Is Vitalism Making a Comeback?

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design. [00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today my guest is writer and teacher Daniel Witt to discuss the topic of his recent [email protected]. is vitalism making a comeback? The term vitalism refers to the idea that living things possess a vital force, some fundamental element that generally does not exist in non life. It's a very old idea that dates back at least to ancient Egypt and ancient greek thought as a darwinian paradigm took hold of the natural sciences in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vitalism fell out of favor. But as Daniel reports, a willingness to flirt with vitalism seems to be growing in certain scientific circles. Daniel, welcome to id the future. [00:00:59] Speaker C: Thanks. Happy to be here. [00:01:02] Speaker B: Well, [email protected] comma, our flagship news and commentary site, may be familiar with your name and your articles there, but this is your first visit to id the future. Can you share with listeners just a little bit about you and what got you interested in intelligent design and the debate over evolution? [00:01:22] Speaker D: Yeah. [00:01:22] Speaker C: So before I even knew about intelligent design and the debate about evolution, I was always just fascinated by living things, plants, animals, whatever, fungi. I was from a little town in West Texas called Lubbock, and there's basically nothing alive there, just dust. That's a slight exaggeration, but, you know, maybe that's the source of the fascination. Like, if you don't have something around you, it becomes more exciting. [00:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:57] Speaker D: But it was just kind of ingrained in me. I don't know where it came from. [00:02:01] Speaker C: When I was young, I basically refused to learn how to read until I discovered field guides. And then I had to learn how to read because how else am I going to get access to that information in there? [00:02:13] Speaker D: I, and I kind of got lucky. [00:02:17] Speaker C: Because when I was about seven, my father, who is Jonathan Witt, quit his job as an english professor to go work for the Discovery Institute in Seattle. And so that was a big windfall. [00:02:33] Speaker D: In a couple ways, because Seattle is. [00:02:34] Speaker C: Kind of the opposite of lubbock. It's like all moss and ferns and fungi and tidal pools and all that kind of stuff, you know, like a dream come true. And then also I was surrounded by scientists and people who are working on these cutting edge questions about the origins of life and how life develops. And so I got to be around that all growing up, and I just found it fascinating from the very beginning. [00:03:02] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. And, of course, there's plenty to read when you're around the Discovery Institute. We have articles galore. We've got books coming out every other week, it seems. What were some of the books that you came across that you found interesting about intelligent design? [00:03:19] Speaker D: Well, Darwin's black box, of course, is. [00:03:22] Speaker C: A classic one that came out. Actually, it was released almost exactly nine months before I was born. [00:03:30] Speaker B: Wow. [00:03:31] Speaker C: So make of that what you will. [00:03:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:34] Speaker C: Maybe there's some connection there, you know? [00:03:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:38] Speaker C: And of course, he's got correlation equals causation. Right. [00:03:42] Speaker D: So if it came out nine months. [00:03:44] Speaker C: Before I was born, maybe I'm like, I don't know, the physical embodiment of the intelligent design movement or something. [00:03:54] Speaker B: You were destined to take an interest, and. And here you are adding to the debate as well and informing [email protected]. details that you've discovered and arguments that you're forming and amplifying. So that's pretty awesome. [00:04:12] Speaker C: Now, one of you mostly writing about what other people are out there saying, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:04:17] Speaker B: You're adding your own inside. You're taking arguments that are out there. We're not claiming credit for them necessarily, but you are doing the. The important task of amplifying them. And I've done that, too, you know, with the podcasting and some of the writing. I think it's important, you know, to get these ideas out there and saturated in the public consciousness. One of your recent articles at evolution news asks, is vitalism making a comeback? So, before we go into whether it is or not, let's start with what vitalism is and what happened to it. I alluded to it in our introduction today, but in your words, can you define vitalism for us? [00:04:59] Speaker C: Yeah. So, in the broadest sense, vitalism is just the idea that there's something quintessentially different about living things from nonliving things, usually something that makes them possible. It can be confused with some specific vitalist ideas. You hear about weird theories in chiropractic and non traditional medicine