Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: If you've been connected to the intelligent design research community for long, chances are you've come across the arguments of biochemist Dr. Michael Behe. He is author of three books challenging the Darwinian account of life, Darwin's Black Box, the Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves. He's also the architect of the principle of irreducible complexity, a key component in the argument for design in nature.
Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDiarmid. Today we're sharing a recent interview with Dr. Behe that first aired on the Truthful Hope podcast with Jacob Vasquez.
Here Dr. Behe discusses his journey into the field, the concept of irreducible complexity, and the distinctions between intelligent design and creationism.
The conversation also explores scientific and philosophical objections to ide, the implications of Darwinian evolution, and the significance of recent scientific advancements in understanding life's complexity.
It's always a delight to learn from Dr. Behe, so let's get right to it. Here's hosts Jacob Vasquez and Dr. Michael B.
[00:01:18] Speaker A: Welcome everybody to the Truthful Hope podcast. I'm your host, Jacob Vasquez. Today I am really looking forward to talk about some science with you all. With none other than one of the pioneers of the intelligent design movement, if you want to call it a movement, and the founder of the irreducible complexity argument. For decades he has done a masterful job just strongly critiquing and dismantling the ideology of the Darwinian evolutionary macro evolution view with sound scientific evidence. And in 1996 he wrote one of the greatest daggers to Darwin's theory titled Darwin's Black the Biochemical Challenge to Evolution, which has made it onto the National Review's list of the hundred most important non nonfiction works of the 20th century. And George Gilder even said it all overthrows Darwin at the end of the 20th century in the same way that quantum theory overthrew Newton at the beginning. So today I have the honor of speaking with who has been called by H. Allen or the most prominent of the small circle of scientists working on intelligent design, and that is of Lehigh University, Dr. Michael Behe. Thank you so much for jumping on Dr. Behe.
[00:02:33] Speaker C: Yeah, my pleasure. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Great to be with you, Jacob.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on. You know, as a scientist myself, we were talking about before we started the recording. I'm a bioinformatics scientist in cancer research and I tend to reference your arguments A ton. Your irreducible complexity argument is just phenomenal, and especially when I'm trying to discuss, you know, ID with my evolutionist colleagues.
And we've had Dr. Casey Luskin on in the past to talk about ID, and we've touched on your argument briefly, not in too much depth, but I feel like this, this topic is just so important, especially given the implications which we'll dive into later on.
So the more we could talk about it, the better. So I'm just really happy to have you on.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: Super. Good.
[00:03:18] Speaker A: So before we dive into some of the questions I have for you, I'm just curious as to what is your story? How did you come about to be, you know, to be involved in this ID movement that definitely has its pushbacks and risks in the field that we're in?
How did you get involved in this? Was it a religious endeavor or did you eventually just start questioning the scientific evidence at some point?
[00:03:38] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it was pretty much all scientific.
It's an unusual route. And let me just say I'm a Roman Catholic. I was born into a Catholic family.
I went to parochial schools, have always been a Christian, never stopped being a Christian.
And nonetheless, we were kind of taught a kind of theistic evolution in schools, in parochial schools. The idea was that, well, God made the universe, he made the laws, and if he wants to make life using those laws, who are we to tell him otherwise?
Sounded okay with me.
Why do I care?
I was always interested in science too, of course. So I went on to study chemistry in college and then biochemistry in graduate school. And everybody, of course, thought Darwin's evolution or Darwin's theory of evolution was correct. It wasn't actually until I was a associate professor here at Lehigh in the mid-1980s, which is a long time ago now, it seems like yesterday to me that I read a book which knocked me for a loop. It was called Evolution A Theory and Crisis by a medical doctor and geneticist named Michael Denton, who was then in Australia, living in Australia.
And he.
He was not a theist at the time, and he was just sick and tired of hearing Darwinists claiming so much for their theory when he saw so many problems for it. And in his book, again, it's called Evolution of Theory in Crisis, he detailed lots of problems for Darwin's theory that I had never heard of, even though, hey, I was a PhD, a professor of biochemistry. I'm supposed to know how life works at the physical level.
And when I read it, I got ticked off. I got mad.
Why didn't anybody tell me about this. And so one of the first things I did was to go look at in the science library, because in biochemistry you study these phenomenally complex systems that undergird life cellular systems.
And when I was studying them, occasionally I would ask myself, well, how did that evolve?
And I'd say, well, I guess somebody must know. And I'd turn the page and go on to the next topic.
I was essentially defeated by the presumption that somebody did know. But after reading Denton's book, I wanted to know who had explained some of these things. And so I went in the library to look for papers where scientists would maybe make a start or good ideas, test them a few times about how complex systems, biochemical systems, had evolved by a Darwinian mechanism. And I was astonished to find that there were 0, 0 count of none papers even trying to detail how a system could have come about by Darwinian means.
