[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:05] Speaker B: The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:12] Speaker C: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I get to hand the hosting mic over to Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro as we share with you his 2019 interview with philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer on the Ben Shapiro Sunday special.
This exchange happened five years ago now and we thought it was a good time to put it out there again. For those who may not have heard it yet or watched it when it first came out, Dr. Meyer considers this one of his best interviews. On the subject of his second solo book, Darwin's Doubt, Shapiro was extremely well prepared and asked great questions, resulting in a thought provoking and thoroughly engaging hour long conversation.
We've got the first half of it for you today, followed by the concluding half in a subsequent episode.
In this first half of the conversation, Dr. Meyer starts off with the basics, including his own scientific background, the scientific pedigree of intelligent design, how ID differs from creationism, and how the theory might be falsified.
The pair then discuss the different meanings of the word evolution. But before Dr. Meyer gets into one of Darwin's biggest doubts, the mystery of the missing fossils and how that relates to an even bigger mystery, the mystery of the origin of biological information.
Here's Ben Shapiro now with special guest Dr. Stephen Meyer. Enjoy.
[00:01:38] Speaker A: This is Darwin's historical scientific method. When you're trying to explain an event in the remote past, you want to draw on your knowledge of cause and effect. And if the effect is a lot of new digital information, we know of a cause that can do that. And it's a mind or an intelligence.
[00:01:57] Speaker B: Well, Steven, thanks so much for joining the Ben Shapiro show.
[00:01:59] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: So let's start from the very beginning. Yeah, because people are gonna ask. So you talk a lot about evolution and science. Obviously your books, Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the Cell are both heavily scientific. So what is your scientific background? So folks know?
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Well, I started in double majored in physics and geology and then I worked as a geophysicist for 5 years in industry and went from there to do a program in the philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of biology at Cambridge University where my PhD dissertation was on the origin of life problem, which was a very interdisciplinary question. How did life first arise from presumably the nonliving chemicals? So it had biochemistry, molecular biology, thermodynamics, information theory. It's a question that has lots of different subjects involved. So it was a very interdisciplinary PhD.
[00:02:51] Speaker B: Okay, so with all of that said, if you go to your Wikipedia page, the first thing that it says is that you are the advocate of a pseudo scientific theory called intelligent design. So let's start with a couple of questions on that. First of all, people suggest that you are a creationist. What is the difference between intelligent design, the argument for intelligent Design, and. And creationism?
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Right. Well, creationism holds that it takes the Bible as the basis of the theory. So creationism is an interpretation or a deduction from religious authority, whereas intelligent design is an inference from biological and physical cosmological evidence.
So the one starts from the data of the natural world, the other starts from scripture.
The other difference is that most creationists hold to a view that the earth is very young.
It was created maybe 10,000 ago or something like that.
Idaho itself is an age neutral theory, but most of us hold the standard ancient dates for the universe and for life and planet Earth. So I'm an old earth guy.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: So the case that is generally made against intelligent design is the idea that it's not a scientific theory. So is intelligent design the idea that there was somebody, you don't actually say God, but something, there was some intelligent force that moved the universe that created life on earth that was responsible in your book for the Cambrian explosion. How is this a scientific theory as opposed to just as maybe Richard Dawkins would say, a God of the gaps argument?
[00:04:18] Speaker A: Well, one of the things I did when I first set off to grad school, my story is that I encountered this information argument. One of the most extraordinary discoveries of 20th century biology is that at the foundation of life is information in a digital form. The DNA molecules stores information in a four character digital code.
And the this discovery of Watson and crick in the 50s has over time created an impasse in both chemical evolutionary theory, which are the theories about the origin of the first life, and theories of biological evolution as well, which are theories about how you get new forms of life from pre existing forms. Because to build anything in biology, you've got to have code, you've got to have information. So I became fascinated with that question and the possibility that the information at the foundation of life was actually an indicator of the activity of mind of an intelligence.
