Episode Transcript
[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. Today we'll listen to the concluding half of a remarkable and candid discussion about the limits of Darwinian evolution and the arguments for intelligent design.
This is a conversation recorded in 2019, hosted by Peter Robinson for his program Uncommon Knowledge and featuring philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer, mathematician and author Dr. David Berlinsky, and Yale professor of computer science Dr. David Giller.
The discussion was inspired by Professor Galernter's 2019 essay, Giving Up A Fond Farewell to a Brilliant and Beautiful Theory. In the essay, Galler points to Meyer's 2013 book Darwin's Doubt for convincing him that Darwin has failed.
Galerter also points to Berlinski's book the Deniable Darwin as essential to his change in thinking.
And so Robinson brings them together for an honest conversation about Darwin, his brilliant and beautiful theory, why it's time to move past it, and why intelligent Design might be a more adequate alternative.
In part two, the focus turns from the inadequacies of Darwin's theory of evolution to the merits of intelligent design.
Although all three men are in solid agreement that Darwinian evolution fails, they differ on the question of intelligent design.
Berlinski's attitude towards intelligent design is warm but distant.
For Galernter, questions of human suffering and the purposes of an intelligent designer give him pause.
I don't look at the world as we know it as more likely the result of intelligence than random playing around. Gallenter says, there are wonderful things, but on the whole, I'd fail this world if I were grading it.
Dr. Meyer, on the other hand, sees a powerful signal of design in the world, even as he acknowledges the suffering within it. He sees evidence of both aboriginal design as well as decay, which aligns not only with the scientific principle of entropy, but but also with the theology of a fallen world.
This leads the conversation to the topic of consciousness and finally to the search for new mechanisms to replace Neo Darwinism. Let's jump back into the conversation now. This is Dr. Meyer, Dr. Belinski, and Dr. Gillaertner with Peter Robinson.
[00:02:32] Speaker D: Intelligent Design from David Gillertner's essay. The evidence suggests to Meyer, who's seated with us today, that an intelligent designer of must have been responsible.
I can't accept intelligent design as Meier presents it. Close quote.
You also have seated next to you David Berlinski, who has been. Who is. This is David who has said that his attitude toward intelligent design, and I'm quoting him, is warm but distant. It's the same attitude that I display toward my ex wives.
So.
So you have one man who can't accept it, another man who definitely wants to keep his distance.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: That leaves Meier out.
[00:03:16] Speaker D: So, I don't know. You want to start the easier case? Try to convince David.
Tell us what intelligent Design is that distinguishes it from some kind of effort to sneak God in by some backdoor.
[00:03:30] Speaker E: Sure. Intelligent Design.
[00:03:32] Speaker B: Parenthetically, just one word. That's definitely not Steve's intention in this book. In Intelligent Design, it's not a way to bring in a theological argument. It is a scientific approach, purely and absolutely valid. Scientifically, one can agree with it or disagree with it, but one doesn't have to reject it insofar as theology making an illegal move because that's not what.
[00:03:53] Speaker D: He'S doing, that's not what.
[00:03:54] Speaker A: Good.
[00:03:55] Speaker E: Let me just sketch the argument briefly and then we can just discuss it.
The big discovery of the 1950s and 60s was that the DNA molecule encodes information in a roughly digital or alphabetic or typographic.
[00:04:08] Speaker D: Why do you use the term digital?
[00:04:09] Speaker E: Well, because in computer science we have characters, zeros and ones.
[00:04:12] Speaker D: I see, I see.
[00:04:13] Speaker E: This is Crick 1957. It's the sequence hypothesis. You realize that the information in DNA or the chemical subunits of DNA called nucleotide bases were functioning like alphabetic characters in a written text or like the zeros and ones in a section of computer code. That is to say, it wasn't their chemical properties that gave them their function, but but rather their specific arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention which was later explicated in the form of what we call the genetic code. So we had genetic text functioning according to a code.
[00:04:46] Speaker D: So it really was a pure, it was pure information.
[00:04:50] Speaker E: This is a genuine information storage system. Crick, by the way, was a code breaker in World War II. So this is fascinating. It's application of the information sciences to molecular biology. Now what we, and this is the argument that I make, is that what we know from experience is that information, whether we find it in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book, or information embedded in a radio signal or in a section of computer code, whenever we find information and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. And what I do in the book, in Darwin's doubt and in my prior book, Signature in the Cell, is show that these undirected evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed as an explanation for the origin of information fail for various reasons. We've talked about the reason The Darwinian mechanism fails because it can't search the space when it's so vast, the odds are overwhelmingly against it. So we, from a materialistic evolutionary standpoint, don't have any explanation for the origin of the information that's necessary to build new biological form. And yet we do know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning of a source of information, of a cause of the origin of information, that that cause is intelligence or mind. And so what I've argued in both Darwin's doubt and signature in the cell is that what we're seeing in life is evidence of the activity of a directing mind.