And that again ticked me off. And I wasn't able to do anything about it. I just would wander the halls at Lehigh, muttering to myself and kind of buttonholing anybody I could find and complaining about McDarwyn, but that didn't get get me very far. But serendipitously, I met a man named Philip Johnson who was then a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and he had his own story about how he became skeptical, skeptical of Darwin's theory.
And unlike me, I'm kind of an introvert. Philip Johnson is a schmoozer, or was a schmoozer. He died a few years ago and he brought together a number of academics who were skeptical of Darwin's theory. And by talking to other folks, I came to realize that I had a point of view that none of them were really aware of, that at the molecular level of life, things were really in opposition to Darwin's ideas.
And so I, you know, I got the idea to write a book and. And I did. That became Darwin's black box. But it was only because, you know, I had no animus against Darwinian theory. You know, from a religious point of view, I think my viewpoint then might have been a little naive. I reconsidered a few things since then, but I didn't have any animus. It was just because I was mad because I thought I was being led down the garden path to believe something not based on the evidence for it, but just because that's what you were supposed to believe in our age. You were supposed to believe that life kind of came about by accident.
[00:08:42] Speaker A: So good. And you know, stories like yours, especially as someone Prominent as yourself in this ID movement here, looking at the scientific evidence and having that be the trigger that has you go the opposite way from the flock, so to speak. Because, you know, for whatever reason in the world, I don't know why, but a lot of my clips and interviews that I post on TikTok, they always gear towards the atheist algorithm and the evolutionist algorithm. And When I posted Dr. Casey Luskin's clips, oh, they came out swinging.
All the comments were essentially, they didn't deal with the scientific arguments that Lus Casey put forward. They were just assuming that Darwinian evolution was a brute fact. It was just, you guys are dumb. This is real, this is a fact. It's not even a theory. It was that firm. And I, you know, unfortunately, it's just a byproduct of what we're teaching kids in schools. We're teaching Darwinian evolution as a fact. So you really gotta come around the back door kind of like you did much later. And it, it seems, I mean, it must have opened your eyes quite hugely.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: Obviously you've got to kind of accidentally stumble across the problem in your education. You're led, led to believe something, I think C.S. lewis once remarked about the educational system in his day, saying that he recounted some stories and saying that students are being led to believe that something that is an active, open question has been settled and that you don't need to consider one side anymore. And that's the case with Darwinian evolution. And for some of your listeners and viewers, just as kind of a little tidbit of why you should be skeptical, why you should not think this is settled.
And that is that mutations, which of course are the fodder for Darwinian evolution, you know, changes, mutations, variations.
Mutations are changes in molecules in DNA and the proteins that DNA codes for.
Science has not even been able to look in sufficient detail at the molecular level of life, at the sequence of DNA, to see what mutations were being selected. Until the past 20 or so years, you know, your own field of bioinformatics is a really new field and it's only in that area and you know, other associated science that the question of the scope of Darwin's theory will be decided. It's nobody denies that tiny changes can happen.
Things like the sickle cell mutation, for example, tiny changes in pre existing systems can happen. Birth defects can happen, of course. But the question is, can this step by step blind mechanism that Darwin proposed build complex structures such as we find in the cell? And again, it's only been in the past two decades that science has even been able to ask, start to investigate that question. So there's the folks who say they are sure that Darwin's theory is true or are simply misled by the spirit of the age.
[00:12:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I think, what did Jonathan Wells call it? The idol of evolution of something of that sort. But it really is, it's like a dogma. It's an orthodoxy that they're holding on to. But you brought up something really important. I think that Darwin just didn't have the insight and knowledge that we have today of the complexities of the cell. And, you know, for all, you know, just to be transparent, like there's obviously the word evolution in Christian communities is all or nothing, unfortunately, sometimes, but it shouldn't be. Right. There's the micro evolution adaptation and macro. And adaptation is just pretty evident. But I think Darwin did a masterful job in showing that. So it's not like everything he did was wrong. It was just he stepped outside the boundaries quite a bit when he went into the macro evolutionary realm.
[00:13:03] Speaker C: Yeah, you can think of it even in terms of everyday life. You know, you can get small changes in your car and it still works. You know, the muffler can fall off, which mine has a few times, or your windshield wiper can break and stuff like that, and that can, you know, and your car can still drive.
And things like that can happen to organisms. They can lose traits, you know, they can fiddle around a little bit. But that doesn't mean that the body of the car or the organism can be built up by random processes.
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Right?