But to determine whether or not that argument could be formulated scientifically, I had to dig in a little deeper into how scientists go about reasoning about these origins questions about events in the remote past. And oddly, one of the people most helpful to me in that was Charles Darwin himself, because in the 19th century he and his mentor, Charles Lyell, the great geologist, developed a method for investigating historical scientific questions. And they Had a principle of reasoning they called the vera causa principle, or the idea that if you want to explain an event in the remote past, you should posit an event which is known to have the powers to produce the effect in question.
And as I began to think about that, I realized that it was possible to formulate a case for intelligent design in a strictly scientific manner using the method of Lyell and Darwin. Because as we think about the origin of information, the one thing we know is that it always arises from an intelligent source. Whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, or information embedded in a radio signal, Whenever you find information, especially if it's in a digital or alphabetic form, you trace it back to its source. You always come to mind, not a material process. So using the same scientific method of reasoning that Darwin used, I came to a different non Darwinian conclusion, which was that there is evidence of intelligent design, not just what the Darwinians call apparent design in the history of life. So if our theory is unscientific, the Darwinian theory would be as well. But I think both are scientific. I just argue for one and critique the other.
[00:06:34] Speaker B: So the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, has suggested that science is basically that which can be falsified. So what evidence would have to arise for the theory of intelligent design to be falsified?
[00:06:44] Speaker A: You would have to find an undirected process that was capable of producing information beyond a threshold that we have defined mathematically.
There's an amount of information that might arise by chance, based on what are called the probabilistic resources of the universe. But if you get beyond that from an undirected process, that would falsify our claim that only mind can produce that amount of information.
There's also other ways of conceiving of what makes something a good scientific theory, Rather than Popper's idea. It's been critiqued by philosophers of science. Typically, a more popular view among philosophers of science is that what scientists are really doing is they're making inferences to the best explanation. And that's how I frame the argument in Darwin's doubt and in signature in the cell for intelligent design, A best explanation would be one that posits a cause which is known to to produce the effect in question. And in the best of cases, where there's only one known such cause, and that's the kind of argument I make for intelligent design, that only intelligence, only mind, is capable of generating the amount of information needed for these big jumps in biological Complexity in the history of life.
[00:07:50] Speaker B: So in the history of science and the philosophy of science, there's been this interesting battle between sort of religious folks who believe that religion should stay separate from science, and folks who believe that religion and science are intertwined.
And that on the one side you have sort of the Thomas Aquinas that God and nature speak in the same language, and on the other side you have the William of Ockham argument that basically God can do whatever he wants. And so what we don't want is a theory of science that can disprove God. And the flip side of that is sort of Stephen Jay Gould's non overlapping magisteria argument that science handles this stuff and religion handles this stuff and there's no crossover. So where does Intelligent Design lie in that gap?
[00:08:25] Speaker A: That's a really great question. There's basically three. There's basically three different approaches to the interface between science and religious belief. One is the idea that the two are in conflict. And that was the kind of dominant view that came out of the late 19th century. Most historians of science now reject that. It's very simplistic. Another view is the Stephen Jay Gould view is that science and faith occupy non overlapping realms of inquiry. The Galileo aphorism was science tells you how the planets go, not how to go to heaven, or how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven.
But the theory of intelligent design I think shows that that's also simplistic. There are many scientific questions and religious questions that are completely separate. But there are some questions that both science and religion speak to. And my view is that when they speak to the same questions in the same way, that there is actually far more agreement than people realize. In fact, substantial agreement. For example, the origin of the universe we now know had a beginning, or the universe had a beginning. And this is one of the first words of the biblical text, that there was a beginning. So that's a point of agreement about the same issue.
Is the universe finite or infinite? Both science and religion are now telling us the same thing, that the universe had a beginning.
Intelligent Design is telling us that life and the universe were designed. And that's something that you would also find affirmed in the theistic religious traditions. So that's a point of agreement about a special question about, in this case, about the origins of life. So I don't say that science and religion talk. They have many areas of specialized inquiry. There are different questions that each address, but there are overlapping areas of interest. And increasingly what we found is that there is increasing agreement as we understand the science better and as we get better, more sophisticated biblical interpretations sometimes as well.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: One of the biggest, probably the biggest argument against intelligent design obviously is made by the new atheists.
