Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Welcome listeners. Thanks for tuning in. I'm Andrew McDermott, your host. Today we bring you a wide ranging conversation with three of the leading voices in sciences and academia on the case for intelligent design. Philosopher of science, Steven Meyer biochemist, Michael Behe and mathematician, John Lennox. Peter Robinson, and the Hoover Institution have generously permitted us to share their interview. Originally recorded as an episode of Uncommon Knowledge. The trio takes turns pointing out the flaws in Darwin's theory and reports on the latest scientific evidence that points to an intentional design of the physical world. Enjoy
Speaker 3 00:00:52 Who's Dead, God or Charles Darwin. Michael Behe, a biochemist, John Lennox, a mathematician, Steven Meyer, a geophysicist filming today in Fi, Italy. Uncommon Knowledge. Now
Speaker 3 00:01:18 Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. Michael Behe holds an undergraduate degree from Drexel and a doctorate in biochemistry from Penn. He's the author of a number of books, including Darwin's Black Box Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Oxford. John Lennox, grew up in Northern Ireland, earned his undergraduate degree from Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and then went on to earn not one and not two, but three doctorates in an academic career of astounding distinction. Dr. Lennox is the author of many books, including the 2019 Volume. Can Science Explain Everything? A former professor of geophysics at Whitworth College, Steven Meyer, is now a fellow at the Discovery Institute. He holds a doctorate of the philosophy of science from Cambridge. Dr. Meyer has published again many books, including his 2013 volume on the fossil record, Darwin's Doubt, Michael, John and Steve, welcome. First question, Darwin versus Einstein.
Speaker 3 00:02:26 Einstein publishes the special theory of relativity in 1905 and in the 12 ish decades since that publication, one Observation after another has tended to confirm his work. Just a decade ago, scientists found clocks on satellites and elliptical orbits kept time just about, as Einstein would've predicted over time to put it crudely, Einstein has become easier and easier to believe. Darwin publishes on the origin of the species in 1859. Briefly, as was true of Einstein, also of Darwin. Has he become easier and easier to believe Michael? No, the opposite. The opposite. John. The exact opposite. Stephen
Speaker 4 00:03:13 Theory has been progressively disconfirmed by multiple observations in multiple subdisciplines of biology.
Speaker 3 00:03:19 Alright, all three of you come out swinging. Uh, gentlemen, you're about to take a layman through three problems with Darwin that the last few decades have turned up. Problem one. Steven, this is for you. Feel free to join in, but this one for Stephen, particularly the fossil record, the Cambri Cambrin. How's it pronounced in either
Speaker 4 00:03:39 Way? Yeah. Alright.
Speaker 3 00:03:40 The Cambrin or the Cambrian explosion, what was it and why is it a problem for Darwin?
Speaker 4 00:03:46 It was a problem that Darwin himself knew about in 1859. The Cambrian explosion is the, uh, refers to an event in the history of life in which the major groups of animal forms, uh, the new body plans that are exemplified by the largest categories of different types of animals, uh, appear very abruptly in the fossil record with no discernible connection to ancestral precursors or intermediates in the lower pre-Cambrian strata. And this pattern of abrupt appearance of the major groups of organisms of biological or morphological innovation, as it's called recurs, up and down the sedimentary rock column, the first ins, uh, winged insects, the first dinosaurs, the first birds, the first mammals, the first flowering plants. There are multiple instances of this type of abrupt appearance. And so the fossil record looks very different than Darwin anticipated that it would look. He depicted the history of life as a great branching tree where the, the forms of life we see today emerged gradually from one or very few simple forms at the base of the tree, at the trunk of the tree. But instead what we see, it looks more like a lawn or perhaps an orchard of separate trees where the major groups of organisms appear abruptly without connections to those ancestral prec precursor forms.
Speaker 3 00:05:01 So the cambri explosion was the first that got noticed. As you say, Darwin himself noticed that this was a problem. But, uh, this is from my reading add to it, or correct me as I've got it. The record shows one abrupt, abrupt meaning a few million years, but in the geologic time, that's the blink of an eye. One abrupt event after another photosynthesis just all of a sudden it's there. The Avalon explosion, the Great Orian BioD diversification event, whatever that may have been, the Urian Devonian terrestrial explosion, fish appear, birds appear, dinosaurs appear. Mammals appear. Okay, so the obvious objection to this is, well, we've only really been digging since about Darwin's time. The Earth is big. Geologic time is essentially endless. There are fossils there. We just haven't found the intermediate forms.
