Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Hi, this is Jay Richards for ID The Future. I am a senior fellow at Discovery Institutes Center for Science and Culture, and I, I'm really excited about this episode and actually a following episode in which I interview longtime colleague, also a senior fellow at Center for Science and Culture, Anne Gauger. And we're gonna talk about this exciting new book called God's Grandeur. But before we get to that, let me just tell you a bit about Anne. As I said, she's senior fellow at Discovery Institute. She received her bachelor's degree from m i t and her PhD in developmental biology from the University of Washington in Seattle, which is where Discovery Institute is headquartered. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University where she focused on the molecular motor of Canin. Her research has examined the limits of protein evolution, the origins of humans, and the evolution of metabolism.
Speaker 2 00:01:01 Her work's been published in Nature Development, the Journal of Biological Chemistry and Biocomplexity. She's appeared in a number of science documentary documentaries, and she co-authored the book Science and Human Origins, and she co-edited con and contributed chapters to the very large book, theistic Evolution, A scientific, philosophical and Theological Critique. But as I mentioned, we're actually here to introduce and to talk about all the details around this project of many years that comes out here in April. In fact, when you're listening to this, you can get it now called God's Grandeur, the Catholic Case for Intelligent Design, and is the editor of this multiple contributor. And many of the people that you may recognize if you follow the Intelligent Design movement, are in this book. What makes this book really interesting is, first of all, it's focus, uh, on, on specifically Catholic questions with, uh, primarily Catholic contributors, but also that it deals in equal measure with questions having to do with natural science, philosophy and theology.
Speaker 2 00:02:08 And it's great to see you. Thanks for joining me. It's good to see you too, Jay. Well, so this is obviously, you know, you and I have been, we probably have 300 emails going back over several years, uh, yes. On this project. And so I'm so excited to see it released. It's turned out really well. And I should mention for those that are listening, that if you're interested in this book, actually, of course you can get it at Amazon or wherever books are sold, but there's actually a dedicated website called God's Grandeur. So it's just God's grandeur is G R A n D E U r.org, God's grandeur.org. If you go to the website, you can actually download a free chapter to get a flavor of this book. Well, so Anne, you of course are the, the editor of the book, but you also are yourself a scientist. So in this episode, I, I want us to kind of focus on the, on the science part. And in particular, you've got a key chapter in there in the book called The Design of Biology. So talk, you know, briefly about what do you think or some of the ways that biology itself shows evidence of design?
Speaker 3 00:03:10 Well, there are things in biology that cannot be explained by purely random natural processes, material processes alone. And there are a number of them, we'll talk about some of them. The most striking one is the code in dna. In the 19 early 1950s, Watson Andrick worked out the structure of DNA n a and they discovered that it had the capacity to carry information, and that that information could then potentially be transformed into protein. And it took the scientific community about 10 to 20 years to work out how the code worked. They found out what the message was that copied the DNA N and they found out what the molecule was that allowed them to change from nucleotide to amino acid and encode the protein. It what's fascinating about this, it's, it's really analogous to human code. For example, the old time telegraph code, you would have information sent by wire, uh, in the form of dots and dashes, and you only could translate it back into words.
Speaker 3 00:04:23 If you had the code, if you knew what each set of dots and dashes corresponded to, if you had the code, then you could translate it back into words and you'd have the information in a usable form. The meaning. Same with dna. You, uh, have the information encoded in nucleotides on the dna, but the DNA doesn't do anything. What does stuff in the cell is protein. So you have to have a way to get from DNA to protein. And there is this beautiful complex system of copying the DNA into RNA and then translating the RNA into protein. And it's just phenomenal. The more we learn about it, the more exciting it is. The, let's see, do you want me to continue with something else? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:05:15 So you got the genetic code. So we're down at the, kind of, at the really microscopic level, obviously at the level of just this very specific, um, kind of information storage and transmission in cells. But what are some other things
Speaker 3 00:05:28 Inside cells, there are, um, collections of proteins assembled together to make a molecular motor or a molecular machine. There are a number of them, and they're essential for life, and they're made up of tens, maybe even a hundred, um, different proteins and sometimes rna. Um, and you have to have them to do basic things like the motor kinesin you mentioned before that I worked on. It transports cargo around the cell, and at certain points in the cell cycle, it, um, takes hold of chromosomes and moves them apart. Um, there are other molecular motors that do the same thing. Kon looks like a little walking man carrying a, a bundle on his shoulders. You can see videos of that at a YouTube channel for intelligent design. We have a model YouTube of the PanIN protein. It, it's actually several proteins working together to move. And I always feel like I should be singing, I don't know, uh, <laugh> some blues song as I watch him stride down the micro
Speaker 2 00:06:39 Sort stroll along. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, ok, so of course, you know, longtime listeners know that there's sort of two claims here. One is that the standard materialistic way of accounting for these things, of course, not mere chance, but that Darwinian process of natural selection, culling, render variations, so variations that aren't, you know, directed for a purpose. So why do you, and then there's the positive claim, right? That this is positive evidence of design. And so why, why do you think that Darwinism briefly doesn't or can't account for these things?