It's fascinating to watch the crossover between neo Darwinian thinkers and new atheists. They basically are the same group of people.
[00:10:30] Speaker A: They're the same group of people.
[00:10:32] Speaker B: So it seems to me that no
[00:10:34] Speaker A: surprise because Dawkins said that Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. And also the Darwinian view, the strictly Darwinian view is not just the idea of evolution as change over time, but the idea of an undirected, unguided process that produced the appearance, but not the reality of design. So they see nature essentially as being a self creating entity that can produce all the wonders and intricacies of living organisms without any guiding hand whatsoever. And so that lends itself to a strictly materialistic or atheistic worldview.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Well, people have suggested that Intelligent design advocates are anti evolution, that they don't believe in the theory of evolution. So what does the theory of evolution say?
And then what in it is an argument too far?
[00:11:21] Speaker A: That's a great question.
The term evolution is a term that has multiple meanings. So if you want to avoid the fallacy of equivocation, it's really good to define terms right from the beginning. So first meaning is change over time, obviously. And that can mean a couple different things itself. It can refer to the small scale variation that we see with things like the Galapagos finches, where their beaks get a little bigger, a little smaller in response to varying weather conditions. It can also refer to the fact that life on the planet today is different than it was in the period of the Jurassic when you had the dinosaurs roaming the Earth, or in the Cambrian when you had trilobites. We've had change in the representation of life forms over time in the fossil record. Nobody doubts either of those meanings of evolution. Second, big meaning of evolution is the idea that all forms of life are connected by common ancestry back to a single ancestral form, a single one celled organism. So Darwin represented that idea with his concept of the tree of life. That's an idea of evolution. That's consistent with the idea of intelligent design. Though many intelligent design proponents and others, other scientists, including evolutionary biologists, are getting increasingly skeptical about it because there's so much evidence of discontinuity in the fossil record and discontinuity in the study of genomics, where we have things like orphan genes, which are big classes of genes that are unique to certain taxa and don't show any similarity to other genes anywhere else in the, in the genomic databases. So you have this sense of genetic information popping into existence in different classes of organisms. Discontinuity. Third meaning of evolution is the one, though that's really contentious. And that's the idea that natural selection and random mutation are sufficient to produce all the new forms of life and the appearance of design that living forms manifest. So it's an unguided process that produces the appearance but not the reality of design.
And that's the meaning of evolution that the theory of Intelligent design is challenging. Some intelligent design proponents may be skeptical about common descent, others are not. But it's that third meaning that unites us.
And it's what the theory of Intelligent design is about. We're challenging the idea that purely undirected processes can produce the complexity or the information necessary to build the complexity of living organisms.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: So you make a couple of arguments in your two books, Darwin, Stout, as well as Signature in the Cell. One is a DNA related argument. One is a fossil record.
But they go back, as you say, to that theory of evolution that suggests that natural selection and genetic mutation are enough alone to lead to the way that life has developed over time. I'm wondering if you can start by spelling out where is the discontinuity with regard to the establishment of life.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: Well, the first big discontinuity is the origin of life itself, which is what my first book Signature in the Cell addressed. And many people don't realize that Darwin himself never addressed the question of the origin of the first life. He speculated about it in a letter to a. But he didn't. This was not something he addressed. In the Origin of Species he presupposed the existence of the first living cell. And there's a major discontinuity between chemical processes that we observe and what we see in actual living organisms. And it's a complexity gap that's absolutely extraordinary. We've got tiny miniature machines. We have not only the DNA with the digital code in it, but a complex information processing system and even the simplest living cells on Earth. So that's a big discontinuity.