Speaker 4 00:05:53 Right. That's an, uh, an objection to the claims about fossil discontinuity that's known as the artifact hypothesis. The idea is that the, the missing ancestral forms are an artifact either of incomplete sampling Yes. Or incomplete preservation. Right. The cbri explosion itself poses a, uh, presents a very nice test of that artifact hypothesis. Um, the, the claim with, with respect to sampling is that the, uh, we haven't looked long enough, right? Well, we're 160 years on now from the cambri or from from the publication of the Origin of Species. And the, the, the, uh, cambri explosion from our point of view has become even more explosive. There are more new forms of life. No more new animal forms known now in that cambri explosion event than there were in Darwin's time. And yet, with that passage of time, we've found no more of the, the intermediate. So there are more new forms still, all of which are still lacking intermediate
Speaker 3 00:06:51 Forms. So instead of our findings regressing to some sort of Darwinian mean they're departing from Darwin Moore and more and more. Right, right. Quickly on one last notion here, one last question on this. Um, before I turn to my big problem in life maths with, with John Lennox, um, punctuated equilibrium, Stephen j Goul, the Late, and by all accounts, great, he seems to have been a dynamic teacher who was certainly prolific, the great biologist Stephen J. Gould, who held, well, you tell me what punctuated equi equilibrium held and why it doesn't answer the problem as
Speaker 4 00:07:28 Well. Well, it, it was a, it was a wonderful, uh, new idea, uh, Gould and, uh, another paleontologist, uh, Niles Eldridge formulated this theory in the late 1970s. And what they were trying to do is describe the fossil record more accurately. And what they saw and what paleontologists saw then, and see now even more, uh, distinctly, is this pattern of abrupt appearance and what they called stasis. That the basic form of a, of an animal, the basic body plan will remain constant through long periods of time, either going extinct or continuing to the present day. There would be variation within the constraints of a body plan, but limited variation,
Speaker 3 00:08:04 Not the crocodile appears,
Speaker 4 00:08:06 Appears
Speaker 3 00:08:07 And
Speaker 4 00:08:07 Remains and remains alright. And, um, and so what what they suggested was that there's the, there are these punctuation events where you have this sudden appearance and then this long period of equilibrium of stasis. Um, and, uh, but they wanted to maintain
Speaker 3 00:08:23 That evolution takes fifth place in fits and
Speaker 4 00:08:24 Starts exactly. Evolution takes place in in fits and starts, right? And so it was a wonderful, uh, improvement in our description of the fossil record. But the problem was that Gould and Eldridges never came up with a mechanism that convinced their colleagues in evolutionary biology that, that, uh, that evolution could occur so quickly. There was no, it, it was a good description of the fossil record without a mechanism to explain how that amount of change could occur in those short burst
Speaker 3 00:08:48 Time. The meteor smacks the earth, wipes out the dinosaurs and creates
Speaker 4 00:08:54 An ecological niche. Yes,
Speaker 3 00:08:56 It creates space for new species to emerge. And so suddenly they do well except Adam persuade these two are
Speaker 4 00:09:02 Chuckling. The, the, the problem is you have to build the animal. And this is the second part of the in, when I wrote in the book at Darwin Stout, I talked about two big mysteries. One is the mystery of the missing fossils, but the second is the mystery of how the evolutionary process generates the new biological form. Because what we know now, as in our computer world, if you wanna generate a new form of life, you have to have a lot of new information in the computer world, wanted to get a new program, gotta have new code. Same thing is true in life. Where's the code come from? Just opening up the niche doesn't explain the origin of the information necessary to build the new animal form to fill it.
Speaker 3 00:09:33 Alright, now we come to maths. The mathematical problem. Maths was always my weakest subject and I'm extremely conscious that I'm speaking to the emeritus professor of mathematics at Oxford University. Alright, so let me just put in layman's terms as best I can. And I have worked on it, what I take to be the mathematical problem that has emerged in recent decades with Darwin, we know now something about when life seems to have emerged something between four and 5 billion years ago. We now know quite a lot about the rate at which random genetic mutations take place. Darwin's theory suggests that evolution arises because random genetic mutations take place and natural selection acts on them. We also know quite a lot about how complicated it is to create proteins that function proteins, chains of amino acids a couple of hundred and longer. And the math simply doesn't work from the beginning of time to the present. There is some number of mutations that had to have taken place to create the life that we see around us. And it just doesn't add up. Is that right? Roughly?
