[00:00:12] Speaker A: Is nature randomly evolved or purposefully designed? Welcome to ID the future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today I'm excited to welcome back to the show biochemist Michael Behe for a behind the scenes chat about his popular video series, Secrets of the Cell. Dr. Behee is professor of biological sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He received his PhD in biochemistry from the University of Pennsylvania. Behee's current research involves delineation of design and natural selection in protein structures. He's author of 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin's Black Box, the Edge of Evolution, and most recently, Darwin Devolves. Michael, welcome Back to ID the Future.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Thanks, Andrew. It's great to be with you again.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Well, today I'd like to chat with you about your video series, Secrets of the Cell. When it comes to the question of whether biological life evolved randomly or was designed purposefully, the answer, as you say, it lies in the cell. You say there's never been a more exciting time to be a life scientist, and that we're living in a golden age of discovery in molecular biology, fueled by stunning breakthroughs in our understanding of the most fundamental unit of life, the Cell. In other words, what was a mystery to Darwin is now well understood. You revealed this in your first book, Darwin's Black Box, showing us that the view of evolution as driven by unguided, purposeless processes alone can't survive an up close encounter with the living cell. You build on this theme in your next two books, the Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolved. And now viewers get a front row seat as you take them on a visual tour of the wonders of the Cell in the Secrets of the Cell video series. So you launched this series in 2020 with a five episode series, or season, I should say, covering topics like irreducible complexity, the machinery of insects, the effects of mutations, and the evidence for purposeful design. Where did the idea come from For Secrets of the Cell?
[00:02:19] Speaker B: Well, it wasn't for me.
In the year 2019, I was sitting comfortably in my office at Lehigh University, and there was a knock on the door, and a man named Cal Covert walked in. I never met Cal before, didn't know who he was, but he introduced himself, said he was an alumnus of Lehigh. He's about five years younger than me.
We didn't overlap at all, but he graduated from Lehigh back in the day, and he was up for some reunion of his classmates. And it turns out Cal has read Darwin's black box, was a fan, and he's also a videographer. He puts together medical videos, training videos for hospitals and doctor's office and such. And he had the idea of making a video series for laypeople, small, relatively short videos that kind of get across the main points of Darwin's black box.
And so it sounded intriguing to me, and so we decided that we would go from there. And he's been the major force behind this, not only filming and setting up all of the videos, but also getting support, financial support and otherwise to produce. So 99% of the credit goes to Cal.
[00:03:53] Speaker A: Wow. That's awesome. Some scientists may have a hard time getting in front of the camera to report on their findings, but you looked like a natural in these videos. Was it difficult for you to record these, or did it just feel like you were in a classroom of sorts?
[00:04:06] Speaker B: Well, yeah, of course. As a teacher, you're up in front of people talking all the time, so you get used to that. It is a little strange when you see yourself on a TV screen for the first time, but I guess in this age of Zoom, most people are getting used to it. But even back then, before, when I was first starting, you are uncomfortable to start with, but you get used to it pretty quickly. And you just imagine yourself in front of the intended audience and speak as if you're speaking to them. You look at the camera, but in your mind's eye, you're envisioning the audience, so it's not that hard. But I have to admit that before I started doing this series with Cal, I wasn't aware of how intricate and how many details have to be just so. The lighting has to be just so. You have to be placed just so. The prop that you're holding has to be held in just the right way. The person walking behind you.
All of these things are important in producing a film that doesn't distract the viewer from the things that you're trying to say and concentrates on the point you're trying to make. And so we would go through 510 retakes of a scene. And I think Cal covert's most famous line is, that was great. Now let's just do one more take for the record, and say that a dozen times after eat. So, yeah, you got used to it. It's easy enough. But films, videos have to be just right. And that actually takes a lot of work.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of moving parts. A lot goes into it. But the finished product can be quite something, and it must feel good. You're reaching folks that may not necessarily ever pick up your books, but they're watching you make the arguments in a concise way on a popular platform like YouTube, so you get to reach a whole new audience.
[00:06:12] Speaker B: Yeah, that's right. And call again, insisted that the segments of the first series, the six segments of the Secrets of the Cell, wherein we kind of laid out the basic argument of Darren's black box and intelligent design, that they be know, bite sized videos, five to seven minutes that people could look at when they had a break in the day because people are busy, they've got lots of other things. And so if you want to reach them, then you have to make it accessible to most people.
[00:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah. And even young ones. I mean, my middle daughter, Isla, she's nine years old and she enjoys really, you know, loves you unpacking the secrets of the cell. I'm showing her all kinds of videos, but she's really latching onto your series. Well, these videos have you shooting on location in several different places. An auto mechanic, a hospital, a data center. Was it fun to record in different locales? And what was your favorite place to shoot a scene?
