[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to id the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm Emily Krylinski, your host for this episode. And every summer, the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture brings together a diverse group of students to learn not only about intelligent design, but also about the cultural impact of Darwin's ideas. These students come from all around the globe, and many are already making contributions in fields ranging from biology and physics to philosophy and film. They are the next generation of scientists, journalists, educators, and thought leaders promoting the evidence for design and purpose. There's so much more I could share about the summer seminar program, and you can find more
[email protected] seminars. But in this episode, we're going to hear directly from one of the attendees, a PhD student in biochemistry and biophysics who attended the seminar during her graduate studies.
[00:01:06] Speaker C: So what name would you like to use?
[00:01:08] Speaker D: I would like to use Mary.
[00:01:09] Speaker C: And why can't we use your real name?
[00:01:11] Speaker D: Well, not everybody is open minded. Some people might look down on me if they knew that I had different views about the origin of life and neo Darwinism.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: What were you taught about the origin of life in neo Darwinism?
[00:01:25] Speaker D: In school? I was taught pretty typically random mutation, natural selection, and those things give rise to the complexity that we see in nature.
[00:01:37] Speaker C: How did you suspect that this was not the whole story?
[00:01:40] Speaker D: I think there was. I don't know, just an intuition about it. But I also remember learning from the privileged planet as well. I remember my first encounter with the privileged planet. I was like, wow, this is fascinating. This, like, totally makes sense with kind of like, my intuition. When I first saw it, I was, like, maybe ten or 14 years old, sometime between that age or angel. And I remember, like, sitting down in the basement with my dad watching it and just thinking, wow, like, this is. This is very fascinating, and I want to learn more about this.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: When you were that age, did you think, I'm going to be a scientist someday? What were your thoughts about the future?
[00:02:20] Speaker D: I actually wanted to be a veterinarian at that point, but I didn't realize how much I actually loved science and, like, the scientific process of generating hypotheses and then testing them. I didn't realize that until much later, but I think I always had a natural interest in just the world around me and, like, an inquisitive nature about wanting to understand how things functioned or.
[00:02:49] Speaker E: Why they were there, those type of questions.
[00:02:53] Speaker B: When you got into science classes later.
[00:02:55] Speaker C: In life, did you ask your professors any questions about neo Darwinism or about origins of life or anything you were being taught in your classes that didn't match the intuition you had?
[00:03:07] Speaker D: I think I raised a question one time in my, like, undergraduate biology course, and I've never been, like, one super good with words. So when I raised this question, I did it in a manner where it was pretty obvious why I was asking the question, I guess. And I definitely received a lot of looks from, like, my classmates and my professor at that time.
[00:03:32] Speaker E: He was actually a very strong proponent of neo Darwinism, but he really liked me as a person, and I think that also impacted me. Like, I had a relationship with him. He awarded me the top biology student in his class, so he gave me.
[00:03:49] Speaker D: The award, but he knew he was a strong proponent of neo Darwinism, and yet he still really liked me. So I think that helped me early on to realize that I could have different views and still succeed in science and be well respected in the community.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: How did you find out about intelligent design and about the community of support that there is for this different set of evidence?
[00:04:13] Speaker D: Yeah, so I found out through my dad. My dad has followed Discovery Institute for a long time, and he is the one that told me about the summer seminar and recommended that I apply for it.
[00:04:28] Speaker C: Is your dad also a scientist?
[00:04:30] Speaker D: My dad is a math professor, yeah, he taught math at a community college in the town I grew up.
[00:04:37] Speaker C: What did you think of the summer seminar?
What were your first impressions after the first session?
[00:04:43] Speaker E: I came to the summer seminar, and I remember that my first impression was like, wow, this is going to be really engaging and also, like, challenging. I was impressed at, like, the ability of the speakers to communicate and raise arguments.
I think I was a little overwhelmed initially because it was just so much information, but that also gave me the feeling that there are actually people who have really, like, deeply thought about this and there are good counter arguments to.