Speaker 5 00:10:55 It's much worse than that because I think one of the very important things, and I'm not a biologist, but I do study the biologists as carefully as I can, is that Darwin's theory, whatever it does or doesn't do, says zero about the origin of life. He didn't claim to speak about the origin of,
Speaker 3 00:11:18 He always presumes that the preexistence of a form from which other forms
Speaker 5 00:11:21 Right. Evolved. That's right. Okay. But unfortunately, for many years, Richard Dawkins, uh, obscured everything, obfuscated the whole
Speaker 3 00:11:28 Situation. Dawkins the Oxford biologist.
Speaker 5 00:11:30 That's that's right. Because he said that, uh, natural selection, which Darwin discovered, and he describes it as a blind automatic process Yes. Is responsible for the existence and variation of all of life. Now, he later admitted, took far too long to do it, that evolution in the Darwinian sense cannot be responsible for the origin of life, for the simple reason is that evolution, whatever it does or doesn't do, presupposes the existence of life. Right. So you have two separate problems here. One is the origin of life, which goes
Speaker 3 00:12:06 Back, we'll come to that one, I promise. Okay.
Speaker 5 00:12:08 We'll come to that one goes back to the origin of information as Steven has mentioned. But the second is just this sheer calculation. Now you mentioned things in your questioning Yes. That have to do with the origin of life, proteins and so on. And I, one of my examiners at Cambridge was Sir Fred Hoyle, and he came to Cardiff, where I was a lecturer many years ago, and he shocked everybody by, he just stood up and said to an absolutely packed crowd, because he was famous. He said, life cannot have originated on earth. And there was a, a collective gasp. And he said, I've done the calculations and mathematically it is simply impossible. There isn't enough time. And I actually have a copy of those calculations at home. And he just said it, it's quite obvious if you do the calculations and he puts it very simply and ly you know, rabbits, produce rabbits and very little else. And what is mathematics, I think showed him was that the innocent aspect of evolution, which we can all accept that is you get minor variations on a theme. Yes. Which Michael here has dealt with so successfully, it is booked the edge of evolution that's non-controversial. But once you go beyond that and think of new animals, new body plants, all of that kind of thing,
Speaker 3 00:13:31 Darwin's book is the origin of species, not, that's not minor variations. That's right. Within species speak. Right. Origin of species.
Speaker 5 00:13:38 But I think, you know, what cuts all this for me now is not what the mathematicians are saying, but what the mathematically conscious biologist are saying. Now, one of my friends in Oxford is a very distinguished biologist, uh, professor Dennis Noble. And he has just made absolutely clear, he said Neo Darwinism, that is the modern synthesis, that, uh,
Speaker 3 00:14:05 Standard textbook theory that
Speaker 5 00:14:06 We all learned, natural selection and mutation doesn't need to be improved. It needs to be replaced. And he almost was quoting someone like Lin Margolis, another very distinguished person who said, it's dead. So these are people who know about the calculations, who know about the complexity and saying from that perspective, it's dead.
Speaker 3 00:14:29 Alright. Um, so I, Fred Hoyle, we should add, add was a very famous mid-century, mid, mid-last century
Speaker 5 00:14:35 Astronomer. Yes, that's right. Correct.
Speaker 3 00:14:37 Alright, Michael, problem three for this little layman cellular biology. Um, can you just tell us about irreducible, this is your, your sort of thing, signal concept, irreducible complexity, and the story of the mouse trap.
Speaker 6 00:14:55 Sure. Uh, well might start, um, might be good to start by saying that Darwin and folks in his day didn't know much about the cell. Right. They had crummy microscopes. It looked like a little piece of jelly, and they knew nothing about molecules. And we now know that light
Speaker 3 00:15:12 Tiny and elementary also meant simple to them. So said biologically
Speaker 6 00:15:16 Simple. That's correct. So like jello or a jelly, they thought it might just bubble up from the sea. But modern science in the past 70 or so years has shown that this, the cell is run by molecular machines, real machines made of molecules and really sophisticated ones. We, there are machines that act as propellers machines that act as trucks to bring supplies from one side of the cell to the other side of the cell.
