[00:00:04] Speaker A: Id the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Welcome to id the future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I'm excited to sit down with Doctor Jay Richards to discuss his work on a revised, rewritten and updated 20th anniversary edition of the Privileged Planet, the 2004 book he co authored with Doctor Guillermo Gonzalez. Doctor Richards is director of the DeVos center and William E. Simon, senior research fellow at the Heritage foundation. Hes also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and editor at large of the stream. Hes the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including money, greed, and God and the Human Advantage. Jay, so good to have you back on the show.
[00:00:52] Speaker B: Thanks so much, Andrew. Good to be with you.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Well, our topic today is a new edition of the privileged Planet, which contains responses to critics, lots of updated facts, some new arguments, and completely rewritten and improved text throughout. But before we get to that, let's just set the stage a little bit and remind listeners how the privileged planet originally came to be and what you set out to do with the book.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it came to be lots of coincidences, actually. I was working full time at Discovery Institute, and so around 1999 in downtown Seattle and read a piece in the Wall Street Journal that was published by this postdoc in astronomy at the University of Washington, which for non seattleites is about 3 miles away from downtown Seattle. This guy named Guillermo Gonzalez and I just called him, said, oh, this is great. He said, oh yeah, I know about you guys. I've followed this work for a long time. I've got some interesting work that I'd like to tell you about. And so I went over to University of Washington. We had lunch, and he showed me this article he had written in astronomy and geophysics called wonderful eclipses. And it was this study that he had done in which he looked at and compared the types of eclipses that we can get on earth with the type of eclipses that you would see from other planets in the solar system if there were someone there to observe it. And what he found is that Earth is by far the very best place in the solar system for viewing solar eclipses. Now, of course, with an eclipse, what you have is with the solar eclipse you've got the sun, which gives off light. You've got an eclipsing or an occulting body, which is your moon. Then you got to be someplace where you can see it. So an observer platform like the surface of the earth, and then they have to all line up in a straight line in space at the same time, but from Earth we have this weird coincidence that the earth and the, the sun and the moon appear the same shape and size in our sky. And so we thought, okay, how common is that? And so he compared the 65 major moons known at the time and found this weird thing that, yeah, gosh, right here on Earth, we get the best solar eclipses, which by itself is interesting, except that he also realized, okay, but the size of the moon and the sun are actually a function of these two features that you need to build a habitable planet, that is, planet that can have life on it. The first is that you need to be the right distance from your host star so you can have liquid water so it's not so hot and not too cold.
But lesser known fact is the large, well placed moon, like the one we have, is actually really important for stabilizing the earth's climate and making it more life friendly. And so he said, this is weird because there's this connection between the production of perfect eclipses and these needs for life on the planet. And there's one more piece of the puzzle, which wasn't really in the article, which is that eclipses are really important to science. They set up, you could think of it as a sort of natural experiment set up for scientists to be able to discover things they wouldn't have an easy time discovering otherwise. And that led to this kind of wider conversation because it was like, okay, this is weird, because at least in this one case, these things that are needed for a planet to have life, complex life, including observers, also provide good conditions for science. What if that's actually a general truth? What if observers find themselves in the best places overall for observing, that is, for scientific discovery? That would really be something. And so that led to a kind of research project, a joint research project to ask this question, to look at kind across the sciences, look across the things needed for a habitable planet, do a comparative study of earth compared to known and potential planets to see if this is the real pattern in the world, in the universe or not. It was an open question when we started, but it got more and more exciting as we worked on the book and realized, gosh, there's more and more and more evidence for this remarkable coincidence between life and discovery. And so we should have probably kept a diary at the time, because Guillermo and I did not reconstruct exactly when we remembered and thought of things. But it was the sort of thing that it kind of came together in the process of, uh, first reflecting on it and doing, uh, more research, but then actually working on the book, which we spent, I'd say, two and a half years on, probably.
[00:05:33] Speaker A: Okay, so it all started with those wonderful eclipses. I I had a hunch, you know, because, uh, Guillermo just loves those eclipses. In fact, he wrote that cool poem recently, totality.