Speaker 3 00:07:17 I think the chief reason is because you have to have the parts for the system all together at once, or the system doesn't work. So, for example, to have a functioning cell, you have to have some way to encode information, the dna, and you have to have some way of translating it to protein. And you have to have protein to make DNA N and you have to have DNA to make protein, you have to have protein enzymes to make amino acids to be able to make protein. It it, you have to have a ribosome to take the RNA and turn it into protein. And a ribosome is made up of proteins in rna. So which came first? It's a chicken and egg problem. Yeah. There are other systems in the cell where the same thing is true. An essential molecule that the cell has to have is called atp, and it functions like the energy storage system in the cell, the molecule that collects energy as it's released in chemical reactions, and then offers it back to other reactions where energy is needed. And we have to have a t p in order to function. Our bodies go through more than our body weight and at t p every day. Now, how, how do you make at t p? Well, it's a complex synthesis, and it turns out you use up six a t p in order to make atp. Now clearly
Speaker 2 00:08:47 For the perfect chicken and egg, you got the chicken and the chicken and the egg and the egg, egg problem.
Speaker 3 00:08:52 But we need so much atp. So, um, this is true for all known cells that I know of. Um, anyway mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, they need a T P and they have to cycle it, and they recycle the ATTP instead of having to make it fresh each time. And there's this beautiful, um, assembly of proteins in the mitochondria. The one called ATP syntase is the one I'm thinking of. And it functions like a water turbine. It allows hydrogen ions to pass through itself like the water in a turbine. And as the water passes through, it harvests the energy of that passage and turns it into stored energy and attp, it takes ad ADP and turns it into attp recycling it. So
Speaker 2 00:09:41 Yeah, so you've got, you've got wheels within wheels and dependent systems within independent systems. Darwinism wants, it's to select these things that have selective advantage all the way along as no foresight. Whereas this stuff, I mean, for people that aren't in this, that just are trusting their common sense, I mean, these systems just scream telogy, don't they? I mean, they just scream in directiveness. And so you really have yeah. Train yourself out of thinking this way. And so of course we're talking down at this kind of very small scale stuff that most people of course don't ever directly observe or experience. Let's, let's blow it up to the, say, humanity itself, because of course, another kind of popular claim, and this is doesn't so much connect necessarily to the natural selection claim, but just this idea that there's perfect continuity between the, the animal kingdom and humans, and that there's nothing especially interesting or unique about humans. And you, there's of course stuff about that. You write about this very thing in the book. What would you say, what's the sort of biggest misunderstanding that people have about what science is shown or not shown about this question of human uniqueness
Speaker 3 00:10:48 Right now? Um, there are probably two things. One is exactly how similar our genomes looking at chimpanzees and our genomes, the number that's been bandied about for a long time is 1%, 1% or 2%, and
Speaker 2 00:11:06 1% different from the chimp that that's the client. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>
Speaker 3 00:11:10 One or 2% different from the chimp. And people say, well, gee, that's not very much. And gee, that must mean that, um, we evolved from chimps and mm-hmm. <affirmative>, first of all, there are more differences than that. Even the, um, standard evolutionary biologist will acknowledge that it's more like 95% similarity mm-hmm. <affirmative> identity. But I think it also needs to be pointed out that 5% that is different is way, way enough to <laugh> switch things around and create a new kind of creature. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that's the first thing. This question of how similar are we is not as important as the question. How different are we, we are significantly different other animals. First of all, we have language, some scientists say temps and other animals have language too, but it's not on the level that our language is as we're talking here. Or if you read a Shakespeare sonnet or <laugh> it, you never hear of a monkey sitting there and wondering where he came from. And of course we wouldn't know that, but yeah,