stuff, but it's actually much broader than that. The idea that there's some sort of principle or fundamental element of living things that sets them apart from everything else. [00:05:31] Speaker B: Okay. And, you know, scientists do take this for granted, but there are some, as we'll talk about that, try to marry it with an evolutionary framework and look for that naturalistic spark that might explain these vitalistic tendencies. You write that vitalism is like the Kardashian family of biology. If the Kardashians are famous for being famous, then vitalism seems to be infamous for being infamous. Why did vitalism fall out of favor? I know, you mentioned some of the history in your article. [00:06:04] Speaker C: Yes. So, initially, for thousands of years, vitalism was sort of the default. Most scientists, most thinkers were vitalists. There have actually been psychological studies of preschoolers that show that human beings in general are, by default, vitalists. That's kind of the intuitive interpretation of life. And you can kind of see why that is. [00:06:30] Speaker D: If you think about how the living. [00:06:32] Speaker C: Things we encounter are different from everything else, they self replicate. That's pretty strange. They seem to grow. [00:06:42] Speaker D: And the really big weird thing about. [00:06:45] Speaker C: Them seems to be that they're doing something on their own, almost like they have their own agency or their own ability to make choices or to produce effects without some sort of outside deterministic cause pushing them along into it. [00:07:06] Speaker D: So, I mean, just sort of common sense. [00:07:10] Speaker C: Something's alive. If it seems to be moving on its own. Like if you're sweeping cockroaches up, and then one of them suddenly starts wiggling its leg, you say, ah, it's alive. Or if your toy starts moving on its own, you're terrified because you say, ah, it's alive. It's moving on its own. [00:07:29] Speaker D: It's. It's kind of interesting to me. It seems like the most fundamental sources. [00:07:36] Speaker C: Of horror, the most primal sources of horror for people, for human beings, is things that we think shouldn't be alive but are. And then the reverse, things that should be alive but aren't. [00:07:50] Speaker D: Because kind of, I guess, ingrained in. [00:07:53] Speaker C: Us is this distinction. There's living things that can move on their own, and then there's nonliving things that can't. [00:08:00] Speaker D: And so even going back to the pre socratic, socratic philosophers, scientists, natural philosophers, were saying that that's the thing that. [00:08:10] Speaker C: Sets living things apart, is that they can move on their own. That's what means it has a soul. And they would apply this even to plants, because they'd say, at the very least, plants can grow on their own. [00:08:25] Speaker D: You could take that a bit farther. [00:08:27] Speaker C: Even, and say, well, they seek sunlight. And this continued to Aristotle. He said that the soul of a living thing is the formal cause, the efficient cause, and also the final cause altogether. Meaning that, for example, an acorn, he thought, turns into an oak tree. Because the purpose of an acorn is to turn into an oak tree. That's the final cause of it. Sort of pre programmed into it, but not in a. You know, I said pre programmed, which is a computer term. They weren't thinking of this physically, but in a non physical way. It's just supposed to become an oak tree. So obviously, this is very compatible with intelligent design. And so throughout the middle ages, this was married to the idea of a God, a designer who intended for acorns to become oak trees. And for baby cats to become adult cats. And that's the final cause. That's the purpose of it, that God imbued in them. [00:09:43] Speaker D: But then you started having the mechanist. [00:09:49] Speaker C: School of thought with Descartes. And he said, actually, everything is like clockwork, like automatons. Descartes didn't even think that animals had minds, even like a horse or something. He thought, no, they're just clockwork animals, basically, in a clockwork universe. And this idea became very fashionable. It sort of gradually took over the scientific world. [00:10:13] Speaker D: And that's when vitalism became a philosophy in a way, because before that, it. [00:10:17] Speaker C: Was essentially the default. And then it became an alternative to this mechanistic worldview. [00:10:24] Speaker D: But it fell out of fashion. It was not disproven. If you think about it, it will. [00:10:32] Speaker C: Be very hard to prove or disprove either of those views. [00:10:36] Speaker D: Because, on one hand, to say there. [00:10:38] Speaker C: Is no vital principle. It's all just a mechanism. There's nothing ontologically different about this organism. You would have to know everything about the organism. You would have to be able to explain how it develops from the first cell, purely mechanically. And we're not anywhere close to being able to do that. And then on the flip side, if. [00:11:03] Speaker D: You wanted to say, oh, there is. [00:11:05] Speaker C: A vital principle, you have to show. [00:11:07] Speaker D: That