Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future. A podcast about evolution and intelligent design
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Is a new, intelligent, design based engineering paradigm of biology emerging. I'm Casey Luskin with ID The Future. And today we have on the show with us Dr. Brian Miller, research coordinator for the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. Dr. Miller holds a bachelor's degree in physics with a minor in engineering from M I t and a PhD in physics from Duke University. He's a very accomplished speaker on the topic of intelligence design having spoken worldwide, and he helps to manage the ID 3.0 research program at Discovery Institute. He's also been a primary organizer of Discover's engineering research group and the conference on engineering and the life sciences, which is part of our ID 3.0 research program. He's contributed to multiple books on this topic. Most recently, the book Science and Faith and Dialogue, published by the South African publisher asis in a chapter titled Engineering Principles Explain Biological Systems Better Than Evolutionary Theory. So Dr. Miller, thank you so much for coming on the show with us today.
Speaker 3 00:01:11 Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Speaker 2 00:01:12 Well, we're here today to discuss your new chapter in this book, science and Faith and Dialogue, which again is titled Engineering Principles Explain Biological Systems Better Than Evolutionary Theory. And I'm really excited to talk about this with you because you have been developing this argument now for quite some time, that there's a new design-based paradigm for biology that uses engineering to interpret biological systems. And you start off your chapter by reviewing some of the history of the design debate. So I'd like to start this interview off by asking, is the intelligent design concept something new? Like, you know, we often hear it's an invention of Christian fundamentalist in the 20th century, or is it a very old idea that goes back deep into human intellectual history?
Speaker 3 00:01:53 Yeah, that's a really fascinating story because this debate actually goes all the way back to about 500 bc. Some of the most famous philosophers of that time period debated these very same questions. See people like Democrats who was an atomist and he believed that you could explain everything in nature as these eternal atoms that you couldn't see and that they would interact according to certain rules and chance time. And those rules would explain everything we see in life from rocks to philosophers who thought about rocks. And he was in a debate between people like Plato and Aristotle. And there are people that believe that there was design in nature. They believe that there was a mind and that mind envisioned patterns. They called them forms and then the matter was shaped according to those forms to see the things we have today like life. So they believe that mind with first and mind shape matter. And of course, Aristotle and Plato thought about that in very different ways, but they both would be proponents of design.
Speaker 2 00:02:52 Yeah, I think this history of design thinking throughout the ages, it's surprising just how many of the most prominent philosophers who western civilization respects, Plato, Aristotle, et cetera, they were essentially proponents of a version of intelligent design.
Speaker 3 00:03:06 That's absolutely true. In fact, one side note I need to mention is that people have tried to argue that Aristotle was actually in conflict over this particular point, and that is completely untrue. There's a lot of modern philosophers who are experts on this, and they've corrected this error because Aristotle believed in design just like Plato. But Aristotle saw the design as almost like a soul, or what he called as a male principle inside of organisms, which shape mattered to produce adult forms like an acorn into a tree. He did not believe that the matter in itself could do that, but he believed that an immaterial agent would shape matter according to a fi, a form or a blueprint to produce life. So he also believed in design, despite what some people have said recently.
Speaker 2 00:03:53 Very interesting. So of course in the recent last couple centuries, there has been a shift in this debate where I think that the more elite segments of society have shifted towards a more materialistic view of origins rather than a design-based view. Of course, it was the advent of Darwinian theory that really cast doubt upon intelligent design in the sciences. But presently, some developments in science over the last few decades have begun to cast doubt on neo Darwinism. So can you share a few of those that you highlight in your book chapter for us?
Speaker 3 00:04:23 Certainly. And just to give a few terms for those that might be new to this podcast is Darwin and Rev evolution is simply the basic idea that you've got variation, you've got different environmental conditions, and some subpopulations will out survive others. What's often terms survival of the fittest or natural selection? The term Neo Darwinism is simply Darwinism plus genetics and population genetics. During the enlightenment, the evolutionary narrative, the Darwinian story became essentially a sacred creation narrative. So it wasn't just a scientific theory, but it was essentially the foundation of their thought about the world. Now what's happened is over the last several decades in particular, the evidence has moved very strongly away from the early predictions of evolution. So for instance, the fossil record does not show a nice tree where organisms slowly evolve over time and change dramatically, but you have anything radically new appear suddenly and after it appears, it doesn't change significantly.