[00:06:07] Speaker D: In the history of life, David Berlinski, to quote the old saying, if you see a turtle on a fence post, you know it didn't get there by itself.
Look around you.
There's intelligence behind this creation we inhabit. Yes, that's an easy one for a man like you. Yes.
[00:06:28] Speaker A: I guess you're not leaving me much to chew with.
Not much.
[00:06:36] Speaker D: You are a contrary man. What do you mean?
[00:06:38] Speaker A: Well, I don't know. I mean, look. Intelligence in the world, intelligence behind the world.
[00:06:46] Speaker D: I'm relying on you. Answer this objection. Whatever he comes up with, you're going to be the one who answers meanest.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Kisses at famine prices.
It doesn't really. In my point, from my point of view, it doesn't really give us much. It's not yet a theory. I'm certainly prepared to say there's a lot of intelligence manifest in the world, but at the same time, I think that doesn't really.
[00:07:08] Speaker D: Oh, it's a tautology to you.
[00:07:09] Speaker A: It's not a tautology.
[00:07:11] Speaker D: Look at this. It's information. Yes, it's information.
[00:07:13] Speaker A: That's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah, it's information. I recognize that information in some loose sense, maybe Shannon's sense, maybe a more elegant formulation of information theory. But I'm much more persuaded by something that leads to a strong counterintuitive claim. For example, that the information is embedded in a topology in a certain way that makes it inevitable that certain life forms will emerge. That would be an interesting conclusion. And for a time I thought there was such a mathematical construction.
I don't think my confidence was entirely well founded, but it was a good idea. But just to say that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. I could have said that before thinking about biology. It is. That's true.
[00:08:01] Speaker D: David Galeritner. I'm quoting your essay again.
If there was an intelligent designer, what was his strategy? How did he manage to back himself into so many corners, wasting energy on so many doomed organisms? What was his purpose?
And why did he do such a slipshod job? Why are we so disease prone, heartbreak prone, and so on? Close quote. But aren't you setting a pretty high standard? Aren't you saying, in effect, either Stephen Meyer can explain all the mysteries of the human heart or he's not allowed to say anything.
That is to say, the difference between a purely materialistic view that all that we see around us came about purely as a matter of chance, and Stephen's view that there is intelligence.
However little we can say about it, however little we understand what we mean by that, that's still a fundamental finding.
[00:08:53] Speaker B: The question is whether the world around us that you're pointing at meets your standard of intelligence, whether the design that we see is in fact an intelligent design or a total mess. When I look at the world at large, I see a mess. When I look at the mind of man, I see a worse mess.
I see a creature as likely to do bad as good. Or more likely, I see many creatures who are fated to die out without leaving any contribution that we can associate with value. Not even becoming oil or something like that. I don't.
Don't look at the world as we know it as more likely the result of intelligence than random playing around, than just random taking your chances. I think if you just took your chances, you'd come up with a mess like the world.
You'd have some lucky breaks. There's some really great people. There's some beautiful cities like Florence. There are all sorts of things.
[00:09:59] Speaker D: Michelangelo down in the valley, there are wonderful things.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: But on the whole, I would fail this world if I were grading it.
This is an important point in the Talmud, by the way, I won't make. There's a famous argument between Beish, Hillel and Beit Shammai, two schools of thought who lived at the same time, famous for disagreeing about everything. One of them was a lot like David.
But there's only one question on which they ever agreed. And that question was, is it good that the Earth was created? Is it good that the universe was created?
Is it good that it happened?
And Hillel says, and Shammai agrees with him, no, it's a catastrophe. If we had to go back and do it all again, we'd have to tell the Almighty, don't do it. The suffering outweighs the good.
[00:10:55] Speaker D: All right, Stephen.
So if in intelligent design it wasn't.
[00:11:00] Speaker E: That intelligent, I look at it a little differently. I See two things when I look at nature. I see evidence of design or aboriginal design, Aboriginal meaning from the beginning in different groups of organisms from the get go. But you also see evidence of decay.
