Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Alright, on this clip we're about to watch, Joe Rogan asks philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer a very good question. Do you believe in evolution?
Now Rogen has had several scientists on his show, but never one that proposes intelligent design as the explanation for the origin and development of life on Earth. Until Meier.
Let's watch how Dr. Meyer responds. After the segment, I'll be back to discuss why his answers are so important to the debate over evolution.
Okay, let's dive in.
[00:00:31] Speaker B: Do you believe in evolution?
[00:00:33] Speaker C: I believe in.
Well that's a. I believe in micro evolution. I believe that there are real evolutionary processes. I'm skeptical about what's called universal common descent, the idea that all living forms have evolved from one single common ancestor. I'm profoundly skeptical about chemical evolution, the idea that the non living chemicals in a prebiotic ocean or prebiotic soup arrange themselves to form the first living cell. And I'm also skeptical about the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism, which as it happens, so are many leading evolutionary biologists. Today I attended a conference in 2016 convened by the Royal Society in London, Royal Society being the oldest and most august scientific body in the world. And it was convened by a group of evolutionary biolog who were essentially dissatisfied with Neo Darwinism, the standard textbook theory that we learn in all high school and college textbooks. And many of them were saying we need a new theory of evolution. The first talk at that conference was given by Gerd Mueller, a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist. And he simply enumerated the five major what he called explanatory deficits of Neo Darwinism. And his basic perspective was the mutation selection mechanism does a good job of optimizing or modifying pre existing forms.
It can generate small scale variation, but it does a very poor job of explaining the origin of those forms. Think about for example, Darwin's finchbeaks. Great job of explaining how variations in weather patterns result in changes in the shape and structure of the finch beaks. But that mechanism turns out not to do a good job of explaining the origin of birds or other major animal groups in the first place. So modification, yes, innovation, no.
[00:02:35] Speaker B: But modification over massive amounts of time, don't you think that would eventually lead to new groups? Because a lot of new groups have, they have similar origins, or at least origins from one ancestor.
[00:02:47] Speaker C: Well, yeah, time was always the hero of the plot, but let me just run a couple of arguments by you and let's see what you think. Okay. And I developed these in a lot of detail in my book Darwin's Doubt we now know. Thanks to the genetic revolution, the molecular biological revolution, that if you want to build a new form of life, you have at least you have to have new code, because all new forms of life depend upon new anatomical a fundamentally new type of animal, for example.
So you need new anatomical structures, but the new anatomical structures require new cell types, new types. So if you've got animals that first come on line and they have a digestive system, they have a gut, well, you've got to have enzymes that can service a gut that can process food. So enzymes are types of proteins. Proteins are built from the informational code in DNA. So anytime you want to get a new. It's just like in the computer world. If you want to give your computer a new function, you've got to provide new code.
So we have these long string, these long digital bit strings, A C's, G's and T's, not zeros and ones, but A C's, G's and Ts in a digital string. And we call that a gene. And if you have a section of DNA for building a protein, that's great, all works.
But if you want to build a fundamentally new form of life, you got to have new proteins to service the new cell types, to build the new anatomical structures.
In our computer world, we know that if you start randomly changing the zeros and ones in a section of digital code, you're going to degrade the function of that code long before you come up with a new string for making a new program or operating system.
The functional sequences are what are called. They're highly isolated in what's called sequence space.
You can change a few things and still retain function, but after a very few number of changes, you're going to degrade the function. And long before you come up with a new function. Now, the Darwinian mechanism starts with the idea that there are random changes in those digital bit strings, those sequences of A's, C's, G's and T's.
And based on our experience in the computer world, we would expect that random changes are going to again degrade those strings long before they're capable of building a new protein.
And there's now very compelling experimental evidence that that's true. There's Israeli molecular biologist Dan Taufek. Unfortunately, he died fairly recently in a tragic accident, but he was doing mutagenesis experiments on sequences of sequences of code for building specific proteins that fold it into stable structures. They're actually called protein folds. And he found that between three and 15 mutations was enough to degrade the. Thermodynamic stability of the protein structure that the gene was making. And once you lose that thermodynamic stability, there's no. You have no functional possibilities.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Is there possibly an undiscovered mechanism for protecting against that that we're not aware of yet?