[00:05:43] Speaker B: That's right. And it really was the kind of, it was the impetus. It was. That's why we made it. The first chapter of the book. This just amazing coincidence that you have this match in the sky between the moon and the sun, which is aesthetically cool, but it's also an intense emotional experience for almost everyone that actually sees a total solar eclipse. A lot of people seen partial eclipses, and so they think, well, I've seen 80% of it. It's like, no, you haven't seen a darn thing. The difference between a near total eclipse and a total eclipse is basically the difference between a slightly cloudy day and total darkness. I mean, it's just two different things, and it has these kind of metaphysical resonances. But by itself, that's not really a design argument. It's just sort of a cool coincidence.
[00:06:35] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:06:37] Speaker A: Okay, so my next question was going to be this main hypothesis of the book that you have proposed with Guillermo, that this pattern of suitability is more akin to a cosmic conspiracy than a coincidence you lay out on the book. I was just going to ask, did that hypothesis take root as you were writing and as you jumped into it more, or was it something you started with?
[00:07:01] Speaker B: I would say it was a hypothesis we started with, but we were able to formulate the hypothesis more precisely the longer we worked on it, because we could sort of imagine intuitively. It's like, okay, well, what kinds of things does life need on the planet? Well, okay, yeah, it needs a star, and it needs to be the right distance from the star. It needs a moon. What else does it need? Well, it needs the right kind of atmosphere. It's going to be the need to be the right size. Not too small, not too large, not too massive, but enough mass.
What about this configuration of the solar system? What about the galaxy it's in? What about the location it is in the galaxy? All these kinds of things. And so that presented a series of questions. Okay, if we were to investigate those things that life needs and then say, do those same sorts of things, are these really conducive to science, and are they more conducive to science than environments or planets that are less conducive to life? Because that's the kind of key pattern, is if you were to find that these rare places in the universe compatible with our existence as observers or the existence of observers in any kind of chemically based life in the universe. To discover that those are the best places overall for doing science, that's the kind of thing you just would not expect if you're a materialist. It'd just be really, really weird. But if the universe is designed for discovery, that's what you would expect. And so if you're comparing those hypotheses, it's much more likely given designed for discovery than given, say, just chance or materialism.
[00:08:42] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:08:44] Speaker A: Now, you and Guillermo and myself included, and those like us, we get excited about this, about these connections and about seeing this design, because our eyes are open to it.
But there is a very different perspective that you guys were kind of pushing back on with this book, and that is that our earthly existence is not only rather ordinary, but, in fact, insignificant and purposeless. In his book Pale Blue Dot, the late astronomer Carl Sagan typified this view when he wrote, our posturings. Our imagined self importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. He was talking about that famous image of planet Earth caught in a beam of the sun's light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic darkest. The privileged planet tackles this popular idea behind Sagan's sentiment, which is called the Copernican principle or the principle of mediocrity. Tell us a little bit about that.
[00:09:43] Speaker B: Yeah. And, in fact, Sagan's use of the word privilege and the word privilege in our book title is not a coincidence. In fact, our argument was kind of directly contrary to Sagan's argument. The Copernican principle set aside Copernicus himself, the man who, in 1543, proposed that the earth was a planet like the other planets, and so the sun was the stationary sort of part of the solar system. He proposed that.
He didn't propose that. There's nothing unusual about the earth or that somehow, if we're a planet, rather than being in the center of the solar system, that makes us insignificant. Probably sometime in the 19th century, though, materialism always wants to construct narrative histories that make it the hero. And so it needed a story that somehow every scientific discovery from Copernicus to the present somehow sort of established materialism and established that there's nothing special about us in the universe. The whole thing requires, first of all, a complete confusion about what the pre copernican cosmology was actually like. The center of the so called center of the universe for Copernicus and Ptolemaisa was not the best place to be. It was, at best, a kind of intermediate place. Better to think of it as the bottom of the universe, where detritus and decay collect and occur, which actually was Aristotle's view.