Then there is a series of discontinuities in the fossil record as we find greater and greater complexity arising over time. One of the big ones that I talked about in Darwin Stout was one that Darwin, that bothered Darwin a great deal, which was what we now call the Cambrian explosion, which is the origin of the first major groups of animals in the fossil record. They were tested in The Middle Cambrian in particular, and many groups of animals exemplifying completely new body plans arise in a very narrow window of geologic time, very abruptly, without discernible connection to ancestral precursors in the lower Precambrian strata. And that's one of the big discontinuities in the history of life. There are many others. I've written an article with a German paleontologist, Gunter Beckley, about 17 such major discontinuities. The mammalian radiation, the origin of flowering plants, the first winged insects, the first dinosaurs. Most of the major groups of.
Of living forms on Earth arise discontinuously. So that's a big deal. The even bigger question, though, that I address in the book is apart from that discontinuity, which is a puzzle for Darwinism, how would you build those organisms? What process could account for the origin of all that new form? Especially now that we know you need information, the information in DNA and from other sources to build complex new forms of life.
[00:16:05] Speaker B: Let's talk about information theory. So for folks who don't, who haven't read your books, don't know anything about information theory. Why does information theory suggest that there must be some sort of designer? Obviously, people like Dawkins who suggest that evolution is the universal acid, they say that these things can arise by themselves. They would also make the suggestion that the information in DNA is not necessarily directed, that it only seems directed to us because we're here to actually look at the direction in which it moves. It could theoretically be random.
What does information theory have to say about that?
[00:16:34] Speaker A: Well, it's actually helpful first to go back to the molecular biological revolution of the 1950s. Watson and Crick discover, in 1953, they elucidate rather the structure of the DNA molecule. They discover it's got this beautiful helix structure. There's these four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the helix called bases or nucleotide bases. In 1957, 1958, Crick, who was, interestingly, a code breaker in World War II, posits what's known as the sequence hypothesis, which is just a breakthrough moment in the history of biology, where he realizes that the nucleotide bases on the inside of the double helix are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or what we now think of as like the zeros and ones in a section of software code. Which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of those bases that is important to their function, but rather it's their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent code, which was later elucidated and we now call the genetic code. So what we have is a true information bearing system that is expressing information as it happens for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive.
So in Seattle, where I live, we've got great information companies. We've got Microsoft, which writes code. We've got Boeing and other manufacturing companies that use code. And there's a process called computer assisted design and manufacturing CAD cam where an engineer might write some code. Code would go down a wire, it'd be converted into another machine language that could be read by a manufacturing apparatus and that will then direct the construction of a mechanical system. If you're at Boeing, it might put rivets exactly in the right place on the airplane wing. So you've got and the same thing that's going on inside the cell that you've got information directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that are absolutely necessary for survivability.
So the big question is where does that information come from? And also what kind of information is it? And that's where the information theory comes in.
In the late 40s, there was a scientist named Claude Shannon who developed a mathematical theory of information.
But his theory only captured his theory of information had to do with the reduction of uncertainty, which he showed was inversely related to probability. More improbable an arrangement of characters the more Shannon information that was carried. But his notion of information didn't capture the notion of meaning or communication function. So you could have a series of characters that were basically gibberish, but because they were aperiodic and random, you couldn't really tell whether they were meaningful or not. But they had a big information measure. So Shannon didn't capture the difference between functional or meaningful information and just an improbable arrangement of characters.
So it's actually not information theory, but it's information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information that we're familiar with in our own parlance. The dictionary talks about variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function. And that's what we have in DNA. And Francis Crick was very clear on that from the beginning. He said it's not mere Shannon information, it's information that's functional. And that's the kind of information that in our experience always indicates the prior activity of an intelligence. If it's just a random arrangement might be undirected processes. But if it's very specific and complex and it's operating in accord with a symbol convention, then you've got information that is the product of mind.