Speaker 3 00:15:43 So when you, when you magnify these days, we unknown enough about cells to know that they're not little blobs of jello. That's right. You get inside a a cell and you're looking at a city,
Speaker 6 00:15:54 Uh, yeah, pretty much. Yeah, that's right. It's got electrical, uh, apparatus, it's got vehicles, it's got information, it's got all sorts of things. And the problem, uh, with irreducible complexity is, if you think about it, machines are made of different parts. Say a lawnmower, it's got a, you know, a blade, it's got a motor wheels, stuff like that. But Darwin always insisted that his theory had to work by numerous successive, slight modifications had, had to be very, very gradual. But if you try to build a machine like a lawnmower or a mouse trap, uh,
Speaker 3 00:16:34 I like the mouse trap because that's so simple. Even I can get it in
Speaker 6 00:16:37 My head. Yeah, yeah. Just think of a mechanical mouse trap. It's got a number of different pieces. Now, if you wanted to build something like that slowly and have each per, uh, each, each part or each intermediate work, you've got a big problem. Cause needs all of the parts to work. It needs a spraying of wooden base, a couple other metal parts. And I, uh, just to capture that concept, I invented the phrase irreducible complexity because it's complex can't reduce it or else take
Speaker 3 00:17:09 Away one piece that it just doesn't
Speaker 6 00:17:10 Work and the mousetrap doesn't work. Right.
Speaker 3 00:17:12 Yeah. Therefore it could not, the mouse trap think away one piece from one of these fantastically complicated machines in a cell. Right. It doesn't function and therefore could not have conferred an adaptive advantage. Right.
Speaker 6 00:17:24 And it could not be built gradually and, uh, improving each step of the way.
Speaker 4 00:17:28 Intermediate stages confer no functional advantage. Therefore, there's nothing for natural to selection to select on the way from the simple to the complex.
Speaker 5 00:17:37 Michael does that. What interests me greatly about that is the gradual building up is a stepwise ascent uhhuh. Whereas am I write in saying that contemporary biologists like Dennis Noble, whom I've mentioned are saying, but look, you have to take the wholesale into consideration that this is top-down causation. Yeah. And that would frustrate any concept of building things up anyway by numerous slight accretion. Is that fair to say
Speaker 6 00:18:08 That if, if you go that way, then you have left Darwin far behind? Yes. And you, you've left randomness far behind,
Speaker 5 00:18:14 But they are doing that. They're leaving it far behind.
Speaker 4 00:18:16 But top down is actually a metaphor for the action of an agent arranging things with a plan in mind. That's danger spouses.
Speaker 3 00:18:23 Right. You see John Lennox just swat Darwin aside for the two of you. It's a much more agonizing process. You try very hard to be fair to the man <laugh> two quotations, Michael two quotations Uhhuh Charles Darwin in the origin. If Darwin himself writes this, if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed, which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Close quote, that's Darwin. He puts the test right there in 1859. Here's Michael Behe. The question then becomes, are there irreducibly complex systems in the cell? Yes, there are many,
Speaker 6 00:19:07 Absolutely. As I said, uh, it's, uh, the cell is chock full of machines. Machines need in many parts, they can't be built by numerous successive, slight modifications. But let me draw attention to one little sneaky trick that Darwin put into that quotation. He says, if it could be demonstrated that something couldn't possibly happen, right? So he's putting a burden on his opponents to prove a negative, which science cannot do and never has no theory has ruled out all rival theories, uh, to be accepted. But we have great evidence and, uh, that it can't, and we have absolutely no evidence that, uh, natural selection acting on random mutation could build much of anything.
Speaker 3 00:19:54 So, so here's, here's the objection, the objection. I say this as if I know enough to be authoritative. Here's an objection and the objection runs. Alright. It's very hard to see how you evolve a mouse trap beginning with a little wooden platform. And true, it can't work until all the pieces are in place. On the other hand, suppose you do evolve it in two or three pieces and they sit around for centuries, they don't confer any advantage on the organism, but they don't harm it either. So they're just, they're these strange accretions on which natural selection is neutral. It doesn't select for them, but it doesn't select against them. And then after eons and eons, we worry about the maths Later, after eons and eons, the final piece drops into place and suddenly it functions plausible.