And that's also something that's consistent with when designers make things. Then there's this thing we call entropy.
And I think here a theological perspective does help because I think from the Judeo Christian perspective you would expect to see both evidence of original creation or original design. But you would also expect to see that something's gone wrong in nature as well. And I think we see both. So my theological perspective does inform my ability to answer that question about the things in nature that don't look so well. It's interesting. For example, the problem of virulent bacteria, you know, nasty, nasty bugs.
They are invariably the result of a loss of information as a result of the mutational process.
So the very process that the Darwinists have invoked to explain the origin of good design is actually, I think responsible for the evidence of decay. So I think there is a. This is the question in philosophy known as the theodicy, you know, the.
[00:12:14] Speaker D: Yes, yes.
[00:12:15] Speaker E: The problem of pain. And so I think there's ways of thinking about that.
But for me, the evidence of design is powerful. It's ubiquitous both in life and at the level of physics, of things like the fine tuning of the laws and constants of physics. So I see a very powerful signal of design. But I don't deny the decay and the suffering in the world. And I have a theological way of.
[00:12:36] Speaker D: Understanding that if the bad viruses are always a result of that fits the theology perfectly. The theology suggests that good is the entity. Evil has no independent existence. It's always a defect or a shortcoming in the good. Right? Isn't that right?
[00:12:56] Speaker E: I think it does fit. And there's quite a lot of microbiology that actually supports that viewpoint.
[00:13:01] Speaker D: But Back to you, Dr. Gillerigner. What are two of the great Jewish minds in history doing saying that creation is bad when the beginning of the Hebrew scripture is? God saw that it was good. Good.
We're departing from Darwin just a bit, but I can't resist that one.
[00:13:19] Speaker B: It's absolutely true that he saw that it was good and both of the two creation stories agree that the world is a good thing. And yet immediately, as far as the Bible is concerned, men start screwing it up, from Adam and Eve to Cain and Abel to Noach and his ark, to the stories of the patriarchs and the world in which they live, to Moses who leads Israel to the promised Land and the people are a bitch. They're constantly fighting, arguing, struggling, being a nuisance in every conceivable way. So God creates a perfect world. On the other hand, he hasn't created a perfect creature. That's why we are obligated to study and struggle, study the good and try to struggle in that direction. But I want to say I have no theological argument with Steve.
My argument is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering it. It seems to me it's widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put up job. It's an absolutely serious scientific argument. In fact, it's the first and most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind.
It's got to be dealt with intellectually, not by the bigotry, the anti religious bigotry, which is one of the most important facts of the intellectual world in the United States, the West generally today.
[00:14:51] Speaker E: The case for intelligent design is not based on.
We can have a theological discussion as we had a bit here, but the case for intelligent design isn't an interpretation or a deduction from the scriptural text, right? It's an inference from biological evidence.
And in that sense it's different.
[00:15:09] Speaker D: He makes that assertion and you say, yep, he's being honest about that.
And anybody can check this out.
[00:15:15] Speaker B: Not only that, but I think it's an important assertion because outside the scientific world one might not know how ideologically bent the world of science, parts of the world of science are becoming.
I say it with real sorrow and it's certainly not true of every scientist or even of most scientists.
But we have a cautionary tale in what happened to our English departments and our history departments could happen to us.
[00:15:40] Speaker D: All right, God. Setting up sort of my last round of questions here.
I'm going to quote you once again, David Gillarentner.
Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory, but the basis of a worldview and an emergency religion for the many troubled souls who need one. Close quote. Now, lots of people have invested lots of energy in discrediting Dr. Berlinski and Dr. Meyer over the years.
You, Dr. Gillertner, are a professor of unquestioned competence and achievement in computer science.
And computer science is with it, baby. It is right at the middle of the new world we're creating.
It's technocracy. We don't have to ask ultimate questions, we just have to deal with zeros and ones. It's totally rational. It's producing a cornucopia of new wealth.
And now Galernor goes over to the other side.
[00:16:40] Speaker A: He's been with us all along.
[00:16:43] Speaker D: So what's the reception been at New Haven? And in your profession, in academia, I mean, that's a serious question.
[00:16:51] Speaker B: What's going on?
I have to make a distinction between the way I've been treated personally, which is in a very courteous and collegial way by my colleagues at Yale. They're nice guys and I like them.
They're my friends. On the other hand, when I look at their intellectual behavior, what they publish, and much more important, what they tell their students, Darwinism has indeed passed beyond a scientific argument as far as they are concerned. You take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually.
