in which an Irish academic called Horton had rubbished Darwin in 1858 and said there's nothing that human beings will not announce as some kind of revelation if it sounds plausible enough.
And how right he was then after that I think what happened was that a lot of scientists demurred about it.
But what happened, according to one lady novelist whose name escapes me at the moment, George Eliot. George Eliot said that Darwinism was not terribly discussed by scientific people. It was more by literary and historical people.
So it sort of, it missed a groove there. And it was taken up by people who were not actually experts but who thought, who sounded, who thought that the theory sounded neat.
But I mean obviously I'm simplifying there, obviously there were other scientists who were interested to take up the Darwinian cudgels, but there were also other people. The other thing is that in 1958 a book came out on Darwin's reception amongst the general public by Alvar Eligard.
And what he found was that the general public did not take to Darwin.
They did not think that this bellum omnium contra omnes, this idea that people would be fighting for food and only the strongest would survive.
He said this is not the case. Nature has so arranged it that there's enough nutriment to go around so that people do not have to go into this murderous whirl of fighting. And there were many other ways in which they thought that Darwin was laying it on a bit too thick and that nature was far more harmonious than Darwin was letting on.
So you've got Joe Public, the chap or the woman on the top of the Clapham omnibus, as the Victorian phrase went.
You've got the litterateur, the writers, you've got the scientists.
And they all had slightly different opinions. But there was no great swell in favor of Darwin really. That only came about when the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel found out that heredity could be passed down in blocks, in other words, discrete bits, so it wouldn't get mixed up and diluted. So therefore you could have a progression. And I think that led to Neo Darwinism, which was sort of christened officially in 1942, and it's really since 1942 that people have dug their heels and said, oh, surely we've got enough information now. It may not be totally clinching, but we've got enough information to say there's a probability that Darwin is probably right.
[00:24:39] Speaker C: Yeah,
[00:24:39] Speaker A: I think you're putting it in a nutshell. I mean, I need about 10 pages of A4, plus some reference books to try and make my case really sound. But, I mean, that's more or less it.
[00:24:55] Speaker C: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, 150 years, there's a lot there.
But that's a good summation of the different types of people that were interacting with Darwin's idea.
[00:25:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:25:07] Speaker C: And, you know, propelling it forward, as it were, or. Or putting brakes on it.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Yeah,
[00:25:12] Speaker C: different corners.
Now, let's talk about you and your books just as we wrap up this session. In Taking Leave of Darwin, you explore the origin of human language and consciousness. Why do you consider them to be particularly challenging questions for a materialist account of human origins?
[00:25:31] Speaker A: The point is that if you look at an ape and a human being, you can think, well, they're quite similar physiologically, but of course, that's a simplistic way of looking at things, because the apes cannot articulate words, for instance. I mean, studies have been done about this.
The laryngeal and esophageal setup of monkeys and gorillas and so on is different in such a way as to prohibit the kind of speech that you and I are indulging in so confidently here.
And so it would be simply simplistic to say that, you know, there was a continuum between ape and human. The other thing, of course, is a matter of intelligence.
In order to speak, even if you've got the lingeal and esophageal apparatus up and running, you've got to be able to think and articulate and then transfer it down to the organs of articulation.
And there is very little evidence at all that monkeys have anything but the most vestigial conception of what we know as human intelligence.
So I think it's a bit of a red herring to think that because a monkey looks vaguely like a human being, that there's some kind of automatic continuum between the two.
[00:27:36] Speaker C: Yeah, that's well put. Now, your own journey is quite interesting because you didn't start as a defender of intelligent design, what first prompted you to reconsider the Darwinian explanation and how did that lead to your books?
[00:27:50] Speaker A: I can remember talking to my very first girlfriend, I think I was 17 or 18, about Darwin and trying to impress her with what I knew about Darwin. People, young men, try to impress their girlfriends, you know, and all that nonsense.
And it was one of these things like the Battle of Hastings or the Spanish Armada that you learned. You didn't question it, you just thought it as a matter of history.
It was only when I woke up one morning in 2019, if you can believe it, that I woke up and I thought, this Darwin business is a load of rubbish.
I mean, you can call that an epiphany if you want to be posh, but otherwise you can just call it coming to a late realization rather late in life.
And I thought, nah, that can't be right. There's so many people who are brainier than I am.
This cannot be right. But then I started to scout around in libraries and what I think the Americans call thrift shops, shops which I think we call charity shops. That's the one.
And I built up, I've got a whole outhouse here full of Darwiniana.
And I thought, well.