Speaker 6 00:20:47 Uh, no, that's ridiculous. <laugh>, uh, <laugh>, I mean, realistically, uh, would you expect he
Speaker 3 00:20:52 Has, he's being, he's being very careful. Darren would be swatting me aside. Sorry,
Speaker 6 00:20:56 <laugh>. Go ahead. No, if, if you think, you know, suppose you didn't have a mouse trap, so you say, well, let me, what can I do? I'll just go into my garage and pick out a few pieces that would function. Uh, as a mouse trapp, you say, well, I need a spring. Well, here's one in this grandfather clock. I have, you know, you wind up, I'll just use that and I need a, I need a hammer to squash the mouse. I'll use this crowbar over here. But the pieces don't, aren't adjusted to each other. You can't just take random pieces and put them together. And natural selection, which as Darwin said is, is constantly scrutinizing life would not be expected to make things in the shape that they would need to be for some future use. They would only, uh, they would hone them for what they were doing right now.
Speaker 4 00:21:45 Alright. Can I, can I weigh in on this? Sure. Because of course there's a connection between what Mike's talking about and the mathematical problems that John was alluding to. And that is that in these actual systems, these nano machines that Mike has made famous through his work, for example, the bacterial flagellar motor or the ATP synthe, one's a, one's a rotary,
Speaker 3 00:22:04 Has made the flagellar motor a rockstar.
Speaker 4 00:22:07 Well, he kind of has. He kind of has actually. But it's, you know, it's a 30 part rotary engine. The ATP synthesis is a turbine with multiple parts, but the parts are made of proteins. And proteins are the, in, in essence the toolbox of the cell. That they're, they, they perform specific functions in view of their three-dimensional shapes. So they make the parts of molecular machines, they function as enzymes to catalyze reactions at super fast rates. Uh, they help process information. But if you were to, to, to build a, a, a system like the Flo Gellar motor, you need 30 proteins that fit together in an, in an integrated fashion. But that requires genetic code. Each one of those proteins requires a long stretch of genetic information to build the protein. And so what you're talking about is not just, you know, some bent hammer or something sitting around doing nothing. You're talking about a need for genetic information that's, that is sufficient to overcome these long odds against, uh, against building the protein in the first place. So it'd be like, to change the metaphor slightly, a gigantic, uh, haystack the size of the North American continent, and you're only allowed to search 1 10 30 seventh of the, of the, the continent, maybe a tiny little square of Southern California. When, if that's the case, are you more likely or less likely to,
Speaker 3 00:23:28 To find the
Speaker 4 00:23:28 Needle? To, to find the needle? And you're, and, and the answer is you're overwhelmingly more likely not to find the needle than to find it, which is to say the mutation selection mechanism lacks the creative power to generate new biologicals information. Anything close to the creative. Exactly. For
Speaker 3 00:23:42 One protein, one protein out of 13 proteins necessary to make the waving little tail, which is only one machine. All
Speaker 5 00:23:48 Right? Yeah. That in a sense is before you said anything about the fact that the information required is linguistic and linguistic language is not produced by random processes. Right. And this is a hugely important,
Speaker 3 00:24:04 You've gotta explain what you
Speaker 5 00:24:05 Mean by that.
Speaker 3 00:24:06 It's linguistic in the way the DNA
Speaker 5 00:24:08 Take the human genome code. Exactly. Yes. Ah, code, the human genome is the longest word we've ever discovered. And we can call it a word because it's written in, uh, a chemical language of four letters. And all those letters strung out like a computer program have got to be in the right order. Otherwise it breaks down. I mean, most programs, if you change a letter, that's the end of the program. So we're dealing with something absolutely gigantic in terms of probabilities before we even think of the extra complexity that arises through the folding of the proteins and all the epigenetic information that's been discovered in recent years, that, that's
Speaker 4 00:24:55 Information beyond dna, that controls only become lower level information
Speaker 5 00:24:58 As you ailing in its complexity, and therefore it becomes a huge stress. And my own simplistic view is to say, I prefer an explanation that makes sense to one that doesn't make sense.
Speaker 3 00:25:12 Alright.