But it required a misrepresentation of what came before Copernicus and then a misrepresentation of what we've discovered since. Now, yes, we know that there are lots of galaxies in the universe. There are lots of stars within those galaxies. So insofar as, okay, our star is, say, one of hundreds of trillions of stars. Okay, well, that's sort of ordinary, but that's not really the relevant question. The question would be, for the things that we're interested in, such as the existence of complex life, how rare or ordinary is the earth? And we actually have a lot of information about that. In fact, almost everything we've learned in the 20th century has moved us in the direction of realizing, you got to get a lot of stuff right just to build a single habitable planet. So the fact that there's, say, 100 billion stars or more in the milky way galaxy, that doesn't tell you anything until you know, okay, fine. If we're talking about life, how many ingredients are there for allowing life in a planetary environment, and how common are those individual ingredients? Because you could very quickly outstrip all of the sort of alternatives. And it's quite possible that the earth is the only habitable planet in the Milky Way, for instance. And that's an empirical question we think that we ought to address. And when we look at it that way, we think that what you find is that earth like planets are likely to be exceedingly rare in the universe relative to the other less habitable places. The argument doesn't require that earth be unique. It's just that earth like planets, life friendly planets, are probably exceedingly rare.
[00:13:13] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: And they do tend to use that argument, the vastness of space, the materialists, to say, hey, we're not alone.
[00:13:21] Speaker B: Yeah, lots of chances, but, okay, fine, yeah. How many tries do you have?
If you're trying to flip a coin and get 20 heads in a row? Well, if you can flip the coin a million times, you're going to eventually get that. On the other hand, if you want to get a million heads in a row, that's going to take a lot more tries for a chance to give you a million heads in a row.
[00:13:42] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: Well, the bold argument of the privileged planet certainly made it controversial when it was released. You mention in the foreword to the 2020 paperback version that neither of you had quite anticipated the sheer hostility and metaphysical panic that the book would provoke. Let me resay that, and we'll cut that out. You mentioned in the forward to the 2020 paperback version that neither of you had quite anticipated the sheer hostility and metaphysical panic that the book would provoke among self appointed defenders of science and atheist religion professors. Can you briefly recount just the experience of that and what you learned out of it?
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Well, the atheist religion professor, that's not just a generic term. There is actually an atheist religion professor at Iowa State when Guillermo was in the physics and astronomy department there, that led a petition to get Guillermo denied tenure based entirely upon his work and co authorship of the book the Privileged Planet. So for him, this had really very serious consequences.
The controversy in many ways. What's interesting is when the book first came out, it actually got a number of respectful reviews, including, I think, a generally respectful review, if critical, by a guy at SETI, at the search for extraterrestrial intelligence operation.
But the documentary based on the book came out just a few months after the book was released in 2004. And we had a premiere of the documentary the following summer in Washington, DC, at the Smithsonian, actually at the Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian. Now, remember, this is when George W. Bush would have been president, and it all was going fine. In fact, we were just renting the theater at the Smithsonian after hours, and then we were going to use the hall of Gems for the reception. It was a really great event, and somebody threw a fit. It's like, oh, this implies that the federal government and Smithsonian are endorsing the privileged planet in intelligent design, which we all know is evil. And so there was just this huge media firestorm. The New York Times, the Washington Post, editors on the editorial page sort of spoke out against this documentary. It was all very strange. On the one hand, he created a massive amount of publicity for both the book and the film, which later showed on lots of PBS affiliates. But it also sort of created negative attention for this young astronomer, an astronomy professor who, though very well published, did not yet have tenure at Iowa State.
And so the whole thing ended up being kind of a perfect storm for difficulty. And in some ways, I mean, it's a perfect illustration of what natural scientists have to deal with on this subject, that the bare suggestion that there could be scientific evidence of purpose in the universe is one of the heretical thoughts. I mean, everybody talks about political correctness and wokeness on college campuses now, they probably don't realize that the first victims of this were scientists who wanted to talk about intelligent design. Guillermo was one of those. And so he definitely suffered for this book. And I remember a conversation we had about the time it came out and I said, you know, was this a good idea for us to write this when you didn't have tenure yet? And he said, well, this was in fact, I'll say exactly what he said. He said, well, God gave us the idea came when it came. I mean, I'm not going to hide it, you know, because of something like that. And that was his attitude. So that's the reality. But the good news is that all of those attacks were mere ad hominem attacks. None of them have touched the, the quality of the argument or the evidence, though.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, that's what I was going to ask.
But he certainly paid the price. And in many ways you did as well.
