Episode Transcript
[00:00:08] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to ID the Future. I'm Casey Luskin, broadcasting with Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington.
We're very privileged to have on the show today with us Dr. Michael Denton, Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture, who has had a critical impact on the debate over Darwinian evolution and and intelligent design. Dr. Denton holds an MD from Bristol University as well as a PhD in biochemistry from King's College in London.
His prominent book, Evolution A Theory in Crisis, coined the phrase that evolution is a theory in crisis and is credited with having inspired both Philip Johnson and Michael Behe to investigate scientific problems with Darwinian theory. His 1998 sequel, Nature's how the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe, elaborates on the evidence for design in nature, showing that the laws of the universe are finely t not only for the existence of carbon based life, but also for complex beings very close to modern humans. And that's part of what we're going to talk about today. So Dr. Denton, it's great to have you on the show with us.
[00:01:10] Speaker B: It's a pleasure to be here.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: We've been privileged to have you here over the weekend speaking at our annual conference and you just gave a wonderful talk on Saturday morning about how the universe is specifically designed not just for life, but perhaps even for carbon based life and even human life. And also how there are many parameters of the Earth which make it fit for life.
So I'd like to talk with you about that today and maybe we could start off specifically talking about how the biosphere is designed for human life.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Well, basically just to go back on something we said, the evidence of science is that the universe is fit for carbon based life and as I've argued in my book, fit for beings of biology very similar to ourselves.
So this is a purely scientific sort of thing. The universe looks as if it's fit uniquely. But for carbon based life and beings like ourselves, the design inference is something that the individual must make on this evidence. The evidence is pretty extraordinary. And clearly, as Paul Davis and many other people in Hoyle have said, the appearance of design is overwhelming, okay? But the actual science shows that it's fit uniquely fit.
To come to the question is why is the Earth fit for beings like ourselves? Well, first of all, we need to have an atmosphere containing oxygen. And you can only get atmospheres containing oxygen on planets roughly the size of the Earth. If they're too big, they retain primeval gases such as hydrogen and helium.
If they're too small, they lose all their atmosphere. So you have to have planets roughly this size. You have to have other conditions. You have to have conditions which maintain the constancy of what they call the hydrosphere and the atmosphere. Okay. And there's two great cycles on Earth which achieve this. One is the tectonic cycle, and the other one is a hydrolytic cycle. And these are two, like two great cogs which work together. The tectonic cycle keeps on recycling the crustal material, and the hydrolytic cycle dissolves the key minerals which are necessary for life and sort of takes them out of the crusts and puts them in the hydrosphere in the fluids of the Earth. So in fact, you've got the tectonic cycle and you've got the hydrolytic cycle that's critical to the maintenance of the constancy of the chemical and physical environment of the Earth. So you've got the size of the Earth, which is critical, and you've got these two cycles which are critical.
[00:03:34] Speaker A: Yes. And I know there are properties of water that make it uniquely suited for the way life works. What are some of those properties?
[00:03:40] Speaker B: Well, the properties of water, as far as we are concerned as warm blooded organisms, the properties of water have two very critical characteristics which are useful. And one is that water has a very high called specific heat. That means you have to put a lot of energy into water to change the temperature. That's very convenient. It means it's very easy for warm blooded organisms like ourselves to maintain body temperature. So that's a property of water which seems specifically fit for beings like ourselves. And there's another property of water which might even be more critical, and that is that in fact the evaporative cooling of water is one of the greatest of any fluid that's known.
And that's very, very convenient because the only way to lose heat when the environment around you is reaching sort of 38 degrees centigrade is by evaporative cooling, because you can't radiate the heat out because the environment is 38 degrees warmer than you. Right. So it's absolutely critical to warm blooded organisms like ourselves that the evaporative cooling of water is very high. It's one of the highest of any known common fluid. So these two properties of water seem not just fit for extremophiles or organisms in the sea or so forth. They're specifically fit for terrestrial beings like ourselves maintaining a high body temperature, warm blooded animals like ourselves. In fact, basically you could say that the high specific heat of water is actually a disadvantage for some organisms, because, for instance, in the morning, dragonflies and bumblebees have to stand there and they have to move the muscles to warm themselves up before they can fly.