there's not some deterministic, materialist, mechanical. [00:11:13] Speaker C: Cause that you haven't discovered yet. Because there always could be something. So it's theoretically possible to scientifically prove that one of the other of these theories is true. But we're not, I don't think, anywhere close to me all to do that. [00:11:30] Speaker D: But because vitalism was not sort of. [00:11:34] Speaker C: In line with the climates of opinion, there needed to be a sort of a. [00:11:40] Speaker D: A myth, a the story of how. [00:11:44] Speaker C: We figured out vitalism was wrong. So, like, Charles Darwin's voyage became the myth of how we learned that intelligent design is not true, and darwinian evolution is true. [00:12:00] Speaker D: There needed to be something like this for vitalism. And what kind of fit the bill? There was a scientist called Friedrich Wooler. [00:12:09] Speaker C: I'm not going to try to say his german name correctly, but Friedrich. [00:12:16] Speaker D: And at his time, there were vitalists. [00:12:20] Speaker C: Saying that organic molecules can only be synthesized in organisms. And they said, this is true, because organisms are just fundamentally different from nonliving things. And he proved that that's not the case, he proved that you can synthesize urea in a lab. [00:12:37] Speaker D: Now, this is a refutation of one. [00:12:43] Speaker C: Specific argument that some people were making for vitalism. It's obviously not a refutation of vitalism. It doesn't show that there's not some fundamentally distinction property of living things. [00:12:57] Speaker D: But it was treated that way, and it's still treated that way in textbooks. It's like in essentially every chemistry textbook. [00:13:08] Speaker C: Introduction, it seems like in the little bit that talks about the history of it. And this is how, you know, history of science. This is how we learned that everything is mechanical, and living things are, too. This guy made urea in a lab. [00:13:23] Speaker D: And I remember even as a kid. [00:13:25] Speaker C: Reading that, it bothered me because it doesn't really prove as much as they're acting like it proves. [00:13:30] Speaker D: And it was always just sort of. [00:13:33] Speaker C: Bothering me in the back of my mind until I went and looked up, okay, what's the history of this? And historians of science can tell you it's a myth. [00:13:42] Speaker D: It developed as an explanation for how. [00:13:46] Speaker C: Organic chemistry came to be as a field and how vitalism was proven wrong. But it doesn't really do either of those things. [00:13:56] Speaker B: Okay, well, that sounds very familiar, actually. A theory that has been scorned in professional circles for philosophical rather than empirical reasons. An inconvenient theory that contradicted naturalism, just as naturalism was on the rise in science. Well, in your article, you include a list of philosophical arguments against vitalism that are essentially the same arguments that are used against intelligent design. I thought we could go over those for a few minutes here. First is vitalism is an argument from ignorance. Right. The God of the gaps critique. What are some of the others? [00:14:31] Speaker D: Right. [00:14:31] Speaker C: So you can say, okay, you're positing this vital principle. You know, the plant grows because of its vegetative principle. And people would say, that's silly because, well, then what causes this vegetative principle? Where does that come from? [00:14:47] Speaker D: People can say that this is not. [00:14:51] Speaker C: Science because it seems like it's invoking the supernatural. They can say it's unfalsifiable because how could you ever show that there isn't such a vital force? And they can say, this is just an outdated theory. Don't try to turn back the clock and go back to Aristotle or something. Move with the times. [00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:15:13] Speaker C: And variations on all of these arguments are made about intelligent design as well. [00:15:17] Speaker B: Right. Right. Just a sign stopper. Let's not turn back the clock. Let's move forward. Yeah. [00:15:23] Speaker D: And I think it's kind of interesting, because on one hand, the fact that. [00:15:29] Speaker C: Some scientists nowadays seem to be kind of surreptitiously bringing back vitalism from an intelligent design perspective, you can say, hey. [00:15:39] Speaker D: You'Re dredging up this old theory just. [00:15:42] Speaker C: To get around having to posit an intelligent designer. [00:15:47] Speaker D: You know, now you're saying that, oh. [00:15:49] Speaker C: Some special vague thing causes life to evolve just because you don't want to say a designer did it. And so it can be sort of the enemy of intelligent design or the competing theory. [00:16:03] Speaker D: But then the funny thing is, both of them were kind of thrown out for similar reasons, and they're actually quite. [00:16:10] Speaker C: Compatible with each other, even though you don't need one to have the other, right? [00:16:16] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. As far as id is concerned, vitalism could be either true or false. It doesn't really matter. And you