Speaker 1 00:00:05 ID the future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
Speaker 2 00:00:12 Greetings and thanks for tuning in. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today I have with me Casey Luskin, one of my favorite people to discuss his new article for Evolution News on whether intelligent design has passed the Dawkins test. Many id the future listeners will be very familiar with Casey already, but for those who are not, Casey is an associate director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute. He holds graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and the legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg, where he specialized in paleo magnetism and the early play tectonic history of South Africa. In his role at Discovery Institute, Dr. Luskin helps direct the ID 3.0 research program. He also assists and defends scientists, educators, and students who seek to freely study, research, and teach about the scientific debate over Darwin evolution and intelligent design. Casey, welcome to the show.
Speaker 3 00:01:15 It's great to be with you, Andrew. You're one of my favorite people too, so it's a lot of fun to be on the show with you here.
Speaker 2 00:01:20 Oh, thank you. And believe it or not, uh, you and I are common voices on this show, but I don't think we've actually ever interviewed one another or spoken on the show, so this is a first. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:01:30 I was thinking about that. I don't think I've ever done an interview with you. Maybe some listener will prove us wrong. Uh, but I don't recall ever doing a show with you before, so it's great to do this.
Speaker 2 00:01:40 Awesome. All right, well, uh, thanks for joining me. Let's, let's talk about this article that you've written. It's a fun piece. It's about Richard Dawkins and in particular the Dawkins test. So for the few of us out there who don't know Richard Dawkins or aren't very familiar, can you just remind us who he is and what this Dawkins test is all about?
Speaker 3 00:01:59 Sure. So Richard Dawkins is well known, I would say over the last 15 years or so for being a, a very prominent spokesperson for atheism. He wrote the God Delusion in 2006. He's written a lot of other books on atheism, but originally he was well known, frankly, for being one of the world's most famous evolutionary biologists. He wrote a book called The Selfish Gene in the 1970s where he sort of put out this idea that really was for first time really putting out the idea that genes are the basic force that drives evolution and that genes will replicate, and those genes that are best able to replicate will make more copies of themselves. And it's sort of at the genetic level. That's where evolution is being driven. And then he also wrote The Blind Watchmaker, I think that was in 1986, where he really put out, I think a, a very clear and well-written and articulate description of the evolutionary view that you can account for the complex features of life through natural selection and random mutation.
Speaker 3 00:02:57 This blind watchmaker, as he puts it, creates the complexity of life. You don't need an intelligent agent, you don't need a designer, you don't need anything other than blind evolutionary mechanisms, natural selection, random mutation. So I'll say this, Richard Dawkins is a superb science writer. He's a very enjoyable to read. He's also very ar articulate. I met him once when I was an undergraduate at uc, San Diego, and he spoke and I got to go up and I think I, I think I checked one of his books out from the library and had him sign the library copy of the Blind Watchmaker. Actually, I didn't own his book at the time, and I thought it would be cool to get the library copy signed. But anyway, I didn't keep it. I did return to the library. But anyway, Dawkins is a very famous scientist and exponent of atheism as well.
Speaker 2 00:03:40 And as you know, Dawkins is very adept at framing the right questions when it comes to predictions of evolution. And he says that congruency in the tree of life is exactly what we'd expect to see if all living things descended from a common ancestor through a Darwinian process. He considers this congruency extremely powerful evidence for evolution. So tell us about the Dawkins test, and are we seeing congruency in the genomes of living things?
Speaker 3 00:04:10 Yeah, so this Dawkins test comes out of some writings and interviews that were recently brought to my attention by Richard Dawkins. I think that one of the first times that he talked about this was from his 2009 book, the Greatest Show on Earth, where he talks about the evidence for evolution. And so we we're calling this sad Dawkins test because in that book, he puts forth a test essentially for distinguishing between evolution and intelligent design. And essentially he says that if Dar winning evolution is correct, then every gene in a group of organisms will give quote approximately the same tree of life, unquote. And he says, uh, on the other hand, if Id was correct, if intelligent is was correct, then a designer could have quote picked and chosen the best proteins for the job in each organism. He says, and in these cases, he says that genes would not all give the same tree of genetic resemblances.