And now you guys were branded, so to speak. But we have come a long way since then, 20 years. And, and Steven Meyer for once keeps talking about the fact that we're getting to that tipping point now, I think so, where many more people are ready to acknowledge the limits of Darwinism and the adequacy of intelligent design. Well, I like the way noted paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Simon Conway Morris describes what you accomplished with the book. He writes. Gonzalez and Richards have flung down the gauntlet. Let the debate begin. It is a question that involves us all. So how has the central argument and the supporting evidence that you marshaled in the book fared in 20 years? It's still holding up clearly, and you do address some of the objections, which we'll mention later. But in general, is it still standing? How has it fared?
[00:18:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it's still standing. And in fact, I'd say it's doing better than ever. Guillermo and I, when the book came out in 2004, we knew there would be a total eclipse in the US in 2024. And we thought, well, heck, thats perfect because that means we should do a 20th year anniversary edition where we sort of update it. We literally plan to do that as early as 2002. And so we actually managed to do it. Fortunately, the publisher agreed to it. But the main thing thats probably changed is that when the book came out, I think there were just around 100 confirmed extrasolar planets, that is, planets around other stars that we've been able to detect. We're now getting close to, I think, 6000 confirmed extrasolar planets. So we have a much larger data set to be able to deal with. We were having to deal a lot of theoretical calculations rather than actual observations. But I could tell you that nothing has sort of changed about our argument. If anything, it's confirmed it. People think, well, now we know they're all these planets. Yes, exactly. So we now know more about what a kind of typical planetary system looks like. I can tell you that the most earth like planet known other than Earth is Mars. It's a planet we already knew about. None of these extra solar planets fare as well as Mars. Mars is similar in size to the earth, similar in composition. Its orbit is quite similar, and its around an otherwise habitable system. Its around our sun, and yet its lifeless. So in some ways, Mars tells you how narrow the conditions are. And the fact that we cant manage to find an earth like planet even as Earth like, as Mars, tells you something about how narrow the conditions have to be just for meeting two or three of the conditions that you really need to have a life friendly planet. And so id say thats the kind of the largest thing thats changed. And then theres just some additional arguments that we developed, because the obvious reason that weve thought about this stuff now for 20 years, were older, I hope were wiser, were also actually much better writers than we were 20 years ago. And so theres nothing, in essence, thats changed about the argument, but weve been able to fill in details, and fortunately, we have a larger evidence base to be able to compare it to now.
[00:21:17] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: And on the topic of the exoplanets, it is fun to look for them. And Bijan Namati, in a recent interview, made the point that no matter what side of the debate you're on with that, you're gonna have a vested interest in continuing to look because it helps our argument and it also satisfies those who aren't sure yet.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: No, exactly. We always felt like this really is ultimately an empirical question. I mean, I wouldn't, I mean, I'm a Christian, but if somebody asks me, okay, did God create the universe to have life in other places or just here, I'd say, well, God could do what he wants to do. Let's go try to find out.
Our argument is always just that, just based on what we know, Earth like planets, we argue are going to be, the proportion of those is going to be very, very small relative to the options. But nothing in argument requires that our earth be unique. But the good news is that's falsifiable if we found that, oh, gosh, no. Actually, life can exist in much wider range of conditions or it's super easy to get Earth like planets. All those things would have put a dent in our argument. And, of course, this is only one half of our argument, that Earth like planets are rare. The other part that we think is what tips the scales in favor of design, is that those rare Earth like planets also provide the best conditions overall for doing science. Whatever you think of that, there's no way that could be an anti science argument. I mean, an argument is essentially that the pursuit of science has been built into the scheme of things, right?
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Well, in the book, you and Guillermo note that the degree to which you can, or we can measure the physical world around us as well as the wider universe is actually quite surprising.
And I just wanted to take a minute there to make that connection between the measurability or discoverability of the world around us and the universe around us and the habitability.
How do those correlate? How would you put that?
[00:23:22] Speaker B: That is the basic idea. The way I would illustrate it is imagine that somebody spent their entire career a sort of astronomer, studying what is needed for life to exist on a planet, all the different factors. And so for 40 years, he studied that and had come up with a list of the kind of, okay, here are the ingredients, the conditions, the type of planet we're going to look for. And then another scholar in some other place, another astronomer, let's say she spent 40 years studying this other question, like, what would be needed for making certain types of scientific discoveries, for discovering whether the universe had a beginning, discovering the composition in the universe, for having access to different times in cosmic history, for being able to uncover the laws of physics that govern the orbits of planets and things like that. What would need to be the case about the universe to be able to discover those things? And she had compiled the list, and she called this the kind of index of measurability.
