Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast of the Discovery Institute center for Science and Culture. I'm Joshua Younkin.
Today we're pleased to present an interview with CSC Senior Fellowship Dr. Michael Denton. Dr. Denton has been a medical geneticist for over 20 years, a researcher on the mammalian eye, and is the author of two books, A Theory and Crisis, and more recently, Nature's Destiny. He holds an MD from Bristol University and a PhD in biochemistry from King's College London. On today's podcast, Dr. Denton observes that the insect body plan were fixed long ago, have not changed, and are, for several reasons, better understood as instances of predetermined type rather than as a collection of historically contingent adaptations.
This predetermination of type, Denton reasons, is the product of laws of form, inexplicable and even invisible. On a mechanistic view of nature.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: My anti Darwinism has always had different components. It's pluralistic. I'm not just skeptical about Darwinism because living things are very complicated, and how on earth could they have come about by random processes? That's a sort of gut intuition I have, and I think that intuition is actually shared really very widely by many biologists who won't admit it, but I'm pretty sure of it. But there's also other aspects of the biological world, the realm of the natural world, which are difficult to account for in terms of Darwinism, apart from the very great complexity of living things. This is the sort of focus of Doug Axe, of Steve Meyer and Demski. That's the sort of how come all the complexity of living things could come about by Darwinism? That's what. That's one very powerful argument. Right? And intuitively, I've never pushed that argument very hard myself, but intuitively I sort of agree with the general theme. But things are far too complicated to come about by purely Richard Dawkins cumulative selection. Right.
But there's other features of biological systems which are also very difficult to explain in terms of Darwinism.
For instance, there's a huge amount of order in the biological world, from the shape of leaves to the deep homologies like the great body plans like the insect body plan, which I'll talk about in a minute, which don't seem to serve any particular specific adaptive purpose.
Okay?
Now, Darwinian selection only sees adaptation in nature. It can only deal and explain the origin of an adaptive order. Right?
I don't think it does that very well. And as I've said, the complexity of living systems and the complexity of biological adaptation is such that I'm very skeptical that that could be generated by purely sort of Darwinian cumulative selection. That's one thing. That's what I was saying earlier.
But what about the shape of leaves? If you go into any suburban garden, there's thousands of different leaves. If you go into a tropical forest, you get leaves 1 meter across, you get leaves a few centimeters across, trees growing side by side. What's the adaptive significance of all these strange patterns of leaves? Right.
And if you can't say what function they serve, it's very difficult to imagine how selection can see them. Yeah, see what I mean?
[00:03:40] Speaker D: Couldn't someone say that it's like the shape of a snowflake? It's somehow inherent in the.
[00:03:46] Speaker C: That's the Platonic thing. Beginning now, that's the thin end of the wedge. Now, if you take the inside body plan, for instance, insects have legs, have six legs, and each leg is divided into six distinct bits. They have four mouthpieces, they have three body plans, and they have three segments in the thorax. Right.
That's a body plan. Right.
But it seems to have a numeric, abstract structure which doesn't serve any particular function. I mean, not really. And all insects for 400 million years through the history of the planet have exactly that body plan. It's totally robust. It hasn't changed one little bit. And this, of course, these observations were the basis of the fixity of the species. The fixity of the tank before Darwin is, in modern biology, sort of forgotten about this and tends to ignore it. But it's a huge problem because the form, these forms don't seem to have any specific adaptive significance. And Darwin himself in the Origin admitted that it's very difficult, or if not impossible, to imagine what functional significance these particular plans had. And what he says is, it's a very weak argument. He says, well, perhaps they did have some function in the past.
But the fact is that in fact, the typological view was that in fact these basic body plans and indeed a lot of the patterns of nature are part imminent in the natural order, like crystals, because the crystal was a great symbol of organic order before Darwin, and they were looking for the laws of form, just as you have laws of crystallography and laws of chemistry which determine a finite set of allowable structures. So they were looking for the biological laws of form which would explain these curious patterns in nature which have a crystalline numerical, geometric sort of appearance. Right. Like a leaf or the insect body plan. Right.
So I'm not only Skeptical of Darwinism because living things are fantastically complex machine like entities which serve functions.
[00:05:48] Speaker D: Right.
[00:05:48] Speaker C: And I mean we're talking about fantastic complexity now. Right.
I'm also skeptical because I think there's a great deal of patterning in nature which is extremely difficult to imagine it ever had any specific function which selection could sort of focus on and see and change. Right.
And so this leads to an extraordinary fact. The whole taxonomic system is based on these patterns.
You define an insect not by its adaptive characteristics, but by the fact that it has the insect body plan that makes it an insect. And all the great taxa of the system of nature are based on these fundamental patterns in nature, the types.
And none of them you can give a clear adaptive significance. You can't see any clear adaptive significance for these things at all. You see, my anti Darwinism resides on two great issues present in evolution. Theory in crisis. Perhaps not clearly differentiated, but it was there.
The theory of the type. Richard Owen called them primal patterns. It's a beautiful term. And he called the adaptations built upon them adaptive masks.
So we have the basic pentadactyl plan of the terrestrial limb, and we have fins, we have hoofs, we have all sorts of things, but they're all derived embryologically from the same basic pattern. We have a fantastic diversity of insects with all sorts of mouthpieces, but the mouthpieces always have four basic parts. We have all sorts of mammalian teeth systems, but they're all based on a particular plan, a pattern underlying pattern. We have seven cervical vertebrae in a mouse and a giraffe.
So these are the homological patterns underlying the adaptive things. Right. I mean, giraffe has a long neck perhaps to reach up to the things. A mouse has a short neck. Right. But the adaptations are built like adaptive masks on these basic primal patterns. Right. So this was pre Darwinian biology. I'm a pre Darwinian biologist.