Speaker 3 00:05:02 And in fact, in a 2009 interview right around the same time that he wrote the Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkin said something very similar. He said that the single most convincing fact or observation that you could point to for evolution, he's saying would be the pattern of resemblances that you see when you compare the jeans of any pair of animals you like. And then he says, you plot out at the resemblances and they form a perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. And the only alternative to it being a family tree is that the intelligent designer deliberately set out to deceive us in the most underhanded and devious manner. So Dawkins is actually saying here that if you take different genes from species and you use them to construct evolutionary trees, then they will form a quote perfect hierarchy, a perfect family tree. And apparently the alternative to finding that essentially is an intelligent agent being at work in his own words.
Speaker 3 00:05:53 And again, in a 2010 interview, he said that when you take different genes and you use them to construct evolutionary trees, he said, quote, you get the same family tree, you also get the same family tree. If you take jeans that are no longer functional, that are just vestigial, they're not doing anything. And he calls this overwhelmingly strong evidence for evolution. And he says that the, the only way that you could get out of saying that this proves evolution is true, is by saying that the intelligent designer God deliberately set out to lie to us, deliberately set out to deceive us. Those are dawkins exact words there. So it's a simple test. Again, he's setting up two competing predictions, one for evolution and one for intelligent design. He says that evolution predicts perfect congruency between different representations of the tree of life. And he says, this evidence is so powerful, he believes that it proves evolution is true.
Speaker 3 00:06:43 On the other hand, he gives sort of incongruency or conflicts between different gene-based trees of life as a prediction of the alternative to evolution, as he says, uh, namely he that's intelligent design. So the question then is, well, what does the data show? And I think if you follow the literature on this topic, you'll become immediately aware that incongruency conflicts between evolutionary trees is extremely common. In fact, it was well known even in 2009 when Dawkins made this quote unquote prediction of evolution. This test between evolution and intelligence design is what it was well known even then that conflicts between evolutionary trees were extremely common. But I, I don't know if he wasn't aware of this or I don't know if he actually, you know, this is what he thinks evolution should predict. So he was sort of just honestly saying this is what evolution should predict. But I can tell you if you follow the literature, you know that his prediction does not come true when you look at the data.
Speaker 2 00:07:43 Right. And your article actually includes several quotes from actual papers about the incongruence that is found in the phylogenetic trees. I thought the language in them was very revealing. Actually, one of my favorites comes from a 2021 paper in current biology. They said this, the continued use of the tree of life for classification is thus as much a reflection of its practical convenience and historical and cultural inertia as it is a commitment to natural classification. So what do you make of that? And do you have other such quotes, uh, that you found in the literature that were as eye-opening?
Speaker 3 00:08:18 Yeah, so this is an interesting paper that sort of re a review paper that ultimately I think comes down sort of decisively in an agnostic position about whether there is a tree of life. And it goes through a review of the, the different viewpoints within evolutionary biology. But it, it very strongly says, look, there are a lot of evolutionary biologists, there's a lot of data that conflicts with this idea that there's a grand tree of life. And the problem is that you do get conflicting trees and it's difficult to reconcile them into one sort of grand tree of life. And so what they're saying at this point, as you just quoted it, is essentially that for many people, the use of a tree to describe the relationships between organisms is simply a result of this sort of history of Darwinian thinking that we have in biology.
Speaker 3 00:09:02 That there ought to be a tree, and they call it cultural or historical inertia as you quoted. It's not necessarily coming straight outta the data, it's the result of just a quirk of history that we've been thinking and living in the Darwinian way of approaching biology. And so we continue to use these evolutionary trees, but a lot of people think that actually trees of life are not the best way to describe the relationships between organisms. And there are certainly many other quotes from papers and similar things that say very similar comments. I wrote a blog post about this that I'm sure will link to from the podcast description on evolution news. And I quoted a, a book titled Phylogenetics in the Genomic Era, which says that quote, conflicting phylogenetics single between genes is commonplace or a paper from. And that was a, a 2021 book, uh, another 2021 paper and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the U s A says Phenomic conflict, where gene trees disagree about species tree resolution is common across genomes and throughout the tree of life.