also know that many once disreputable you also know that many once disreputable theories have been proven true, and many once reputable theories have been proven false, so they are compatible with each other. You don't have to take one over the other, which I thought was a good point. Well, let's turn to the thrust of your post now, the new trend of reconsidering vitalistic explanations. You cite a few recent examples of scientists who were trying to probe the vital force in living things through purely naturalistic forces. What can you tell us about their approach? [00:17:02] Speaker D: Yeah, so you see a lot of people invoking teleonomy. [00:17:06] Speaker C: For example, there's a book that came out last year called evolution on teleonomy in living systems. And it's all about, well, teleonomy in living systems. [00:17:20] Speaker D: Teleonomy is a word that means internal. [00:17:23] Speaker C: Teleology or internal purposiveness. [00:17:27] Speaker D: And this word was coined for the. [00:17:29] Speaker C: Express purpose of being able to talk about purpose in biology without invoking a design. They're saying, this purpose comes from within. [00:17:38] Speaker D: And you've got, I mentioned, I think. [00:17:41] Speaker C: In the article, Stuart Kaufman and Andrea Rowley, they actually are bold enough to say, yeah, what we're positing is the vital principle. But they say this is a totally non mystical vital principle. They say it's rendered non mystical. [00:18:00] Speaker D: I'm not sure if it's as non. [00:18:03] Speaker C: Mystical as they want it to be. [00:18:05] Speaker D: So Kaufman and Rowley, they say that. [00:18:09] Speaker C: Actually, you can't reduce biology to physics or even to math. [00:18:14] Speaker D: And they're very, you can almost say. [00:18:18] Speaker C: Dramatic about what they're saying. [00:18:20] Speaker D: They say, this is time to move. [00:18:21] Speaker C: Beyond the newtonian paradigm. This can be a third shift in science Newton, quantum physics, and now this. This is showing that we need to throw out everything we've assumed for hundreds of years. [00:18:36] Speaker D: And the core of their argument is that you could not get evolution by an algorithm because there isn't a definable number of ways that something can be adaptive. [00:18:53] Speaker C: So the example Kaufman gives at one point is a screwdriver. He says, how many uses can you get from a screwdriver? [00:19:02] Speaker D: Well, okay, you can screw screws in. [00:19:04] Speaker C: With it, you can scrape gum off a seat with it, you can kill someone with it. These are mine samples. [00:19:12] Speaker D: You can scratch the Mona Lisa with it, you can scratch ten copies of. [00:19:17] Speaker C: The Mona Lisa with it. [00:19:19] Speaker D: When you think about it, you realize. [00:19:21] Speaker C: There'S not actually a limit, it's just limited by your creativity. [00:19:25] Speaker D: And Roli is a computer scientist, and they say, actually, this is why you'll never have strong AI, because a computer, it's based on if then pathways. [00:19:37] Speaker C: If this happens, that happens. [00:19:40] Speaker D: But when you have new possibilities that. [00:19:44] Speaker C: Are created by new situations there, unless you already know about the situation and already have programmed that in, you're never going to be able to figure out new possible uses for something. [00:19:57] Speaker D: So then from there, they have to. [00:20:01] Speaker C: Ask, okay, in the context of evolution, what does it mean for something to have a function? [00:20:08] Speaker D: Aristotle treated this in a very, I. [00:20:11] Speaker C: Guess, essentialist way, like, its function is its function that doesn't fit with naturalism. So they take an idea from Kant, the idea of a kantian whole which. [00:20:25] Speaker D: Exists for and by means of its parts. [00:20:29] Speaker C: So your parts are able to exist because of you, and they exist for you in order to keep you in existence. They point to catalytic closure in life, which is the idea that, okay, one. [00:20:47] Speaker D: Reaction catalyzes another reaction in organic chemistry that catalyzes another, makes it possible, that makes another reaction possible, and it ends up making the first reaction possible. So it's a closed loop, and it's fascinating. They point to research by Johanna Xavier, Joanna Javier. I think that's how you say her name. Yeah. They point to research by Johanna Javier that seems to show that in the ancestors of bacteria and archaea, there is. [00:21:23] Speaker C: A catalytic loop of 172 reactions. That is a closed loop. So this is like a chicken and the egg problem. [00:21:32] Speaker D: And they just use this to say, okay, once you have this closed system, then all the parts exist by means of the whole. [00:21:43] Speaker C: They certainly can't exist without it. And on top of that, they exist for the whole. And so then you can talk about function, you can talk about what benefits the whole system in an abstract sense. [00:21:55] Speaker D: Of and then you have to talk about affordances, which means this new development. [00:22:03] Speaker C: Affords you the opportunity to do this. And you have evolution that