Totally. And, you know, it's. That's why I try and recommend our listeners, you know, every time we talk about evolution, always ask, what do you mean by evolution? Because it's such a loaded term that you don't want to get lost in not distinguishing what it means and just go down the wrong rabbit hole. So really ask that question to. To the, the skeptic. But with that said, you know, what is. Now that we've distinguished evolution, I think another distinction needs to be made that's really important, and that's intelligent design from creationism. Because one of the wonderful, lovely atheist comments I get on my posts is that intelligent design is creationism, that there's no differentiation. So I know that's wrong, but maybe for our listeners, can you correct that assumption?
[00:14:28] Speaker C: Sure, yeah.
Creationism is a religious doctrine that says we read in the scriptures that God created the heavens and the earth, and therefore we take it based on that authority, which, you know, might be perfectly good idea.
That in fact God made it. But that's not from observation of the external world, that's from reading our religious text. So it's a religious argument. Intelligent design, on the other hand, is an empirical argument. It is based on observation and normal modes of reasoning that what we see in life and other aspects of nature is best explained as being designed, purposely made. And some people say, yeah, well that sounds pretty philosophical to me. But it's not really.
If you. I have often show in lectures a picture of a mouse trap to illustrate a couple points. But one point is that when you look at a mousetrap, a normal mechanical mousetrap with a spring and a hammer and wooden base and stuff, you immediately see, well, this was designed. This is not some collection of rocks and twigs that I picked up off the dirt. And how do you know that? Well, it turns out that the way we decide that something was designed that is made or arranged by an intelligent agent is when we see a number of parts that are set in relationship to each other so that they can perform something that the parts themselves, the separated parts, do not do. And that is of course true with a mousetrap. And it's also true with, you know, many, many things in living systems. I talk about them in the, in my book little outboard motors that spin and other systems in the cell.
Many people are surprised to learn that in fact the cell is run by machines, literally machines made of molecules. This not controversial. I'm not the one calling machines. That's the common term in the literature. And if you look in the dictionary, pretty much the definition of a machine is a system where a number of parts that do different jobs get together to perform a function. So that's literally how we conclude design.
One thing one has to remember is that we people are intelligent agents.
We are intelligent ourselves. We have minds.
And one of the fundamental aspects of our rationality is the ability to recognize other minds. If you can't recognize other minds, that's something that philosophers call solipsism. You think you're the only intelligent being in the universe.
I know some people who do think that, but most people don't. And the reason we don't think is because we see people doing intelligent things, putting things together, and we can recognize their effects. So I guess that's a long winded answer to your question of what's the difference between creationism and intelligent design theory. And intelligent design is based on observation of the molecular machinery of life, plus our normal reasoning that when we see parts that are arranged to do Complex tasks.
We always conclude that it was purposefully designed.
Let me also take this opportunity to say that this is not the first time in the history of science that people have concluded things about nature that some scientists got all spooked about, antsy and said, why, wait a second, you're, you're invoking some religious argument here.
People forget that back in the 1930s, a little bit before the 1930s, most physicists thought that the universe was eternal and unchanging.
And then it was. Notice that the galaxies were expanding away from the earth and away from each other. And that was the beginning of the Big Bang theory, which, if you kind of roll it in reverse, suggests strongly that the universe had a beginning. And the point I want to make with that is that many physicists hated the Big Bang theory because it suggested a creation. You know, here was the beginning of the universe.
But nonetheless, the Big Bang theory was not a religious idea. It was based on observation and our normal conclusions after we see things moving away from each other as if in the aftermath of a giant explosion.
ID theory is wholly scientific in my view, just based on physical evidence and normal logic.
[00:20:08] Speaker A: Absolutely. No, I thought you did a great job there, and the examples you gave were fantastic. You know, it's.
It's following the evidence where it leads. And that's what Dr. Casey Luskin kept saying over and over. And I think that's exactly what it is. It's because if you go the other way, if you're assuming Darwinian evolution is true, then you're not really following the evidence where it leads. You're following what fits your narrative. And that's just not, that's not science. That's not intellectually honest. So, you know, I think for our listeners this is, it's Intelligent Design, I think, is an amazing field because it's not just assuming and it's not even assuming a particular religion. I think we have to say that too. That's important. It's just saying, just like the cosmological argument that you stated, there's a. The. It's most likely a theistic or there's a God or designer that exists that's behind this order.
And it's just such a good way to go about it. So maybe I'll send this to that guy who commented on to differentiate the two.
But with that said, you know, now I want to get to where you significantly contributed to the field, and that's with irreducible complexity.
I would love for you to just unpack this for us because I was just recently Talking to a colleague, and I was like, hey, have you heard about irreducible complexity? And he had no idea. And I got to share it with him, and he was like, wow, I never, never thought of it like that. So maybe unpack that for our listeners today.