[00:06:11] Speaker C: Possibly, but there's numerous lines of evidence suggesting that mutations are within limits. You can modify again, you can optimize an existing protein structure called a fold, but if you allow too many of those mutations, you're going to degrade, and long before you would get a fundamentally new protein structure, another protein fold. So that's just one of many. I want to run one other argument by you that I think is very intuitive if you want to build. It turns out that there are structures or systems for building that are very important for building new animal body plans, and they're called developmental gene regulatory networks.
They were discovered at Caltech by Eric Davidson and colleagues. Eric Davidson has also, unfortunately, recently passed away in the last few years.
But what they discovered is that you not only have genes for building proteins, you have genes that are building that for constructing molecules that send signals that tell the genome when to express other parts of itself. So you've got. There's signaling molecules that are telling the genome when to turn this part or that part on in order to build the right proteins at the right time, as new cells are going through cell division in the process of animal development. So if you go from one cell to two to four to eight to 16, et cetera, you've got to. And so you have a developing animal form.
There are points in that trajectory where it's important to differentiate one type of cell from another. And for certain types of cells, muscle cells, as opposed to nerve cells or bone cells, to start to be constructed.
And all of this is closely choreographed by these signaling molecules.
So you get DNA that builds regulatory RNA that turns on another part of the DNA that then turns on that builds a protein for servicing a particular type of cell at the right time and not at another time. And as Davidson and his colleagues mapped this out, they discovered that the functional relationships that were involved looked like an integrated circuit.
And they call them developmental gene regulatory networks. And the point is, you can't build a completely developed animal form unless you have this choreography taking place that is expressed through these developmental gene regulatory networks. But they discovered something else about them, and that is that they cannot be altered significantly. If you alter any of the core elements of these developmental gene regulatory networks, animal development shuts down. And this makes perfect sense to anyone. With a background in, say, electrical engineering, because there's a principle of engineering that says the more tightly integrated a functional system and the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defect to the whole. It's a constraints principle. And this turned out to be true in spades. Of these effectively integrated circuits. Now, they weren't controlling the flow of electricity, but more the flow of information in the developing organism. So here's the argument. You need a developmental gene regulatory network to make an animal body plan.
But if you want to turn one animal body plan into another animal body plan, you're going to have to change developmental gene regulatory network a into developmental, a completely novel developmental gene regulatory network to build that novel animal form. But the one thing we know experimentally is these things cannot be altered without the destruction of the initial form. And once that form is destroyed, there's no more evolutionary development possible.
Now, it turns out that not only neo Darwinism, the kind of standard textbook form of evolutionary theory, has no answer for this. And Davidson was quite explicit about this. He was, by the way, no friend of creationism or intelligent design. But he said very explicitly that neo Darwinism commits a catastrophic error in thinking because it is not addressing this fundamental problem. There's no.
But it's not just neo Darwinism. There's also newer models of evolutionary theory, and they don't address this either.
So there are these sort of fundamental challenges to the creative power of mutation and selection and other similarly undirected materialistic processes that have not been answered. And they seem pretty fundamental.
What it looks like when you look at it. I've got a picture of both in two of my books. These networks, they look like circuits. And circuits, in our experience, are the product of engineers of intelligence. I mean, we're looking at distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency. When we look at circuitry and code and information processing systems. I mean, this is what we're finding inside life. It's not what Darwin thought in the 19th century or his colleagues. Huxley, who said the cell was a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
It's a new day in biology. Things are much more complex than people thought when they formulated these evolutionary ideas.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: So does Stephen Meyer believe in evolution? Yes, he believes in real evolutionary processes, but he also believes in the limitation of those evolutionary processes. And he takes several minutes to unpack and explain some of the challenges the standard neo Darwinian account of life faces today.
You heard Meier tell Rogen that it's A new day in biology and that we are now finding distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency in even the simplest forms of life.
He pointed out that in the 19th century, Charles Darwin and his contemporaries considered the cell a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm, glorified goo. In other words, they had no idea what was really going on inside the cell.
Well, today, with more powerful technology and research techniques, we have a much better idea. We're seeing layer upon layer of complexity and design.
Integrated circuits, code information processing systems, nanomachines, transcriptional hierarchies, signaling molecules. I mean, if we saw evidence of these kinds of things anywhere else, we wouldn't doubt the origin of a mind.
But when we look inside the building blocks of life and see the same, we're supposed to credit an undirected process.
That's why Meyer tells Rogin he's skeptical of the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism, and so are many leading evolutionary biologists.