Speaker 2 00:12:24 No, the average chimp is spending a lot of time on these deep metaphysical questions. I they certainly,
Speaker 3 00:12:29 They go to college and study how to be rocket scientists too, right? Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:12:34 <laugh> <laugh>. Oh yeah. And I mean, and so, and and language, just the, the level of, of abstraction that we have in language, I mean, certainly animals communicate. Nobody denies that. So yeah, it's not, it's not as if we say, well, of course we're, we're different in every way. It's the, it's the difference that makes the difference though, because I, when, when I've used to hear these kind of comparisons of genetic similarity, said, well, if we're only, you know, even let's say it's 5% or you know, or whatever, um, they say, well, that we're 95% the same as chimps. Well, that implies, first of all, that we're just genes. Right? I mean, you could say, well, maybe we're 99% typically the same. It doesn't mean you're the same thing. Right? Yeah. It's, it's the question, the the sort of complex arrangement and the sorts of things that you do with those individual parts, but the fact that every culture and every time and place is recognize the, the qualitative difference between humans and everything else is itself kind of testimony that it is an intuitive level. People recognize this in some ways. Again, you almost have to be trained out of it. Yeah. Not to know that humans are not chimps, for instance,
Speaker 3 00:13:39 They don't have music. We have prehistoric musical instruments that are 40,000 years old. So music has been a big part of, of humanity for a long time. There's no evidence that chimps have more than maybe pounding on a rock, but it's not intended as music. It's not something regular. It's not, or buried in an interesting way, art drawing, representational art self-portraits. They don't do that landscapes. Nope. Never seen a chimp landscape. So I think it's important for us to recognize, and there's also biochemical differences, and we, it, we just have to know that we're not the same. And yeah, the biggest differences are we've got our intelligence, but we also have free will. That means we're responsible for our actions. We have morality, we know mm-hmm. <affirmative>, certain actions are wrong. And yeah, there's agreement across cultures that certain actions are wrong. This is not something that chimps demonstrate.
Speaker 3 00:14:45 And we have this belief in an immortal soul in our place in relation to God. We, we, this is an essential part of who we are. Humanity looks for the divine in one form or another. There are religions in every culture. And for us as Catholics, as Christians, we have a clear tradition of who that other, that divine person is. We know more about it. And one of the things that comes out of that teaching is that we have souls. The mind body problem is a, is a significant thing that scientists don't know how to solve. Why, why do we have this sense of ourselves as an immaterial mind that sort of sits behind our eyes, <laugh> and directs our bodies?
Speaker 2 00:15:37 Yeah. I mean, in the Catholic doctrine is of course we're not, we're not ghosts trapped in bodies. We're this, this, these hybrid beings that are fully spiritual and fully material. We're embodied, but we are not reducible to our material parts. And that's, you know, a kind of universal intuition that again, people have to be taught out of. But let, let's talk just about one piece of evidence that of course you've talked and written about that's very specific to the Catholic setting, I think, because in some ways I try to summarize what the sort of, if there's official Catholic teaching on some of these origins questions, is there certain non-negotiables, one that God created the world and so the universe is not self sufficient or, uh, you know, that it didn't bring itself into existence, but that there's kind of flexibility about some of these scientific questions, but there's a very kind of clear line drawn on this question of mono genesises that is the claim that human beings ultimately are all human beings, that we share the same parents a as opposed to being, you know, different races or different ethnic groups, maybe having different origins.
Speaker 2 00:16:41 And, you know, a lot of people, a lot of people are taught, in fact, I suspect there's some Catholics taught this in Catholic schools. Unfortunately, the sciences has somehow disproven this idea that there could have been a first ancestral couple. Uh, could you sort of ex explain a bit about that? Like is is it true that population genetics, for instance, does it show that there can't have been an original pair at the beginning of the human race? Or is the evidence quite consistent with that? How would you put it?
