Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
Today's episode is adapted from the Eric Metaxas show and features Eric Metaxas talking with molecular biologist Douglas Axe about his book Undeniable.
For more from this radio program, visit metaxastalk.com that's metaxas. M E T A X A s.
[00:00:34] Speaker B: The word talk.com this is the Eric Metaxas show, folks. I'm here at my microphone in the mountains, way up on a crag, and I get to interview very, very interesting people.
I guess I don't do it just for myself, but sometimes I feel very selfish because I get to talk to very, very interesting people about very interesting topics. No matter who's listening, I hope you're listening and sharing these things with your friends. Today I get to talk to a brilliant scientist named Douglas Axe, A X E.
He's a molecular biologist. He's a director of something called the Biologic Institute. He got his PhD at Caltech. Big deal. He has held postdoctoral and research scientist positions at the University of Cambridge. Again, who hasn't? What's the big deal? The Cambridge Medical Research Council center and various other important places. My goodness, he really has done so much that I have to make fun of it just to feel better about myself. Doug Axe, welcome to the program.
[00:01:38] Speaker C: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:40] Speaker B: Listen, you do a lot, but you wrote a book. We talked about it at some point last year. It's called Undeniable, and I only got the chance to actually read it recently. And when I read it, I said, I've got to have you back on the program because it is so, well, important.
Beautiful.
Describe to my listeners, because you're with the Discovery Institute, right? Are you the director of the Biologic Institute there, or is that something else organization?
[00:02:08] Speaker C: It's a separate 501C3, but it was set up with the help of the people at Discovery, and we work closely together.
[00:02:15] Speaker B: Okay. Well, the point is that when I read the book, I was amazed. I said, first of all, there's some hard science in there. It's not such an easy book, but the ideas in it are astounding. So for my audience, give the basic summation, synopsis of what the thesis of the book is. The title is Undeniable, and it says how biology confirms our intuition that life is designed. So talk about that.
[00:02:44] Speaker C: Sure. Well, I've done 25 years of serious laboratory research, computational biology and experimental molecular biology, testing whether Darwin's theory could possibly testing it at the smallest level of single genes that encode single proteins. We can maybe talk a little bit more about that. Came to the unambiguous, strong conclusion that it doesn't work at this small level, and that means it doesn't work at any level.
And when I had an opportunity to write this book, I thought about how I should go about it. And one thing I could do would be to simplify the technical science and explain to people in simple terms for non scientists how the science shows that Darwin's theory doesn't work. But I wasn't satisfied with that because I felt for a long time as though this really isn't a technical argument at root. At root, this is a common sense argument.
And I came across a quote from UC Berkeley psychology professor Alison Gopnik in the Wall Street Journal. In a Wall Street Journal article she said, by elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate godlike designer to explain the complexity of the world around them. Even children brought up as atheists. And I thought I had been thinking of this, hanging the book on an intuition. I thought, this is a confirmation of the fact that there is an intuition. I call it the universal design intuition. It's in everyone from the age of three or four. When we look at living things, we know that they were made by a godlike designer. It doesn't matter what you were taught from your parents, you just intuit this.
And the book is not simply stating the intuition. It starts with the intuition and then it asks whether there might actually be some substance to this particular intuition. Not all intuitions are true. But I walk the reader through simple line of reasoning to show that this particular intuition is true. You can bank on it. And I think by going this route, instead of translating technical science, I'm hoping to make people have some confidence in their own sense that life is designed and therefore enabling them to stand up against the torrent of claims to the contrary, sometimes coming with a little bit of condescension.
[00:04:58] Speaker B: Well, I think half of life is attitude. And if you think that, well, we don't have any evidence for our strange religious views that God created the universe that comes across. And I think I've come to the conclusion as a result of my reading not just books like yours, but books by Stephen Meyer or John Lennox or whatever, so many different things, that the idea that we just appeared by chance is one of the dumbest ideas in the history of ideas. It's a terrible idea. It's so stupid.
We have to be honest and understand that we're living in a world where bad ideas can Dominate Communism lasted in the Soviet Union for. For many decades before it fell apart. Horrible ideas can last sometimes for centuries, and you have to fight them. You have to be willing to fight them. You have to have the courage to fight them. But the idea that we got here by accident is a horrible idea. And the more science we know, the more we know how bad and how laughable an idea it is.