And each one that I came to, I thought, well, I was right. And I was surprised to be right because I thought I'd be contradicted by something. But no.
And it was only when I achieved financial stability, not richness, but stability, that maybe my mind went to things which were not of primary financial importance but were still of importance from an existential point of view. And I think that's the best answer I can give you as to. It sounds a bit balmy and daft, but that's the way it came about.
[00:30:09] Speaker C: Yeah, well, that's your journey, you know, and it's, it's unique and it's quite remarkable. And you do tell this story in your book Taking Leave of Darwin, which I hardly recommend.
So as we close today's session, I just want to come back to Dawkins's claim in, in his recent article on the Telegraph. He asserts that Darwin demolished the so called argument from design.
And it sounds like based on what we've learned in your research and about Darwin and all the evidence that's come out for intelligent design and in recent decades is. Let's just have a final answer. Is Dawkins justified in making that claim today?
[00:30:48] Speaker A: Well, I can't see any possible way that he, that he could be justified in making the claim.
I don't even see.
I don't see how anybody could have been justified in making the claim in 1860 when Sir Charles Lyell said, this won't wash.
It just doesn't work. It is not a mechanism.
I can't even believe that it could have been believed in 1942.
So to say that it is believable in 2026 is, to me, absolutely ludicrous.
It brings a huge hiatus in our knowledge of humanity. And I must admit this, and I sometimes find it a little bit intimidating because we have none of the crutches that we used to have.
Those people who are not Christians will not believe in special creation.
Those people who believed in Darwin, sooner or later they're going to see through it.
And so we're going to be left with what the Victorians called the mystery of the mysteries.
The mystery of mysteries sounds a bit frightening, but it's the only.
It's the only phrase that I can bring to mind that properly conveys to me what I think is something inscrutable.
[00:32:46] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think we're already seeing evidence of biologists and other scientists who are hitting the ceiling of reductionist, you know, views of. Of life. And they're starting to incorporate design arguments without the designer. You know, they're trying to look for ways to.
[00:33:04] Speaker A: To
[00:33:05] Speaker C: have evolution explain emergence and purpose and biology. And so, yeah, I think we might already be there, you know, in terms of, you can't go any further without purpose and without design. Anyway, Neil, I appreciate you taking the time to unpack all this with us.
Really appreciate your scholarship, your efforts and your books.
Speaking of books, let's talk about how people can get a hold of your books. We have Taking Leave of Darwin and we have False Messiah and you can plug those titles into any online book ordering website. Yeah.
[00:33:38] Speaker A: The best way is to go via Amazon, I think.
[00:33:41] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Because if you're on Amazon prime, it won't cost you anything in postage and packing.
The first book, I think, was quite, well, cheap. I can't remember, it was something like. I don't know what it was in dollars, I'll say 12.$99 just for the sake of it. The second one is a bit bulky. It's 1799.
I mean, I'm in the position, if need be, to sort of give a subvention to anybody who buys that book. But I mean, I don't think that's commercial. Good practice.
[00:34:30] Speaker C: Yeah, well,
[00:34:33] Speaker A: yeah,
[00:34:33] Speaker C: they're getting a free gift by listening to us talk about it. And perhaps if that piques their interest, they can go get the book.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Actually, I do. Even if I say so myself, I do think that both books are important because they are opposing some pretty silly prejudices which were doing the rounds for decades before myself. And it's not just me, you know, there are, there's a whole industry of anti Darwinism going on. I'm just one of them.
So.
But I do think that if people can get around to buying one, one of those, those books, they will learn a heck of a lot.
[00:35:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk is a great, great place to get those. And I should mention that this is part two of a discussion with Neil and I. So if you haven't enjoyed part one of it, go back and listen to that or watch it. We discussed the dust up between Meyer and Dawkins in the Telegraph recently and at length. So those are some resources. And we'll include links to the books and to the articles in the show notes for this episode.
[00:35:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:35:50] Speaker C: Thank you,
[00:35:50] Speaker A: Neil. My wife is trying to draw my attention to something, but it's extraneous. Is it? Okay, Sorry, sorry. No, no,
[00:35:56] Speaker C: no problem. Yeah. Well, thank you to your wife for, for helping to organize this and get us going. And Neil, it's always, always a pleasure to have you on and have a conversation with you.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Well, I've enjoyed it, actually.
And I, I, I always feel a little bit keyed up, a bit nervous, but you've put me at my ease and I thank you for that.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: Oh, good, good.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:36:25] Speaker C: All right. Well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for joining us.
[00:36:29] Speaker A: Bye.
