Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future. This is Sarah Chaffee.
Today we're talking about a big new book from Crossway publisher, Theistic A Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Critique.
The anthology has contributions from several of our fellows, and I'll be talking with one of those today, German paleontologist Gunter Beckley.
A quick point of clarification. The particular kind of theistic evolution critiqued in the book is what we might call theistic Darwinism. That is the idea that God set up a fine tuned universe and the laws of nature.
Then when the first life emerges here on planet Earth, random mutations in natural selection kick in and generate all the variety of life we see around us without any intelligent guidance from a designer.
The book weighs in at over a thousand pages, but today we'll be zeroing in on just one slice from the science section, a chapter having to do with the fossil record and the notion of universal common descent.
And to help us unpack it, we have with us on the show Gunter Beckley, who co authored the chapter with Stephen Meyer.
Beckley is a German paleoentomologist who specializes in the fossil history and systematics of insects, especially dragonflies. He's a big player in the field and served as a curator for ambler and fossil insects in the Department of Paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.
And I'm pleased to say that he's a senior fellow with Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Beckley.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: Hello, Sarah. Nice to be with you.
[00:02:09] Speaker A: I should also mention that Dr. Beckley has the honor of being erased from Wikipedia after he came out in favor of intelligent design. One minute there was a long standing English language Wikipedia page on this eminent scientist and the next minute it was gone. If you scared the Darwinists enough that they want to hush up your very existence, Dr. Beckley, I say we can count that as high praise.
[00:02:34] Speaker C: I take this as a compliment. Yes, thank you.
[00:02:38] Speaker A: Hopefully no more exciting news.
So universal common descent holds that all organisms, including plants, bacteria, and us, descended from one initial life form. It seems that universal common descent is a bludgeon that science uses to try to discount any sort of belief in a sacred text account of origins. Can you explain the significance of offering an alternative scientific point of view?
[00:03:09] Speaker C: Yeah, basically I think the whole issue, at least for me, is a scientific issue. So maybe, you know, I'm coming from originally a secular background. Only very late in my life started to question materialism and atheism. Came to believe in God.
But my critique of Darwinian evolution and also my doubts in common ancestry, at least in certain versions of common ancestry, are basically scientifically based. But of course this theory has large implications in terms of philosophy and theology.
So if the Darwinian story would be hundred percent correct, including the origin of humans, then at least certain versions of Christianity would be wrong. So there is a certain incompatibility between at least naturalistic evolution of humans and certain versions of Christianity. And of course there are philosophical implications in terms of is there free will, are there objective moral values?
Most naturalists would deny this and would say, well, that's all based on evolution. And I scratch your back, you scratch my back, and there are no objective moral values. So there are huge implications of this theory. And common ancestry is not just a question for scientists and the ivory tower.
[00:04:46] Speaker A: And you felt that? I can't help but see that as you mentioned, this theistic evolution is pretty much the opposite of your story.
You know, studying paleontology, raised in a secular home in Germany, you directed Germany's largest celebration of Darwin day at the State Museum of Natural History.
And it was through accidentally picking up a few books by intelligent design proponents that you began seeing discrepancies between what you knew as a paleontologist and what neo Darwinian evolution claimed. Can you tell us a little bit more about your personal interest in writing this chapter?
[00:05:25] Speaker C: Yes, of course. I have this personal story in the background which shows that I have a very strong interest personally in the fossil record in paleontology. I really love this field. And of course I changed certain views in the course of my exploration of the arguments that I confronted when I read those books of intelligent design by Michael Behe and Bill Demski and Steve Meyer.
And the important thing I think is that many people think that this is a religious issue and that most scientists would never even consider. To doubt the story of common ancestry and to show that there are scientific reasons to doubt this account and to look for alternative explanations was something that was very dear to my heart. And therefore I was very interested in participating in this book and very much enjoyed co authoring this chapter together with Steve Meyer.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: That seems like a pretty radical stand from in Germany.
[00:06:43] Speaker C: It probably is. And of course I had some reactions from colleagues who don't really like the fact that there is a scientist and a relatively well established scientist in this field who changed his mind and pretends to have changed his mind based on rational arguments and evidence. And of course there are these kind of accusations that this is not really True. And you have been a crypto Christian all the time and you probably are a fanatical father fundamentalist evangelicals in decades. And now you came out and this whole conversion story is just a hoax. They cannot imagine that somebody is really convinced by the arguments. And most people who have this kind of attitude personally never looked into those arguments, but simply by the story they read at in the media or at Wikipedia. If you look at the Wikipedia page of Intelligent Design, you basically said it's a religious argument, which is not true. But they never explore the arguments at the primary sources, the original books. And so they are quite hostile to my personal activity and my current views. But one has to live with it.
