Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Today on id the future, we're happy to bring you another interview with Doctor Tom Woodward, host of the Universe next Door, syndicated radio broadcast in conjunction with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Doctor Woodward regularly interviews CSC scientists and scholars on various aspects of the debate over darwinian evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:30] Speaker B: Welcome to the universe next door, a program that tackles really tough questions about worldview. Is there a real God out there who rules the universe? Who created us for a purpose, who undergirds our existence with something of a bigger picture? The universe idea that we're dealing with has both a physical aspect and that worldview that I just mentioned. The universe next door is a name, a very important book written by Jim Sire. But we've chosen that name to symbolize our search for the truth. Well, how do you detect design? How do you detect the possibility of intelligent causation? And how do you figure out whether the darwinian answer really holds water any longer or not? Well, we have with us today on the phone from his office out in Washington state, one of the leading scientists who has devoted years of his life, really decades of his life, to searching for the answers to those big questions of scientific fingerprints, of design in nature, and a fair and honest evaluation of the darwinian answer. His name is well known, of course, in the world of science. It's Jonathan Wells. He holds two earned PhDs, one from Yale University and one from the University of California at Berkeley. Those are two pretty heavyweight institutions, one in cell and developmental biology from Berkeley. And of course, he also studied the history, the background of the darwinian story, the kind of the both theological and scientific story there at Yale University. Welcome back to the Universe next door program, Doctor Jonathan Wells.
[00:02:06] Speaker C: I'm delighted to be here, Tom.
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Well, we are delighted to be mentored by you through your books, your articles. I'm holding in my hand, I'm clutching very strongly one of my favorite books I have in my library called Icons of Evolution, science or myth. And I love what it has right below that, why much of what we teach about evolution is wrong. And of course, the famous series of monkeys looks like a chimp, maybe developing in five stages to modern man. I guess that's a CRO Magnon. I remember those diagrams as a child in elementary school in California, back in the seventies. Well, and you know, I love what Jonathan Wells has achieved in terms of a blurb from Doctor Michael Beheveden, author of Darwin's Black Box, who says, Jonathan Wells demonstrates with stunning clarity that the textbook examples Darwinists themselves choose as the pillars of their theory are false or misleading. What does this imply about their scientific standards? What a great question. Why should anyone now believe any of their other examples? Well, Doctor Jonathan Wells, this book of course, has been a leading one of the top five of the entire intelligent design movement in exposing and guiding us to the truth, exposing the misleading information and helping us to understand what is true in this area of real information.
What would you say today about these chosen and I believe they're ten. Aren't there icons of evolution that you deal with?
[00:03:38] Speaker C: I described ten in the book. Of course there are more.
[00:03:41] Speaker B: There are more.
[00:03:41] Speaker C: I had to stop somewhere.
[00:03:42] Speaker B: You had to stop somewhere. That's good. Well, would you say that if you went back and reinved did the book today? And I know that would just. It's a thought experiment, but would you still today probably choose those same ten? Have any of the ten been completely cleaned up in the textbooks to the best of your understanding, or are all the ten, to some extent, still problematic in textbooks today?
[00:04:13] Speaker C: Well, to varying degrees, some of them have been downplayed or modified since I wrote the book, but basically they're all still there, if not in exactly the same form in which I analyzed them, at least in some form or another.
So the first icon was Stanley Miller's experiment, 1953 experiment, where he shot a spark through a mixture of gases and produced some amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.
And this was supposed to show that life could have started on earth without any kind of design or supernatural involvement, just from the random interactions of natural processes.
And if not that particular experiment, that specific endeavor to show that life could have started basically on its own, materialistically, that effort is still very much alive and it's still presented to students, biology students, as the probable way that things happen, when in fact they, the origin of life researchers, are actually no closer to solving the problem than they ever were. In fact, I'd say they're farther away.
[00:05:32] Speaker B: Wow. In other words, the more they learn from their experiments, the further a solution seems to elude them or slip away.
[00:05:42] Speaker C: That's correct. So they bring in things like undersea volcanic vents where all these strange gases bubble up through the ocean floor and strange organisms live around them. And they speculate that that might be how life started. In other cases, they speculate that it might have started in ice on a frozen planet. So they go from one extreme to the other, but they're really no closer to solving the problem.
And here's the problem. They are trying to explain how the basic building blocks could have arisen the amino acids, the nucleotides and so on.
But even if they were to succeed, and they have not, they would be no closer to explaining the origin of life. And I can give you a very simple thought experiment that shows that.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: Okay, we're ready.
