Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Like I said, not just treating one organ separately, but looking at the organ as a system within a system.
And so the whole body is like a system of systems.
Idaho the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: You might have heard of proprioception, the awareness of our limbs in space and time. But there's another, lesser known sense that is emerging as a design concept in interoception. Welcome to Ivy the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Joining me today to discuss this trending area in scientific research is freelance science reporter David Coppage. Mr. Coppage worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also known as JPL, for 14 years on the Cassini mission to Saturn until he was ousted in 2011 for sharing material on intelligent design, a discriminatory action that led to a nationally publicized court trial in 2012.
Discovery Institute supported his case, but a lone judge ruled against him without explanation. He has been a board member of Velostra Media since its founding and serves as their science consultant. A nature photographer, outdoorsman, and musician. David holds B.S. degrees in science education and in physics and gives presentations on ID and other scientific subjects. Welcome back to the podcast, David.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: Good to be with you again, Andrew.
[00:01:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, before we get going with today's topic, I just wanted to touch on something I mentioned in the introduction, and that is your rejection from NASA's JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, back in 2011.
Now, in the show notes for today's episode, we'll link to a page on our free Signs Today website that explains in more detail this unfortunate chapter of your career. I just thought maybe you could touch on it briefly for those who are not familiar with that part of your, your life and your story and just kind of give us a brief understanding of what happened there.
[00:02:04] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. January 24th was the 15th anniversary of my being unceremoniously walked off the lab in the middle of work.
And I was out of a job instantly.
And what had happened. What had happened was, you know, I'm, as you mentioned, I'm on the board of Illustra Media and I had this bad habit of sharing DVDs on intelligent design that they produced.
In fact, one of them, the privileged planet, had four JBL scientists in it, and it was filmed on the lab with NASA permission. So you think this is a perfect place to share this dvd?
And the other reason I like to do it was because JPL is well known for its scientific materialism and evolution.
They go looking for life on other planets and they think if they find water and dirt, oh, principal, there Must be life there. So I thought I'd give a different opinion about that.
And these are non religious DVDs. I thought it's science and why not? So I would do that occasionally, you know, with people I knew.
But I did it one too many times and got reported by a lady who thought she was being harassed by this dvd. I mean, go figure.
So that led to a whole sequence of events. My being reported, my being demoted, giving a written warning and placed under a sort of Damocles of sorts. So one of the. And I want to just thank Discovery Institute for all of its help. In fact, the first person I called was John west, explaining the trouble I was in. And he gave me a lot of helpful advice. Alliance Defending Freedom got involved and there was a lawsuit in 2012. After two weeks and 22 witnesses, I thought, we're gonna win on some of these 10 counts that we, we placed. But the judge ruled against me with no explanation.
He was supposed to watch the DVDs, but we never knew if he ever did, so.
So I lost. But.
But yeah, David Klinghoffer, Joshua Youngkin, Casey Luskin and others were very helpful in that whole ordeal. And I'm also glad that they had that. They have allowed me to write for Discovery Institute for Science and Culture Today. It's called Now.
I figure I've written like at last count, There were over 1600 articles I've written for the site.
[00:04:31] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: I once calculated, what an archive. Yeah. That would be about 70 books worth. Non fiction books, I thought I've lost count of how many books it is now, but. But it's been a real privilege to work with Discovery Institute on this.
[00:04:46] Speaker B: Yeah, a treasure trove of coverage we've gotten.
It's unfortunate that you lost that job, that part of your career.
Most unfortunate.
But we're glad that we have you today and you're sharing all your expertise with us in these parts of science, that we're exploring the evidence for intelligent design, the debate over evolution, the implications of these things for culture and society.
You've done an amazing job. And for those who want to probe David's archive, all those articles, we'll tell you how at the very end. And of course, if you want to learn more about this particular chapter, as I said, Free Science Today is the website to go to to read stories of David and also many other scientists who have unfortunately lost position, lost funding, lost reputation, lost jobs for the cardinal sin of presenting intelligent design as a viable alternative to the Darwinian story.
