[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: By now you might think that the icons of evolution that Dr. Jonathan Wells wrote about 24 years ago have been put out of our misery, and indeed, much has changed, and these icons have even less ground to stand on than they did back then.
But they don't call them icons for nothing. Whatever else they are, they're stubborn, and it's not uncommon to see evidence of them still popping up in popular science articles, cartoons, movies, and even scientific journals.
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Today I welcome back freelance science reporter David Coppage to give us a few recent examples of the icons of evolution that keep shambling along.
Mr. Koppage worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the 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 Illustra 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 again to the podcast, David.
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Good to be back with you, Andrew.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, one of my sources for daily news and commentary on the evidence for intelligent design, as well as the debate over evolution, is our very own science and culture today.
Scienceandculture.com you might know it formally as evolutionnews.org now, David, you're one of our regular contributors there, and I recently came across a piece you wrote this year about two icons of evolution that have lately shown up.
Let's start with the peppered moth myth. Up until recent decades, you could almost open any textbook dealing with biological evolution, and you'd probably have found photographs of peppered moths resting on tree trunks, illustrating the classic story of natural selection in action.
Let's touch on the history of this fine myth before we look at your recent sighting. Before the mid-1800s, almost all peppered moths were light colored, but during the Industrial Revolution, dark colored moths became more common, a phenomenon known as industrial melanism. It was thought that the dark moths were better camouflaged than their lighter counterparts and less likely to be eaten by birds.
Evidence was slim for the theory. And then in the early 1950s, British physician and amateur moth collector Bernard Kettlewell released light and dark peppered moths onto nearby tree trunks and watched as the birds ate the less camouflaged ones. Kettlewell then released moths he had marked with a tiny spot of paint. When he recaptured some, the proportion of moths matching the color of nearby tree trunks was significantly higher.
Considering this consistent with the camouflage predation theory, he called his findings Darwin's missing evidence, and it quickly became standard fare in biology textbooks.
On closer inspection, there were problems with Kettlewell's experiments. His moth densities were too high, creating an artificial intensity of predation. He measured camouflage by his own eye, even though bird vision is quite different from human vision. He ignored evidence that selection might operate on caterpillars instead of adult moths, or that the moth's main predators are night flying bats, not local birds.
Nevertheless, a myth was born and for a time it flourished. But the story began to unravel in the 1960s. Biologists noticed that the dark moths were unexpectedly plentiful in unpolluted locations, for example, and that the light colored moths later made a comeback, but without the corresponding changes in tree trunks.
Then in the 1980s, biologists realized that peppered moths almost never rest on tree trunks, preferring to hide underneath horizontal branches high up in the trees where they can't be seen.
All that said, the myth is still popping up to muddy the waters and confuse people. Now, David, you recently found it in the pages of the esteemed journal Science. Tell us a bit more about what you discovered there.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Yes. What they're finding out now is that industrial melanism is not a good example of Darwinian natural selection because it's not a case of a gene mutating and being becoming selected. What's actually happening is there are micrornas and non coding RNAs that are acting like switches and they can act quickly and be responsive to the environment.
So it's not a mutation. They thought that the cortex gene, for instance, was mutating and that's what gave the the different varieties of moths. But actually it's small RNAs that regulate the cortex gene that are responsible, which is a much more interesting theory.
[00:05:11] Speaker B: Sure. Now, you mentioned some irony in this recent mention of the peppered moth myth as it relates to the true cause of the color variants.
Tell us what's likely actually behind the color changing in peppered moths.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Well, we need to remember one thing, is that these changes are taking taking place in the pupa stage of the moth. In other words, in the darkness of the embryo, these changes, these that are triggered by small non coding RNAs are taking place. It's not like the moth is landing on a dark tree and saying, oh, I need to Change my color because I see stick out too much, you know, it's too late by then. And so there are. The micrornas apparently are responsive to the environment.
In other words, there are sensors built into the system that can detect changes in light and changes in temperature. And more and more micro RNAs are becoming noticed as very key players in what's called phenology, which is the seasonal changes of animals in their life cycles.