They will destroy you if you challenge it. Now, I haven't been destroyed. I'm not a biologist and I don't claim to be an authority on this topic.
And a book review is not the same as a book.
It's sort of a satellite around the book.
Anyway, it remains a case that I have nothing personally to charge my colleagues with. But what I've seen in their behavior intellectually and at colleges across the board west, is nothing approaching free speech on this topic is a bitter rejection. Not just a sort of bitter, fundamental, angry, outraged, violent rejection which comes nowhere near scientific or intellectual discussion. I've seen that happen again and again. I'm a Darwinism. Don't you say a word against it or will or I don't want to hear you, period.
[00:18:22] Speaker D: Which proves that you're attacking their religion.
[00:18:24] Speaker B: In effect, I am attacking their religion. And I don't blame them for being all head up. It is a big issue for them. Unquestionably.
[00:18:32] Speaker D: Dr. Berlinski, who holds his doctorate in philosophy. I want to depart. This isn't strictly Darwin, but it's a. I'm indulging myself. This is a quotation that has struck me as compelling for a long time. But for a long time I've thought, I really want to try it on Berlinski.
Here we go. Okay, I'll try you. This is CS Lewis.
Granted that reason is prior to matter, I can understand how men should come to know a lot about the universe they live in. If, on the other hand, I swallow the scientific cosmology, and for scientific cosmology, we may as well read the Darwinian theory of evolution. If I swallow the scientific cosmology, then not only can I not fit in religion, but I cannot even fit in science.
Here we go. Here's the payoff on this. If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry and biochemistry on the meaningless flux of the Atoms.
I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than. Than the sound of the wind in the trees. Close quote.
He's onto something there isn't he isn't. The existence of. Isn't consciousness.
The first question we have to answer.
[00:19:52] Speaker A: Not mine.
[00:19:54] Speaker D: Totally wrong. Just.
[00:19:56] Speaker A: It's not even the first question I would think of asking.
Why does it seem so very compelling to you or C.S. lewis? Consciousness. Yeah, it's one of those things. It's certainly true that I'm conscious. I have my doubts about you and these two guys here. But those doubts really don't matter a whole lot. I'm prepared to welcome my friends. Automata doesn't matter to me.
[00:20:20] Speaker D: He's not onto a point or he's onto something that's just uninteresting.
[00:20:23] Speaker A: I'm not sure I understand the point. I mean, let's say.
[00:20:26] Speaker D: Does this make any sense to you?
[00:20:27] Speaker E: Makes sense to me. This is what bothered Thomas Nagel and what he's become a skeptic of, Neo Darwinism. Is that minds are real things. And if you can't give an account of where they came from or what they do that isn't itself self defeating, then you end up in a really incoherent.
[00:20:45] Speaker D: Okay, talk to Galertner to break the tie. Because his latest book was on consciousness.
[00:20:52] Speaker B: I have to agree. I am also an admirer of Nagel. And the question of consciousness is unsolved.
You can argue whether it's important or not. I think most people intuitively believe it's important. I think they're right. But the question of the origins of life and the origins of consciousness are the intellectual bookends of modern science and philosophy.
And we can't say much about either of them.
[00:21:20] Speaker A: We can't characterize either of them. And if we can't characterize them them, we're not really in a position to explain how they emerged.
That seems to me a prior commitment to be able to say what we wish to explain.
Someone says, I'm deeply puzzled about consciousness.
Everybody says that. It's a very fashionable thing. They say it in Teen Vogue, for heaven's sakes. But I would like to have a better sense of what is prompting the puzzlement I don't have that.
I can't sit in your seat when you're sitting there. So I can't experience your sensations when you're having them. All right, so what? Why is that intelligible from a scientific or a philosophical point of view as a pressing issue?
[00:22:10] Speaker B: If you say most of Your friends happen to be automata.
We'll turn you into an automata and you'll get a $50 coupon right now where you can spend in Florence. Would you accept the deal or not?
[00:22:22] Speaker A: 50 bucks in my consciousness?
[00:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah. For you becoming an automaton. Excuse me?
[00:22:27] Speaker A: No, you're foiched.
[00:22:29] Speaker D: But now you're just dickering over the price.
[00:22:31] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But that's true of all intellectual discussions. We're always talking about the price. The price seems to me very low. To be puzzled. There are lots of things that are puzzling in the world. Some of them we understand, some of them we don't.
[00:22:46] Speaker B: But before your consciousness, at least at $50.