[00:08:12] Speaker A: So in this chapter you talk about abrupt appearance in the fossil record as evidence against universal common ancestry. Reading this section, it seems like the examples keep going on and on. Could you speak to fossil discontinuities?
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Right. So most people have heard, at least if they are interested in this issue, have heard about the Cambrian explosion. And Steve Meyer has written this very best selling book, Darwin's Doubt about the Cambrian Explosion. What many people may not know is that the Cambrian explosion is just one of many, many examples. And we give 19 different examples of similar abrupt appearances of life forms, of body plans in the fossil record. And this starts with the very origin of life at the first possible moment in Earth's history where life could be sustained by the planet. It's already there, though. The latest findings shows we have evidence for life 4.1 billion years ago.
And it goes on with photosynthesis and of course the Cambian explosion and then later explosions in the autovicians, the origin of mammals, the origin of modern birds, up to the origin of humans and even human culture. All these phenomena are very abrupt. It's not that the Cambrian explosion is a kind of weird singular phenomenon, exception from the rule, but abrupt appearances are the rule. And many paleontologists of course know that. And it's not for nothing that people like Eldridge and Gould forged this theory of punctuated equilibria because they knew that the fossil evidence is not really resonating well with the Darwinian picture of a gradual continuous development.
So the fossil evidence, in terms of these abrupt appearances, of these explosions, of these discontinuities, clearly is conflicting evidence to a continuous development in the history of life, as it would be expected based on Darwinian evolution with common ancestry and modification.
And that is one of the arguments we give another argument. It's not only the abrupt appearances, but the fact that you have this reversal. What you would expect top down versus bottom up. So what you should expect from Darwinian framework is that first an ancestral species would diversify into similar species, and then they would change into different genera and then different families, different orders, different classes. And finally, very late, you find different phyla. But what you find is exactly the opposite. Especially in the Cambrian explosion, you find the very different large groups, the phyla at the very beginning, and then only later in the autovision you have this diversification, the so called great autovician biodiversification event, where you have these playing on these themes of the phyla in diversification of the phyla in many different species, which is exactly the opposite of what you would expect from the Darwinian theory of evolution. So there are different evidence, of course, there are also evidences from the fossil record that can be and have been interpreted in terms of supporting universal common ancestry. And we name these evidences because to make a reasonable case, you have to look at all the evidence and then look for the best explanation, make an inference. The best explanation to explain all evidence. And one evidence that was usually considered as uniquely supporting common ancestry is this kind of order in the geological column that you in the oldest layers you find the more simple organisms. And then complexity increases when you go up in the geological column and go into more recent layers and you also grow in similarity. The younger the layers are, the more similar the organisms are to modern flora and fauna. But what we show is that in all these cases there are also alternative explanation. And in the introduction to our book chapter, Steve Meyer explains and that that is one of his special interests and special field of expertise, Epistemology and the philosophy of science is the kind of argument that is used for common ancestry is a so called abductive argument.
And there is this example, you have a premise, if it rains, the streets get wet. We observe the streets are wet, and then you make an inference it has rained. But of course this conclusion is flawed because there could be other reasons why the street is wet, because somebody run with his car against the hydrant. And there were other causes for for the streets to get wet. So to really make a reasonable case, you have to look for the best explanation and analyze alternative possibilities to explain the effect in question. And that's what we are doing in this book chapter and show that there are alternative explanations for these stratigraphical pattern that is observed in the fossil record. And if we take all evidence together, paleontological evidence, as well as biological evidence, genetic evidence, then overall at least there is an equal case. For common ancestry or design, if not design the better explanation because especially these phenomena of abrupt appearances and this reversal of large groups first appearing and the variation later appearing. This is of course to be expected based on common design and on introducing information in the history of life at certain points into the system.
I think we make a quite good case that intelligent design and polyphyletic view is at least on par with the common ancestry explanation that is favored by naturalistic scientists.
[00:15:15] Speaker A: We've been listening to German paleontologist Gunter Beckley about the fossil record and the problems it poses for the theory of common descent by Neo Darwinian evolution. You can find more on Dr. Bechley's argument and much more in the new Crossway anthology Theistic A Scientific, Philosophical and Theological Critique, available at Amazon for ID the Future I'm Sarah Chaffee. Thanks for listening.
[00:15:45] Speaker B: 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.
[00:16:04] Speaker A: It.