And it said that some of the reptiles in the past, like there's a famous reptile with a vast sail on its back called Dimetrodon and that had to spend a few hours to warm itself up before it could start to move.
So these properties of water, the high specific heat of water and the evaporative cooling of water, they're specifically fit for beings like ourselves. And the other thermal properties of water, like for instance, the fact that ice is lighter than water and hence this preserves the liquid water on the planet. This is really relevant for maintaining a planetary environment suitable for life once again, extremophiles, organisms in the deep hot biosphere, organisms at the bottom of the sea beside the black smokers, irrelevant to these things, Right? So a lot of the properties of water seem very fit for beings like us, but there's lots of other types of organisms which can look the other way. It wouldn't really matter.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: I know that you went and enjoyed some of the beautiful mountains here in Seattle over the weekend and did some hiking and you were saying that if it weren't for the high evaporative capacity of water, then something terrible might happen to you.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: We were hiking in the Cascade Mountains and it was very hot.
It was getting on to body temperature outside and we sweated.
Everybody on the party was really sweating, actually.
So this brings it really home. And the other thing is about humans is because we are naked mammals with very little hair over the body. For instance, in Africa in the past, this gave humans a great advantage in hunting in the midday sun because they could sort of keep running and sweating and losing heat much better than a hunting dog or the kudu or an antelope, which they were hunting. And in fact, there's a brilliant BBC Horizon one hour program with David Attenborough and he shows the bushmen of the Kalahari running down a kudu in the midday sun. And of course, the other thing is we can carry water, which is another advantage, but they take turns chasing the animal to exhaustion and it's virtually dead of heat exhaustion before they actually spear it and kill it. So therefore, that's a very strange thing that as naked mammals, it's particularly relevant to us and gives us a huge advantage on the African plains in the past. How significant that was, I don't know, but it's a fascinating idea that here is one of the properties one of the laws of nature, which in fact seems to be very strictly tailored for life on the African plains. Right.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: What about the composition of Earth's atmosphere? Does that have any special properties for life?
[00:07:50] Speaker B: Absolutely, because first of all, oxygen is absolutely critical. By the way, just to say, when I say the universe is uniquely fit for carbon based life and fit for beings like us, this is not really any longer some sort of esoteric or exceptional idea. When NASA are looking for life in space, they've got a rover now on Mars, they're looking for water and carbon compounds.
And when they look for extrasolar planets which might have intelligent life on, guess what they look for? Oxygen. Okay.
And oxygen is the only fit atom for carbon based life to give the energy you need for highly active organisms like ourselves. Essentially you're burning carbon and hydrogen in oxygen. It's the same sort of reaction that goes on in a fire. Okay?
So carbon is the favored atom to build complex self replicating systems, and oxygen is the favorite atomic to give energy to those systems. Right. And if you're going to be highly active organisms like us, with a high body temperature and a high metabolic rate, you've got to use oxygen and you've got to use oxygen interacting with carbon and hydrogen to give you the energy. Right. So you need oxygen. Right. And when you look at the atmosphere of our planet, it almost miraculously, in the words of the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are an awesome set of coincidences in the atmosphere which happen to allow the light of the sun to come right down to the surface of the earth, where it can empower photosynthesis, where it allows photosynthesis to occur.
And the atmosphere blocks out lots of other forms of radiation and allows the life giving light to get to the planetary surface to allow photosynthesis to occur so you can have oxygen. But the amazing thing about the window in the atmosphere is uv, gamma radiation, dangerous radiations are blocked out. And so the light of the sun comes right down to the Earth where oxygen can be manufactured. But there's other coincidences on top of this because you need quite a lot of oxygen in the atmosphere. We need a lot of oxygen. We need 250 mils of oxygen every minute. As you're sitting there breathing there, relaxing, you're using up 250mils of oxygen every minute. It's incredible. That's the amount of oxygen you need to maintain your energy levels.