[00:05:16] Speaker D: This ideology that has so permeated the culture.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: Do you remember a talk or a specific topic that or a speaker that impacted you the most?
[00:05:26] Speaker D: I remember the first time I heard Richard Sternberg speak, I did not like completely.
I did not completely understand, like, all the arguments and stuff, but I really appreciated his talk during my attendance at the summer seminar.
[00:05:43] Speaker C: What kind of community did you find yourself in at the summer seminar? Among the other students that were there?
[00:05:48] Speaker D: I really enjoyed getting to know all the other summer seminar students. I felt like that was so encouraging to know that I was not alone. There were all these other people from different walks of life, sometimes different countries, sometimes really different disciplines. I was in the natural sciences track, so there were like people in astrobiology and physics and geology, all these different fields. They also had similar questions and, like, doubts about this theory.
[00:06:20] Speaker C: How did the summer seminar affect your plans for the future?
[00:06:24] Speaker D: So I attended during my junior year of my undergraduate. At that point, I was still trying to decide between going to vet school or going into research. And I think what I took away from the summer seminar is that it sort of like sparked my interest in the research process. It was actually like my first exposure, really to scientific research, like it being presented in that way. So it kind of opened my eyes to the world of scientific research, I would say. And then later on in that year, I kind of had a self realization that graduate school would be a better place for me than like, vet school because I just liked to experiment. I like to test things and run experiments and see the outcome. And I knew that in vet school it would be more just like learning protocols and, like, treatment things, and it wouldn't be as much of like, actual, like, inquisitive. How does this work?
[00:07:26] Speaker C: So after summer seminar, you go back to your academic studies, you go back to the community of people that don't support intelligent design, by and large. What kind of conversations come up with your colleagues, with your professors? How does the information that you got from the summer seminar, how has that impacted your experience, your further experience as a student and then also getting into research?
[00:07:48] Speaker D: So I started grad school like a year after I had attended the summer seminar. And it was in graduate school that I definitely had the most conversations about this with colleagues. And I would say that it was so helpful knowing that the summer seminar community existed. And if I had a question or something that came up in my classes or anything, that I could go to that community and ask them what they thought, that was very helpful. I also felt like it gave me more confidence to have conversations with my colleagues because I had met this group of people that had similar concerns as I did. And so I knew that this existed and I wasn't crazy, even though I received many crazy looks or stuff. If this came up in conversation with my colleagues, any type of even questioning was usually kind of returned with, like, what? Are you serious? Like, type of attitude. But I'm still, like, close friends with many of the people who probably thought I was a little crazy for these ideas. Yeah, still maintain those friendships, and they raised very valuable concerns to me and made me, like, think deeper about these arguments as well.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: Mary, looking beyond just the ideas that you've been exposed to about intelligent design versus natural selection and random mutation, and just the science side of this. How do you see Darwin's ideas impacting our culture?
[00:09:22] Speaker D: I think the strongest way that I see it impacting the culture is just that people live kind of purposelessly. If you have the worldview that everything is just the result of chance and there's no purpose, meaning or order in the universe, I mean, why would you study biology? Why would you pursue a higher education? I think a lot of those questions to me, for myself, if I didn't think that nature had meaning and order and purpose, I would be much less inclined to want to study it or think that I could learn something or benefit the community even by studying it.
[00:10:11] Speaker C: What gives you hope for the future?
[00:10:14] Speaker E: I love this question because I feel that the truth is on our side.
[00:10:19] Speaker D: As we learn more and more about.
[00:10:22] Speaker E: Biology and biochemistry and metabolism and bacteria and the stars over and over again.
[00:10:31] Speaker D: The recurring theme is that it's more.
[00:10:34] Speaker E: Complex than we thought, it's more highly organized than we thought, it's more advanced.
[00:10:41] Speaker D: Than we thought, we can learn things.