[00:21:32] Speaker C: Sure, yeah.
Irreducible complexity is kind of a.
It's a phrase. It sounds fancy, but it stands for a simple idea. It just means you've got some system that does something, but it's made of a number of parts, and all of the parts are needed and they work on each other, with each other to produce some effect that the parts again, themselves couldn't do. I talked about the mousetrap a minute or two ago, and mousetrap I used as an example in Darwin's black box for irreducible complexity. Because if you take away one of the components, say the spring or the wooden base or a number of other different components, it's not like it works half as well as it used to. It doesn't work at all. It's broken. So it needs all of those.
So what does this have to do with evolution? Well, in the Origin of Species, Darwin looked at, had a chapter or a section in a chapter.
The chapter was called Problems with the Theory, and the section was called Organs of Extreme Perfection.
And he tried to tackle things that even back in the 19th century looked really forbiddingly complex. And one example was the eye. He kind of waved his hands and says, well, here's a simple eye and here's another more complex. He says, well, maybe evolution could do the same. He never actually showed how that could happen, but he tried to convince people that his theory could even account for very complex stuff. But in concluding that section, he wrote an interesting phrase. He said that if it could be shown that there were any organ that could not be made by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.
And the reason he said that is that he knew that if in his idea, evolution had to work in tiny steps over long periods of time, improving things slowly and slowly, because if things appeared to improve in leaps rapidly, then it would look very suspiciously as if something other than chance were involved there. So he always insisted on this gradualism to evolution.
Well, if you think about it, what sort of thing can't be built by numerous successive, slight modifications? Well, think about a mousetrap.
If you start with nutting, what are you going to suppose you get a piece of wood for the platform, and is that going to catch mice? That doesn't catch any mice. And suppose you put on It a little piece of metal that'll later act as the hammer, that doesn't do anything yet either because you don't have the spring or anything else.
So that was a challenge to Darwin's criterion of numerous successive slight modifications.
Because it turns out that Darwin's theory can do some things, but it's limited in that if you need only one change, one tiny mutation to help an organism that would benefit an organism, then Darwin's mechanism of random mutation and selection is just what the doctor ordered. It's great for that. You get one tiny change, that's fine.
But if you need two changes before you get a helpful effect, if you have to push this and then pull this before you get a helpful effect, then it turns out Darwin's mechanism is already breathing heavily. It can't deal with that. And if you need three things before then, well, you exponentially decrease the likelihood that Darwin's mechanism can work.
But as I said, the cell is filled with machinery and machinery that looks, for all intents and purposes, like it would make need a lot of changes, a lot of construction and putting together it together. And so it's precisely what you would not expect from a Darwinian mechanism.
People in the day from Darwin's time onward were kind of got enamored of his mechanism because mostly they couldn't see the molecular level, as we mentioned, only until recently. And so they closed their eyes and imagined, you know, fish swimming along, then suddenly growing legs and going up on a beach. And it was heavily dependent on the imaginations of the scientists who were working on it.
But when you get to the nuts and the bolts and in life the nuts and bolts are at the molecular level, then it becomes pretty close to impossible to see how that could work.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. It's really. It's like these mechanisms are all or nothing. Like they're there and they can't possibly come about through that gradual change. And we only know that because we have such great insight into the cell. And again, it's just Darwin didn't have that, you know, And I keep thinking it's like, it's not as if, you know, folks like you and other scholars who are working on this are trying to be biased in this. You're trying to, like, twist the data to force this, this narrative because you're seeking the truth. And I, I liked what you said in the beginning. Even if, let's say that you saw evidence pointing the other side that maybe Darwinian evolution could explain this, you could always fall back on theistic evolution. In some sense, you know, you could maybe work that into there some. So you're not committed. But if the evidence shows that it's a designer, the evidence shows that it's irreducibly complex, you're obligated, especially in our field, to follow the evidence.
[00:28:03] Speaker C: Yeah, that's an interesting point. In my view, my completely unbiased view, a Christian or a theist at least, is the freest person to look at the data and come to a conclusion. If, you know, some genetic change happens, it's a birth defect or something, well, okay, accidents happen in our world.
If another genetic change comes along and it's helpful, say in the sickle mutation that I alluded to a little earlier, it helps in resistance malaria and it spreads in the population. Okay, that's great.
Maybe that happened by accident. But if you come along, you see a bacterial flagellum or you see complex intracellular transport or a whole lots of other things, and you say, well, that does not look like.
Then you could say, well, okay, maybe that didn't. But if you're committed to a materialistic, unguided view of nature, then you simply have to say, even the most fantastic, complex, elegant molecular systems simply had to come about by a Darwinian process or something akin to it, because you don't have any other options. But a theist anyway can invoke it when it seems appropriate, that is chance and selection, or say that, no, this is well beyond it and this needed deliberate intelligent design.