So very unfortunate, but we can learn from these tragedies and these, these unfortunate episodes. And David, I. I thank you for continuing strongly and bravely even after that.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Well, life, yeah, life has been good since then, after I picked myself up off the floor for losing that and things got better. And I'm really enjoying life now. And I love writing the things that I find in the news.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Excellent. Well, onto today's topic. You have written about this recently, and honestly, I had never heard of it. So I'm really glad that we're covering it today because if I haven't heard of it, then the general idea of the future, listener or viewer may not have either. It's called interoception, and you've covered this recently on our flagship news and commentary site, Science and Culture Today.
Now, for those who have not come across it before, like myself, just tell us briefly what it is and why it's important.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Yes, interoception. I can join you in not being familiar with the term either. In fact, it's not even in dictionary.com yet. But, but what it basically means is the body's communication within itself.
If you think of your five senses, you know, sight, sound, touch, smell, taste, those are involved with perceiving the external world. Okay. And some people call that exteroception. But the term interoception refers to all the signaling going on within the body itself between all of your organs and the brain and the. And so this is actually an old concept, but it's taken on new life with neuroscience.
And now the National Institutes of Health and other organizations and journals are taking a great interest in this topic.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Interesting. And one of the, one of the sites you linked to somebody described as the dialogue between your brain and the inside of your body.
I like that.
So is this something we feel or we're conscious of, or somehow we control, or is it happening in the background without us even known?
[00:07:59] Speaker A: We. Well, it's both.
Mostly it is unconscious and we're not aware of it. There's all kinds of signal traffic going on through the, through the organs and through the brain. And many of these things reach different parts of the brain than the external senses do. And so there's all this traffic going on within the body, informing the brain of what's going on and the brain giving instructions to the body to how to respond to it.
So it's a pretty exciting field.
It's sort of an umbrella concept within science.
If you think about what science tries to do many times is unify a number of disparate phenomena within a single umbrella concept. If you think about ecology, it's one of those where it could be talking about deserts or underwater or even other planets, but it's the relationships between living things.
And so interoception is one of these umbrella concepts that brings together a lot of disparate phenomena under a single unifying idea. So this is an old concept that actually originated in the 1800s, but it just sort of sat idle throughout most of the 20th century.
But then it's picked up again since around 2000. And now you see more talk about it in the journals and science news.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: Okay, yeah, and that was my next question. You've mentioned it's quite an old idea. Almost like people sense that there was something there, but just didn't have the science to back it up. So is that simply why we're talking about it more now that we have the scientific techniques and technology to be able to examine this at a deeper level?
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Yes, that's part of it. But also the National Institutes of Health actually had an initiative a few years ago where they got together a number of, of different interdisciplinary scientists and realized that, hey, there's, there's something going on here. There's a lot more going on within the body than we've been talking about.
In the past, medical doctors and others used to treat organs individually. You know, you got a stomach problem or you got lung problem or liver problem, and so they would treat that in isolation. But actually the whole body is a unified system. It's a system of systems, actually.
And so this took on new interest just a few years ago.
[00:10:33] Speaker B: Yeah, and we'll mention more about that unity towards the end here.
Now, how does interoception fit into the larger framework of systems biology and using principles of engineering to study living things?
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yes, it's part of this new move to unify phenomena under and, you know, step back and get a wide angle view at what's going on.
You know, like I said, not just treating one organ separately, but looking at the organ as a system within a system.
And so the whole body is like a system of systems. And so if there was engineering design in just systems biology, just imagine the potential for engineering design in a system of systems. And so I think there's a great deal of potential for medical practitioners and for scientists, neuroscientists, and especially for intelligent design.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
Now in your article, you compare interoception with proprioception. What's a good way to differentiate between those two?
I know you've touched on it, but let's unpack that just a moment.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: Well, proprioception is how we are aware of our limbs, our arms and our legs and our positions in space.
And there's a really good clip in the, the film that we'll probably be talking about living in a 3D world where Steve Laughman and Howard Glicksman are talking about how, how you don't even have to watch your body to know what it's doing and what its position is. And we have a number of senses, including in our inner ear or middle ear to give us that ability. They show this clip of a baseball outfielder running and leaping to catch a fly ball.