And then eventually, these two astronomers meet at a conference.
They discover that they're describing the same planets, that there's rare place, say, in the galaxy where a planet needs to the place in the galaxy where a planet needs to be, to be in the habitable zone. That's also the best place for doing science.
That's the idea of the argument. It's not something that we would have expected ahead of time.
And even if you're a total orthodox darwinian, no one would argue that our ability to, say, detect galaxies outside the Milky Way somehow played a role, a survival enhancing role in ancient humans. In fact, none of these things played a role, had a selective advantage for humans. But it turns out that the things you need for life to exist at all on the planet actually provide the best conditions for doing science. Again, that's just the kind of thing you'd expect in a conspiracy, but not if it's just a coincidence or a brute fact.
[00:25:30] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:31] Speaker A: Well, in my first reading and what I know of this book, including the documentary, which, as a private school teacher, I used to show my kids, and they ate it up, that was quite a tradition, just showing them clips of that. It was great. But in my understanding of the book, at least the first time around, I caught the galactic habitable zone, you know, Goldilocks zone of the galaxy that we live in. And I recognized that we live in a. The place we live in, the position we live in is remarkable and fine tuned. But what I missed the first time around, and maybe you guys embellish on this in the new edition, is that it's also remarkable timing.
[00:26:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:17] Speaker A: Not only are we extremely well placed to observe the universe, it sounds like we're also well timed. And you guys talk about that in the book. I'll talk about that with Guillermo, but do you have thoughts on that?
[00:26:28] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah. Just as there's a circumstance around our star, the Goldilocks zone, or circumstellar habitable zone, and just as there's a location within the galaxy where you want to be both for life and for discovery, so there is a segment within cosmic history where you'd want to be for doing science. And so that's what we call the cosmic habitable age. Now, it's a pretty. It sounds wide. It's a few billion years, probably. But remember, cosmologists are used to thinking from t equals zero. So the moment, right, the universe came into existence all the way out to ten to the 150 years, ten to the 150th, raised to the 150th years into the future, that's a massive sort of timescale. And so if you've got just a few billion years in there as the segment where you need to be, where life's going to be able to exist, and then to be able to say, okay, now, where would be the best time for doing science? To discover that it's that same cosmic habitable age. Again, it's another confirmation of our argument. So, just to give one example of this, is we can now detect the cosmic background radiation, this kind of leftover echo of much earlier time in the history of the universe. We can detect that and, in fact, discover a lot of stuff about the universe from being able to dissect this background radiation. But in the future, because the universe is expanding and in fact, its expansion is accelerating, that will, in effect, blink out from view. In fact, you go far enough out in the future, even distant galaxies will have blinked out from view so that we would not be able to see galaxies that we now see. And so we are in a moment and sort of maximum benefit for being able to discover all sorts of things that would be difficult or impossible if we had been way earlier and difficult or impossible if we had landed much later.
[00:28:31] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:28:32] Speaker A: So interesting. And even dyed in the wool materialists like Lawrence Krauss are willing to admit that, which is interesting as well.
[00:28:41] Speaker B: It is. And I mean, that's what's funny, is all the elements of our argument are just. I mean, they're straightforward, empirical arguments based on stuff that scientists have discovered. It's just that we argue that, okay, now, you have to be open to the possibility, but if there were evidence for design in the universe, what would it look like? Right. And so we don't. You can't construct an argument that's going to convince a committed skeptic, because they can always just sort of change the premises argument. We tried to design it for people that are reasonable, moderately skeptical, fence sitter, so people that are open to the possibility there could be evidence from science of purpose in the universe, but don't have to, aren't convinced right away.
That's what we wanted our argument to be.
[00:29:31] Speaker C: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:29:32] Speaker A: Well, I think you accomplished that. The closing chapter of the privileged planet fields 15 of the best objections that you've considered against the arguments in the book. And I just wanted to take a minute or two before we close, just to review a few of these.