Speaker 3 00:05:25 So that's often referred to by people like Stephen J Gold as punctuated equilibrium Iasis. Now people talk about what are called transitional fossils, things like arche optics telic, the whale series. What's important to realize is the term transitional fossil does not mean true transition. It's not a fossil where you have an ancestor, a descendant, which is a transition, and the descendant of that, which is another ancestor in a clear linear progression transition simply means two fossils that share similar features in the same way a toaster oven has features of, of a toaster and an oven. But those quote unquote transitions also appear suddenly and then do not change. So the fossil record shows that things only evolve in very small ways. In addition, um, what we'll talk about later is the fact that evolution predicts that the similarities you see in species should fit along a very consistent tree-like pattern.
Speaker 3 00:06:18 Things that are supposed to be more closely related should be similar in every way. And that is proven to be not the case. But you often see dramatic differences in creatures that are believed to be very closely related and remarkable similarities and creatures that are very distantly related. Uh, in addition, you have what's called the waiting times problem, and that was really pushed forward by people like Gu Beckley and Gaer Ola Hoffler. And what they've realized is that when you do a very rigorous mathematical analysis of how long it takes for new mutations, very specific and corded mutations to enter a population spread through through the population is a really, really long time. And, and they weren't the first, there was people like Dore and Schmidt who wrote about this in like 2008. For instance, if you look at a human population or the ancestors of humans, the time it takes for two specific coordinated mutations to appear in a population is like over a hundred million years.
Speaker 3 00:07:14 So the time available for these major transitions in the fossil record is far, far, far too short for even the smallest amount of the new genetic information required for those changes to appear and spread through the population. Another problem is that when you look at mutational studies, what you find is all mutations which alter the basic architecture of an organism, mutations that would operate early in development are harmful if they are expressed and do anything significant. So what you find is this is a great paradox that people have talked about for decades, that the genetic variation you see in any species only is allowing for small scale changes and not large scale changes. So all these problems when you bring them together, create, uh, an enormous challenge to the neo Darwinian framework or the standard evolutionary model. And this was highlighted at the famous conference in London by the Royal Society New Trends and evolutionary biology where leaders in the field acknowledged that the standard evolutionary model, Neo Darwinism, the modern synthesis cannot explain large scale changes. It can only explain small scale changes. And at that meeting, people presented all alternatives that could expand their theory. And there is not one piece of evidence that was produced that any alternative extension like phenotypic plasticity or niche construction could do anything significant that could explain these large scale transformations. So the theory isn't a very difficult place.
Speaker 2 00:08:46 So you argue Dr. Miller, that not only is Neo Darwinism falling into question, but that there are reasons to explore a return of telogy to the sciences. And you say quote, part and parcel with the erosion of the reductionist assumption has been the implicit acceptance of the assumption that teleology is central to life. So how do you see biologists assuming that teleology is central to life, and do you see them sort of putting up some resistance to this assumption in the way that they talk about biology?
Speaker 3 00:09:14 Well, what's fascinating is if you go back even many decades, even if you go back early 19 hundreds, people biologists intuitively recognize that you have to assume design in life to understand it and to study it. But they resisted that idea strongly because they were materialists, they were scientific materialists. They believed there is no teleology. And uh, teleology is just a fancy word for design or purpose, but they believe there is no teleology in nature. So they assume that it really wasn't there. In fact, there was a famous quote by a physiologist named Ernest Wilhem, Richard von Brook, who stated, teleology is a lady without whom no biologist can live, yet he's ashamed to show himself with her in public. Now the difference today though is that people are talking about teleology explicitly there there's a wonderful book put out by m i t press, which deals with systems engineering and it's called Systems Modeling and Cellular Biology. It came out early, early two thousands. And they basically say that to understand biology, you have to look at the purpose and they use words like purpose in design for these systems. So theology is now becoming much more explicit in the language because they just simply cannot avoid it.