[00:29:41] Speaker A: Right, I agree. I think it's the freest position because you could adapt and you're not committed. And I think that's how it should be. We're following the evidence where it leads, and we're following truth.
Now, to what you just said, irreducible complexity, the mousetrap, the flagellum, that all is so convincing to me, even if I wasn't a proponent of id, I would just think that's blatantly obvious given the technology we have, given what Darwin didn't have. It's not like a slap against Darwin. He's the worst. He's, you know, he's thinking, he's trying to deceive people. It's just he didn't have the technology and he thought he was right.
But what are naturalists saying in response to this? Surely they're pushing back what is the most. And we'll get to the philosophical objections I think are much weaker later on. But what are the scientific objections that you've seen and engaged with? Maybe the most common or most prominent that you've engaged with.
[00:30:34] Speaker C: Well, that's, that's a good question. And it's particularly good now because my book was published in 1996 and it caused quite a stir and lots of people gave counter explanations. Objections said, well, wait 10 years and we'll have the answers then it's your lack of imagination. La de da da da.
But it's 30 years later now, so we've got a record. And so we can say, well, okay, what has happened in the meantime for the poster child example of intelligent design was the bacterial flagellum, which I guess I never actually talked about right here, but probably many of your viewers will be familiar with it. It's kind of like an outboard motor that many bacteria used to swim. It's all really convoluted, complex. It's, you know, elegant. It's got a motor, it's got a drive shaft and uses acid from flowing from the outside of the cell to the inside. The power it's turning. It's just crazy complicated. And I said, well, hey, it's irreducibly complex. There's a purposeful arrangement of parts. Looks like it was intelligently designed and you know, just kind of knee jerk reflex. People said, nah, yeah, you know, we'll find an answer.
And one, one rebuttal was that, why, over here, here's a different molecular machine called a type 3 secretory system that has some proteins that kind of resemble some of the ones in the flagellum.
But the type 3 secretory system doesn't, you know, isn't an outboard motor. It, it has kind of a sub function that the flagellum had in that the flagellum also has to construct itself. Unlike machines in our world, which are put together by intelligent agents or robots, which are made by intelligent agents, the cell has to construct the machinery in it. And take my word for it, that itself is a phenomenally complex process too.
And during it, the nascent bacterial flagellum has to actively pump out parts called proteins that make up the exterior part of this outboard motor.
Well, there was another little machine that as I said, sort of kind of resembled it. And it also could pump proteins, but it didn't act as a road remoter. It would pump proteins into other cells essentially to kill them. It would act as poison.
It was part of a predator prey relationship.
And that's fine. Okay, that's interesting. But just having things that looked like each other doesn't tell you how it was put together. You know, they had a mousetrap and some other that doesn't tell you how it was put together.
Folks talking about that never gave an explanation for how one could come to be the other. They never explained how the secretory system might evolve into a flagellum, which again, has this other completely independent function of being a rotary motor, has nothing to do with the function of excreting proteins.
They couldn't even tell, you know, if you started with that, how you would get to a flagella or even if you got to had a flagellum, I get the other way or, or, or anything. They just says why these two things look like each other. And that's not a, an explanation. And it turns out that a number of years later, about 10 years later, after folks started to point to this, that a group of researchers showed that if you analyze the sequences of a bunch of the proteins involved here, that it looks like the bacterial flagellum, the much more complex machine, arose first in the history of life. And that other thing, the secretory system, either derived from it or was made independently or came independently.
And so there went the story that the first one was somehow a simpler precursor to the second.
And since then, pretty much nobody has said anything about the flagella. There's one person working on comparing sequences of flagella and different organisms in life, and we can now do that a lot more easily because the sequencing of DNA genomes, as you know, is much, much easier than it had been.
And what he showed recently is that, well, flagellum occurs in a number of different lines of bacteria, but they lose it very quickly.
It's lost at a rate much faster than it's gained by transferring genes between bacteria.
So the long and the short is Nobody's explained it 30 years down the line. Very few people even try.
And the same is true for every other system that I discussed in Darwin's black box. The blood clotting system, the immune system, intracellular transport. And nobody has explained any of those things.
I would urge people that I discuss these things in the appendix of my last book, Darwin Devolves.
So if you're interested in the latest and the situation is still the same, go there.
What typically happens is it's an interesting exercise in rhetoric and the social interactions of science is that somebody with some sort of prestige in science writes an article and says, why we have answered this.
And then you see, later on, people cite this all the time.
And I might go and post something and say, why this is nonsense.
And nobody ever addresses it. They just move on.