And he's not looking at his hand, he's not looking at the glove, he's looking at the ball, but he knows where his hand is and where it needs to be to catch the ball. All so that's the idea of proprioception. But that's external signals coming in that give us awareness of our position in space.
But internal perception, interoception, we're not aware of our organs unless they hurt. Okay, if you got a stomachache, you become very aware of what, what's happening down there. But most of the time this is unconscious automatic signaling that goes on between our organs and the brain.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Okay, that makes sense. So proprioception, think of it as, you know, my ability to know exactly where my hands are, you know, even though I'm not looking. But the interoception is the communication going on inside between the brain and different organs and systems. Well, let's talk about how it actually works for a few minutes. This new area of research got a jump start after scientists discovered touch sensitive receptor proteins in the brain known as piezos. Tell us how they work in this process.
[00:13:36] Speaker A: Yes, I did an article about piezos and the term comes from piezoelectric effect.
Maybe you remember in a science class one time your teacher hitting a quartz crystal with a hammer and getting sparks to come out. And that's called the piezoelectric effect.
So in other words, minerals and their structure can sometimes give rise to electric effects.
Well, in the body we have piezo proteins, piezo one and piezo two. And these are only remotely electric. I guess they are electric because they're mechanosensitive. In other words, a pressure on them causes them to open a channel and let calcium ions flood in.
Now, since calcium ions are doubly charged, I guess it is an electric effect because these charges come into the cell as signals and tell the cell how to respond to the mechanical pressure that was felt.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Okay, and in your article, you Give a specific example of interoception, showing that the gut functions like a second brain. Can you unpack that for us?
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Yes. I saw this press release from the Champollomad foundation in Lisbon, Portugal, and they said, your gut's railway switch. How the second brain decides between attack and repair. And they go on to say that your gut has as many neurons surrounding its organs as the spinal cord does, which is a phenomenal reality.
And what are these neurons doing? They're responding to those piezo proteins, those ion channels, and sending signals that something's happening. Now, it might be something good or it might be something bad, but the gut is constantly bombarded by information that may be helpful or bad. There may be pathogens attacking the gut, or there may be just food coming down and it needs to be handled, or there may be something broken. And so your second brain in your gut is able to tell how to respond.
It's able. It was like a railway switch, they say, where it can decide whether to go into attack mode if there's pathogens, or repair mode if there's something that needs to be remedied.
So that's pretty exciting to think that these mechanical channels send electrical impulses which feed this network around the gastrointestinal system, and this is informing the brain of what's going on.
So that's pretty exciting, I think.
Yeah.
[00:16:25] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a great example. And I've heard for, you know, some years now that.
That the, you know, the gut is functioning like a brain, and it's quite a phenomenal thing to grasp. And this is some of the mechanics of why now all this is. All these processes are working towards something called homeostasis. Tell us what that is and how that figures in here.
[00:16:47] Speaker A: Yes. Homeostasis was a word that was coined in the 20th century to reflect what's called dynamic equilibrium.
If you think of trying to stand up in a strong wind, for instance, you're trying to hold your position while the wind is trying to blow you over.
Or you think about somebody treading water.
A good person treading water can have a calm conversation with somebody on the side of the pool, but underneath the water, a lot's going on.
You know, arms and legs are moving frantically trying to keep the head up. And that's what homeostasis like is like or what it means. And.
And that fits in well with pro. With interoception, because interoception is trying to maintain homeostasis within the body. When a lot is going on, we're constantly bombarded with messages from outside and from inside. And so, and yet you can get up out of bed and stand up. A lot's happening right there. Your blood, blood vessels need to dilate. And, and a lot of things happen when you just stand up and then you walk into the kitchen, get something out of the fridge. You know, your eyes are working, your ears are working, but there's a lot of signals inside the body going on. And the brain is constantly in this two way communication between your organs and the brain so that you maintain homeostasis within the body.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: Hmm, two way communication. That was my next question I was going to ask you. These messages and communication are going from organ to brain, but you're saying also brain is sending messages to organs to make adjustments or take necessary action. Is that what you're saying?
[00:18:37] Speaker A: Yes. And that's what's new about interoception in the 21st century is the fact that they're recognizing that it's not just all done by the central nervous system.