[00:10:43] Speaker E: From it and apply it to build better things. So I'm really excited in the sense that I truly believe the truth is on our side, and that in the future, there will just be more and more evidence of top down organization. I feel like since the genetic revolution, the evidence for intelligent design has just skyrocketed. Like, before we had access to the technology and stuff, it was easier to just imagine these organisms as just kind of like bags of cytoplasm and able to change. But now we know that's not the case. Like, in order to present a coherent theory, one needs to explain how all of these proteins came about. And from an evidence standpoint of how one organism evolved into the other. When you have the proteins not showing direct courses of evolution or whatever, it.
[00:11:41] Speaker D: Just seems like the burden of proof is on them.
[00:11:44] Speaker C: Mary, we can't talk too much about what you're doing with your work and your research, but can you talk just a little bit in general about how your knowledge of design and your perspective, your unique vantage point on that, affects the way that you interact with people?
[00:12:01] Speaker E: Sure. So I'm working now in personalized healthcare.
[00:12:06] Speaker D: And I feel that having a perspective.
[00:12:10] Speaker E: Where you appreciate complexity and don't make assumptions about things like junk DNA or that there's not order and things like that, I feel like that is actually really important in my field because I do a lot now of genetic analysis of people. And when we find, like, certain mutations in a non coding region that seem to be causing an effect, I don't automatically think, oh, well, that could not be the causal mutation. Like, I actually look at that and think, well, I mean, even though it's not in a coding region, these non coding regions, I have a suspicion that they also function, just not, they just don't necessarily code for proteins. But that doesn't mean that having a base pair change in one of those sequences could not actually give rise to a disease or a human condition. So I do think that having a perspective where you are open to the fact that this is not all the result of blind, unguided processes is really important for these emerging fields where we are looking at all this data and trying to correctly interpret it.
[00:13:32] Speaker C: Mary, it's so exciting to me to hear how there's such a practical application for the theory of intelligent design and how you can apply this theory to make your work better and improve quality of life for people. I wanted to just mention that, that there are a lot of people who listen to our id the future podcast who believe in you so much and believe so much in our other seminar participants that they have donated to our annual summer seminar program so that you and other students can have this opportunity to hear truth. What does that mean to you?
[00:14:02] Speaker D: I'm so thankful for those people because.
[00:14:05] Speaker E: Discovery Institute helped me so much just.
[00:14:08] Speaker D: Having that support system and the community that I needed like multiple times throughout my graduate career. I am so thankful to everyone who donated or who supports, like the summer seminar. I feel like it's an incredible opportunity, life changing for lots of people who attend, myself included.
[00:14:29] Speaker C: Thank you so much, Mary. We really enjoyed having a chance to chat with you.
[00:14:33] Speaker E: Yeah, thank you so much.
[00:14:35] Speaker D: This has been a great pleasure.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Mary holds a PhD in biochemistry and biophysics, and she attended the Discovery Institute summer seminar program during her graduate studies. Because so many academic environments are hostile to those who question Darwin, we can't disclose Mary's real name. But for Mary and so many others, the summer seminars provide a welcoming community and a safe space to talk openly about the origin of life and the origin of the universe. Through lectures and conversations with Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, John west, and many other fellows at Discovery Institute, students have an opportunity to truly follow the evidence wherever it leads, without fear of persecution and censorship. If you'd like to learn more about our summer seminar program through the center for Science and Culture, you can visit discovery.org seminars. Again, that's discovery.org seminar seminars.
I'm Emily Kurlinski, and you've been listening to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution if you enjoyed this podcast and you're wondering how you can help promote the evidence for design and purpose, well, here's just one small thing you can do, and it'll only take a few minutes. Go to iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen and give a positive rating for this podcast. And while you're there, write a quick review. Its easy to do and its a great way to help both friends and strangers gain access to this open conversation about the origin of life and the origin of the universe. Thank you in advance for your help, and thanks for listening.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: 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.