So essentially you're ignored.
But the long and the Short is that I would not change a word of what I wrote in Darwin's book black box 30 years down the line. And I could still use all of those as examples of systems that have utterly no explanation in terms of Darwin's theory.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: And that's amazing. Well, you just said it was quite amazing because, you know, science as we know is a rapidly changing field where you're constantly refuting the last discovery and you're finding new advancements. So for you to have a heavily scientific based book and 30 years go by and you're confident in every word and I agree, I think I've read it. It's phenomenal. I haven't seen any pushback either. Just philosophical, which we'll get to in a bit. But yeah, it seems like it's like a mix of cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias all in one. It's really like, you know, if you, if you're assuming a solution, any hint of whatever supports your narrative, you accept it, you move on, you don't want to look one more time, you don't want to look back. That's it.
It's unfortunate too, because the applications. But go ahead, Dr. B.
[00:38:38] Speaker C: He's just going to comment that. Yeah, and, and if you think of the amazing progress that's been made on other topics in science in the past 30 years in bioinformatics, sequencing and finding all sorts of new ways that DNA controls gene expression and, and so on, and nothing in no advance in how Darwinian theory might explain some of these things. And you can kind of get the feeling that maybe we're barking up the wrong tree here with, with Darwin's theory.
[00:39:14] Speaker A: Absolutely. You know, and that's, it's funny you say that because I was preparing for this, I wanted to ask you this question and I was thinking like, wow, it was written in 1996. I know there's a couple editions, I don't know which one I have, but the book is right here for our listeners. I should have shown this earlier, but Darwin's Black Box, fantastic book. And I was looking for recent challenges.
This has been argued a long time ago. I'm sure they've found something with next generation sequencing or something of that sort to combat it, but nothing. And that is, that's a testament in itself.
[00:39:47] Speaker C: It's actually.
Maybe you'll get to it later, But I was just going to say that things have gotten much worse for Darwin's theory since 1996.
My latest book, written in 2019 was called Darwin Devolves and that looks at the advances that have been made possible due to increased ability to sequence DNA. And what some people have done is to grow bacteria or other organisms and just allow them grow for tens of thousands of generations and just see how they evolve, see what mutations come up and see what helps them to grow faster. The long and the short of that is that there are mutations which are beneficial, which help things grow faster or meet some challenge. But virtually all the time they are ones that mutations that degrade pre existing genes, that throw away or decrease the function of stuff that was already there.
There has been nothing seen where a new complex system is being put together.
One of the kind of COVID story for the Darwin devolves was polar bears which are thought to be derived from grizzly bears, brown bears. And it turns out that in around the year 2010, scientists sequenced the entire genome of grizzly bears and the entire genome of polar bears just to compare the two to say how could this one evolve into the other. And they found that the top, the most highly selected, most beneficial mutation was one that destroyed the ability of in polar bears of them transporting brown pigment into their fur. So now they're white. So they survive better.
That's great. They do survive better.
Brown bears wouldn't do so well in the Arctic. But it is a degradative mutation. It's not constructive. And it turns out of the top 17 or so 3/4 of them had mutations that the paper thought analyzed them by computer and they would be expected to degrade the performance of the, of the gene, of the protein that the gene codes for.
So I wrote provocatively that the polar bear devolved from the grizzly bear did not evolve.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: I'm so happy you touched on that. I was going to bring up Darwin devolves because I'm, you know, I'm in cancer research. I don't come across too many, too many good mutations. We could put it that way. They're all pretty dangerous.
So you know that that's a great book and I'm glad you were able to emphasize that. So to our listeners, Darwin devolves and Darwin's Black Box 2 really good book especially if you're into the science, the science stuff there. But I want to jump to more of the philosophy. You know, all these comments that I get, it's mainly philosophical. I'm surprised if I come across a substantial not ad hominem scientific response to, you know, whatever I post with the Dr. Luskin and you. I'm sure we're going to get comments of the same sort.
But you know, I just want to run some of them by you. I'm sure you've heard them a million times just to get your initial thoughts.
The first one, you know, is, is quite simply, oh, Intelligent Design isn't real science, it's pseudoscience. And I think if you Google Intelligent design, you might even see that too. What are your thoughts on it being pseudoscience?
[00:43:53] Speaker C: Well, that's, that's not an argument, it's, it's a label.
So if you don't like something, then you can call it pseudoscience. Just like, you know, if you didn't like when Social Security was first proposed back in the day, you could say it's a communist scheme. That's not an argument, it's just trying to denigrate something by putting a label on it. And as I said earlier, you know, Intelligent Design is based on the structure of the machinery that has been discovered in the cell.