And so here it is, what was once considered junk DNA that is actually responsible for the story of the peppered moths.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Yeah, they used to dismiss micrornas as just nothing to worry about, nothing special here, but in fact we're finding a lot of function there.
Yeah, that's a great point. That this happens early in the development of these moths and it's not something that plays out later, but it's actually early there. Now, a promotional video made for this paper claims that these genetic switches are called go to mutations that are repeatedly used to create the dark light polymorphisms, unquote, in the insects. Is that giving the unguided selection mutation mechanism more credit than it deserves?
[00:07:14] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. They're not genetic mutations that are assumed in neo Darwinism. They're like switches and rheostats that are built into the cell. Okay. In other words, the cell can respond to the environment with internal cues. And that's a system that requires foresight.
All right. It's not something that just accidentally happens by some unguided mutation.
In fact, the authors of this paper never used the phrase natural selection, even though the press release for it talked about it being a textbook example of natural selection.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty telling. Now, as to the source of these regulatory switches for color change you mentioned, there are non Darwinian interpretations that are possible, including genetic drift or internal engineering. If something is intelligently engineered, it's going to contain built in flexibility for internal adjustments that can be activated or deactivated as needed. Right. I mean, does that make sense to you?
[00:08:18] Speaker A: Sure. And they're finding that these micrornas, by the way, a couple of men received the Nobel Prize last year for their discovery of micrornas, which was a completely unprecedented and unexpected discovery back in the 1980s, 1990s, that has become an important part of the field of epigenetics. In other words, here are these systems and triggers and sensors built into cells that are responsible for how genes respond.
So the old dogma, the central dogma of microbiology, that genes control proteins, control organisms, has been thrown out, out the door and now it's it's this interconnected system of amazing mechanisms that work together to create the phenotype of the organism. Now let's think about this light and dark industrial melanism. There's actually a lot of changes within many organisms. Like let's take the snowshoe hair, okay? It's white in the wintertime when there's snow on the ground and it's brown in the summertime when it can camouflage itself. So are we calling that an example of Darwinian evolution in a single individual rabbit? Of course not, because the rabbit has micrornas too. And most animals and plants operate on this principle where epigenetic systems are responsible for the appearance of the organism.
And so we should look at peppered moths in this way that here there are these micro RNAs and long non coding RNAs that are actually responsible for the phenotype whether it's going to turn out dark or light. And it's nothing to do with Darwin's theory of random mutations and natural selection.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: I love the idea that, you know, prior engineering has built in these adjustments that can be activated or deactivated as needed. It's a pretty awesome idea and one I think that the Darwin is Darwinian evolution struggles to, to account for.
[00:10:29] Speaker A: And in honor of Jonathan Wells, who we're honoring with this series of articles, by the way. I had a chance to meet him just once briefly in an airport on the way to a conference. And I was struck by his, his quiet dignity, I guess you could call it. He's.
He's not like the young radical I guess he was in the anti war era of the Vietnam War. But he, he conveys a very honorable sense of dignity and knowledge. And he's soft spoken. He doesn't need to be boisterous or flamboyant in his speech. He just stands up there and quietly talks and yet attracts your attention with his, his wisdom, his ability to put sentences together with the right words and right thoughts that make you nod your head and say that makes perfect sense.
So we want to honor him for his book Icons of Evolution as we talk here. But he said regarding the peppered moss, that it was simply a shift in the proportions of two existing varieties of the same species.
All right, so where's the evolution?
You know, other than there is no speciation and no natural selection, this is a great textbook example of evolution in action, isn't it?
[00:11:49] Speaker B: That's a great way to put it. And I appreciate your sentiment about Dr. Wells. Yeah, a gentle giant in many senses of that term.
Now you make another point that I thought was, was a real kicker and that is this. Even if the peppered moth theory were 100% true, it would be largely irrelevant to the debate over evolution. Even if fully true, it would only show a reversible shift in the proportions of two varieties in a pre existing species. Is that enough to prop up macro evolution?