[00:06:08] Speaker C: So.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: So that's kind of what you talk about in your book, that we ought not to discount common sense. It doesn't mean that you can know everything by common sense, but things don't seem undesigned. Things seem designed. Now, a lot of atheists would just argue and say, well, that's because you've bought into something. But you have a story. What I love about your book is you tell your story as you're a pure scientist trying to do actual scientific work and bumping up against some really weird stuff where people are starting to sniff out that you may be going in a direction that's going to embarrass them.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: Yeah. So I tell the story in the book of ultimately losing my job at the Medical Research Council center in Cambridge over this controversy.
And I tell that not as a way of complaining against the establishment or trying to get any sort of restoration on account of that, but simply to let people know that science is not the dispassionate, purely rational, purely sort of perfect discipline that some people still seem to think it is. I think everyone recognizes that scientists are human, and so all the flaws of humanity have to come into science in some way. But we've managed to convince ourselves, many of us have, that the scientific method somehow irons all that out so that the flaws in individual scientists somehow don't appear in the whole enterprise. And the whole enterprise is pure monotonous ascent toward perfect truth, and nothing can derail that.
My story shows, and it's one story of many that could be told that that isn't true, that the humanity, the human part of science brings all the baggage and complexity that humans bring to every other discipline, to science, and how could it be otherwise?
[00:07:57] Speaker B: I'm talking to Douglas Axe. We're talking about the scientific method, science, the design of the universe, whether it happened all by itself, without a design, the universe, I mean, or whether there was in fact, the designer. Now, Douglas Axe, you say that you were doing research, and in your research in the late 90s in Cambridge, you were bumping up against some things, you began to see some things. Can you describe that? What was happening there specifically?
[00:08:26] Speaker C: Well, in my own work, I was testing whether the DNA sequences that are called genes, whether they were particularly fussy, or whether you could monkey with these things arbitrarily, mess them up any way you wanted and they would still work and produce functional proteins. And I was finding that there was a sort of a myth out there or a standard way of understanding proteins that suggested that you could really mess these things up and they would still work.
And my projects kept showing the opposite, that if you even start to mess with them a little bit, they break entirely. They were much more fragile than people were wanting to admit.
[00:09:04] Speaker B: I said, when you say fragile now, what kind of proteins are we talking about?
[00:09:08] Speaker C: I was working on enzymes, which are proteins that do chemistry. And there were two particular enzymes I was looking at and they both behaved the same way. It was commonly thought that the exterior of these things was not very important for their structure or their function, but the interior was really where it had to hold itself together. And so I started messing with the exterior and these things broke and they broke in two very different enzymes.
So I started to realize that the common story that these things were not at all fragile was false. And I was talking with people about it.
[00:09:42] Speaker B: Now, when you say fragile, just to translate to layman, of which I am one, because I've read your book and I think I get this, you're saying that there's this myth out there that the way things are, it's not such a big deal. In other words, here you have some enzymes and there's a whole bunch of ways that accidental processes could have come up with these. In fact, if you mess around with it a little bit, it's not going to matter. You're saying, no, you did the research and if you would change these things in the very slightest way, then in fact the whole thing would break apart. So this was big news, this is big science. In other words, that you've demonstrated in the lab that the myth of this tremendous flexibility, it did not exist. Which leads people to believe, again, I'm translating, that these things are far more perfectly designed and fine tuned than had previously been believed. I mean, that's really the punchline, isn't it?
[00:10:42] Speaker C: Yes, it is. And I had conversations with some very top scientists, some of whom totally got it and realized, hey, this is big.
And some of whom didn't.
And at the same time, at the lab where I was, there was various issues occurring. There was a project that had led to a paper that was published in Nature, which is considered to be the very top tier science Journal that was claiming that you could get one enzyme to convert its function to another enzyme by monkeying a little bit with the sequence and then allowing the thing to evolve its way into the new enzyme function.
Big major deal made every time a Nature paper comes out.
About a year after the paper was published, it became clear with the disappearance of the lead author on the paper that.
[00:11:34] Speaker B: What do you mean the disappearance of the lead author?