Back in Darwin's day, it was a whole lot easier to think evolution might be true because we didn't know how complicated life was at the molecular level.
The cell then was thought it might be a little bag of jelly protoplasm, they called it. Nothing, not a big deal at all.
So it's been the science uncovering the structure of DNA, the genetic code, the fact that proteins are molecular machines, that genes have to be regulated, turned on and off in precise ways.
That's what has provoked the modern idea of Intelligent design. So that is science, you know, that's the result of science.
And our reasoning about design is the same way we reason about a mousetrap or same way we reason about, you know, the faces on Mount Rushmore or others that, you know, that we immediately recognize those were purposely made. They're not just odd rock formations because we see a purposeful arrangement of parts.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's an ad hominem. Right. I mean, that's how I take it too. It's just like if you say you're a Christian to someone, an atheist, and they say you're ignorant or you're whatever, homophobic, whatever it might be, you know, it's just a label that you're putting on someone.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: Not, here's my argument, you're stupid. Yeah.
[00:45:57] Speaker A: And then we've really, we've moved mountains on that one. So. So it just doesn't really do much to the conversation. But again, it's, it's that cognitive dissonance that, that confirmation bias that comes with some sort of anger. And I think this is where Jonathan Wells was kind of building up to. With his. I forgot the exact name.
Darwin's idol. Idol of evolution, something like that. But it's like there's a, There's a, A religion behind it. There's a, there's like some type of intense feeling and attachment that if you poke that bear, it will roar.
[00:46:32] Speaker C: I think we've seen that because I was sort of in the same boat. And when I read, as I said, Michael Denton's book Evolution Theory and Crisis, where he questioned it, I got ticked off because a large chunk of how I thought the world worked was shown to be based not on solid evidence, but just on essentially fluff.
And I can imagine a lot of people looking at your videos and reacting the same way. But, you know, you might. Instead of getting mad at, you know, people who taught you evolution, you might get mad at you because. Because, you know, I know the way the world works, so don't upset my view of the world.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: Right. Well, there's implications, right? It unravels their worldview. I, I know it's so much deeper than just the clip or anything like that, but it is, It's a. It unravels the worldview for sure.
[00:47:29] Speaker C: I, I've always said that if it were not for the extra scientific implications of ID, this would have been prop 70 years ago when Watson and Crick discovered DNA and the genetic code was, Was deciphered. Because what sort of chemical has a code, you know, so design became really obvious. But, yeah, but there are stakes beyond just the science. So that, you know, affects. Affects things.
[00:48:03] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah. And, you know, the other. The next objection is similar, but a lot of comments I see are, oh, well, if, If ID was so.
Was so strong and it was so substantial, then why are so many scientists, modern scientists, evolutionary biologists, why are they still holding on to Darwin's theory? Wouldn't they all change if they're looking at the same evidence that you and Dr. Luskin are looking at? So what would you say to those folks who put that out?
[00:48:31] Speaker C: Well, you have to understand the sociology of knowledge. You know, it's. If you're taught something and you've always been educated and you're working within a paradigm, it seems all normal to you. You make assumptions that even you don't realize you're making.
And again, when, as your agitated commenters exhibit, if somebody says no, one of your basic understandings, Mr. Scientist, you know, you've been wrong in assuming this.
You say, what. What do you mean? I'm. Well, no, we are not Mr. Spock.
None of us are Mr. Spock. We have investments in different ideas.
So it's, it's not at all surprising that people don't immediately change a basic understanding of how they think. The world, the world works.
[00:49:35] Speaker A: I was listening to a podcast that you were on. I need to pull it up because I need to give them credit. There was a fantastic podcast.
It was the resume or Ravel podcast that you appeared on and you talked about something similar and the commentators said it's the same.
The modern scientists are not ID proponents for the same reasons. Why there's not conservative, Conservative journalists coming out of journalism school. I just thought that was hilarious.
So true.
It's so good. But. So that's like the two quick philosophical objections that I see so many times. And you know, to our listeners, if you see that, I think just work around that, you know, ask them questions and really get. Try and root them back into the science. And that's what we're looking to do with id. And that's what I think makes it different than creationism. So I do have Odin. Go ahead.
[00:50:29] Speaker C: I was just going to make one other comment on that same area, and that is that people probably don't realize that very few biologists think strongly about evolution.
And of the ones who do, almost nobody is wondering if it's true. And almost nobody is working on the question of how could evolution build something?
They start with the idea evolution is true.
Whatever we have discovered, evolution built that.
So nobody's giving these questions very deep, deep thought, although this might have, you know, so it's.
When you think of, you know, how could all these scientists be wrong? It's because almost none of them are even thinking about these questions.
[00:51:24] Speaker A: Right. That's a great point. It's just an assumption. It's just this is. This is what's happening, and this is what they go with.