How about this one? How can you have a correlation with a sample size of one?
You're taking the earth.
What would you say to that?
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Well, of course, here's the thing that I haven't said so far, is that the good news is that when you think about habitability, we're talking about life. And so life has these kind of biochemical characteristics. We actually know a lot, just from our knowledge of chemistry and biochemistry, about what would be needed. So, in other words, we know, for instance, that given the periodic table of the elements in this universe, life is going to need to be able to build large macromolecules. It's going to need to be able to store information like you store in DNA. It's going to need to undergo chemical reactions, but it's also going to need to be stable. So it's going to need to be this perfect balance between stable and reactive, which is called metastable or metastable. And then, okay, and guess what element that is? It's carbon. And so there's just no other element other than carbon that really competes when it comes to the needs for life. And then you need a solvent, a matrix where carbon chemistry interactions can take place.
What would that be? Well, it turns out that water, liquid water, um, is, water is liquid over the same narrow range of temperatures over which carbon chemistry is most reactive. And so if you're going to have life in this universe, it's going to need carbon and it's going to need liquid water. That narrows the conditions right away because we know that the vast majority of places in the universe are either way too hot or way too cold. And so it turns out even though you seems like you just have a sample size of one, you actually have universal knowledge from chemistry. And then, of course, because of our ability to determine what the other galaxies and stars and things are made of, we know that the rules of chemistry that apply here apply absolutely everywhere. And so it's surprising maybe to non scientists, but you can do a heck of a lot of work in narrowing the conditions for what life would need on a planetary environment just by being able to study Earth and then to be able to extrapolate based upon our knowledge of the universal principles of chemistry. And so that's the, that's the simplest way to, to answer it. And then, of course, the more planets that we discover, the larger the concrete sample size actually is.
[00:32:13] Speaker A: Right. And the better our technology gets to be able to study these far off exoplanets as well.
[00:32:20] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Well, what about the objection that it's inevitable?
I used to enjoy the movie Jurassic park, still do as a piece of entertainment. But in there, Malcolm says life finds a way.
What about that objection? Whatever environment we find ourselves in, wed find examples conducive to its measurability.
[00:32:42] Speaker B: Yeah, well, and its sort of similar also to the argument that, yeah, well, life has evolved this way here because that was what was available. And so if you treat the kind of evolution of life from, lets say, simple chemical constituents as an inevitability, then thats how youre going to think.
But thats an empirical question. Right. And we have absolutely no reason to believe thats true. The reality is that theres a reason that NASA spends so much money just trying to look for evidence of liquid water on the past surface of Mars. Its not because NASA is unimaginative its because they understand the biochemical requirements for life in this universe. And so not just, you know, life's not just going to evolve given any particular environment. In fact, life can't even once it's come into existence, continue to survive without very narrow conditions in complex metazoan life. So like humans, we actually turns out if you look at the options in the universe, the conditions under which we can persist and exist are actually quite narrow.
And so that's the sort of remarkable thing. At the same time, if we discover complex sort of science conducting life around a completely different environment based upon a completely different biochemistry, that will refute our argument. So the argument's risky, but we're not, we're not laying awake at night worrying that we're going to discover complex life on radically, you know, radically different environments. In fact, the solar system itself tells us that. Right? We're not, we're not finding life around the other planets in the solar system.
[00:34:31] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:34:33] Speaker A: And you're not, as you say, lying awake and worried about this. You have dedicated this, this argument to the future. You know, you're not trying to inoculate it against future discoveries. You're ready for them.
[00:34:46] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:34:47] Speaker A: And in the rare case that you are refuted, you guys already have the humility to accept that. But it doesn't look likely, that's for sure. Well, Jay, we'll have to leave it there for now, but I want to thank you for your work putting this new edition together. It's so cool that you guys, way back over 20 years ago, already knew that you'd have a 20th anniversary edition. So it must be really exciting. And I wish it well.
Audience, to get your copy of this revised, rewritten and updated edition of the Privileged Planet, you can go to the website privilegedplanet.com. privilegedplanet.com. Don't miss this new opportunity to dive into the latest scientific evidence showing that Earth is designed both for life and for scientific discovery. Privileged plans for id the future I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
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[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org dot this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