[00:22:49] Speaker A: Yeah. $50 for my consciousness.
[00:22:51] Speaker D: At least you've established a floor.
[00:22:53] Speaker A: We can go up from there.
[00:22:54] Speaker E: I think we're all saying it's a mystery, but we're framing the mystery in different ways.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: That's exactly right. It's a puzzle. I don't even. I'm not even persuaded. It's a mystery in the sense which the structure of a natural language is.
[00:23:07] Speaker B: Whatever it is, it's valuable to you.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: To me, maybe not to you, just as yours is valuable to you. But not entirely to me.
But we have to be very skeptical about these claims of profundity because when examined, they don't always remain what they seem.
They don't always remain that.
[00:23:27] Speaker D: Gentlemen, let me name three names that all but remade modern consciousness. I think the three of you would agree with that formulation when you Hear the names.
19th and early 20th century.
Karl Marx no longer taken seriously.
A few faculty lounges in American universities.
Fundamentally, Karl Marx no longer taken seriously. Sigmund Freud.
Fascinating. A few interesting insights. But psychology has now moved so far beyond Freud that at universities across the country they're renaming the departments the departments of Psychology and Brain Sciences. We're scanning brains. We. All right. And now we have Darwin. And the three of you are taking him down too.
What does this mean for the way people think about the world? Is this.
He won't go down easily.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: No one has taken down Freud. His value doubles every decade.
[00:24:29] Speaker A: I'm with David on that.
[00:24:30] Speaker D: You are? I'm just wrong about that.
[00:24:31] Speaker A: Freud rises in my estimates.
[00:24:33] Speaker D: Oh, he does.
[00:24:33] Speaker B: The fact is that the feminists in the 1970s were outraged because. Because of something he said or didn't say in a political way. Has nothing to do with the value of his writing.
[00:24:43] Speaker D: But I'm right at two out of three. Marx and Darwin.
[00:24:46] Speaker B: Certainly. Marx and Darwin.
[00:24:49] Speaker A: Marx is kind of a windbag. Let's Agree on that kind of bastard. Personally. Yeah, he didn't bathe a whole lot.
[00:24:57] Speaker D: A windbag and a bastard.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: He certainly had no sense of style. Darwin is a different case.
[00:25:03] Speaker E: I think you're onto something to, to group them together because you've talked about how Darwinism, David talked about how Darwinism has become the foundation of a worldview. And if you look at the questions that they address, Darwin tells us where we came from, Marx has a utopian vision of the future, and Freud tells us what to do about our guilt. And between the three of these great materialistic thinkers of the 19th century and early 20th century, they form a, the basis of a kind of comprehensive materialistic worldview. They answer all the same questions that traditional Judeo Christian religion has addressed. And so it's understandable when we talk about some of the intense opposition that Darwin skeptics often face, that it's understandable when you realize that you actually, it makes sense because you're challenging a fundamental plank in the worldview of many of the scientists. Many scientists equate their worldview of scientific materialism with the practice of science itself. And when you challenge one of the thinkers that supports that worldview, you're going to get a very kind of emotive reaction. And that's often what happens.
[00:26:11] Speaker D: Last question here, and I'm going to quote David Gillaretner's essay One final Time.
Darwin now poses a final challenge. Whether biology will rise to this last one as well as it did to the first when his theory upset every apple cart remains to be seen.
How cleanly and quickly can the field get over Darwin and move on?
Striking sentence. This is one of the most important questions facing science in the 21st century. Close quote.
Is it generational?
Does a whole generation of biologists have to die before the field gets over Darwin? What's going to happen here might be.
[00:26:52] Speaker B: Generational at the very best. I mean, I think that would be a great outcome to have the old guard die.
But you know, religion is imparted more than anything else by the parents to the children.
And the young people have been brought up as little Darwinists. I mean, kids I see running around New Haven are all Darwinists anyway. The children, I mean, the students in my class are all Darwinists.
So these guys know more about it than I do. I'm not hopeful.
[00:27:26] Speaker A: Well, I think Darwin is eternal because Eternal. Eternal. The name is eternal. The idea is eternal. The belief, the commitment, they're all eternal. The theory will disappear in good riddance to a bad theory. But no matter what It's a beautiful theory, all right, it's a beautiful theory. Whatever it is, it will disappear, but whatever replaces it will be called Darwinian. No doubt about that. No matter what Christian heresy emerges in the tides of time, it's always called a Christian heresy. This will be a Darwinian heresy. But that legacy, that commemorative legacy will never disappear. It's part of the history of the subject.
