[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Do you know how to respond to the most common criticisms of Intelligent design?
On today's episode, Casey Luskin helps us do just that as he reviews the basics of Intelligent Design.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. You're about to enjoy the second half of a discussion with Dr. Luskin that originally aired on the Truthful Hope podcast, hosted by Jacob Vasquez. In part two, Cayce refutes common objections to Intelligent design, including the God of the gaps argument. Cayce reminds us that the fossil record doesn't reveal the gradual transitions predicted by Darwinian evolution. Instead, it largely shows abrupt appearances or explosions, that of new life forms, infusions of information that demand an adequate explanation.
Luskin explains the Truth about Lucy as well, a frequently cited fossil find often hailed as a human ancestor.
He also responds to an objection to irreducible complexity.
The episode concludes with some practical advice for public school science teachers who want to navigate the teaching of evolution in their classrooms.
So let's get back into the discussion. Here again is Casey Luskin and Jacob Vasquez.
[00:01:25] Speaker C: So objections to id I think this is important.
Interestingly, Casey, I was not able to find too many scientific objections. A lot of it was philosophical in nature.
For instance, the first argument, I do have one scientific for you, but the first philosophical one is, isn't this just God of the gaps when we posit in a designer?
[00:01:48] Speaker A: Yeah. So, great, great point you're making there, Jacob. That does come up a lot. People will say that Intelligent Design is just a God of the gaps argument. What do they mean by that? Well, what they're saying is that there are certain things that science doesn't know yet. And they're saying that basically you are just inserting God or Intelligent Designer into the gaps in our knowledge. Okay. But someday science is always discovering new things. Science is going to solve those problems. And so therefore, you should not be making this argument. And the way that basically that. The thrust of what they're saying is that Intelligent Design is just an argument from ignorance, is based upon what we don't know, what science has not yet discovered, and we're inserting God into that gap in our knowledge. The problem is that Intelligent Design is not an argument from ignorance. It's not based upon what we don't know. It's based upon what we do know. We do know that there are certain kinds of complexity, namely, you know, complex and specified information, irreducibly complex machines, and all of our experience.
Those kinds of things always trace back to a mind or a personal agent. So we're not making an argument based upon what we don't know. We're making an argument based upon what we do know. That information, language based code always comes from a mind. And so this is not a God of the gaps argument.
It's an intelligence of what we observe and experience in the world around us argument.
And this is very much, I think the God of the gaps argument really just fundamentally misunderstands how the argument for intelligent design works.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: Yeah, and it's kind of like, you know, the naturalist will say or the pro evolutionists will say, oh, like, like you said, oh, we'll find out given enough time. Or naturalism or science will figure it out. That's naturalism in the gaps. It's the same thing, just different objects. So we're really not making much progress here. So I like how you put it. We're going, going based on what we do know, not what we don't know.
So I think that that addresses that just fine. The next objection I hear so commonly, I know our listeners probably do too.
Doesn't the fossil record show evidence of evolution? And this may lead into a conversation about Lucy. So I'm happy for you to just go on a rant about both of those.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: Sure, sure.
So yeah, you do hear that argument. People think, oh, evolution is supported by fossils. Okay, well, when you talk about the fossil record, what are you talking about? If you're Talking about, yes, 3 billion years ago, all we had in the fossil record were bacteria, like basically bacteria. And today we have all kinds of complex animals. So in a very general sense, yes, things did get more complicated over time. But what Neo Darwinism predicts is that what we should see in the fossil record are these transitional forms where, which document one type of organism evolving into another. Okay. And yes, occasionally we do find fossils that might be potential transitional forms. But by and large, the pattern that we see in the fossil record is that new types of organisms appear abruptly in what paleontologists call explosions. And these explosions of life are found throughout the fossil record where new types of organisms appear very rapidly without any direct evolutionary precursors. Okay. The most famous example of this is the Cambrian. There's a bunch of examples, but the most famous one is the Cambrian explosion where basically most of the major groups of animals appear abruptly in the Cambrian period without any direct evolutionary ancestors. I think Richard Dawkins, you know, famous evolutionary biologist, has this great quote where he says about the Cambrian animals, he says it's as though they were Just planted there without any evolutionary history. So, yeah, I'm not, that's, that's Dawkins saying that. Okay, so it's really extraordinary the degree that we of sort of abrupt appearance of new types of organisms. There's another explosion later when it comes to plants.
Land plants appear explosively in the fossil record. Then flowering plants appear later in the Cretaceous in a very explosive manner. It's been called the big bloom of organ of life.