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely not. I mean we see variations in almost every organism. I mean out here in California I'll see wildflowers that differ in their shades of color.
And like I said, you have the snowshoe here and other other animals that exhibit different phenotypes at different times of the year. So this is a very common feature. It's not macro evolution. These things are occurring within the same species.
So variability is, is, is very common. It has nothing to do with Darwinian progress from bacteria to brain.
[00:12:58] Speaker B: Now you quote the authors of the science paper saying this and future investigations of non coding RNAs will shed light on the long standing hypothesis that it is the complexity of swiftly evolving non coding components of the genome rather than the relatively static evolution of protein sequences that drives organismal complexity.
Their paper claims a textbook example of natural selection and evolution, but as you point out, they don't even mention natural selection once. This passage seems to point to a mechanism beyond the old gradualistic neo Darwinism. What are they alluding to here?
[00:13:35] Speaker A: Well, here's a situation I often find in my reporting where the press releases are a little more dogmatic and assertive than the scientific paper is.
So yeah, the press release called it a textbook example of, of evolution. But the, the actual scientific paper was a little more reserved in that regard. Okay. In other words, most animals and plants are able to respond quickly to their environment. And this is an exciting field that intelligent design scientists are getting involved in which is built in adaptability. And this takes foresight. It's good engineering because you don't know what an animal or plant is going to encounter in its environment.
And so the organism has to have sensors to be able to detect a change in the environment and then built in switches to be able to adapt to that environment. And we see many examples of that. And I think that's what's occurring here in the peppered moths, that there's this built in variability and it may be adaptive or it may just be an interesting variety, but it has nothing to do with the upward progress of Darwin's tree of life from simple to complex.
[00:14:50] Speaker B: Well, it's worth noting too that micrornas are an example of non coding regions of the genome. And as you mentioned already, until recently, they've been dismissed as junk DNA, evolutionary garbage, not worth studying. In fact, researchers have been discouraged from studying these portions of the genome for decades thanks to the stubbornness of the junk DNA paradigm. But that's all changing. What do you make of this newer approach being more open to studying these regions?
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Well, you know, for years, critics of intelligent design say that, well, design is a showstopper. You know, you just say that a designer did it or God did it or whatever. But actually it's this, this is an example of the show stopping being done on the evolutionary side where they're considering something they don't understand as just junk. And so it's not interesting.
And it makes you wonder how far ahead biochemists would have been by now if they had seen these parts of the genome they don't understand and say, hmm, the fact that they work means that something, something is meaningful there. It's not just junk. So let's take a look at it. And I think we might have been a decade or two ahead in the understanding of microbiology and organisms in general if they had taken that approach.
[00:16:15] Speaker B: Yeah, very good point.
Now, before we depart from the peppered moths, just one other thing I wanted to point out. For decades, biology textbooks contained photographs of peppered moths resting on tree trunks. If peppered moths rarely rest on tree trunks, how were these photos being obtained?
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Well, Judith Hooper did a book where she said claimed that they were staged, that some of these moths were glued onto the tree trunks, dead moths, to get good pictures of them. Even though it's been found since then that they don't rest on tree trunks, for the most part, they're invisible. Although Michael Majeris did some studies on these in the 1990s and later, where he tried to count how many were resting on tree trunks. And he found some, but. But most of them rest out of sight in the upper branches.
So that part of the story collapses as well. And also the part of the story that says that birds prey on the ones they can see on the tree trunks, that was never established as well. So it's time for this zombie of icon of evolution to pass quietly into the history books and not the science books.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll say.
Now you found another myth lurking in this very same issue of the journal Science. This one. In an article celebrating the 100th anniversary of Russian scientist Alexander Oparin's 1924 book, the Origin of Life, Oparan, a pioneer of origin of life studies, was interested in solving the origin of life problem within a materialistic framework of thought. His book was influential to American physical chemist Harold Urey, and we know that name.
One of the most famous laboratory experiments attempting to advance Oparin's theory of chemical evolution came from Urey and his graduate student Stanley Miller at the University of Chicago. This paper in Science praises both Oparin and Miller and calls the Miller Urey experiments spectacular. But you lay out a few questions for the author of this paper. Let's recap those questions and you can give us the answers. Now, does the author make mention that the early Earth likely had oxygen?