Just like Newton will not disappear.
[00:28:10] Speaker D: Oh, but Newton, David Galernt. See, I'm prepared for that one because I read David Galerner's essay very carefully and of course he based on your work and your work several times as this David says, look, there's a range of physical phenomena, very big things, planets, stars. Newton isn't too good at that. Very tiny things, quantum mechanics, tiny particles. We can't, he's not too good at that. But this huge range, Newton is perfectly predictive, it fits, it comports flawlessly with 98% of human experience. And Darwin doesn't you have to go.
[00:28:51] Speaker B: Farther than planets and stars?
[00:28:53] Speaker D: Oh, I do, yeah.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: But you're.
[00:28:55] Speaker E: I think what David Berlinski's getting at is that Darwinism has filled a niche in our intellectual life. That is, you've got to give some kind of account of where all these wonderfully intricate systems we call living organisms came from. And the fundamental commitment of Darwinism is some kind of bottom up materialistic account where the molecules get more complex and form more complex molecules in cells and the cells compete to form more complex organisms. So now what we're getting is post neo Darwinian theories of evolution that are trying to provide new mechanisms that will account for the things that the Darwinian mechanism doesn't account for.
[00:29:40] Speaker D: So even you who bear the scars of abuse from Darwinists say Darwin may have been mistaken in his answers, but he was asking invaluable questions.
[00:29:48] Speaker E: He was asking invaluable questions. But I think he got it wrong. I think all Darwinians in the broad sense get it wrong. They're trying to explain something very, very complex in terms of bottom up undirected processes. And yet what we see in life, complex miniature machines, complex information processing systems, digital code, these are things that bear the hallmark of mind and they suggest rather a top down instead of a bottom up approach. So I'm sure people committed to a materialistic view of things will continue to generate bottom up explanations. But I think we're in a new day. We're looking at life in light of our own high tech digital computing technologies and realizing these systems bear all the hallmarks of design. Let's start to look at life differently. And I think looking at it from a bottom up Darwinian approach is holding science back. We're starting to make predictions based on intelligent design.
Some of our guys were the first people to predict that the non coding regions of the genome previously identified as junk by the neo Darwinians are in fact importantly functional. And so looking at life as a design system is actually yielding insights into how life works.
[00:30:57] Speaker D: It's a new day.
You'll go with that?
[00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah, sort of.
There's been big changes. Let's put it this way. I think what we have determined is that Darwin created a 19th century Local theory without looking at extreme cases that was reasonably successful for breeders for the explanation of local characteristics like beak size or the growth of wings. But he entirely failed to explain what he thought he was explaining the emergence of biological complexity on the species level or higher order levels. He wasn't able, it was a premature question to address an audience about the origin of species. He couldn't say anything about what he did not know, what he could not comprehend.
And the fact that he did not know or could not comprehend these things is simply a reflection of the fact that we do not know or cannot comprehend those things in the 21st century. So the question addressed was widely premature. In the 19th century, it's still premature. We're just learning the structure of intellectual inquiry necessary to understand something like the biological cell. And it's much harder a problem than we ever suspected.
Much harder.
[00:32:21] Speaker D: David Gillertner, last word to you. Do you concur.
[00:32:27] Speaker B: It is much harder? Absolutely. It's a fantastically difficult problem.
We'll solve it, but it's not going to be simple.
[00:32:39] Speaker D: David Glaertner, author, most recently of the Tides of Consciousness. Thank you. David Berlinsky, author of many, all three of you, author of many books, but author in this case the relevant volume is the Deniable Darwin and Other Essays. And Steve Meyer, whose book, in this case the relevant book is Darwin's Doubt. Thank you all.
[00:32:59] Speaker E: Thank you. Thank you to my friends.
[00:33:01] Speaker D: I'm Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge, the Hoover Institution and Fox Nation. Thank you.
[00:33:17] Speaker C: That was Stephen Meyer, David Berlinski and David Galernter in conversation with host Peter Robinson. We're grateful to the producers of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, a production of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
For permission to share this exchange on ID The Future.
Don't miss part one of this conversation as Meyer, Berluski and Gerlunter explain why they've given up on Darwin's brilliant and beautiful theory. Of Evolution that's available as a separate episode. And if you'd like to read or listen to Professor Galernter's essay Giving Up Darwin, we'll include links to it in the show notes for this episode. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:34:00] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.
[00:34:02] Speaker B: Com and intelligentdesign.
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