can't be computed mathematically because the number of possibilities aren't definable. [00:22:13] Speaker D: Now, the interesting thing to me about this is that to even start with. [00:22:19] Speaker C: This, you need something that's a closed. [00:22:22] Speaker D: Loop, which normally that would imply foresight. [00:22:27] Speaker C: Because you have this chicken and the egg problem, especially when you have 172 reactions that are in a closed loop. [00:22:34] Speaker D: And Kaufman and Rowley actually argue that the universe, they say, is non ergodic. [00:22:43] Speaker C: Over 500 daltons, which just means that most molecules over a certain size will never form the history of the universe. [00:22:52] Speaker D: Over a relatively small size. [00:22:55] Speaker C: So even just a complex protein, they say there's not enough time and space in the universe to make that likely to happen. So then where you get this closed loop of complex chemical reactions to start. [00:23:10] Speaker D: With, I'm not really sure. [00:23:12] Speaker C: They're having to pause at something as the beginning point. That should be an endpoint. [00:23:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:21] Speaker D: And they say that this system, it's. [00:23:26] Speaker C: Able to choose adaptive possibilities without any sort of mind being involved just by natural selection, because now a feature can be considered adaptive to the kantian whole. However, in an interview with Perry Marshall, Kaufman says actually, he's not so sure that you don't need mind. Maybe there does need to be some sort of internal teleology. [00:23:56] Speaker D: And then he starts talking about how. [00:24:00] Speaker C: He thinks that mind comes from our mind, brains being quantum entangled with the world. And he thinks that this makes true free will possible and telepathy and precognition possible. He says there's lots of scientific evidence for telepathy and precognition. [00:24:20] Speaker D: And so then you begin to wonder, okay, is what he's saying really as. [00:24:25] Speaker C: Non mystical as they want us to think? [00:24:28] Speaker D: You know, does your mind brain being. [00:24:33] Speaker C: Quantum entangled with the world, does that have a firmly defined meaning? Maybe it does. Maybe some physicist can correct me. [00:24:42] Speaker D: But with a lot of these neo. [00:24:45] Speaker C: Vitalist theories or naturalist vitalist theories, you. [00:24:48] Speaker D: Sort of wonder, are they really explaining. [00:24:52] Speaker C: As much as they think they're explaining, or are they just describing the mystery of it, describing the fact that life is very different from non life? [00:25:01] Speaker D: And so then this to then you have other scientists who and colleagues of. [00:25:11] Speaker C: These guys even, who are very bold about saying it is consciousness that's necessary for evolution to happen, or at least for it to happen to the extent that it did. [00:25:23] Speaker D: They say that even single celled organisms. [00:25:27] Speaker C: Are conscious and they guide evolution. So you have Frantischek Belushka at the University of Bonn in Germany and his colleague Arthur Rieber arguing this. And in their writings, they are very. [00:25:41] Speaker D: Clear that when they say things are conscious, they mean this in the colloquial. [00:25:46] Speaker C: Sense, that it is aware that it has feelings, it has desires, it makes choices. [00:25:54] Speaker D: It actually seems like quite a few. [00:25:58] Speaker C: Biologists are wondering about this, even with protozoan and fungus and stuff, because when. [00:26:03] Speaker D: You get something in a lab and look at it, look at how it. [00:26:07] Speaker C: Behaves, you get the weird sense that it's moving on its own, that it's. [00:26:13] Speaker D: Not a clockwork animal. [00:26:15] Speaker C: I don't think any of them have been able to prove this yet, but several of them are arguing these things can move on their own, which goes back to the pre socratic definition of having a soul, is that you can move on your own, non deterministically. [00:26:34] Speaker B: Yeah, very interesting. Well, it sounds like these researchers are dancing around vitalism and coming up with all these fancy terms. But as you say, are they just looking for a different way to describe the mystery, or are they actually providing a valid alternative? And, you know, in preparation for this chat, I looked back on evolutionnews.org dot. I mean, we've reported on other instances of appealing to naturalistic processes. To explain this, Eugene Koonin and his colleagues presented an expanded theory of evolution as what they called multilevel learning. They suggested that systems that evolve complexity learn about their environment, and that this learning decreases entropy and boosts their chances of selection and survival. But this, again, seems to be another example of ascribing vitalistic properties to non living matter, like atoms and galaxies, without really having a valid mechanism or way of it occurring. Now, how long has this trend toward vitalism, or neo vitalism, as you've mentioned, calling it, been going on? I mean, is it, is it in the last decade or