[00:18:32] Speaker A: No.
[00:18:35] Speaker B: Does he lament the fact that Miller used an improbable reducing atmosphere?
[00:18:39] Speaker A: No.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Does he point out that the predominant product of the spark discharge apparatus was tar that would have been destroying products faster than they formed had Miller not built a trap to separate them out?
[00:18:52] Speaker A: Again, no. And in fact, if you cycled these products through the apparatus with the sparks, then they probably would have been destroyed faster than they were collected. And so many things were wrong with this experiment, including a recent paper, 2021 that said that, hey, the kind of glassware that Miller used was also implicated in the products he got. If he used borosilicate glass, Some of the silica particles seem to act as enzymes to create the amino acids, but when they use Teflon with the same apparatus, they got far fewer amino acids. And so there was some factors like that that were not figured into the. The famous conclusions from that. And by the way, the peppered moss and the Miller myth were both. The Miller apparatus were both shown in my high school textbook decades ago, and they still can be found these days in some textbooks.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: So you were brought up on this, you were taught this. Did it sway you? Do you remember these illustrations kind of swaying you at that time?
[00:20:02] Speaker A: Well, I had a strong father who was a Christian preacher, and he helped me work through these things. And so I was pretty well inoculated against the propaganda myself. But I know that many, including some I've heard, were highly influenced by this and turned away from belief in God, belief in a designer at all, because of the propaganda of these icons.
[00:20:29] Speaker B: Wow. So with the Miller Urey experiment, we've got wrong atmosphere, chirality, probability, damaging cross reactions, of course. Intelligent design. Right. Interference. Right.
They're producing the sorts of effects they're looking for.
So you got all kinds of problems. Is this a dead icon or why does it keep coming back? Why, why do these authors mention it here, do you think?
[00:20:54] Speaker A: Well, it should be dead and it shouldn't be walking around anymore because there's so many problems with it. And, and that's, this is true of all the origin of life experiments.
Scientists who believe in a mechanistic, naturalistic origin of life, they typically will focus on one little detail like the origin of nucleotides or the of amino acids and think, ah, we've got this clue. And one analogy I use sometimes is imagine a canyon between non life and life. Okay. And the evolutionist imagines this bridge across the canyon that's going to explain how we get from one side to the other. And so they'll come up with one little rivet or a piece of steel that could be part of that bridge. And it's like they fly a helicopter over the canyon, dangle this piece out there and say this is where this piece would fit in our story, in our bridge. But then they let it go and it falls to the bottom of the canyon and does nothing. And these amino acids, they're just dead.
They're not doing anything.
Someone said that a 747 jumbo jet consists of 6 million non flying parts.
Wow. To get flight you've got to connect all these parts in the right sequence, the right order.
And that takes foresight, that takes engineering. And the same with the origin of life. A cell is so complex that if you have a few amino acids dangling out there over the canyon, they're not going to do anything. And the same with all the other ingredients that they think they're bringing together.
So yeah, the Miller Heary experiment should die a quiet death in the history books as well.
But the reason it persists I think is that, well it, they've got the right religion. Materialism.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to bring that up. You know, materialism sort of drives these ideas with evolutionary biologists who subscribe to this. You know, there's no other way to look at it other than this came about from a bottom up reductionist framework. Do you think different training is going to change that in them if they have a top down framework or an engineering framework?
[00:23:14] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. And that's why I'm excited about what the Discovery Institute is doing, for instance, with the sales conferences where scientists who understand engineering and the requirements for having things that work.
Paul Nelson, I remember, says if something works, it's not happening by accident.
And that's a good way to look at life. If something works, it's not happening by accident. It took foresight in engineering. And so these scientists at these conferences are considering what are the specifications, the requirements for Putting a bird together or a rose together or a cell together, and you have to have many parts that are organized for that function in a specific way and is much more complex than anybody ever believed.