[00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, it was great. We moved around. As you sAid, we actually had a couple of scenes shot at a local car dealership, which is owned by another Lehigh University graduate who was a friend of Cal's, too, and who gracious enough to allow us to shoot within their really large, modern building. And that kind of doubled as the hospital scene. The first floor of that was the car mechanics scene in one of the videos where it showed guys working on cars and made an analogy to the cell. I think my favorite shot, though, or my favorite scene was when Cal thought it would be a great idea for me to drive a Jeep through some back roads.
So he got a Jeep. He got a jeep for me to entrusted me to drive it. I had never driven such a thing. And he had me go back in the woods and drive through swampy areas to make it look authentic. And that was a lot of.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's great. A nice little Indiana Jones touch.
Yeah. Well, in episode five, you talk about the X Factor responsible for the complexity of life. You say that scientists through the ages have acknowledged the reality of purposeful design, but things took a detour when Charles Darwin proposed his evolutionary theory of natural selection. What did this detour eventually teach us about biological diversity?
[00:08:40] Speaker B: Well, it taught us a lot of things. First, Charles Darwin first proposed that, gee, all of this stuff that really looks designed and looked designed to everybody in the world before his book was published, whether you were religious or not, whether you were educated or not, everybody thought that life was designed. He proposed, well, hey, maybe it could arise by the accumulation of small, beneficial mutations and sounded like an idea. But then, comparatively little was known about biology back in Darwin's day. And in the 150 years since then, we've learned tons about the overwhelming complexity and elegance of the foundation of life. And I think, in a nutshell, what we've learned is that the elegance and complexity of organisms at the surface level, things like eagles and frogs and all the creatures that fascinate us, is underlain by even more phenomenal complexity. So that Darwin's reasonable attempt, at least back in his age, his attempt to try to explain the surface complexity of organisms by appealing to somehow an underlying simplicity, turned out to be the opposite of the case. It's kind of like saying, well, sure, computers look complicated on the surface. There's this screen and there are these keys and stuff. But probably if we take off the COVID and look at the insides, it'll turn out to be simple. Well, of course, the opposite is true. When you look at the insides, it's even more complicated. And again, we recognize design, we recognize purpose. When we see a lot of things that are matched to each other which are put in relationship to perform a function, like the parts of a machine, like the parts of a computer, they're matched up so that it can do things. So we are rediscovering that complexity that we knew about before Darwin is just the surface, and it's even more elegant and more complex inside. People have gotten used, especially people in the scientific community have gotten used to thinking that life could develop by an unthinking process.
And they're kind of stuck by some sort of intellectual inertia in the same mode of thinking. But it's clear that the data now have really reversed it and shown the wisdom of folks before Darwin in recognizing the design and the beauty and function and complexity of life.
[00:11:31] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. In his day, he didn't know the half of it. And you can't blame the guy. If somebody had come from the future with a high powered microscope and said, hold on, before you hit publish with your book, look at this. Chances are he may have had increasing doubts, more so than he already had.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Sure.
Pretty much every year, too, or every month, things are published in science journals that astound us already. And we've gotten used to new things coming along. And somebody publishes a paper and say, look at this new system that I just discovered. And it does all these extraordinary things. We didn't know about it last week, and yet it turns out that all life depends on it, and life would not be possible without it. So you certainly can't blame Darwin for not anticipating such things when we experience this same thing, right?
[00:12:25] Speaker A: And if it can knock evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins sideways with wonder when he sees the intricacies of the cell, imagine what Darwin would have thought. Well, I think the word detour, there is a really great word to explain the Darwin chapter when it comes to evolutionary proposals. And it looks like we've come to the point now in our understanding of biology where we can say definitively that that detour is over and it's back to our regularly scheduled program. Or maybe it's a better program because the scientific evidence has finally caught up with the design hypothesis. We've got the evidence to confirm our suspicions.
[00:13:01] Speaker B: That's exactly right. It's a detour in the sense that we got off the correct path and we looked around for a little while, but now we're firmly back on the path that life requires purposeful design. I mean, some people like that idea, some people don't like the idea. But lots of things occur in nature that we like or don't like, and that's just the way it is. And it's important to realize that Darwin and his contemporaries knew so little about life compared to what we know now. They thought the cell was like a little piece of jelly. And we now know it's this elegant, sophisticated factory. And that we understand that we recognize design by looking at how parts are ordered to function. That's the hallmark of design, that's the hallmark of thought. That's how we realize that something required design. Why this piece? Well, this is simple, but when you put it in relation to this piece and this on here and over here, now they can work together to do something like the simple example of a mousetrap that I used in Darwin's black box. See that all the parts are matched to each other for a purpose. We've seen amazing examples of that in the cell.