There is an explosion of many major bird groups in the late Cretaceous, early Tertiary. And then in the early Tertiary, we see a mammal explosion where most major groups of mammals appear abruptly. So what we see in the fossil record is not this sort of this gradualistic pattern that was predicted by Darwin's theory or even neo Darwinism. What we see is the more common pattern are abrupt explosions. Now there are a few fossils that are occasionally cited as potential transitional forms. And most of them end up going, you know, sort of belly up when you, when you explore them in greater detail.
And we could talk about Lucy if you want. There's other ones as well as well. But Lucy is supposed to be a transitional form leading from sort of our ape like australopithecine ancestors to ultimately to our genus Homo. We are the species Homo sapiens. Homo, that means wise man in Latin. We're genus Homo species sapiens. And so Lucy is supposed to be a direct ancestor of our genus Homo. The problem with this whole argument is that when you look at the paleoanthropology fossil record, there is an abrupt gap. There is a major break in the fossil record between ape like species like Lucy and human like species, like some of the earliest members of the genus Homo, such as Homo erectus or Neanderthals. Okay, so, and I could give you quotes on this. Ernst Mayer, a very famous evolutionary biologist, he said the earliest fossils of Homo are separated from Australopithecus by a large unbridged gap. By the way, Lucy was the species Australopithecus afarensis. And the Australopithecines are supposed to be an ape like genus of hominids that are directly ancestral to our genus Homo. But listen to what Mare is saying again. The earliest fossils of Homo are separated from Australopithecus by a large unbridged gap. He goes on to say, how can we explain this seeming saltation? Saltation means a jump, he says, not having any fossils that can serve as missing links, we have to fall back on the time honored method of historical science, the construction of a historical narrative. I mean, I could give you many other quotes from the mainstream literature to that effect. But the bottom line is that there is a major break in the fossil record between the australopithecines, who are very ape like, and the earliest members of the genus Homo, which are actually very human like. Now Lucy in particular is said to be special or important because they think that she had a very chimpanzee like head on top of a very human like body. It was kind of like this, this bipedal upright walking species that had a very chimp like small brained head. Okay? So imagine a little ape like creature that's walking around a lot like you and me. The problem with that interpretation of Lucy is that there's been a lot of doubts raised that she really was bipedal or at least habitually bipedal for one. There's one study that said that she had hand bones like those of a knuckle walker. Okay.
There's also evidence from her pelvis that Lucy's pelvis actually had a very chimp like shape originally. Okay. A pelvis that would have been more suited probably for quadrupedal type walking rather than bipedal. And there have been some.
Basically, I think what it comes down to is we don't have a good enough idea of what Lucy's pelvis was like to make an idea of exactly how she walked. But the big bone that sided for Lucy is her knee. And it said that Lucy's knee joint is that of an upright walking species. And you can make that case. However, if you think about the angle, if you're standing upright, you'll notice that your femur kind of points down and in towards the middle from your hips. Okay. There's an angle there called the bicondylar angle. Lucy's femurs would actually have pointed in towards, you know, towards the center even more. Much more, actually much, much more than the human being femur does. So whatever was going on there with Lucy, it was very different from the way human beings walk with our knees and our legs. Okay? And Lucy also had very long arms, very sort of ape like, long strong arms. Probably was very good for climbing in trees. A lot of people have said that she was very well suited for a tree dwelling or arboreal lifestyle. So again, that's not human being type of locomotion type of walking, right? So, so we see in Lucy is a mixture of traits that she could, she, she could do knuckle walking, she spent a lot of time in trees and she probably had some Limited capability for upright walking, but I think that that bicondylar angle probably is best suited for, like, walking on tree branches. Okay. If you're, like walking, putting one foot in front of the other, your knees are going to kind of be pointing in very sharply from your pelvis as you do that. Well, that's kind of how Lucy walked. Okay. And so I think that when Lucy was walking, think of her with her long arms grasping tree branches, walking on tree branches. I think that's the kind of upright walking that she was doing. It was not upright walking like we do. So Lucy was great for what she did. In fact, one study, by the way, said that when Lucy died, she died because she fell out of a tree. So she spent a lot of time in trees.
Probably not the funnest way to die. But I think that what we see with Lucy is a species that was very different from humans and, and had a mode of locomotion that was very different from modern humans. Yes, some limited upright walking, but not in the same way a habitual biped like we are.
And so that's Lucy. I mean, we can talk about other species if you want, but I think that a strong case can be made that, you know, she was great for what she was designed to do, but there's not a good case for her being a human ancestor.