[00:20:08] Speaker B: So this is where we get into the theories of probability, because the question becomes, could there have been such a strand of DNA that comes about by chance? Because the theory, obviously, as you mentioned, of evolution suggests that it's mutations now in the DNA that create all of the change in human life over time. So we'll skip the origin of life problems in just a second, and then we'll. But when it comes to the information string in the DNA, the contention is basically that given enough time, you run the experiment enough times, and eventually you will end up with an evolution that, combined with natural selection, it preserves the mutations that are good, and you will end up with something that looks designed, even though it is not designed. That mutation over time being preserved by natural selection is enough. Why doesn't that work?
[00:20:52] Speaker A: There's a mathematical problem, and it's a profound one.
My colleague David Berlinski calls it the combinatorial problem, or the problem of combinatorial inflation, maybe. Simple analogy, way to get into it. We know from our experience with software code writing and using it that the last thing you want in a section of functional software code is a series of random changes to those zeros and ones. If that happens, you're going to degrade the information that's in that code long before you'll ever generate a new software program or operating system.
And Richard Dawkins and many, many others biologists have acknowledged that what we have in DNA is akin to machine code, or as Leroy Hood puts it, digital code. It's functioning in exactly the same way.
So what we've learned from software writing and using is highly relevant to understanding whether or not the mutation selection mechanism would actually generate, could generate conceivably or realistically new information.
And there's a reason that changing software at random invariably degrades the information before you get anything useful and new. And that is because there's so many more ways to go wrong. In any system of digital or typographic or alphabetic communication, there are vastly more ways of arranging the characters in question that will generate gibberish than there are ways of arranging those same characters that will generate something functional. So if you start randomly changing things, you're overwhelmingly more likely to find a gibberish sequence than a functional one.
And as we've actually tried to quantify that, how much more likely the quantitative odds are prohibitive. There's a scientist who worked for 14 years at Cambridge University, Douglas Axe did his PhD at Caltech went on to do a long term molecular biology research postdoc at Cambridge to try to quantify this question. How rare or common are the functional sequences that would make a new protein or a new gene capable of making a new protein? How rare are the functional ones in comparison to the non functional ones? And for a relatively short protein, about 150amino acids long, he determined that the ratio of functional to non functional sequences was about 1 over 10 to the 77th power. Now, to put that in context, There are only 10 to the 65th atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.
So what that means is that a random search for a new functional sequence is going to be like looking for one marked atom among 10 trillion, or, sorry, yeah, 1 trillion galaxies of the size of the Milky Way. So, and it turns out that even 4 billion years of life's history is not enough time to solve a search problem of that magnitude. And I go into all the math of this in the book and it's pretty straightforward. There's only 10 to the 40th organisms in the history of the planet, not enough replication events to search a space 10 to the 77 big. So you're looking at even in the whole, if you take the whole history of life on the planet into account, you're only going to be able to search a tiny, tiny fraction of the total relevant sequences. So you got a really big haystack, really small number of needles and very little time to look for them. The bottom line is it's overwhelmingly more probable that such a search will fail than succeed in the known time of life on planet Earth. Which means that the mechanism is more likely. The hypothesis that the mechanism produced new information is more likely to be false than true.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: And so the result of this is, as you say, that it's more likely that it's designed than that it was randomly done in terms of DNA. And that's reflected in the fossil record to the extent that there have to. There's sort of these jumps in the fossil record. And this is what you talk about in Darwin's doubt, is that it's not a continuous process of mutation upon mutation, building one on the other, just randomly.