You know, we, we tend to think of, that's, that's the pathway where all the signaling goes on. But actually there are signals coming from other directions, from chemicals in the liver that get dropped into the bloodstream and go to the brain or, or the brain triggers organs different, like neuroendocrine cells, other endocrine cells to release chemicals in response to a signal.
And these pathways can go in different, different dynamics, different directions. And so what may start with the central nervous system can actually trigger a response through the vagus nerve or through lymph nodes or through other organs. And so that's exciting to see that here we have communication through multiple pathways occurring inside the body all the time.
[00:19:44] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:19:45] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:45] Speaker B: And I'd never heard of the vagus nerve either until a few years ago when my naturopath mentioned that. I'm like, what, what is this? Can I gamble there? No.
But it does help to activate that. And there are ways to be able to calm your body and to, to kind of come into sync a little bit more with your body. And of course you can see how this can, you know, be taken to the extreme by, by certain, you know, beliefs and ways of going about things. But I think if you, if you grasp it and look at the science and, and understand what's actually going on, you can use it in moderation to understand what's happening with your body.
[00:20:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Psychologists are very interested in interoception and certain cults and teachings out there are also latching onto the word and using it for their purposes. So we do need to be discerning and stick to the scientific, scientifically observable and verifiable evidence. But, but yes, this really goes on and it does affect our emotions. Like you said, interoception has a very intimate integration into our, how we feel about stress. And, and whenever you get the signal that you're hungry or you have some other bodily need, interoception is involved in all of those things and those can affect our moods.
[00:21:12] Speaker B: Now this is a burgeoning field in science. How do you see research into interoception benefiting human well being and our understanding of how life works?
[00:21:22] Speaker A: Well, I read a number of papers on this because I was unfamiliar with the term myself and found out that yes, it plays a very definite role in the medical sciences.
In fact, one of the papers that I read in Current Biology talked about whole body health, that enteroception is a way for us to understand what's going on in health problems. And, and so you may have some malady in one part of the body that is affecting a very distant part.
And so this is important for doctors to begin to realize that you can't just go to the organ that's hurting.
The cause may be elsewhere in the body.
And I think it's poised to give a lot of new therapies, new treatments that may benefit us all.
[00:22:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
Well, let's talk about which scientific theory of origins better explains interoception.
What would a Darwinian process find challenging to explain about it?
[00:22:24] Speaker A: Yes, well, at what level did, did this system of systems emerge? I mean you think about every living thing on earth is involved in this two way communication between its cells and it and its organ. Even if it doesn't have a brain like a plant, there's all kinds of communication going on. And much of this discovery, many of these discoveries are new.
And so but you think about even, you know, from a mighty dinosaur down to a microbe, you've got some form of interoception going on.
So in the origin of life and you got a single primitive cell, it's got to stay in touch with itself. You know, it, it has different proteins and DNA and even the simplest organisms are communicating with signals from outside and from inside. And so this kind of concept had to, did it just emerge by chance?
Because you've got multiple different actors playing together, so you've got some irreducible complexity going on here, otherwise you're dead.
And in, in a complex system like a human being to consider all of the messages and signals, they have to be Interpreted, they have to be understood. I mean, if a signal comes to the brain and there's no meaning to it, there's not going to be a response to it. And in the same way, if the brain sends a signal to the liver or to the foot or whatever, nothing's going to happen unless cells there understand, oh, this means that I have to respond in such and such a way. So intelligent design is clearly the most obvious choice to realize that there was foresight and engineering involved to make all of these systems work together.
[00:24:11] Speaker B: Yeah, and it calls to mind Dr. Bill Dembski's work on the nature of information.
I mean, he's got a whole book, you know, Being as Communion, where he's making the argument that the fundamental unit of life is not matter, it's not energy, it's not atoms, it's not quarks, it's actually information.
And that's what runs the show. And it seems to me that enteroception and these other, you know, these other processes we're talking about seem to fit right in with that. You know, this is information being shared between the systems inside a living thing. And that boils down to information. And you don't get information for free, you know, no free lunch idea.
So.