[00:14:27] Speaker A: Yeah, we have. Well, in 2022, you kicked off a second round of the series with episode six on Bacteria as superheroes of the microbial world. And this one featured animations that show us remarkably complex inner workings of various types of bacteria. Did you oversee these animated sequences? And how do advances in technology make it possible to know what's going on, even in tiny bacteria?
[00:14:53] Speaker B: Yes, I did oversee the animations in the sense that I made sure that the science they depicted was correct. But I am no artist, so I certainly didn't tell people how to draw things, or really even a lot of the analogies that are depicted in that film of how something called a magnetactic bacterium works, were put forward by artists with a lot more imagination than myself. And, yeah, again, how do we know this? It's because of amazing developments since Darwin's Day of better and better microscopes, or better and better ways to look at smaller and smaller things, because it's critical to understand that life, that the foundational level of life is the molecular level, the molecular and cellular level that was unknown to Darwin and his contemporaries. But that's where you have to look for how life works. And in turn, that's where you have to look to see if, to properly evaluate Darwin's theories, see what it can do and what it can't. But a number of techniques developed, including things like electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance, cryoelectron microscopy. The big one these days is the developments in the ability to sequence DNA, to read out the letters of DNA units in the complete genomes of organisms and compare them to each other.
All of this took tens of thousands of scientists half a century to develop. And lots of it was surprises. But we do live in a golden age of discovery and biology and concomitants with that. We are now in. And just in the past 20 years, we are in a really good position to definitively evaluate what Darwin's mechanism can do, because it certainly can do some important things, and what it cannot do because it certainly can explain the complex functional parts of the cell.
[00:17:14] Speaker A: Yeah, I agree. Well, bacteria are incredible, as your episode lays out. They can be very useful. I mean, dairy farms powered by manure eating bacteria. I think I'd heard something about that, but I wasn't convinced until I heard it in your video. I mean, wow.
What are some other ways that we're harnessing bacteria now that we know more about how it works?
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Well, in a lot of different ways. One of the ways that the film talks about is trying to get bacteria to be used as drug delivery systems in people.
That kind of plays into one of the main examples in the film. There are these bacteria called magnetotactic bacteria magnetomagnets. They have little magnets in them, really little magnets which can orient the bacterium in a magnetic field and which they then use the bacteria use to try to figure out their way, swimming either down towards the bottom of a pond where they might be living, or up towards the surface. Because, of course, bacteria don't have eyes, so they need some way to sense direction. And of course, clever scientists are trying to use these things for their own purposes, which the film talks about is perhaps they can be maneuvered to deliver drugs to places like tumors, which seemly helpful. And in the film, it talks about the structure of these magnetosomes. You think about, well, a little magnet and a bacteria. That's cute. My child has a little magnet that they play with. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but like everything else in a cell, it's really very sophisticated. And it's not just a simple magnet. It's a series of magnets that have to be perfectly aligned and the right length, and the manufacturer of them has to be within critical specifications, or it doesn't work, and all sorts of things like that. So that's one example of the use for a bacterium. But of course, there are many more and are environmental concerns. People have developed bacteria that can help break down plastics, which are contaminating the ocean, and many more.
[00:19:39] Speaker A: Yeah, it's very interesting to see how scientists are using those. Well, in the latest episode in your Secrets series, you unravel the mystery of biological information. You explain what information is and why so much of it is needed to drive the development and operation of our bodies. In the video, you suggest thinking of the fundamental unit of information as one simple decision. Shall I flip the light switch on or off, or keep it off? Why is this a good way to begin to understand what information is?
[00:20:10] Speaker B: Well, it's analogous to what computer scientists always use as the fundamental level of information. And that's one bit either yes or no, or whether something is turned up or is turned down. And I wanted to use an analogy that everybody's familiar with. So whether the light switches up or it's down, that's one decision. And it also emphasizes some other things that I think is important for people to understand, and that is that a bit of information is a decision, and decisions are made by minds. In these discussions, you have to realize that these are being put together by minds. And this is intricately connected with the realization that we are real, rational thinking beings and that we can recognize the work of other rational thinking beings, such as the designer of the cell and the designer of these complex systems. Additionally, that you can put together decisions, put together bits of information into something very, very complex. You can turn the switch up or down, okay. But if there were ten switches, you could turn the first one up and the second one down and the third one up. And these kind of exponentially increase the amount of information, the amount of that go into building something. And I wanted to start out small with one bit being switch up or down to try to get across the idea that even things that you kind of take in one fell swoop, you think of a machine or a computer. Well, I have a computer that does this. But the information, all of the procedures that go into making something work are enormous amounts of decisions, enormous amounts of information.