And to get this amount of oxygen, you need to take it from an atmosphere. And you need about 20% or so oxygen in the atmosphere to feed your metabolic needs.
But oxygen is a very dangerous atom. It's very, very reactive. And oxygen has certain characteristics which attenuate its reactivity under 50 degrees centigrade. And this allows in fact, quite a high level of oxygen in the atmosphere without spontaneous combustion. If you raise the level of oxygen much more than 20%, perhaps, certainly more than 30%, you'd have raging spontaneous fires all over the place. Okay, so there are characteristics of oxygen which allow it to build up to a sufficient level to empower our metabolism.
So it goes on and on and on, one coincidence after another. And as I say, as far as science is concerned, these things facilitate beings like ourselves.
And you can say scientifically that in fact the universe is fit for beings like ourselves to use oxygen. Right. But an obvious inference is this is certainly consistent with traditional design hypothesis.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: And you mentioned how oxygen is reacting with carbon, and we're carbon based life. Why carbon based life? Why is that important? Why does the universe seem to be friendly towards carbon based life?
[00:11:37] Speaker B: Well, if you look at the properties of the carbon atom, it's the only atom in the periodic table really, that you can build a vast diversity of complex chemical compounds with. And I would assume that like NASA and everybody now, that if you're going to build complex self replicating chemical systems, you're going to have to choose the carbon atom. Just as you have to choose oxygen as the giver of energy, so you have to choose carbon as the giver of biological complexity sufficient to build complex chemical systems.
So you could say that, in fact, I'm repeating myself a little now, but basically the universe is fit for carbon based life and fit for higher organisms utilizing oxygen. And that is not my view. That is the view of everybody working in the field of astrobiology and Everybody working for NASA. Essentially 20th century science has demonstrated this fact. And for me, this is one of the most important demonstrations in the history of science, because it means that in fact, human form, human biology has some sort of a special place in the order of nature.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: And as opposed to phosphorus or silicone based life, many times we will hear arguments from people saying that, well, couldn't there be other forms of life out there? Maybe there are all these different possible ways of doing life, but it doesn't seem like that is the case. It's hard to imagine silicone based life being anything remotely like life as we understand it, and even being able to have the of reactions that, as we understand, are necessary for life. So why not silicone based life?
[00:13:06] Speaker B: Well, as I say, basically the conventional mainstream view now is that there's only carbon you can use.
I think I showed in my presentation a joke from a leading text in astrobiology which said that, in fact, if aliens come visiting, let's give them carbon cupcakes rather than rocks, because the chances are very high they're going to be made of carbon rocks.
The scenarios where people have imagined silicon life are things like frigid oceans, like subterranean oceans and Triton and all sorts of weird sort of things. Even if there were silicon forms, life in the subterranean oceans of Triton, I don't think they could do much. It would be a very, very limited, limited environment in which they could enjoy nothing like the surface of the Earth, which is so fit for technology and everything else. I mean, you can peer through the sky and you can see the stars and so forth.
[00:13:54] Speaker A: Now, you mentioned a book that had an impact on your thinking on this top. It was by a Harvard scientist named Lawrence Henderson in the early 1900s. Can you tell us what his book was and how it impacted you and why it was important to your thinking about the fine tuning of the biosphere for life?
[00:14:09] Speaker B: Well, it was after reading Henderson's book that I decided to write Nature's Destiny to sort of update his arguments.
So the fundamental aim of Nature's Destiny was to take Henderson's arguments, and his book was published in 1913.
[00:14:22] Speaker A: The book was the Fitness of the Environment, is that right? Published in 1913, it's a great classic. And how did you encounter this book?