[00:07:46] Speaker D: Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:46] Speaker C: You see, I mean, I think theory of the type.
If every American school kid knew that the types which underlie the whole taxonomic system of nature, the basic types, insect, body, plant, et cetera, et cetera, are probably or can't be clearly said to be adaptive, that's a huge hole in, in the Darwinian worldview because you're now putting all the adaptations in nature onto a series of great types and plans. And these types and plans look abstract and geometric. And when you go into the invertebrate world, you go into like seal entrance, you'll have sort of certain sorts of organisms divided into eight bits, six bits. For instance, squid have 10 limbs, octopuses have eight.
So there's another separation of two types. Is it adaptive having 10?
Is it adaptive having eight? Is it adaptive having five fingers? Why not six? Why not four? So you can't give Darwinian explanations for this vast panoply of patterns which underlie the biological world. So that's the theory of type in a nutshell.
[00:08:55] Speaker D: So if we had a thoughtful, clear minded Darwinist here with us today, what would he say in response to what you're saying? How would he defend?
[00:09:04] Speaker C: Well, he would say that in fact these patterns once served some adaptive function, you see. But even then, if you take that view, right, that means they must have evolved gradually, but for some reason mysteriously were frozen at one stage and then never changed.
So however you try to explain it in terms of dons and folks, first problem you've got is you've got to show that the insect body plan is adaptive. Now tell me how you could explain in adaptive terms exactly the same design in six limbs, what did the right hand front limb perform to get 6 bits?
And why should the next limb also have 6 bits?
How crazy is this when you start to explain it in detail, how you could come about these recurrent patterns and strange geometries in terms of the duct. But even if he tries to do it, he's now got a problem.
Why should it have been fixed, right?
[00:10:01] Speaker D: Why does it not change?
[00:10:02] Speaker C: It must have changed once, because Darwinism implies that you build everything gradually, bit by bit. So how do you get all this vast number of geometric patterns gradually bit by bit and suddenly fixed? 400 million years ago? The inside body plan is fixed and it never changes.
It's absolutely robust ever since.
So the moment it became non adaptive, it was fixed. So there's a whole lot of peculiar contradictions in trying to account for this in terms of Darwinism. And so basically Darwinian biologists, if you look at the textbooks of modern biology, textbooks of evolutionary biology, nobody touches this problem because it represents an entirely different view of the biological world. It's a different paradigm altogether, which doesn't fit with the functionalist adaptational paradigm, right? So it's ignored.
When they celebrated the Darwin centenary at the Natural History Museum in London, they moved Richard Owen. Richard Owen of course was a great believer in the typological conception of nature, right?
He was a great typologist and he was the founder of that museum, right? And so they moved his statue to a very unprominent place because of course Owen's view was a complete contradiction of Darwin. And Darwin never met Owen's challenges. What happened was the attraction of the machine analogy. You know, the sort of living things are machines and every bit of them has some function was such a powerful idea and particularly in British natural theology. Right. This continental Platonic typological view that there's a lot of order which is not functional, doesn't serve any specific environmental demand that was just ignored. You have to ignore it.
You can't even start discussing it because once you start discussing it, you open a huge can of worms. Because this non adaptive patterns extend from leaves in a suburban garden all the way to the pattern of my limbs, to the insect body plan, to all the body plans in nature which have the same problem. They're all sort of geometric, numerical, sort of abstract forms. Actually primal patterns was the beautiful term that Owen used to describe them. Primal patterns. And on top of them were grafted the adaptive masks. So my anti Darwinism has it's pluralistic.
I basically represent a sort of a throwback to the typologist of the 19th century. However, the mechanical Darwinian view of the world, the reductionist conception of nature is under tremendous pressure, particularly in the realm of cell biology. Because machines, if you think of living things as machines, Darwin thought of them as machines and so did Paley, of course.
But the theologians were in the 19th century divided. There was the Pale ites who believed living things were complex machines made by God. But then there was Alexander Agassiz and there was people like Richard Owen who believed that these basic patterns were imminent in the natural order itself and they were generated by laws of form. Right.
[00:12:55] Speaker D: Does the view you're expressing imply intelligent design?
[00:13:00] Speaker C: I mean, Owen would have argued that these patterns were adaptive at a very deep level. They didn't satisfy any particular environment, but they were ideal frameworks to build, like the realm of insect forms. Right. You see what I mean? That's what I think he would think.
I can't ask him and I can't ask Agassiz. But Agassiz thought that these patterns were ideas in the minds of God, which is very Platonic. Yeah. But back to sort of in the beginning was the logos. You know, there's the idea that the logos is made flesh and the idea that these ideas were ideas for a biological world.
They're the basic forms on which everything was to be built. That's what Agassiz thought.
These ideas are brought out amazingly in Google's structure of evolutionary theory.
That was Gould's last will and testament. It's a book this thick and the first half of it is a very sympathetic review of all these ideas of Owen of Agassiz and everything and there's a wonderful quote from Gould when he says that the typological structuralist view of nature has stood the test of time and amazingly Gould the great advocate of Darwinism in his last great work is Magnus opus really structural revolutionary theory. He is saying probably there's a lot of truth in the typological view of the world. There's probably a lot of laws of form order like crystalline order underlying the biological world.
Anyway this is the typological view. The idea is laws of form as.
[00:14:38] Speaker B: Dr. Denton explained the abstract and geometric nature of the insect body plan like a crystalline structure suggests intelligence at work in the law like unfolding of the universe well before Darwinian processes got going.
This has been Joshua Youngkin for ID the Future. Thanks for listening.
[00:14:58] Speaker A: 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 design.org or www.idthefuture.com.
[00:15:35] Speaker B: It.