Speaker 3 00:17:07 It was taught from about the 1980s as population geneticists went after this question. And it was in part in response to what's called mitochondrial eve. It's the story that some scientists, they looked at the sequences of mitochondria, which are small organs in cells that have their own dna, little loop of dna, and it's easy to purify and sequence. So they sequence the mitochondrial DNA all around the world, Europe, Asia, Africa, south America, et cetera. And then they, they compared the sequences among all those individuals and they came up with a sort of a map saying who was clo most closely related to who and how you could trace it back to the origin. And the origin was demonstrated to be in Africa some 200,000 years ago. People jumped on that saying there would be a single woman from whom we all inherit our mitochondrial dna.
Speaker 3 00:18:13 People jumped on that and said, oh, that's evidence of eve mitochondria leave. Well, the, uh, population geneticists hated this idea. So they set out to prove that it couldn't have been just one person. And they had a number of different arguments. But the main one was there wasn't enough time for the, uh, genetic variation we have in our population to arise, starting with one individual that's only one version of, of the genome, accumulate mutations over time. And then by the time you get to here, we have a certain number of mutations scattered throughout our genome. And actually most people are very, very similar. We are more similar to each other in our genomes than other animals, but still you have to account for the differences. And they said it could not be done. So I worked on the, oh, it's, it's your fault. This part is your fault.
Speaker 2 00:19:10 Okay, now I'm remembering sort of pestering you about this <laugh>,
Speaker 3 00:19:15 About 2011, I got a text from a philosopher named Dennis, uh, bonnet, and he had been working on the question of Adam and Eve wanted to know how strong the evidence against Adam was. And I said, I don't know, I'll go look. But then he was so excited by that answer that I thought maybe he was a little bit crazy. And I texted you and said, this is what's happened. What should I do? Do I wanna get involved with this or not? And do you remember what your answer was?
Speaker 2 00:19:48 I don't remember. Now
Speaker 3 00:19:49 You said it sounds like destiny
Speaker 2 00:19:52 <laugh>, you were the right person to focus on it. And it's a key question, you know, so yeah. Doesn't surprise me. I remember talking about it, but I don't quite hadn't remembered exactly what I said. Yep.
Speaker 3 00:20:04 You said it sounds like destiny. So I started working on the problem and several other people joined, and in particular a Swedish mathematician named Ola Huster. And he put together a model where we could start from a first pair and let them go through generation after generation. And we keep track of their DNA sequences and their mutations as they accumulate. And the branching pattern that happens, anybody who studied genealogy knows you start with parents and you have four grandparents and then you have eight great grandparents and it goes on from there, it sort of explodes out. And if you're gonna keep track of all of that, you need a lot of computer memory, which is why nobody else had ever done it. Well, he worked out a way where he could pair down to just the paths that actually ended up in the future, in, in our time. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and just look at those. And so we did it. We used assumptions about how often they had children and how many they had, and how many generations between then and now, et cetera. We used standard estimations from the scientific literature. We wanted to make sure that it was as simple and as straight a model as possible. Yep. We ran it. And the answer was, well, we could have come from too. Now it doesn't prove that we did. Sure. It just means they can't say anymore that we couldn't have.
Speaker 2 00:21:35 That's right. They, they, they, solid science doesn't show that we couldn't have, that's, you know, that's a modest finding. You don't need to claim more than it shows, but it, I think it's significant. I suspect the average Catholic would be surprised to hear this, you know? And so that's, yeah. That's why I'm really excited about this book. And we're gonna talk in another episode about this, the weird situation in which a lot of Catholics don't wanna have even have this conversation and why you think that is. They'll talk more about the philosophy and theology, but we'll end this episode here and then return in the next one. So for those of you that maybe tuned out or you have not heard this whole episode, I'm talking to Anne Gaer, the biologist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. She is the editor of this brand new book, God's Grandeur, the Catholic Case for Intelligent Design that deals with science, velocity, and, and theology. We have been talking about the science in this episode, and we'll come back to talk about the other stuff. I am Jay Richards contributor also to this volume. Really excited to be a part of it. And if you want to actually get a free chapter, you can go to the website right now and get a taste of
[email protected]. Thanks so much for joining us. I'm Jay Richards for ID The Future. Until next time,
Speaker 1 00:22:46 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