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Basically, I became friendly with a Parisian intellectual, Marco Schutzenberger, and for many years in the late 80s, every time I went to Paris, I stayed in his flat in the Rue de Ren? Lague, just off the Bois de Boulogne. Great place to stay. You'd go for jogs in the Bois de Boulogne, you know. And he introduced me to Henderson's book. He had a copy of it and I took it with me back to Australia from Paris and I opened it up just as we were taking off from Charles de Gaulle Airport, and I opened it up and I read every single page. It was an amazing revelation, because although I knew some of the facts that Henderson was referring to, the book is a masterpiece. Because, in fact, what he shows is that carbon, CO2, water, carbon compounds and oxygen have a miraculous, almost magical synergy for the generation of complex living systems. And the synergy is so extraordinary that you can't imagine there being any other collection of compounds in nature which could achieve the same things.
And this book blew me away because at that stage of course I was always being skeptical of Darwinism and still am just the same, right?
And here was a positive argument for design and had been very well received over the last century, right? Henderson's book is a great classic, okay? And so this was very exciting for me. And so I decided to then update the arguments in Nature's Destiny and took them, I think, quite a lot further, in fact, because of course a lot of things have been discovered since then.
But the things that struck you as so amazing when I was reading the book was he points out that oxygen's a gas. And we've said over and over again in this talk that in fact oxygen is the giver of life, okay?
Complex life anyway, needs oxygen. Some simple organisms can get by without using oxygen, but really they're like streamophiles or they live in the deep ocean and so forth. But if you want complex living things, you need oxygen. As I say earlier, that's why NASA are looking for oxygen and extrasolar planets. They're searching for it actually. But the rationale of looking is that oxygen is the giver of life, complex life.
But then Henderson points out, isn't it convenient that CO2, the waste product of oxidation, is also a gas?
As you're sitting there breathing in your 250 mils of oxygen every minute, you're also breathing out the CO2, the end product. How convenient. This is how nature is fit for our form of life. He points out all sorts of things like if that wasn't the case, how would you get rid of the CO2?
How do you get rid of it? Right? He also points out, relevant to our walk in the Cascade Mountains yesterday, that without the evaporative cooling of water would be highly constrained because, you know, how are we going to lose heat when it gets a bit warm? How could he live in the tropics? It's a marvelous book and he paints this picture of this fantastic synergy which underlies our life and all carbon based life. But he also keeps on touching on things like the fitness for man, an animal like man, he says, and incidentally, there's an interesting angle on this. He was a medic, okay? And I'm a medic as well. And he came to see, when he was doing respiratory physiology, when he was training in medicine, he came to see the strange thing that oxygen's a gas and you breathe out CO2. And there's also some technical points about the maintenance of what you call ph, which is the level of acidity in the body, which is critically related to the properties of CO2.
This is highly technical and just at the moment I can't go into it. But of course he discusses this in the Fitness in a way that anybody can understand and read. Right.
When I was doing respiratory physiology before I read Henderson, I also became aware that there seems to be some synergy in the use of oxygen and the maintenance of acidity in the body, which has an extraordinary elegance to it. All right? And I was aware of that purely doing work in intensive care medicine myself. Okay. And so I'd seen the same as Henderson and Henderson says that it was the realization of those synergies underlying human respiratory physiology which sort of motivated him to get on and write the Fitness of the Environment.
But I had seen those same things myself. So when I picked up Henderson's book on the plane and started to read it, I said, wow, yes, this rings all the bells.
[00:18:57] Speaker A: And it's extraordinary that he came up with many of these fine tuning parameters in terms of biology and chemistry back in 1913.
We think of these as being modern arguments, but they go very far back and really have a very strong tradition in science.
[00:19:11] Speaker B: Oh yes, they go back. And some of the fitness of water was discussed in the Bridgewater treatises already. So that was 1830. So people had already realized that water had some strange properties which gave it a remarkable fitness for its biological roles and roles in maintaining the stability of the earth. I'll tell you what's really extraordinary about this is you see, if you take the properties of water, not only are they fit for you, they're also fit to maintain. We've talked about the hydrolytic cycle. The same key groups of compounds which are so fit to make a replicating system are also fit to maintain a complex entity like yourself. The same things, water, carbon dioxide and oxygen, also fit to maintain the stability of the environment on a planetary scale. Now that's amazing parsimony. Okay. The same compounds you put together that have a synergy for making self replicating systems, they have a wonderful synergy to give you your ability to use oxygen. The synergistic for the physiology of an organism like yourself, the synergistic for a self replicating cell, and the synergistic on the global scale to maintain an environment which you can enjoy. There's wheels within wheels here. It's extraordinary.