Now it brings up another question that I have for you, and that's what do you think? And this is shifting back to the philosophical.
What do you think are the implications of this, of this assumption that they hold of the Darwinian evolution, You know, what. What does that mean for our view of life? And what difference does it make if intelligent design is true?
[00:51:53] Speaker C: Well, let's see. Well, if.
If by Darwinian evolution you take it at full strength and say that that means that nobody planned at all anything about life, it unfolded just by the laws of nature and statistics and stuff like that, then there is no particular significance that you can put on anything in life.
Something happened. It's like, you know, an avalanche going down a Mountain, if a boulder bounces this way or that way, you know, doesn't have any great moral significance.
Life doesn't have that much significance.
Now I know there are theologians who can kind of dance around that, but that's the kind of prima facie view of a Darwinian, Darwinian theory. On the other hand, if life was purposely designed, as I think the evidence of course strongly supports, then that suggests, of course, very deep questions. It means that we were intended, that this biosphere was intended. And you can ask, what might those intentions be? They might be good, they might be bad.
As you've said before, this bare conclusion of design doesn't take you much further. You've got to go to philosophy, theology, history, other disciplines.
But it does provoke those questions. On the other hand, the Darwinian view says that it was all pretty much fortuitous.
So philosophy and theology and history don't have a whole lot to do with anything. Matter of fact, nothing has much to do with anything.
So it's a big, big difference.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: Absolutely, yeah, 100%. And it's just, it goes to show ideas have consequences. And Dr. Richard Weikart, we had him on recently, and he was just differentiating between naturalism and the Judeo Christian worldview of being made in the image of God. And these ideas have consequences. Like if we're just made by random mutation through a blind process of natural selection, what meaning is there? What purpose is there? Nothing's truly good and evil.
To me. That's worldview shattering way more than having to start over. Not necessarily start over, just look at the world through a different lens, that it was designed.
So I'm hoping that intelligent design, that's why I want to have more of, you know, proponents like yourself and Dr. Luskin on to hope, spread this even further because it's, it's such an important topic that we get a hold of.
[00:54:50] Speaker C: And it's, it's always annoyed me that the past hundred years that the very progress of science has made intelligent design more and more and more obvious. Not only in life, of course, which we've just talked about, but in astronomy and cosmology and so on. People back in the day used to think that Earth was not no big deal, you know, that there might be lots of planets just like Earth out there these days. We, we see that we're really special, that if Earth hadn't been set up the way it has, we would be toast. And of course, many arguments in cosmology about the fine tuning of the universe for life.
And yet in popular culture, in popular media and even in many universities and science departments, you're kind of taught the opposite that. Well, in the words of Stephen, what's his name, Weinberg, the Nobel physicist, he says, well, the more we know about the universe, the more pointless it seems that, you know, that's crazy and it's exactly the opposite of what the data show. But that's what we have to argue against, right?
[00:56:13] Speaker A: Yeah. If you're making a case for a designer, this is just a piece, the id, the biomechanical part of it, the genetics part of a piece of the puzzle. You have the fine tuning, like you mentioned, the cosmological. Then you go philosophically of the moral. So it put it all together and you have a really convincing case that I think you really have to try and look the other way to deny. So, but I think this piece is a big one and it comes about through not. Not in spite of or not because we don't let. We don't have it, but through modern scientific technology, technological advances. So it's just, it's a great book, great work that you're doing for our listeners. Again, Darwin's black box and Darwin's devolves. Dr. Behee is there. And do you have a website where people could check your workout? I know you could. They could Google you and find a whole bunch of work.
[00:57:04] Speaker C: Yeah, there actually is a website named or www.michaelbehe altogether.com.
i can't do that. Somebody set it up for me.
But there's a lot of stuff there, including opportunities to buy books and there's short videos, funny ones, that can make these ideas easily accessible for even younger folks as well as adults who are interested. Yeah. So check it out.
[00:57:31] Speaker A: Perfect. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join today, Dr. Behe. It's been an absolute pleasure.
[00:57:36] Speaker C: Absolutely. Thank you very much for having me.
[00:57:39] Speaker A: All right. Well, to our listeners, have a good one. Thank you for tuning in and God Bless.
[00:57:44] Speaker B: That was Dr. Michael Behe in conversation with host Jacob Vasquez in a conversation about the evidence for intelligent design that first aired on the Truthful Hope podcast. We're grateful for permission to share the exchange here on ID the Future.
You can learn more about Dr. Behe's work and get your own copies of his books@michael behe.com.
that's the website www.michaelbeh.
well, for ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org.
[00:58:22] Speaker C: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and.
[00:58:25] Speaker B: Recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