Speaker 2 00:10:26 That's really fascinating. I think that this is obviously a good sign that teleology is being talked about more and more. Uh, what about the concept of optimality? You provide quotes from various sources predicting that biology is sort of like these poorly cobbled together clued structures that are far from optimal. But do you think this assumption holds water and is it bearing good fruit as we try to understand how biology works? Well,
Speaker 3 00:10:51 What's really amazing is in biology, particularly systems biology, engineers are working with biologists at a much, much greater level. In addition, biologists have been able to really understand what's happening in these systems in much greater detail. And those two advancements in the field have caused the evolutionary assumptions, the assumptions driven by materialism, the anti teleological assumptions to change. So more and more biologists, particularly assistance biologists, are using design-based assumptions, tools, models, and language. And this optimality is really significant because evolution predicts at both an abstract level in a, in a more of a deep theoretical level that life should often be suboptimal and non-functional. And there's a beautiful paper put up by David Snow in the journal complexity that really lays us out in detail in, in a, in a model. And the reason for that is if you wanna innovate, if you wanna increase in complexity, you've gotta give space in the genome for experimentation.
Speaker 3 00:11:51 So you've gotta have duplicated genes that are allowed just to exist and be non-functional as they randomly mutate until something useful occurs. Or you've gotta allow different proteins to interact and cobble together in different ways, even if it's non-functional until something interesting appears. So the suboptimality in non functionality is a very clear prediction of the theory, yet the more biologists study different systems or structures, particularly with the help of engineers, what they find is what they initially thought was suboptimal or poorly designed or non-functional, they now know is optimally in exquisitely designed, classy examples would be our vertebrae eyes. People thought the fact that the photoreceptors faced backwards was a bad design, it was just a remnant of our evolutionary past. But now they realize it has to do that because it has to interact with epithelium cells to basically remove burnt out discs and to exchange materials and basically to regenerate.
Speaker 3 00:12:54 People said the a c l in our knee is badly designed because it tends to break. But people like Stuart Burgess, who is one of the leading engineers in UK has talked about how that's a perfect engineering design because engineers often design certain things to fail first, like the bumper in your car because the bumper is expendable while the passenger section is not. In fact, ACLS really don't tear all that much more than bones like tibia break. So that's, that's again shown to be optimally designed. The laryngeal nerve is this nerve that has this curvature and, and seems a little bit longer than it should be and naively, but engineers have shown that that is a very good design because that nerve allows other nerves to carry along its trajectory to reach other systems in the body. So again, that's a good design. I could talk more about the pandas thumb and countless other examples where people thought design was poor at first, but then they realized it was optimal.
Speaker 3 00:13:50 In fact, you, if you read people like Bic at Princeton and other leaders in the field, they talk about how if they predict optimality, that helps 'em to do better research because that prediction typically comes true if they understand the system. It almost always comes true as science develops. In fact, what they found is that many systems operate close to the maximum efficiency possible by the physics in the chemistry. So again, optimality is being recognized more and more as a powerful tool of prediction in biology. Oh, oh, the best example though was junk D n a because if you go back to the 1980s, people thought 97% of human d n A was non-functional junk because that's the natural predictions I talked about. But the encode project found that almost everything they thought was non functionally. Now no is functional. Like they went up to like 80% pretty quickly. And every year more and more examples of what they thought was non-functional, they find as serving a clear purpose. In fact, there is a biochemist named Dan Grower who said, if encode is right, evolution must be wrong because there's no way that much should be functional if the evolutionary framework is accurate.
Speaker 2 00:15:06 Yeah, that's exactly right Dr. Miller. Most of these examples of suboptimality or non functionality tend to evaporate upon closer inspection. And the more we look at biology, we realize that this sort of Darwinian evolutionary prediction that life is full of poorly functional structures is really not holding, uh, up very well. So you go on to write, evolutionary theory predicts that biology should resemble human engineering only marginally at best, perhaps we might say along the lines of clunky Rube Goldberg machines. Do you think that this prediction holds up that that evolutionary biology resembles human engineering only marginally at best? Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:15:45 This whole idea of a Rub Goldberg machine is, is really significant because evolution predicts that you've got lots of structures that form like proteins, for instance, and they do something. But then what happens occasionally is they come together randomly to produce something new like the A t p Synthe Sorbact gel. But the proteins were not initially designed to work in something like the Flagella, but they just kind of came together by chance. So it's almost like a Rube Goldberg machine. And Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist engineer who would create these really elaborate contraptions like this device that would wipe your face. Like it would, it'd have a napkin that would wipe your face, but it was composed of like a parrot, a clock, a spoon, and several other items that were not designed to fit together. And the humor was that these systems were incredibly clumsy.