so? [00:27:45] Speaker D: It's HaRD to answer that, because vitalism is very broad, and scientists aren't usually. [00:27:51] Speaker C: Announcing their vitalistic tendencies because it's not fashionable. [00:27:56] Speaker D: But I can think of some key developments where things seem to be turning in that direction. [00:28:03] Speaker C: So you have systems biology becoming fashionable in the early two thousands, which is systems biology is a non reductionist way of looking at biology as whole systems. [00:28:16] Speaker D: And then related to that, you have. [00:28:17] Speaker C: People talking about emergence and stuff and evolution. The Journal of Biosymiotics was founded in 2005. It was first released in 2005. Biosymiotics is the idea that you can talk about biology as language, and you should treat it as language, which, again, has interesting implications. [00:28:41] Speaker D: And then in 2014, some scientists who. [00:28:46] Speaker C: Weren'T satisfied with neo Darwinism but didn't want to go the intelligent design route founded the third wave evolution group. And many of these people, Kaufman, Xavier, are in that group. [00:29:01] Speaker D: And so that was kind of, I. [00:29:03] Speaker C: Guess maybe their coming out moment. [00:29:05] Speaker D: And I think it's interesting that a lot of this really took off in the wake of the sort of, I. [00:29:14] Speaker C: Guess you could call it first wave intelligent design movement with Beh and Dempsky. And then everything sort of blew up. You had the Dover trial, you had Richard Sternberg getting fired from the Smithsonian, you had Gerbo Gonzalez getting driven out. [00:29:32] Speaker D: Of his job, and everyone was saying. [00:29:34] Speaker C: Ah, this intelligent design, it's so awful. How, how can they be so unscientific as to question neo Darwinism? [00:29:42] Speaker D: But at the same time, many scientists were quietly beginning to look for other. [00:29:49] Speaker C: Options, you might say quietly, and then not so quietly by 2014. And I don't think that timing is a coincidence. [00:29:58] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, no, I think you're right. And you know that this trend toward vitalism really is an admission, an acknowledgement on the part of the scientists pursuing it. What are they acknowledging? [00:30:10] Speaker D: Yeah, so if you have a bunch. [00:30:10] Speaker C: Of people sitting in a room saying. [00:30:13] Speaker D: We have no problem, there's nothing to ask. [00:30:17] Speaker C: Everything in life can be explained through deterministic mechanistic processes. No need to posit a vital force. [00:30:26] Speaker D: And then someone comes into the room and says, hey, I figured out what. [00:30:29] Speaker C: The vital force is. And good news, it's not something supernatural. I've got a naturalistic explanation. Okay, what's he admitting? He's admitting that there was something that needed explaining from the beginning. [00:30:42] Speaker D: And then if his explanation for why. [00:30:45] Speaker C: It'S naturalistic doesn't pan out, you've cut off your retreat route, so to speak. [00:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, definitely an admission there, whether it's implicit or explicit. So even scientists who are not at all sympathetic to supernatural explanations are not satisfied with the naturalistic explanations that have been given. Very telling. Well, I like the point you make towards the end of your article that no idea can simply be shamed out of existence, no matter how hard people try. Why is that important to remember? [00:31:20] Speaker C: Well, it's important for id, because people certainly have tried to shame intelligent design out of existence. [00:31:27] Speaker D: But the fact is, climates of opinion always change. [00:31:30] Speaker C: If something's against the fashion, then most people are going to just sort of set it in their mental category of don't go there. Don't consider that. Not everybody, though. And the one consistent thing about fashions is that they always change. [00:31:49] Speaker D: And so eventually the fashion will change. [00:31:52] Speaker C: And then the unfashionable idea can re emerge. [00:31:57] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that. Well, Daniel, it's been a pleasure to have you come by for your first visit to ied the future. Thank you for dropping by and chatting with us about vitalism today and some of these new items of research that are coming out, kind of bringing back the idea. It's a timeless one, and I don't think it's going to stay out of fashion for long. Well, this has been very interesting. I hope you'll come back and talk about perhaps some of your other [email protected]. dot thanks for coming by. [00:32:32] Speaker C: Thanks for having me. [00:32:33] Speaker B: Well, you can find out more about Daniel and read more of his [email protected]. dot that's evolutionnews.org again, our flagship news and commentary website for the debate over evolution and the arguments for intelligent design. For id the future, I am Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening. [00:32:55] Speaker A: Visit [email protected] dot and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.