[00:11:43] Speaker C: Yeah, it's super helpful, I think, you know, as you were talking about the fossil record and Lucy, I just keep thinking like, you really, as a pro evolutionist and maybe to no fault of their own, you really have to go into looking at this evidence, assuming or presupposing that Darwinian evolution is true, to reach that conclusion as confidently as you do, because you could look at, you know, common ancestry, the shared DNA, with the completely different perspective and get a equally reasonable conclusion. And same with Lucy being, you know, a tree species and the fossil record having so many gaps, it's easy to overlook that if you're just looking for evidence for your Darwinian evolution for you. So it's really good to clarify that. And for our listeners, I think push back a little bit on that. It's good to engage in these conversations.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: But what do they say about Lucy having the hand bones of a knuckle walker? They will interpret that as saying, well, maybe Lucy, maybe one of Lucy's. Lucy's ancestors, knuckle walked. But they will reinterpret it saying, oh, but that was just a primitive retention from her ancestors. Kind of like people will say, we don't need our appendix anymore. That was used by our ancestors. That's not true by the way. The appendix is very important for as a storehouse for good bacteria probiotics. Okay, but that's another story. But you know, they would say that this was just a leftover from her ancestors. Okay, you can interpret, you can interpret that if you want that way. But that's more like explaining away the data than explaining the data. I think if she had the hand bones for a knuckle walker, then that's probably a piece of evidence that tells you how she walked, you know, at least some of the time.
So there you go, Right?
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Yeah. It's important the lens at which you look at the evidence.
I'm not going to leave you without a scientific objection though. I was able to find one, one interesting one and this is regarding CO option and does it adequately explain as an alternative theory for irreducible complexity? I was, I found this one quote from and I might pronounce his last name wrong, Nicholas Matsky.
Are you familiar with him?
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Maybe. Oh yeah, for sure. He's a well known ID critic. Yeah.
[00:13:45] Speaker C: Okay, good. So he said this quote about CO option and to refute Behe's flagellum example, and he said this, there is a strong. He lists four reasons why this view works. There's a strong possibility, previously unrecognized, of further homologies between the type 3 export apparatus of F1 F0ATP synthetist. Much of the flagellum's complexity evolved after crude motility was in place via internal gene duplications and sub functionalization. Only one major system level change of function and four minor shifts of function need to be invoked to explain the origin of the flagellum. This involves five subsystem level CO option events for this transition between each stage is bridgeable by the evolution of a single new binding site coupling two pre existing subsystems, followed by co evolutionary optimization of components. Therefore, like the eye contemplated by Darwin, careful analysis shows that there are no major obstacles to gradual evolution of the flagellum. So for our listeners that probably sounds like a different language.
Maybe you could rehash what he's saying, but what would you say in response to the CO option objection to irreducible complexity?
[00:15:07] Speaker A: Sure. So there's no way to go through everything you just said and actually you didn't get into a lot of the details of what he's saying. What's wrong with it? Some of these steps, these alleged parts that could be co opted into the flagellum are nothing like flagellar parts. So they can't be co opted as easily as he's saying that. I'm familiar with the paper that you're talking about there, but let's take one of the examples that he gives. He says that something called the type 3 secretion system could have been a system that could have been co opted to become part of the flagellum. Okay, so what does co option mean? Co option basically means that you are taking other systems that are in the cell and you are retooling them, changing them, and suddenly recombining these systems to create a completely functional new system. Okay, so you're basically borrowing parts from other systems. It would be like saying you want to build a laptop. Okay, so what do you do? Well, you take the power cord from your toaster, you take the monitor from your tv, you take the hard drive from your old desktop computer, you take the keyboard from your typewriter and you retool all these parts together and suddenly you got a laptop. Well, yeah, you can see similarities between those parts and other systems, by the way, that could be the result of common design, not necessarily common descent. But you can see the similarities between these parts. But that doesn't mean that those parts are easily interchangeable where you can just swap them in and out from one system to another and suddenly give yourself an entirely new system. It doesn't work like that. So it turns out, for example, that the type 3 secretion system is.
It's kind of like think of an outboard motor. Okay.
I did a lot of boating with my family growing up, and I still love to do boating.
You put an outboard motor on the back of your boat, you, you need to attach it to your boat. Okay, well, this type 3 secretion system in the flagellum kind of functions like the attachment, the bracket that you attach the flagellar motor in the bacterial cell membrane with. Okay. Kind of like the anchor. It anchors it in the cell membrane. It also can do these really complicated, important function of helping to export proteins outside the cell. So then you can assemble the flagellum. Right? So what people will say was maybe the type 3 secretion system, which is another system known in biology, maybe the flagellar sort of anchor body was borrowed from the type 3 secretion system. Well, there's a problem with this argument, and that is that this type 3 secretion system is known from this bacterial organelle that is thought to have evolved very, very late in the history of life. Okay. It's only found in a very narrow subset of bacteria. Whereas flagella are distributed among Many, many diverse types of bacteria. Okay. You ask a complex question, you're going to get a complex answer.