Speaker 3 00:16:35 They were ridiculously inefficient and overly complex and that's what life should look like if evolution are true. But as I mentioned that book, the System Modeling and Cellular Biology, they have some beautiful quotes in the book. How they're saying a much better way to see life is through engineering frameworks because it really looks like top-down design where you, it looks like a mind planned, the large scale features in advance, like you plan a car, you know, it has to have a passenger section, a transmission, an engine, and then each component of each of those systems, which perfectly engineered to work at an optimal level with the entire hole in mind. So everything was put together with the hole in mind, and that's the sort of patterns you see in life.
Speaker 2 00:17:18 So Dr. Miller, let's close out this first podcast about your paper by talking about the bacterial pH gel and an engineering analysis that was performed by an engineering named Walde and Schultz. You write in your paper the number of essential components in a relationships requirements and constraints in the flagella proves that the system must have originated at once through the act of an intelligent agent. This sounds far more elegant than the Rube Goldberg type kludgy engineering that you're talking about. So can you flesh this out a little bit for us?
Speaker 3 00:17:48 Yeah. And and Dean Schultz did such a beautiful work on that set of three papers on this because what he did is he said to himself, if I were going to design a propulsion system, a rotary propulsion system in a, in a bacteria, so it's nanotechnology, how would I do it? So we envisioned what are the major components or systems you would need? Uh, you would need obviously an assembly system, you would need a propulsion system, you would need a navigation system, a repair system, and so forth. And then he started to think about what are the constraints, what's the design logic? And then he, with the help of biologists, looked at the details of the biology. So his imagination of the system was sort of a top down analysis. Looking at the biology was a bottom up analysis. He was looking at the lowest level in the hierarchy of the actual proteins.
Speaker 3 00:18:36 And then in his third paper, he showed how those two analyses fit together beautifully. Like he was able to anticipate many aspects of the system because any propulsion system, a rotary propulsion system must fit within tight, uh, design constraints. And it's really beautiful because even if you look at something like the navigation system, if you don't have a navigation system, thema is completely useless because it's just not gonna turn on and turn off at the right time. It's gonna likely cause more harm than good because it'll waste resources. But this navigation system has to perfectly integrate with every other system to operate properly. So it's a perfect example of top-down design, the opposite of a Rube Goldberg machine because everything had to be planned in advance, fit together perfectly with the right interrelationships and meet multiple constraints. In fact, Dean Schultz identified like 80 constraints on the proteins in terms of if they fit tightly together, loosely together, they fit temporarily or they didn't connect at all.
Speaker 3 00:19:39 And what happens if you look at, let's say Michael B, he's idea of irreducible complexity, that was really beautiful work. But the challenges that he identified pale in comparison to what we now know is true about the flagella because what you see is a top-down design logic where it's an irreducible set of systems and those systems represent an irreducible set of subsystems. And those subsystems represent an irreducibly complex set of components like proteins and they must fit together through foresight, coordination, goal direction, and meet multiple tight constraints at once or it's completely useless. So one, it's very clear the system couldn't come about by things like co-option or incremental complexity increase. And two, you see such clear evidence of a mind of design, of planning that to deny it, one has to practically come close to deliberately suppressing the truth.
Speaker 2 00:20:33 Yeah, you know, when I see these Rube Goldberg machines, Dr. Miller, I think that even they require foresight in planning. I mean, it's not easy to get all those parts to come together and work, but what we see in biology like the bacterial Flo gel is far, far more advanced than a a Rube Goldberg type contraption. The parts are fit together quite elegantly in a coordinated manner, as you said. And I think that this is definitely a different view of biology than what we hear from the the evolutionary side sometimes. Very well said. Okay, well thank you Dr. Miller for this first podcast about your paper engineering principles explain biological systems better than evolutionary theory. Will you stay along with us for a second podcast on this? Yes, I'd be happy to. Okay, well that's great. We'll continue the conversation with Dr. Brian Miller about whether engineering or evolutionary biology better explains what we see in living systems. I'm Casey Luskin with ID the Future. Thanks for listening.
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