Speaker 3 00:10:04 And I go through many other similar quotes. I tried to quote just recent papers, you know, from maybe say the last 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years to show that this is not something that was just, you know, discovered in the 1990s or the two thousands, finding these gene conflicts between trees. Although that did happen, in fact, when we sort of had the phylogenetic, or I should say the genomics revolution in the 1990s and the two thousands, when we finally started to sequence the genes of all these different organisms, it immediately became apparent that all this genetic data that we were essentially discovering did not fit into a nice neat Darwinian evolutionary tree of life. And there was a lot of conflicts between different trees. But I think one interesting commentary about the, the prevalence of these conflicts between, uh, trees of life comes from a lecture that was given by a newly inaugurated professor of evolutionary genomics at Queen Mary University of London named Richard Bugs.
Speaker 3 00:11:03 And someone sent me a YouTube, uh, lecture, uh, that he gave recently when he was inaugurated as a professor. And he talked about this actual test and he said, you know, Dawkin says that every gene delivers approximately the same tree of life. And then this is what Bugs says. He says, many of you who work like me with sequenced data every day probably winced a little bit when you heard me read that out because you know, it is actually not the case. And he goes through some of his own research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution in other papers where basically you just find mass amounts of conflict between different genes, essentially the problem is that one gene will give you one version of the Tree of life and another gene gives you a very different and conflicting version of the Tree of life. And this definitely shows that that dawkins test for evolution is failing. I also
Speaker 2 00:11:52 Noticed another quote that I think reveals a lot about the issue, and it was from that current biology 2021 paper, it said, phylogenetic methods designed to build a tree will do so whether it is the best fit for the underlying data or not. And I thought that was quite revealing too.
Speaker 3 00:12:09 That's a great point. And that's actually, there's quite a few papers over the years that have made comments like that. And I think I should probably give credit to our friend and colleague Paul Nelson, who is just a, a literature hound. And he has dug up quite a few quotes over the years that basically say that, look, the reason why you get a phylogenetic evolutionary tree when you compare genetic data for different species is because you're using an algorithm, a computer program that is designed to give you an evolutionary tree. Okay? So it could be as simple as, you know, as they say in computer programming, garbage in garbage out. You create a program that's designed to take a data set and give you a tree. It's going to give you a tree, even if a tree is not a great description of the data, but you can make a program that will give you a tree regardless of what the data says. And that's really what a lot of these programs are designed to do.
Speaker 2 00:12:58 Okay. Now I saw the term phylogenomics in your article. Can you describe what that is? Is that, is that a way of them trying to explain this disparity between what they think they'll see and what they are seeing?
Speaker 3 00:13:11 Well, uh, sort of, but let's, let's take it back a little bit. I mean, phylogenomics, strictly speaking is just the use of large amounts of genomic data interpreted through an evolutionary perspective to try to understand the relationships of organisms. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with doing that. You're allowed to make a model. You can, you want to use an evolutionary model to interpret the data, that's fine. Another thing that follow genomics does is it tries to predict gene function by comparing the function of a newly discovered gene to the function of genes with similar sequences in other species. So I think there's nothing wrong with doing that. I mean, actually from a, from an intelligent design perspective, you might assume that there are similar genes being reused in different species. So if you find a gene, uh, in some newly discovered, you know, newly sequenced genome, and you wanna know what it does well, you can compare it sequenced to similar genes in other species that have already been well studied where you already know their functions.
Speaker 3 00:14:06 And you can say, we can therefore infer that this newly discovered gene that has a similar sequence to this gene we already know a lot about it probably does a similar function. And that's a fair, um, I think a fair inference to make, whether you're coming from an evolutionary perspective or an intelligent design perspective. Because even from a design perspective, you might assume that a designer will reuse functional parts that work in different organisms and that that will, you know, you can compare organisms and their traits and and see common function. So I don't have a a problem with that at all. I think that the real story behind Phylogenomics, uh, and the way it's used in terms of building evolutionary trees is that it first starts off with this just fundamental assumption that genomes are the result of strictly evolutionary processes. And that by comparing genomic data at a large scale, you can sort of filter out all the noise and get to the true signal of evolutionary relationships.