Speaker 6 00:25:14 If I could add just a little something. We're, we're talking about this UL ultra complex machine, the bacterial flagella and, and saying that, but Darwinian processes are laughably inadequate to explain it, but I wanna point out that it can't explain things a whole lot more simple than a bacterial flagella. But we talked about how many amino acids these things have, and there's 30 proteins and 400 amino acids and, uh, so 12 thousandish or so. But in order to develop resistance to the anti-malarial drug, uh, chloroquine, it took trillions and trillions of, uh, malaria cells, plasmodium falciparum to get two crummy mutations. Two, and we're talking about 12,000 for the flagella now trillions. And, and for each extra, extra, uh, mutation, it goes up exponentially that, you know, Steve was talking an exponential language, but that's another factor of a trillion for another one and another factor of a trillion for a the next one too.
Speaker 6 00:26:29 So this is truly, truly, you know, uh, even much, much simpler things than we've been talking about are beyond Darwinian processes. I, I just want to add one little cute thing is that, uh, these days scientists can do, uh, evolution in the laboratory, grow bacterial cultures and, uh, for a long time and see what happens. And, uh, a man named Richard Len gave a biologist at Michigan, did this for, uh, bacterium called E coli. And one of the first mutations that he saw that really helped the bacteria grow faster was when it deleted the genes got rid of the genes for the bacteria. So he
Speaker 3 00:27:10 Still adding inflammation,
Speaker 6 00:27:11 Dropping it. Exactly. And that's something we haven't touched on yet, but it's oftentimes a whole lot faster and easier to get rid of stuff and improve a species chance to survive and prosper then to, but
Speaker 3 00:27:25 You can't, can't get the new species by dropping out information by becoming stupider. That's,
Speaker 4 00:27:30 That's correct. Adding, adding new capabilities requires new proteins, which requires solving this combinatorial problem. The search for those exceedingly rare sequences among the vast number of gibberish sequences that don't do anything useful.
Speaker 3 00:27:46 Little
Speaker 4 00:27:47 Peren. So again, you're back to the needle in the haystack
Speaker 3 00:27:49 Problem. This is the layman struggling to understand this. Again, Copernicus says the earth revolves around the sun. Had he had access to telescopes that would be developed not that many decades later, let alone to the instruments we have for searching the heavens today, he would've understood immediately that that suggestion was ridiculous. Right. And so what we are talking about here is you
Speaker 6 00:28:17 Think, you mean vice,
Speaker 3 00:28:18 I got, excuse me, I've got it the other way around. I've got it the other way around. Copus is the, Copernicus is the one who Correct. To the old Tmeic system. Right. Ah, okay. So t the tmeic system, which persists until what four we, I don't want to get Galileo mixed in all forties, but we get this, get this into the 16th century
Speaker 4 00:28:35 Yep.
Speaker 3 00:28:36 Telescope, which Copernicus, Copernicus figures out that that's partly because of the technology. He can see what they couldn't see before. Alright. So Darwin's a little 170 some years ago, and they, it was plausible that the little tiny cell was a blob of jello in the old days. But now thanks to Behe here, we can look into that cell and we have the same experience going into smaller and smaller dimensions. The telescopes had going into the larger and larger dimension, which is every time we look, it becomes more complicated, deeper, richer, more mind boggling. Is that roughly correct?
Speaker 4 00:29:17 It's roughly right. And it's, it starts back in the, it's importantly correct. Yeah. It starts back in the 1950s, you know, with Watson Andrick mm-hmm. <affirmative> and what, uh, historians of science now called the Molecular Biological Revolution. Uh, they of course elucidated the double heli structure of the
Speaker 3 00:29:31 Molecule. They discovered the language
Speaker 4 00:29:32 Exactly. They discovered, they discovered the structure of the molecule in 1953, but it's crick who makes the important breakthrough in 1958, he was a code breaker in World War ii and he formulates something called the sequence hypothesis. And he proposes that the four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the DNA molecule are, they're, they're called nucleotide bases or just basses. The, he propose proposes that they are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like, for example, the zeros and ones in a section of software today. That is to say they perform a function as a group, not in virtue of any of their physical properties, but in virtue of their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention later discovered and now known as the genetic code. And in over the ensuing seven or eight years, Craig's sequence hypothesis was confirmed by a series of experiments on both sides of the Atlantic. And that gave us this new informational understanding. The information revolution came to biology because what we realized is that in inside the cell, we have a, a complex information storage transmission and processing system. And to explain the origin of life, you've gotta explain that. And to explain any new form of life, you've gotta explain how you can take a section of code, randomly change it and hope to come up with another section of code without destroying the function of the code you
Speaker 3 00:30:48 Started with. So the three of you, I wanna get to the que to the way science capital S is responding to people such as the three of you, but the three of you are not some sort of throwbacks saying you're attacking all that civilization stood for. What you're saying is, wait, we know more than they did. Look at the newest information. You, you are, you are at the, you are, you are champions for the latest science, not for some sort of retrograde worldview. Is that, that's fair.