[00:06:36] Speaker C: Every biologist knows this, really. If I were to take a living cell and put it into a small test tube in which there was no other life, a sterile test tube with just a salt solution at the right temperature and the right acidity and so on, and then take a sterile needle and poke a hole in that cell, its contents would leak out into the tiny test tube, and in that test tube, I would have all the ingredients needed to make a living cell. Not just the basic building blocks, but also the complex molecules in just the right proportions. And yet, every biologist knows I could not put them back together again. It's called the Humpty dumpy experiment.
[00:07:22] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:07:22] Speaker C: So the fact is, the transition from the building blocks to the living cell is a total mystery. And nobody has even begun to explain how that happens.
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Today with us on the phone, Doctor Jonathan Wells. He is an expert in the study of not only the icons of evolution, the purported proofs of darwinian theory that are often presented in textbooks in visual format as pictures, diagrams and so forth, with a little bit of, you know, splash and dash of explanatory paragraphs with them, but also he is an expert in the epigenetic information that is beyond the genome, the codes and the patterns of helpful cellular information that are even imprinted, I should say, I think that they were invented by a wise designer and placed there in the membranes. Doctor Jonathan Wells, we have about 40 seconds. If you just tell us, what is the name of the article? That was just days ago put up on biocomplexity.
[00:08:21] Speaker C: The title is membrane patterns carry ontogenetic information.
Ontogenetic means developmental, okay? Membrane patterns carry ontogenetic information that is specified independently of DNA.
[00:08:37] Speaker B: Wow. Well, this is going to be available to anybody in the World Wide Web. We're going to be coming back and talking about the content of that article in our next segment as we continue on the study of the latest information on intelligent design from one of the top scientists, Doctor Jonathan Wells. You're listening to the universe next door. I'm Tom Woodward, your host. We'll be right back.
Welcome back to the universe next door. As today we are privileged to walk down the pathway of discovery as we are learning more about information that is embedded in the membrane of a cell. And we are on the phone with Doctor Jonathan Wells, who is the co author of a very important article that was just recently put on the Internet, available. Of course you can print it out on your own, but it's there electronically. Doctor Jonathan Wells. If you would just tell us how we can access that for anyone who's listening to the program today, as they might want to read. I know it's a bit maybe above the app level of, let's say, a high school student, if we're dealing with scientific content. But I enjoy a challenge in reading, and so I think anybody would benefit from this article.
[00:09:54] Speaker C: Sure. Well, it's easily accessible at the following websites.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:09:59] Speaker C: Www. Dot. Bio dash complexity. Bio dash complexity.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Very good.
[00:10:13] Speaker C: It's in the current issue, and it's easy to pull it up and download it, print it out.
[00:10:18] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:19] Speaker C: It does have technical detail in it, but the abstract is in plain English. The introduction is in plain English, the conclusions in plain English. So even a high school student should be able to get something out of it.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Okay. And give us one more time the title. And then after that, walk us into the essence of what you and your colleagues have discovered.
[00:10:40] Speaker C: Sure. The title is, membrane patterns carry ontogenetic information that is specified independently of DNA. And what that means is that despite the common understanding that DNA controls embryo development, the genetic program idea, despite that misconception, the fact is that the embryo has to have a lot more information than it has in its DNA. And some of that information is in the form of membrane patterns. These provide spatial information that helps DNA products get to where they're supposed to go in the cell, for one thing. And the DNA itself cannot specify that.
[00:11:26] Speaker B: You see, this seems to me a major pivot point in understanding of ontogenesis.
[00:11:33] Speaker C: Well, I agree. It is a major turning point. I have to say. I'm not the first one to think of it.
Various biologists have been saying things like this for decades. But one implication of this fact is that neo Darwinism, which insists that evolutionary changes originate in DNA mutations, that theory is false.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: It's false in the sense that it doesn't even touch this realm of important information. Contribution to the development, let's say, the embryonic development.
[00:12:11] Speaker C: That's correct.
You can mutate the DNA all you want, and you have not even approached dealing with this information outside the DNA.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: Well, let me just jump in and say, let's say I'm imagining I'm one of these new kids on the block, these feisty biologists that go over to Vienna, Austria, to the Altenburg mansion there, the Altenberg 16, and they're casting around with this idea and that idea to save Darwinism as it's sinking like the Titanic. And they say, oh, well, Jonathan Wells has a good point, but we can save Darwinism. We'll just add, on top of DNA mutations, we'll add ontogenetic membrane mutations. There, there. Now we've fixed it. What would you say to that?
