[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Greetings, I'm Tom Gilson. Today on ID the Future, from a program first aired on the Michael Medved show, we hear an interview with Discovery Institute senior fellow and intelligent design pioneer Michael Behe as he talks about a new short film and a new article that he's recently produced. And we'll let Michael Medved pick it up from there and tell you more.
[00:00:36] Speaker A: And another great day in this greatest nation on God's green earth. It is a great day in this nation for discovery. A discovery of what? Discovery of a small film. It's a short film. It's less than a half hour, but it is just remarkable and actually fills you with wonder and amazement and a fascination. It's extremely well made and I'm really very glad that I watched it. I have the Discovery Institute to thank for that. And in particular, Dr. Michael Behe, who is a professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, and he's a senior Fellow at Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. He received his PhD in biochemistry same from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978. It's where my dad got his PhD in physics at the University of Pennsylvania.
Behe's current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures. What are protein structures? They're cells. Okay.
And he has a.
A series of wonderful videos that are entertaining and amazing and very watchable and very comprehensible even for people with no background in these fields at all, called Secrets of the cell. Dr. Behe, always a pleasure speaking with you and congratulations on this latest contribution.
[00:02:17] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks very much. It's always great to talk with you, Michael.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Well, thank you. Okay. What you look at and you begin with a little episode which is of concern to everybody. I mean, right now your fellow Pennsylvanian John Fetterman is in the news. And so people are aware of stroke and the threat of stroke. And there's an individual who suffers a stroke and you dramatize how his life depends on getting a prompt and capable and complex response from a first class medical team.
What does this have to do with the way your body protects itself when you get cut and when you're bleeding?
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, we start out just to show everybody that they already know that in order to get good care, you've got to have good systems in place, things that are ready to go when they're needed in an emergency. And it turns out that in our bodies, emergencies go on a lot more frequently than you would suspect, that sometimes you get cut. Or sometimes just when you're running around, one of your capillaries or blood vessels inside ruptures a little bit. And you gotta stop the blood flow. You've got to contain it or you'll bleed out. And on the other hand, like the poor fellow in the film, if you, if your emergency system for clotting blood to stop blood, blood flow goes off at the wrong time, you could form a blood clot that might go to your brain and cause a stroke. And so you've got to have this system within very narrow tolerances.
And even though blood clotting looks pretty simple, you know, you get up in the morning and you know, you might nick yourself shaving and it bleeds a little bit and slows down and stops.
Research has shown that there are dozens of sophisticated components that are needed for the whole thing to work.
[00:04:37] Speaker A: Okay, this was what was so eye opening and amazing to me is you had mentioned this in your film, which is about the body's emergency response system, which is blood clotting. I'd always assumed that when you have a wound and a scratch or a cut, the blood just dries and then it forms a scab and it's just that simple. But what you show with wondrous animation, I mean, congratulations on that beautiful animation there.
What you show is that it's extraordinarily more complex than that. And without it, we would have very, very serious problems anytime we had some kind of wounding.
[00:05:27] Speaker C: Yeah, that's right. Most people don't give clotting much of much thought at all. Because like you say, you scratch yourself and blood slows down and stops. Well, maybe just dried up and, and stopped things. But it turns out that it wouldn't stop. People with hemophilia who are lacking one or more of the components of blood clotting cascade, no, they'll just keep bleeding and bleeding and bleeding and it can be life threatening. But it turns out that in your blood there's a component called fibrinogen that's kind of like inactive Jello or something. Jello. Before you boil it up and cool it down and it's soluble, but it's there ready to go. And when you cut yourself, that sets in motion a whole cascade of factors. Ultimately, there's another factor called thrombin which cuts off a piece of that fibrinogen and activates it. It's kind of like boiling the jello and then when it cools down, it can clot. But when you activate this fibrinogen and it cuts off a Piece of it, it turns out it changes its shape and aligns with each other and itself assembles to form something like a fisherman's net, which is kind of cast over the cut and slows down the bleeding and eventually stops it. But in order to turn on the thrombin, which turns on the fibrinogen, there's another factor that has to activate it, then another factor that has to activate it. And like I said, a whole cascade of things.
[00:07:16] Speaker A: And what does the individual patient have to do to install this sophisticated and very complex system?
[00:07:25] Speaker C: Well, you have to pick the right parents. If you don't pick the right parents, you're out of luck.
Yeah. We generally come ready made with this. And like I said, there is a couple dozen different pieces that all have to be put together.
And kings and queens of Europe were known for having hemophilia because one of their factors was not working correctly. And since they tended to intermarry in those days, they passed along that broken gene.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah. This is how Rasputin got power over the Tsarina, over the czar and the Tsarina of Russia. Right. Because they had a son who was the hemophiliac.
Yeah. I mean, so this connects with all kinds of things. But leaving aside the royal families of Europe and their tendency toward hemophilia, does this same kind of protective system, does that operate on organisms that are further down the evolutionary ladder? That would be.
[00:08:38] Speaker C: It goes pretty far, yes.
Vertebrates, all vertebrates, you know, fish and birds and reptiles and mammals and so on, all have pretty much the same blood clotting system. So how this all started is a big mystery. It's not present in invertebrates.