Speaker 3 00:14:59 And again, this will give you a tree because that's what the method is designed to do. It's designed to give you a tree. The problem though is that there is a lot of noise, so to speak, and by noise I mean genetic data, genomic data that might not fit your preferred evolutionary tree or might conflict with the evolutionary tree that you know you're coming up with as your consensus tree. So I think that what's happening is that a lot of that genetic noise, so to speak, is telling you something interesting about the origin of that species that might not fit your preferred evolutionary story. So I would say that phylogenomics can be useful in predicting the function of newly discovered genes because we can do that assuming evolution or assuming intelligent is on either, either way. But when used to reconstruct evolutionary history, phylogenomics can also become an exercise in assuming evolution so much that you're just smoothing the data so that you build a phy and you really lose any ability to test whether common ancestry is true or whether it's a good explanation of the data set that you're looking at.
Speaker 3 00:16:03 So it's really an exercise like the ultimate exercise and assuming evolution is true and smoothing your data so that you smooth out any noise that might not fit an evolutionary tree. And of course the assumption then is the tree that you're left with is the true tree. And if common dissent is true, if dissent with modification and evolutionary mechanisms are all that have shaped living organisms, then okay, fine, use that method. I don't have a problem with, with, you know, testing a model within its own assumptions, but it's certainly not, it's certainly not testing whether that model is true. Um, it's basically assuming evolutionary and common ancestry to be true. And this gives you license to smooth over inc any incongruency in your dataset. So I don't, I don't think it's a very good method if we actually wanna test common ancestry.
Speaker 2 00:16:48 Sure. Well thanks for explaining that. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3 00:16:51 You know, I should, I should add one thing, Andrew, before we move on, and that is that intelligent design, as I'm sure our listeners know, is not necessarily incompatible with common ancestry. I mean, we have plenty of leading folks in the ID community who are very supportive of common ancestry. And so I don't think that, uh, dawkins, uh, test is necessarily saying whether intelligent design is true at the macro scale. He's probably right that perfect congruency between these evolutionary trees is not best explained by intelligent design if it's perfectly congruent. But ideas of scientific theory doesn't claim that everything must be the result of design or detectable design, at least after all the most that perfect phylogenetic congruency would demonstrate as common ancestry. And common ancestry is, uh, compatible with intelligent design, uh, because the original design could have been located in the common ancestor, right?
Speaker 3 00:17:42 So I think d Dawkins would be wrong to claim however, that any degree of tree-like distribution of trees refutes intelligent design when he says, you know, if you find any tree that somehow that can never be compatible with a designer, that's not true at all. And that's because I'll try to explain this in a way that makes sense, but design structures are loaded with functions, okay? And functional components often depend on and interact with other functional components in logically necessary ways. And this can lead to non-random correlations and hierarchical distributions of traits. So in other words, design even, you know, non-com descent based design can give you some tree-like structure in a data set. What am I talking about here? Okay, well, let's say that you find a shirt and you find a shirt with buttons in it. Well, if you find buttons on a shirt, you're almost always going to find button holes.
Speaker 3 00:18:34 So you're gonna have a correlation between traits, you find buttons on a shirt, you're also gonna find button holes. Or when you find wheels on a vehicle, you're probably almost always going to find an axle two. So these correlations can lead to the kind of tree-like distribution of traits that is, you know, essentially what Dawkins is saying. We ought to find if evolution is true. And there are undoubtedly many similar kind of analogous correlations in biology, uh, which will also lead to some tree-like structure in a data set, even if organisms were designed. So what again, what am I talking about? Well, let's say we're talking about, I don't know, genes for noses and mammals. Those will probably also be found with genes for nose hairs. Okay, so you find that these traits correlate, well, that's gonna give you some degree of tree-like data. Uh, genes for toes in, uh, terrestrial tetrapods, uh, are probably going to correlate with jeans for toenails, right?