[00:17:57] Speaker C: I appreciate it you're following.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So if you think about the bacterial phylogeny, according to evolution, flagella, which are very widely distributed among many bacterial phyla, they should be very deep. They should have originated very, very early in bacterial evolutionary history. You know, this is from an evolutionary perspective and not late yet. The type 3 secretion system is found only in a very narrow subset of bacteria. So it's thought to evolve much later, which actually makes sense because what is the flagellum used to do? It's used to help bacteria swim around to find food. That's something you're going to need really, really early on in, you know, the history of bacteria. I mean, you're going to need them immediately, really. Bacteria, you're going to need flagella in order to find food very, very, very early. But the type 3 secretory system is actually used by this very, very special type of unique predatory bacteria that eat eukaryotes. Now, eukaryotes are very, very advanced types of cells. We're eukaryotes. They're very, very advanced organisms that are again, thought to have risen much later in the history of life. So everything we know about the type 3 secretion system suggests that it arose very late in the history of life, whereas everything we know about the flagellum suggests it arose very early.
So there's no way you could have co opted the type 3 secretory system when you were, when you were trying to evolve a flagellum because it, as far as you know, the best evidence shows it didn't exist yet. All right, so these CO option stories, they might look good on paper, but they really fall apart when you look into the details. And by the way, don't look into the details because you're never going to get details of how all these different parts suddenly, spontaneously come together and make a new system. And this is really the catch 22 of CO option. Okay? Because either CO option models, everything just looks like it was set up to evolve into this new system, in which case they tend to look very, very designed. The word we use is teleological, like it was kind of preordained or the evolutionary pathway doesn't work very well and they're too different to actually serve as sort of the, the systems that you can borrow. I mean, I think Nick Matzky talks about borrowing a kind of a pilus to form the, the bacterial propeller, the filament. And these are totally different systems. And I don't see how he can say that just a couple change, a couple binding sites is going to convert a pilus into a bacterial flagellar filament. It's just these are very, very different systems. So sometimes it's like he's counting on so much luck it starts to sound really suspicious. And other times it's like, no man luck is not going to do that for you. So I don't, I am not aware of any successfully peer reviewed, published, detailed explanation for the CO option origin of anything in biology. Okay, People have used that term, they've, they've thrown it around here and there, but I've never heard them actually explain how a system evolved via CO option. And so it's a nice idea, but lacking details, I think right now is just an idea. And so I love this quote by two ID theorists that I work with, Bill Demski and Jonathan Witt. And they basically say what in our experience can take machines and then retool them, recombine them, recombine their parts into new irreducibly complex machines, basically what can do this? CO option. They say, well, there's only one thing that can do that and that's intelligence. So if CO option really is happening, I think it's more of an argument for design than anything else.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: I 100% agree. I had to look into that quote in that paper a lot more. But as I was reading, I just kept thinking common design would explain this, a designer would explain this. So again, it's that lens and I'm happy you clarified that for our listeners. And if our listeners got overwhelmed by the scientific lingo, I apologize, but, but it needs to be said, I have one more question, I have a lot of questions for you actually, but one more, given our time limit here, and this is a practical question, so pretty more law related.
And this came from someone in our youth group at our church and she's a high school teacher and she teaches in science, but she's in a public school and told to teach Darwinian evolution, but given her Christian faith, seems a rock, like a rock and a hard place with what to teach and to. Do you teach it as a fact? Do you teach as a theory? So how would you recommend she goes about proceeding with this direction from the curriculum? Does she bring up intelligent design? What would you recommend?
[00:22:35] Speaker A: Well, first of all, I'm not going to give legal advice, you know, to a specific person, a specific situation if she.
And you know, actually we don't even give legal advice. We give Just practical curricular advice, which we think is the best way to teach this scientifically, objectively and all of that. So if your friend actually wants to reach out and contact us at Discovery, we could help her work through whatever her situation is, and there may be some resources we could point her to. But generally speaking, what we recommend for public school teachers, and I don't know if she's in public schools or not, but generally what we recommend, okay, is that actually teachers don't get into intelligent design.