It can explain the small scale variation and optimization of pre existing forms. But it does a poor job, Meyer says, of explaining the origin or arrival of those forms. Then Rogan asks, but don't you think with enough time, those small scale variations could become new forms?
Ah, time, says Meyer. Time is often cast as the hero of the plot. But no amount of time can give the Darwinian selection mutation mechanism the creative power it needs to produce all the forms of life we see on Earth.
Why?
Because the random mutations that time brings to organisms are going to degrade the code of life long before they're capable of building a new protein with it.
What we're learning about the code that powers life is that functional or useful sequences of information are extremely rare in sequence space in the vast sea of possible arrangements of the code.
In his book Darwin's Doubt, Dr. Meyer explains why the Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection fails to account for the origin of genetic information.
He says it fails for two one, it has no means of efficiently searching combinatorial sequence space for functional genes and proteins, and consequently, two, it requires unrealistically long waiting times to generate even a single new gene or protein.
Remember that the Darwinian mechanism, by definition, is random, undirected and literally aimless.
This is not a process with foresight that can make a beeline for some specific complex adaptation.
No, as Dr. Meyer writes, it has to wander aimlessly in a vast sequence space of neutral, functionless possibilities with nothing to direct it or preserve it. In any forward progress it happens to make toward the rare and isolated islands of function represented by complex adaptations.
So time, it turns out, is not on Darwinian evolution's side.
Molecular biologist Dr. Douglas Axe, a colleague of Dr. Meyer's, has conducted experiments to calculate the probability of a mutational trial generating or finding a specific functional protein among all the possible 150 residue amino acid sequences.
What's that number?
One chance in 10 to the 77th power.
That's one chance in 100,000 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion.
Now, to put that number in perspective, Axe also calculated an estimate of the number of organisms that have populated Earth since life began.
He put it at 10 to the 40th organisms. But if every organism from the dawn of time had generated by random mutation 1 new base sequence in sequence space, an extremely generous proposition, that's still only 1 in 10 to the 37th probability of a gene sequence capable of producing a novel protein fold or function, which itself is a tiny fraction of 10 to the 77th.
So Rogin is right to ask about time and whether that would give a Darwinian evolutionary mechanism the chance to produce all the life we see around us.
But Meier has to break it to him that the chance of that is vanishingly small.
These are fundamental challenges to neo Darwinism that have not been answered. Meier says, but we do know of a mechanism that has the creative power to produce life in all its variety, and that's intelligent design.
And in other parts of this thought provoking interview, Meier unpacks several lines of evidence for intelligent design in the natural world.
Let me close with this. If you want to have your own conversation with a friend, associate or family member about evolution, start by defining the term evolution so that everyone's on the same page.
Stephen Meyer has done this in his books and lectures. So let me briefly break it down for you what he says.
Definition number one of change over time. This meaning of the word is uncontroversial and straightforward. It simply refers to the fact that things can change over time.
Definition number two of universal common descent. That's the idea that all living forms have evolved from one single common ancestor.
Darwin represented universal common descent as a branching tree diagram showing all life forms related to one another through a single common ancestor.
This definition of evolution is often put forward as fact, but it's actually an inference based on the assumed power of the mutation selection mechanism.
Dr. Meyer says he's skeptical of universal common ancestry for the simple reason that he's skeptical of the selection mutation mechanism of Darwinian evolution to do what some say it can do.
Now, a third definition of evolution is this.
All forms of life that have emerged throughout Earth's history are the product of an unguided evolutionary process, namely natural selection acting on random mutations.
That's the definition of evolution that Dr. Meyer spends a lot of time discussing in his interview with Rogan, explaining the fundamental challenges to this view of evolution.
As he explains, the selection mutation mechanism does not have the creative power or the time to produce life on Earth.
So the next time you're asked, do you believe in evolution?
1 take a minute to clarify the meanings of evolution first.
Then, like Meier, discuss some of the fundamental challenges to evolution that have not been answered.
Then finally, you can share just a few of the many distinctive hallmarks of intelligent agency that science has discovered in the last century that point to the reality of intelligent design in nature.
You may need to consult Dr. Meyer's books, and I recommend you do. He's got three of them. Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis.
Have fun, learn as much as you can and stand your ground confidently as you talk about the origin of life and information with others around you.
Thanks for joining me. We'll see you next time.