[00:24:48] Speaker A: It becomes a big engineering problem because it's not just that there's gaps in the fossil record. You have to ask, well, how would the evolutionary process produce all the new information necessary to build these completely new body plans, new cell types, new anatomical structures? And we know that would take a lot of new information. And so then you've got to look, well, is there enough time to do that. Do you have enough trials through this mechanism? And the answer is just overwhelmingly no. It's not plausible at all mathematically. And on the flip side, we do know, however, of a cause that is sufficient to produce new information. This is why it's not a God of the gaps or an argument from ignorance. Is we're drawing, and this is Darwin's historical scientific method. When you're trying to explain an event in the remote past, you want to draw on your knowledge of cause and effect. What kind of causes out there that we've observed that is capable of producing the effect in question. And if the effect is a lot of new digital information, we know of a cause that can do that. And it's a mind or an intelligence. And it happens that that's the only known cause that can produce lots of new information. And it's certainly much more plausible than the Darwinian idea of a random search. And we show why mathematically it's much more plausible.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: Now, one of the theories about the idea that randomness is still in the system is Stephen Jay Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium, that that essentially small groups of animals kind of went away from the big group, they did all their changes and then they reintegrated. Why doesn't that work? The idea that the jumps in the fossil record are a result of small groups breaking away in a certain level of group selection?
[00:26:15] Speaker A: Yeah, Gould's model was a terrific advance as far as its accuracy in describing the fossil record because he described these big punctuations or big jumps and then the long term stasis that would occur, lack of directional evolutionary change, that's what we see in the fossil record. Very non Darwinian.
The problem was he didn't really have a mechanism that could accomplish that could produce the amount of change that we're seeing.
I discussed it as a whole. I do a whole chapter on this in Darwin's doubt. But the mechanism he proposed was called species selection. A lot of other evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins, were very critical of the mechanism, and in a way, rightly so, because what it came down to in the end was that species selection itself depended on the natural selection random mutation mechanism.
And that mechanism requires lots of time to get the job done.
And it turns out 4 billion years isn't enough. But certainly the abrupt jumps that Gould was talking about were not allowing the mechanism enough time to work. So you had this kind of irony in evolutionary biology in the 80s and 90s in particular, Gould's model pretty much was dismissed by the early 2000s. But you had Gould's model was viewed as a good one for describing the fossil record accurately, but it didn't have a mechanism. The Darwinians had a mechanism, but it was inconsistent with the fossil record. And also then as we've later critiqued, the mechanism was also lacked the creative power to generate the information necessary to build big new, you know, major innovations in the history of life.
[00:27:45] Speaker B: So from a design perspective, what exactly is the theory of how one species would become another suddenly? Is it that there is a bunch of dead DNA that is suddenly activated, or is it that something injects new information into the system? How exactly would that work? What's the mechanism?
[00:28:01] Speaker A: The question of species raises this whole question of envelopes of variability. We see evidence of design. At the loci of the design are when you get the major innovations occurring in the history of life. But the information that is present in a major group of organisms might be sufficient to allow a lot of variation within an envelope. So that's why there is evolution, we think there, there's clearly evolution that takes place. The question is how much information was present and how wide the envelopes of variability are that are generated by that information. So there's a terrific evolutionary biologist and cell biologist at the University of Chicago also named Shapiro, James Shapiro, who's got a new theory of evolution he calls natural genetic engineering. And he notices that and has documented that that many of the mutations that we actually see at work are not random at all.
They're an expression of what he calls pre programmed adaptive capacity, where there's an external trigger or stress put on an organism and that triggers the production of certain proteins for which the organism had the capability of building all along because it had the genetic information there.
And so a lot of the evolution we see is actually pre programmed adaptive capacity, which is really an exciting biological phenomenon that the Darwinians haven't really taken full account of. But it does raise the question of the origin of that adaptive capacity. Where did the pre programming come from? So intelligent design says the inputs of information from outside the system, from an intelligence, are located in that pre programmed adaptive capacity. But the theory also acknowledges that there is evolution possible going downstream as a result of that pre existing information.
[00:29:48] Speaker C: That was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Ben Shapiro in a 2019 interview about intelligent design and Dr. Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt. Don't miss the second half of the interview on a separate episode.
And if you haven't read Darwin's Doubt yet, you're going to want to add it to your book list, learn more about it and order a
[email protected] that's darwinsdoubt.com we're grateful to Daily Wire and the producers of the Ben Shapiro Sunday Special for permission to share this interview at ID the Future.
Find more episodes of the Ben Shapiro Sunday
[email protected] for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thank you for listening.
[00:30:32] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