Our priority with intelligent design is to see it grow and develop as a science. And this has been our priority for many years and we're having a lot of success. We've seen hundreds of peer reviewed pro ID scientific research papers being published. We have lots of great things coming out of the ID research program. We want to see ID grow, continue to progress and grow as a science. When ID gets pushed into the public schools and that tends to politicize the debate, it takes the debate out of the lab and pushes it into sort of like the courtroom or the political sphere, and that then politicizes the debate, which results in increased persecution of pro ID scientists and scholars who are trying to develop the case for intelligent design in the academy. So we really discourage public school educators and policymakers from bringing ID into the public school context. Now, we understand that evolution is already being taught there and we don't want to leave those folks high and dry. So what we recommend for public school teachers generally is to teach the evidence for and against evolution, which is already in the curriculum. So if you're already going to teach it, teach it factually correct, teach it accurately, teach students, you know, the pro evolution evidence that's probably in the textbooks. But if there are legitimate scientific critiques of what's in the textbooks, then teach them about that too. Okay? And let's see, you know, let the students use this as an opportunity to develop critical thinking skills, to weigh the evidence on both sides and form their own conclusions. This is the best way to teach students science anyway. So we think that teaching the evidence for and against evolution is really the best way, scientifically and pedagogically speaking, to teach evolution. And that's what we encourage folks to do. Now, that being said, you know, I can't speak to your teacher friends specifically situation. We don't want anybody to get, you know, fired. And unfortunately, most public school teachers have very little academic freedom. Sort of as a general matter, if an administrator or a school board does not want a teacher saying X, Y or Z, they have a Lot of power to tell teachers not to say X, Y and Z at penalty of being fired. There are a few states that have what we call academic freedom laws. We've been really supportive of states and actually helped some of these states to, to get good language into their bills to pass academic freedom laws that protect the rights of teachers to critique evolution or to talk about these topics, controversial scientific topics, objectively without having to worry about losing their jobs. So, so, and I have no idea where your friend lives, if she lives in that kind of a context. But again, you know, we might be able to point folks if they're, if they're in of these few states with good policies on the books. There are some protections there. But at the end of the day, it's a tough world we live. You know, this July, Jacob, is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial.
And the scopes trial was July 1925. And that was when a bunch of, you know, fundamentalists, I would say that they were very misguided in what they did, but they criminalized the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee public schools. Now, I don't think that a scientific idea should ever be criminalized to talk about it. Okay, I might disagree with it, but absolutely, you should never tell people it's illegal or prevent them from being allowed to have the conversation. I think that that's, that's definitely a very wrong way to go about dealing with this issue.
But Justice Scalia, if you remember him, he passed away. Was it like eight or nine years ago? Now he once said that today we are living in a time of scopes and reverse, okay, where instead of evolution being criminalized, it's those who are promoting non Darwinian views who are being attacked and persecuted and censored. And that really is true, Jacob. We still have this power dynamic where we can't have in most places, I would say in most public schools or universities even, we don't have free speech and true scientific intellectual freedom on the top of evolution. But today the power dynamics have shifted exactly 180 degrees where it's the evolutionists who hold the power and they are by, in many, many cases censoring scientists who would challenge Darwinism or educators who would challenge Darwinism or support id. So we got to stand up for free speech. And it's really unfortunate that this is just the world that we live in today.
[00:27:34] Speaker C: Yeah, well, I appreciate that answer. I think that's helpful for her and maybe countless others who are teachers and wrestling with the same issues.
You know, it's It's a good point. Right? You don't want to risk getting into that political realm, especially given that trial that was now 100 years ago, which is crazy.
But it's, it's helpful and I think she'll appreciate that. So thank you for giving that answer. And Casey, we are at time. I might have to have you back for the host of other questions I have for you, but thank you so much for jumping on Casey. I think this was fruitful for me. I'm sure it was helpful for our listeners as well.
[00:28:08] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you, Jake. It was a lot of fun. Appreciate the great questions. And you clearly have studied this issue a lot and understand it pretty well. So thanks for the great conversation.
[00:28:17] Speaker C: Awesome. Well, to our listeners, thank you guys for tuning in and God bless.
[00:28:28] Speaker B: That was Dr. Casey Luskin taking us back to the basics of intelligent design in the second half of a conversation.
We're grateful to Jacob Vasquez at the Truthful Hope Podcast for allowing us to share the discussion here.
If you missed the first half of the chat, be sure to look for it in a separate episode. And before you go, did you know we have a new YouTube channel and that many of our interviews and commentaries are now available in video format? That's right. You can watch my interviews, commentaries, readings and other content on our new ID the Future YouTube channel, and I need your help to spread the word.
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I really appreciate your help and feel free to reach out to me anytime with comments, interview suggestions, someone you think I should interview for ID the Future or just general comments? You can reach me at
[email protected] andrewdefuture.com well, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks again for listening.
[00:29:38] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