Speaker 5 00:31:19 I think it is fair. I think it's worth saying you accused me of swiping Darwin aside. I don't swipe him aside. He was, he was, he observed some very interesting and useful things.
Speaker 3 00:31:31 He was a good writer too,
Speaker 5 00:31:32 But he was, but he, he was limited by his time. And we also haven't addition something that we haven't discussed at all. And that is that ideas that were perhaps crystallized by Darwin had existed a long time before where there was nothing of what is called science Lucretius had them. In fact, if, if you read Dere Natura Lucretius book on the, on the, on the nature of life, he gets almost everything Darwin does except for the transmutation of species. And he deduces it from materialistic philosophy because one of the things
Speaker 3 00:32:16 Give, gimme
Speaker 5 00:32:16 A century, yes,
Speaker 3 00:32:17 I can, what, what century is lucretius?
Speaker 5 00:32:19 Oh, he's, he's in the back of the first century, but he was building on stuff even earlier. Greeks going back to the early Greeks of Democrats. And the point of that is important, there's a worldview dimension to all of this. You see, if I put on my atheist hat, which I do with some difficulty, but I try to do it, and you say to me, write me an account of the origin of life, I will come up with an evolutionary theory immediately because that is the only possibility allowed by the naturalistic worldview. So we're competing with that as well. And of course Darwinism has such appealed massively to the atheists, uh, and increasingly so as we know through Richard Dawkins. So you have to remember that once you start raising the kind of question these two gentlemen have been raising, and that is that there's information, there's code and the looming specter of the possibility of a coder that raises a crucial problem
Speaker 3 00:33:26 Of
Speaker 5 00:33:27 Bounds. That's, that's outta bounds, that's not science. Yes. Yes. That means that we have to broaden the discussion as to how science is defined
Speaker 4 00:33:37 And of course can
Speaker 3 00:33:38 Ahead. Well, I just wanna get to, because I promised John that we would come to this <laugh> and that is the origin of life itself. As I understand it from your work, Steven life emerges pretty quickly after the conditions for the emergence of life themselves. Right. Emerge, it's there from the get-go in the geologically speaking,
Speaker 4 00:34:01 3.85 billion years is the accepted time. Okay. The, the cessation of a meteorite, bombardment of the earth occurred at most 50 million years before that, a blink of the eye geologically we get from simple chemicals to a complex functionally integrated cell with information processing systems and minister machines.
Speaker 3 00:34:23 Okay, so here's what I was taught when I was going through school. There was the famous Yuri experiment, 1952, I looked it up, where if you put in a chamber, all the chemicals that were supposed to have been present when Earth was at the moment when life arose and introduced, I seem to remember from textbooks the idea that there was some terrible thunderstorm. So you mix it all up with electricity and a couple of scientists, Yuri, at the University of Chicago tried this. And lo and behold, somehow or other they managed to form a few amino acids. They didn't form life. But that's because you have to run the experiment a lot of times. And as I understand it now, again, to the extent that we understand you couldn't, the more we try to run better experiments than Yuri was able to in 1952, the farther we are from actually creating anything that could be recognized as life. Is that roughly correct? Yes. So once again, we have this understanding which is receding from us rather than finding ourselves approaching it. What does
Speaker 5 00:35:30 That mean? Well, it means that we're understanding more the complexity that was not realized at the time. They thought, I think that it was just enough to get a few menino acids and hey pressed to what would happen. They knew nothing of the linguistic structure. And so what has happened subsequently is it has receded, as you say, because we've discovered more and more about the sheer sophistication about what life is. And by the way, nobody really knows what life
Speaker 4 00:35:59 Is. Huge irony is that 1953, you have the Miller Uri experiment, big flash in the media, but you also have the Watson and correct discovery. And the two things have run counter to each other. Ever since Miller and Uri produced two or three protein forming amino acids out of the ensemble of 20 that you would need to build a whole protein. But more importantly, they didn't show how you could sequence the amino acids properly to get them to fold into proteins. To do that, you need instructions. And those instructions were found on the DNA molecule. And it's the origin of the code that's pre has presented the most acute problem for origin of life research because chemistry simply doesn't move in the direction of informational complexity. It moves in other directions. So one other origin you can't get from chemistry to code, that's
Speaker 6 00:36:47 The problem. If I could just hop in just for a sec. Yes, yes. Uh, I just add that the, the uh, process you described that people were hopeful in the fif early fifties, and the more they worked, the more difficult they saw the problem to be. That means you're barking up the wrong tree. That's the signature of a wrong idea. Because if you have the right idea, you expect future results to haste to support it again like Einstein. Exactly. But on the other hand, Darwin thought the cell was a little glob of jello. But the more and more we find, the more and more and more sophisticated, uh, genetic code, uh, splicing of dna, molecular machinery, uh, and and so on, that's for uh, an intelligent design proponent that's looks like you're barking up the right tree.