[00:20:33] Speaker A: Fine tuning goes so deep.
[00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah, it's so deep. And what's interesting is that in fact in this argument, Aristotle of course said that mind, consciousness, creativity, the characteristics of living things are the really important things and physics has to fit biology. Physics will have to explain biology, not the other way around. And it's interesting, as this came to light over the last century, it was a biologist in the fitness that first announced the idea that the universe might be uniquely fit for carbon based life. And the physicists came on, it was Hoyle, you know, discovery how atoms are made in the stars, and then of course all the fine tuning guys from the 50s on. But it was biology first and then physics. Right. So it's quite interesting historically, as we
[00:21:20] Speaker A: talked about this earlier, before we started the interview, that Alfred Russel Wallace in the very early 1900s, who was of course an early idea proponent, maybe 10 or so years before Henderson wrote Man's Place in the Universe, which also makes a similar argument that the Earth is uniquely fit for life, but a decade before Henderson. So I don't know if you are familiar with Wallace's works as much.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: I have actually browsed that book you're mentioning. Right. But I've never looked at it in any detail that after having conversations with you in the last few days, I'm going to go back to that book of Wallace and have a good look at it actually.
But I'm pretty sure that Henderson's fitness is a great advance on Wallace because in fact, just that there was a few decades later and respiratory physiology was developing and you know, organic chemistry was advancing and biochemistry was moving along.
But I'm sure that Wallace has got some arguments that are also embellished and developed in once again, biology first, then the physics.
[00:22:20] Speaker A: You say that as a biologist, but you're right. What it shows is that these arguments have a very strong tradition within the scientific community, within modern science, and they ought to still have a place at the table. I think they're not coming in from left field, something new or something out there. They have a very strong tradition among some of the most eminent scientists of the last hundred years.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: Yes, it's amazing now that over the last century, if you look back from medieval times, right away to the end of the 19th century, there was no connection between life and the stars. And there was no real argument you could make for saying that in fact the universe was fit for human existence. You see, many evil people thought stars and man, everything was interconnected. Right. But those interconnections have come out in the 20th century. I mean, Hoyle is the great connector between the atoms of our body and the stars.
That's a beautiful thing. We are stardust. This is putting the connections back together again in the overall picture of fitness. But from my view, I look at the 20th century as it developed from Henderson, from Hoyle's work with the stars. It's a relentless trend of discovery, more and more fine tuning. The more you look, the more and more you seem to find. And in my view, discovering the fitness of the universe, the unique fitness of the universe for carbon based life and beings like ourselves is one of the major discoveries of 20th century science and one of the major discoveries of all time. I mean, the human form is something significant in the cosmic order and that's a scientific finding.
[00:23:52] Speaker A: You're not using religion in any way.
[00:23:54] Speaker B: It's implicit in astrobiologists thinking about looking for carbon based life somewhere else and looking for oxygen on a planet.
There it is. The 20th century have shown that human form is not semi relevant, not some freak of nature. It's deeply significant.
I can't think of any discovery that's going to come in the 21st century which could be more significant than this. Actually, it's a very significant finding.
[00:24:19] Speaker A: Well, Dr. Michael Denton, thank you very much for your time. We're very fortunate to have you here to share with us so many of your ideas and arguments that you've encountered and developed over your career. And we look forward to the work you're doing right now to further develop these ideas. And thank you so much for being on the show with us.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: It's a pleasure.
[00:24:35] Speaker A: I'm Casey Luskin with ID the Future. Thanks for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information visit www.intelligentdesign.org or www.idthefuture.com sa.