So for some reason, the ability to clot blood appears in. In life exactly when you need it. When you get organisms that have hearts that are pumping blood at pretty high pressures and you find this at its.
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Full complexity, you're saying, even for organisms, animals that are further down on the evolutionary ladder. So the question becomes, could this possibly be evidence for, dare I say it, intelligent design?
We will be right back with Dr. Michael Behe. His signature of the Cell series is terrific. And you can see this episode that I'm talking about. So rhapsodically, you can see that episode by going to michaelbehe.com that's B E H e. We will be right back.
And the Discovery Institute is where Michael Behe, our guest, his most recent in a series of videos called Secrets of a Cell, and also a cover story that Dr. Behe just wrote at World magazine, and the theme is on the way that science has vindicated the words of the Psalmist, I will praise thee, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Marvelous are thy works, and that my soul knoweth right well. That's also what he's talking about in this video series is the amazement of what goes on inside the human body.
Recognizing a purposeful arrangement of parts in biological systems large and small doesn't require a scientist to draw it. It was available to the thoughtful observer of life thousands of years ago. But the closer and deeper he writes that technology has permitted us to peer into such systems, the more evident it has become that they reflect a deliberate design.
Given.
Given the fact that this deliberate design was already in place. You were saying for vertebrates, vertebrate animals, is it. Has anyone tried to suggest the way you could evolve from animals that don't have this protective function of the cells for wounds and for healing, how that could have evolved from organisms that don't possess that ability?
[00:12:00] Speaker C: Well, yes, there's suggestion and then there's scientifically valid studies. People have kind of suggested how it might have arisen in the sense that Rudyard Kipling suggested how tigers might have gotten their stripes.
But if you look in the scientific literature and ask yourself who has conducted experiments or who has proposed a detailed and rigorous model for how we could see how random mutation and natural selection suggested by Charles Darwin, how that might have put together this elegant and complex system, there's simply nothing there. And in the video itself, I go over an incidence from a couple decades ago when the leading researcher on blood clotting in the world, a guy named Russell Doolittle, who's deceased now, he suggested, or he didn't suggest, he derided my idea of irreducible complexity and design of the blood clotting system, which I had written about in a book back then, and he pointed to a paper that showed that some of the components of the blood clotting system could be knocked out. And it didn't bother the experimental mice in which it was done. And it turns out that he had misread the paper that he cited and that the mice were very sick when their blood clotting components were knocked out.
And I was delighted to read his criticism because when I saw that he was incorrect, it demonstrated the point that not even the best scientists in the world have any idea how a complex system such as the blood clotting cascade could have been put together by a Darwinian process. If you ask people, scientists in particular, biologists, evolutionary biologists, they will insist that yes, we know. Yes, it did happen. But when you go to the science library or ask for details, there is nothing there.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: And what about the whole idea? Because I know that when you talk about secrets of the cell, given the recent discoveries about the nature of the cellular universe, has there been any indication of the, a greater store of information that you can find in every single cell of our bodies?
[00:14:46] Speaker C: Well, yeah. The history of modern biology is progress showing that the design of the cell or the complexity and intricacy of the cell keeps going deeper and deeper and deeper into levels that we, you know, the week before last we didn't know even existed. And I think perhaps the most talked about level these days is something called metagenomics. Metagenomics. Most people know what genomics is. It's kind of the DNA in your cell and the sequence of nucleotides that gives the information to the cell to make protein, that make machines. This metagenomics is kind of a newly discovered phenomenon where different components of the cell can chemically modify portions of the DNA itself, turning it off and on. So that means something other than the DNA is telling the DNA what to do. And this is kind of a whole new level, a higher level than just the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA itself. And what this portends for evolution, what it portends for the complexity of the cell, has people still running around pulling their hair out.
[00:16:16] Speaker A: But then there are obviously cellular defenders who will come in to replace the hair in most cases.
[00:16:25] Speaker C: Yeah, there are always apologists saying that we've got everything under control, don't worry. Look, these bacteria develop antibiotic resistance, so that explains everything.
I guess the bigger story is that even a lot of members of the science community these days are skeptical that Darwin's mechanism of random mutation and natural selection can explain all of biology.
They're not like me, proponents of intelligent design, but at least they're now skeptical that the old theory can explain everything. And I'll settle for that at this point.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Let me urge people to go to our
[email protected] to read the new cover story that Michael Behe has written for World magazine. It's full of just gobsocking insight and information about the complexity that we enjoy every moment that we live and what a miracle being alive really is. And then you can also go to our website and find episode seven about blood clotting. The bodies emergency response system was actually pretty thrilling. Shocking. It was a lot better than some of the full length Hollywood movies that I see.
But you can view that at no charge at
[email protected] Godspeed to you, Michael Behe. And I know that people are going to enjoy exploring your work. We will be right back.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: That was Michael Medved with Michael Behe from a recent episode of the Michael Medved Show. You'll want to check out the video and the article they were discussing, and you can find links to both of them right here in the program notes for this ID the Future episode. For ID the Future, I'm Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