[00:12:57] Speaker C: It's just a word.
It's actually just a word in the case of DNA as well, my friend and colleague Steve Meyer has argued very persuasively that the information in DNA cannot be explained by random mutations.
And if that's true at the level of DNA, it's even more true at the level of membrane patterns.
[00:13:24] Speaker B: Well, the membrane. Go ahead.
[00:13:26] Speaker C: You can't just randomly change membrane patterns and hope you get an embryo out of it, a living thing, because long.
[00:13:36] Speaker B: Before I'm jumping in and kind of thinking alongside you, before you would ever get a new, genuinely constructive, let's say, pattern that would set up a different kind of shape or morphology, a new structure, would it not logically degrade the original pattern so you would lose information before you ever got to a new informational pattern? I mean, that's what I would say.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Well, I think you're right. And it's actually much more complicated than that, of course, because to change a fruit fly into a house fly or a mosquito or some other insect, much less a horse, you would have to change the DNA, you would have to change the membrane patterns. Actually, there are other things you'd have to change, too. The cell contains an internal micro skeleton called a cytoskeleton, and this too carries patterns. So you'd have to change all of these things in a coordinated fashion because they all have to work together.
And that's just three things we know about. There's a lot more to the cell than those.
Mutation. The idea that it could happen somehow, by accident, is really biologically impossible.
[00:14:51] Speaker B: Today, on the phone with us, Doctor Jonathan Wells, author of so many key icons of Evolution, the politically incorrect guide to darwinism and intelligent design. And this very important new article just released on bio dash complexity.org dot Doctor Jonathan Wells. Someone of the Darwin side might come back and say, well, you're fussing at this neo Darwinism theory. Well, we are learning new mechanisms all the time. The theory is safe. The fact of evolution is safe. Even though we don't know how it happened, we know that it happened. The tree of life is secure. What would you say to that?
[00:15:29] Speaker C: Well, again, I would say it's just words. Evolution in one sense, of course. Is true. And that is in the sense that things change over time. Sometimes that's the way evolution is used.
But I think in the context you just mentioned, the idea is that all living things are descended from other living things. In this tree of life that Darwin drew in his book, the art and.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: The species, would that be universal common ancestry?
[00:15:55] Speaker C: That's one way to put it, yes. And a lot of people think that that can make it through the criticism, even though the criticism of the genetic program and DNA destroys the neo darwinian version of that. But the evidence for this tree of life actually is quite slim. And, I mean, it starts all with the idea that one species can transform into another, which is not unreasonable, but in fact, no one has ever observed it.
[00:16:26] Speaker B: Now, I want to point out what you just said, because that is a very powerful assertion. But you have a PhD in cell biology from Berkeley. You are well known to be at the cutting edge of knowledge. And you've just said that we do not have certain knowledge of species being transformed through an evolutionary pattern. That is a stark claim. I would say that that should be a sober statement taken seriously by anybody interested in science. Am I wrong?
[00:16:56] Speaker C: No, I totally agree with you. I should quickly add that there is one small class of exceptions to that statement.
[00:17:03] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:17:03] Speaker C: We do know of some plant species that originate through a process of chromosome doubling.
It's called polyploidy, technically, and this does happen in some plants, although the result is not a radically different kind of plant. It's a plant that looks very much like the parent plant, but technically, it cannot interbreed with the parent plant. And so by some standards, that's a new species. But apart from that, and that's not the kind of branching speciation that Darwin's theory needs to produce the tree of life. Except for that one class, there have been no observed cases of new species arising by Darwin's mechanism. And so the starting point of this whole theory remains speculative.
[00:17:54] Speaker B: Well, Doctor Jonathan Wells, you have taken us on a tour of not only your new study in the embedded patterns of information for ontogenetic, that is, the development of a new life form from the membrane of that embryo, but you've also opened us up to an understanding of at least several of the icons that you have critiqued of evolutionary theory. Doctor Jonathan Wells, I would love to have you come back. Would you consider coming back and being with us on next week's program?
[00:18:26] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:18:27] Speaker B: Very good. Well, we'll be continuing with Doctor Jonathan Wells as he continues to update us, including something related to human tales. Be with us next week on the universe next door as we continue the study, the fascinating study of the icons of evolution. I'm Tom Woodward, your host. We'll see you next week.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute, center for Science and Culture. Id the future is Copyright Discovery Institute 2014. For more information, visit www.intelligentdesign.org or www.idthefuture.com.