[00:11:36] Speaker C: She was from Mexico, an MD, PhD. She had a little team of graduate students working for her in Cambridge there at the Medical Research Council center. Had this Nature paper come out. And because of the Nature paper, there were half a dozen students who wanted to work under her and do similar projects because hers was so successful. Well, maybe nine months into their project she disappeared. As in she went home for Christmas and never came back.
[00:12:03] Speaker B: Vamoosed. Amscrade.
[00:12:05] Speaker C: Yeah. With no explanation at all. They couldn't get in touch with her.
So the director of the center wanted me to take over her group. People were scrambling to try to figure out how to patch things together.
Well, one of these students found out that the miracle sequence that she had evolved that supposedly worked as well as a natural enzyme was in fact the natural enzyme. It was a contaminant. So her whole project was false. I don't think there was any deliberate cheating going on. There was a mistake.
[00:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah, this is one of these things. But it's bad news for the good news. In other words, people are thinking like, hey, this is fantastic. It proves what we're hoping, that there are all kinds of possibilities, that we don't need to worry about everything being so perfectly fine tuned. Mutations can lead to good stuff and it's all great and then suddenly find.
[00:12:54] Speaker C: Out, no, we have not proved that it collapsed. And so that paper had to be retracted.
And I went to my boss, Sir Alan first at that point and said, you know what if these students whose projects are floundering because they were predicated on something that turns out not to be true, if they're willing to reinterpret their data as evidence that it's actually hard to get these enzyme functions, then I could take over this group and I could lead them.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: In other words, you are approaching Sir Alan first. I don't think anybody needs to have that explained. This is a distinguished dude in the world of science.
He got the order of the British Empire, he's a big deal. So you approach him honestly and you say, we've got a problem.
What about if we switch things and these students can at least be working positively towards Showing that these things are fragile rather than easily manipulated.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: Correct.
And I could tell that things were tense because there was stuff going on in the British scene where Intelligent Design was being taught in public schools and there was hoopla. Tony Blair was the Prime Minister at the time. This was being debated in the House of Commons. Huge controversy.
And in the midst of that, I'm trying to pitch an idea to Sir Alan first about taking a number of research projects in the direction of Intelligent Design. I didn't use that term, but it was clear when I pitched it.
[00:14:26] Speaker B: But what's interesting is that science is supposed to be above politics. It's supposed to be above the fray. It's like math. It's like. We're not supposed. It's like physics. We're not supposed to worry about outcomes. There's a purity and an integrity. And you're telling me that Sir Alan Furst, having this very important position, suddenly smells that this could be leading in a direction where he could get criticism?
[00:14:54] Speaker C: Yes. And in retrospect, it seems silly of me not to have anticipated that, but I really had this kind of. I call it a utopian view of science, where I felt as though whatever people's personal inclinations are, if they see data that is compelling, being scientists, they will give up their personal inclinations and.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: They'Ll go with the data because they believe in science.
[00:15:18] Speaker C: Exactly.
[00:15:19] Speaker B: But you're supposed to think that way. So your utopianist naive views, you're actually scientists are supposed to think that way, as you knew. And so how heartbreaking it must have been for you to see a major figure like Sir Alan Furst at Cambridge shy away from the implications of the science.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: It was very disturbing for me at the time, and I found myself without a job. So I basically had two weeks notice given no clear explanation. Given. The explanation was, we've run out of space, you need to leave.
And he didn't come and communicate that to me. It was communicated through his assistant.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: He meant they'd run out of integrity, but it doesn't matter.
He just misspoke.
So the idea that they would push you away. And why? Because he feared losing funds or he feared being attacked or what was it? He just didn't have the.
The mettle to enter this fray.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: Speaking sympathetically, I surmise, and I never got a full description of this from him, but I surmise that he was looking at the political scene and realizing that he's the director of a center that needs to get government funding and there's a huge controversy boiling over and being debated in the House of Commons. Do I really want this smelly, dead rat on my doorstep, or should I kick it off into the bushes? And, you know, it would have taken not just integrity, but quite a bit of courage and willingness to risk his own position, I think, for it to have stood with me.
[00:16:52] Speaker A: That was the first part of Eric's recent interview with Doug. Stay tuned to ID the Future for the second half, and for more information, visit Intelligent Design.org and IDTheFuture.com this program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit IntelligentDesign.org and IDTheFuture.com.
[00:17:28] Speaker C: SA.