Speaker 5 00:37:42 Alright. There's another irony about all this because much more recently, I think it's Jeremy England dug out the test tubes that were used in the Miller Urie experiment and discovered on examination that there were more amino acids in them than Miller and Yuri had originally discovered. And Dan Brown, the novelist of that name, yes. Division code man, pick this up in a book that he entitles origin and use this to develop his theory of the origin of life to which the scientist Jeremy England, who'd done this, worked to great exception. And I think Stephen being the historian, you probably explained exactly what happened.
Speaker 4 00:38:31 Well, well, I mean, again, the big problem is not making amino acids. It's sequencing them properly. It's like getting a, a bag of Scrabble letters and thinking you've got a triple word score. You've gotta arrange the, the letters in the right way and put 'em on the board in the right place for them to actually convey information.
Speaker 3 00:38:45 One more sudden emergence man, the anthropologist John Hawks, I, somebody, I can't remember whose work I read this in, maybe yours, maybe yours anyway,
Speaker 4 00:38:57 Probably not
Speaker 3 00:38:57 Mine. John Hawks is an anthropologist and he argues that about 2 million years ago, our genus homo just appears quoting hawks. No gradual series of changes in earlier aloe populations clearly leads to the new species. And nolo species is obviously transitional close quote. Well, we don't seem to have descended from apes, or at least if we did, it ain't in the fossil record. What does that tell us? It's one thing to say, wow, where did the dinosaurs come from? But we have this notion from textbooks in school on humankind rising from,
Speaker 4 00:39:46 We've seen the artwork, right?
Speaker 3 00:39:48 Also in the artwork. So what does this tell
Speaker 4 00:39:51 Us? Well, it's another example of an abrupt appearance of, uh, morphological innovation in, in the history of life. Um, there and there are two such, um, big verses of innovation in the history of mankind. The first is the sudden emergence of the genus homo. The second is what's sometimes called the cultural big bang, the evidence of higher cognitive capabilities that occurred within the last roughly 40,000 years.
Speaker 3 00:40:16 Homo is 2 million years ago,
Speaker 4 00:40:17 Right? You get homo erectus. But uh, in, in the last place
Speaker 3 00:40:21 Homo would include Neanderthal and
Speaker 4 00:40:22 Sure, you okay? Yeah. But within the last 40,000 years, you get the first agriculture, you get the first cities, you get the first written language, you get the, uh, first representational art. Uh, and so there is, this is another big bang of innovation. Suddenly this, uh, the, the cultural revolution is, uh, also occurs very suddenly.
Speaker 3 00:40:43 Okay. Is it a problem for Darwin that Bach lived what series that of adaptative advantages could possibly have produced all those cantatas? Well,
Speaker 4 00:40:56 That's a series or mathematics or, or language. The origin of language completely unexplained on Darwinian grounds.
Speaker 2 00:41:01 That was Steven Meyers speaking with John Lennox. Michael Behe, an Uncommon Knowledge host, Peter Robinson. Stay tuned for part two of the conversation in our next episode for ID the Future. This is Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:41:19 Visit
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