And again, folks like Darwin, back in his day, thought that cells were simple. They just thought of them as little pieces of jelly. And so if you don't need much information, if you don't need complexity at the foundation of life, maybe you could just kind of smear it together and it'll somehow work. But when you see the amount of information, the amount of decisions, the amount of thinking, the amount, the work of a mind that goes into all of these decisions, all of this intricacy, then the conclusion of intelligent design really becomes overwhelming. So that's what I was trying to get across.
[00:22:56] Speaker A: Yeah, and you did a great job of communicating that well in the video, you walk us through what it would take to build even one seemingly simple item in the body, let's say the femur. By the end of the sequence, though, we realized that just one single bone is a marvel of engineering, part of a complicated, coordinated system of organs throughout the body. But here's a question that I wonder. We already take our bodies for granted. I mean, we're walking around using them and not really thinking through the amazing processes we're part of. Even if we learn in vivid detail about all the amazing machinery and systems present in biological life, we might still wake up in the morning and shrug our shoulders and just forget about it. Why is it so easy to take this complexity and purposeful engineering for granted? Is there a way to stay humble and grateful about it?
[00:23:48] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it's easy to take anything for granted just because when we're born here, we're born into this world where people give us food and pat us on the back and give us things, and we start out thinking, well, of course we deserve that.
I and my magnificence am do all of this stuff. But as we grow up, most of us learn that, well, we're not owed, that. This is the generous gifts.
This is due to other people, other persons in their own right, doing stuff for us. And in the case of appreciating the body, again, most of us learn to appreciate it by coming into circumstances where it doesn't work as well as it should. For example, we get cut or if we hurt ourselves, wow, this is not working the way it should. Why? Because all of these things have to work together. They have to work in a certain way. And so as you get to appreciate it more when it's not working correctly. In Darwin's black box, I pointed out that many parents know a whole lot more about the biochemical details of life than they ever wanted to know. Parents who have children with sickle cell disease or cystic fibrosis learn to their horror, that life depends on all these intricate details. And if one tiny thing goes wrong, one amino acid residue out of hundreds in hemoglobin, out of the tens of thousands of proteins in your body, it can bring your world to a crashing halt. So I think the way to stay appreciative of it is to pay attention to people who have gotten the short end of the stick, so to speak, who have health problems, who have difficulty in doing the things that we take for granted. Or another more positive way is to contemplate the development of a baby. If you have friends or acquaintances, relatives who are expecting a child, just think of all of the things that go into building a human being, and hopefully that'll renew our sense of wonder and appreciation.
[00:26:19] Speaker A: Very good points. Yeah. An unfortunate thing about human nature is you sometimes don't appreciate it till it's gone.
So trying to learn from what others are going through and also being appreciative of how things develop for your own children, for yourself, and of course, just good old fashioned learning, how does this work? And that's where intelligent design, the future and your work comes in, is teaching these people well. One viewer of your latest episode on YouTube says, this is so much better and clearer than all my university classes on biology. Thank you for making this great content. And I noticed another comment that said, Dr. Behee is an example of the real Scientist. For me, integrity and honesty should be the foundation pillars of each and every scientist.
So that's some kudos to you.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: It sounds like I gave both of those guys a $20 bill to write into to say that.
[00:27:19] Speaker A: There you go. There you go. Well, they earned it.
It does sound like from reading the comments and seeing the response that you have had, a good response, and these are making an impact.
What's been your response personally? Have people come up to you? Have you been thanked in a special way for these things?
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Well, mostly in this age of the Internet, you get emails. And so I get emails from folks who have seen the videos, and a lot of the responses are exactly as you say that they say, wow, this is so cool. I hadn't thought about it, and that's oftentimes because these are directed to folks who have not experienced, who haven't studied biology in much detail or don't pay much attention to these issues. So it's wonderful for me to think that Cal covert's vision of trying to reach folks who had not had the time or inclination or ability to get into intelligent design, that we're starting to reach a lot of these folks, and I'm hoping to reach a lot more in the future.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, Michael, will there be other episodes of Secrets of the cell that we can look forward to?
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yes, indeed.
Even as we are speaking, Cal is talking to people about supporting a new episode on a topic to be revealed later. But let me just say, these are going to continue. And again, we hope to reach more people and help them appreciate the wonder of life and the mind behind living systems.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: Well, Michael, thank you for doing these. I really appreciate it on behalf of those who have watched, and we'll do our best to keep promoting them as a great tool to communicate what's also in your books and in your life's work and research. And Cal, if you're out there, thank you for all you've done to put this together as well. Mike, thanks again for joining us.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: Okay, thanks, Andrew. It's always a pleasure.
[00:29:23] Speaker A: Well, listeners, viewers, watch the full secrets of the SAL video series and learn more about Mike Behee's
[email protected]. That's Michaelbeehy.com. And if you enjoy ID of the future, let us know by posting a rating and review at Apple Podcasts. Your feedback will also help others connect with the show. For idthuture, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:29:49] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
Close.