[00:24:06] Speaker B: Hmm. Yeah, I like that. If something works, it's not happening by accident. Another way to put that, you know, kind of on the, on a Bayesian approach to this evidence, is saying if something works, the probability of it working by accident is very low, you know, as opposed to by design, you know, by foresight. And so you, you know, might not want to rule out natural causes 100%, but you can definitely say that the, the weight of evidence is, you know, one way and not the other.
[00:24:39] Speaker A: I, I guess you can never rule out a successful thing, but it takes a lot more faith to believe that than it takes to believe engineering.
[00:24:47] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely.
Now we have lots of resources to dig deeper into the origin of life and why chemical evolutionary theories have failed. We've got Stephen Meyer's book, Signature in the Cell. He lays out all the different approaches to the origin of life that have been mustered, and he evaluates each one. There's the new edition of the Mystery of Life's Origin that makes a great reference on this topic. David, where else can people turn for more on this particular topic?
[00:25:15] Speaker A: Well, Illustra Media has a really good film called Origin, and there's a portion of it on the improbability of Life that I think is very powerful.
I'd like to mention also considering Jonathan Wells, that he appeared in a couple of our Illustra videos, including the very key one called Unlocking the Mystery of Life, and it was really good to have him in that one. Also in Darwin's Dilemma, the one about the Cambrian explosion. So you can see Jonathan Wells in action on those two illustrate films.
[00:25:49] Speaker B: Yeah. Now, you close your article on these icons with a rather humorous mental picture that I wanted to share with you with our audience today, referring to the persistence of a materialistic worldview. You say this for this reason, science notwithstanding, the mainstream media continues to allow these zombie icons to shed light on evolution. Rising from the tombs, putting on Darwin costumes, holding up their sparking flasks, distributing samples of prebiotic soup to the townspeople as peppered moths flutter about their heads.
It's a great image there. Now, in your estimation, why are we still seeing these icons of evolution pop up in the scientific and the popular literature? And what's the best thing we can do about it?
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Well, I think it's human nature to try to amass evidence to support your point of view.
But yeah, these two icons that we talked about today are very picturesque and useful for propaganda, and I think that that's why they persists. It's hard to give up a good story when it somebody said that an easily workable falsehood is more useful than a highly complex incomprehensible truth.
And yeah, you find the incomprehensible truth in the scientific papers that show that these things don't work. But a nice little picture of a spark in a flask or a peppered moth on a. A white peppered moth on a dark tree trunk has great pictorial propaganda value.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. And as for things that we can do, I think one way we can honor our friend and colleague, Dr. Wells is we continue to bring up his work on the icons of evolution every time we see these pop up.
So you've done a good service. You're showing us an example of that. You see it in a science paper or in the popular entertainment and media. Hey, bring it up.
Point out Dr. Wells's work and his book and his efforts to.
To kill off these icons that just keep shambling along.
I think we're in a better position now thanks to his work, but there's definitely evidence that they keep popping up and we need to do our due diligence.
[00:28:02] Speaker A: Well, more power to Science and Culture Today for bringing this up. And I noticed too that you can listen to these articles now.
[00:28:10] Speaker B: That's right.
[00:28:11] Speaker A: Click the audio icon and you can listen to them rather than having to sit and read them.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: Yeah, hopefully that doesn't put me out of a job, but yeah, that's a nice feature on our new website, Science and Culture Today. You can Access it at scienceandculture.com used to be evolutionnews.org, you might know it as that, but it's now got a new name and a beautiful new design that really shows the breadth of the commentary and the insight that we apply to all these different types of sciences as we explore the evidence for intelligent design and the debate over evolution. Well, David, again, thank you for joining me. I appreciate your time and your unique insight on this.
[00:28:52] Speaker A: My pleasure. Thank you.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: So you can go to learn more about Jonathan Wells and his books@jonathan wells.org and as for David's writing, you just gotta hop onto scienceandculture.com click on the authors tab, that's near the top and you'll see his name.
Well, for ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott, this is David Koppage. Thank you very much for joining us.
[00:29:16] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