Yeah. And as you're saying, it fits well into the theory of intelligent design because it's what you would expect in a design system, isn't it?
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Yes. And a couple of other Discovery Institute books I would highly recommend are Undeniable by Douglas Axe, where he talks about functional holes and functional complexity, that you've got these integrated systems that defy evolution. Another one I'd recommend is Foresight by Marcus Eberlin. And he, he talks about the signaling going on. In fact, he has some interesting examples there. He talks about, you know, when, since we're talking about the digestive system, he, he talks about how the diarrhea response is like a power, power wash of the gut and sometimes you need that.
And, and when you think about when you, you have a vomiting episode, the body is making a decision. There, there's a railway switch going on. Is this material? If you've ever had food poisoning, and I have, it's miserable.
The body has to decide, is this substance so bad that it needs to come out immediately or can it make it through?
And so the body has to decide those things. So the signaling going up from the digestive system to the brain is very complex.
And we can't imagine that this all just happened to work out by chance.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Right. Too much information, too Much coordination, too much integration. Well, interoception is a good reminder about the unity of the body. As we mentioned earlier, why is it important to study the body not as a collection of parts, but as. As a unified, integrated whole?
[00:26:44] Speaker A: Well, it's true in many things in life, if you just focus on one problem, you may miss the whole picture. You may miss the cause of the problem.
If you're trying to treat a patient who's bleeding on the sidewalk and just looking at that, you may ignore the crime problem that caused it.
And maybe you could prevent a lot of crimes if you worked on that aspect instead of just the details that's immediately apparent to you. And the same way in the body, I think medical doctors need to take a more integrated whole body approach to treat patients, both mind and body and spirit. You know, that these things all work together and we can't see them, we can't understand them in isolation.
[00:27:30] Speaker B: Well, let's just discuss where our audience can learn more about interoception and proprioception.
We have Secrets of the Human Body is a video series currently being produced. We have, I think, three episodes out now. And episode two is, as you mentioned earlier, Living in a 3D World and explores the hidden systems that give us our spatial awareness. That's why the baseball player can reach out and be confident about grabbing the ball, not letting it touch the ground.
So we definitely have that.
And that's available on YouTube. It's called Secrets of the Human Body. And the episode in mind is living in a 3D world. You've also mentioned Marcos Eberlin's book Foresight, Douglas Axe's book Undeniable.
Is there anywhere else that people can term for this? Or should they just look out for the keyword, maybe search it on scienceandculture.com and just keep an eye out on new research coming up?
[00:28:29] Speaker A: Well, they can read my article, I guess. But yeah, within my article, there's.
[00:28:33] Speaker B: You linked to some things.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Well, yeah, there's a. There's a couple of videos that you can watch. There's a National Institute of Health video that explains what interoception is. And there's that episode, living in a 3D world that you can watch there. So. So that's a good introduction to it.
I'm. I've found a number of journal papers, even series of papers on the subject of interoception. And, and it's amazing to me how few of them talk about evolution.
You know, it's like they don't want to touch Darwinism with this complexity that they're uncovering.
So I, I think that's pretty exciting. And I, I would encourage any young scientists looking for a field to get into if you want to major in a subject or get a PhD in it. This is interoception is a hot topic right now. And I think that it, it promises great benefits to all of us for our health and also greater understanding of the complexity of life that defies evolution.
[00:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. This is definitely a field that is ripe for exploration from an intelligent design perspective, you know, top down rather than a reductionist bottom up view. Well, David, thank you for unpacking this with us today.
It's great to have you on the show as usual, and I look forward to our next little chat about something else you're going to be writing.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: My pleasure. Thank you very much.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Well, for more of David's writing, be sure to bookmark and visit regularly. Science and Culture Today, that's our flagship news and commentary site covering the evidence for intelligent design in the sciences and the debate over evolution, the cultural implications and related topics. It's a wonderful site and we just revamped it recently, so it's even better now. So bookmark that. Scienceandculture.com looks just as good on a mobile device as it does on a computer. So either way you'll get the information that you're seeking. That's scienceandculture.com and once there, you can click the authors tab near the top and select David's picture to read his latest work.
Scienceandculture.com for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