Speaker 3 00:19:28 You have toes, you're probably gonna have toenails. So again, we have correlations here. And so intelligent agents, when they design things, they might reuse parts that work in different organisms, and those parts might often go together for functional reasons. And that's gonna give you some degree as a nested hierarchy. But here's the catch, intelligent agents are not compelled to always distribute all traits according to a nested hierarchy. And so this is where you can get similar parts being used in widely divergent types of organisms. And I think this is actually what we see in the real world world of biology is we, we do see that traits are being reused. There is some degree of tree-like structure in the data sets, but there's also a lot of genomic data that does not fit a tree, which is exactly what we would expect from a design paradigm where, where a designer will reuse functional parts that work in different designs. There may be some correlations where they, you know, it just happens to lead to a tree-like structure. And it does, doesn't always have to be a tree, though. You may sometimes be reusing parts that work in a nont tree-like manner. And that's exactly what we see when we look at the distribution of traits across organism.
Speaker 2 00:20:38 Okay. So what can you tell us about lateral gene transfer? This is a new evolutionary force that is being postulated to help explain that incongruence in the trees.
Speaker 3 00:20:49 Okay. So lateral gene transfer also sometimes called horizontal gene transfer, is a process by which microorganisms can obtain genes through mechanisms other than inheritance from a parent. Okay? So essentially instead of getting all of your genetic information from your parent, some of your genetic information might come from your neighbors. You're actually swapping DNA with your neighbors, and that is where you're getting some of your genetic information in your genome. And processes like horizontal gene transfer, lateral gene transfer, they have been observed in nature. An example, we can observe that it can spread beneficial traits like antibiotic resistance between bacteria. Uh, but evolutionary biologists have tried to extrapolate this process claiming that it also applies to much more complex organisms like eukaryotes, like, you know, swapping genes between human beings in a fungus or between, uh, different species of plants. And what they often will do, and I can cite from the literature, they actually will specifically explicitly admit this, that they will say, well, look, when we find gene data that does not fit our evolutionary tree, that right there is evidence for lateral gene transfer being at work.
Speaker 3 00:22:00 So rather than conflicts between evolutionary trees being evidence that maybe something is wrong with the common ancestry model, they will take that as evidence for sort of this other process of horizontal gene transfer that somehow caused widely diverse types of organisms to swap d n a with each other. So you'll get genes appearing in places that you would never expect if common ancestry was true. So, you know, the way I like to analogize this is to the old geocentric model of the solar system, which of course, you know, everybody now knows that it's false, that the earth is not the center of the solar system. The sun is the center of the solar system and the earth goes around the sun. But, you know, maybe 500, 600 years ago, early astronomers thought that the earth was the center of the solar system, and they built, they built, uh, cosmological models based upon that, that view.
Speaker 3 00:22:50 And sometimes the data wouldn't fit that model. Sometimes they would've be observing the motions of the planets, and suddenly the planets would go backwards for a few days and they would call this an epicycle. Okay, why did the planets not fit this geocentric model of the solar system? Well, it was an epicycle. And what's an epicycle? Well, it's just data that doesn't fit your model, okay? And they had an explanation for it. It was an epicycle, you know, for some reason, whatever, the planets didn't go in the right direction for a couple days and it didn't work. So what is going on right now with common ancestry and typical phyletic methods of reconstructing trees is sometimes it works. I mean, sometimes you can get data that fits a tree, but very frequently, and again, go through the quotes in my article, the quotes we've discussed here very frequently, you get genetic data that does not fit the predictions of common ancestry.
Speaker 3 00:23:39 You get similarities between and differences between organisms appearing in places that are not predicted by common ancestry. So what do they do? They invoke their epicycles and they've got all kinds of epicycles. I mean, horizontal gene transfer is one. You've got differing rates of evolution, you've got convergent evolution, you've got incomplete lineage sorting and all these different mechanisms which way they will invoke to explain why the data did not fit a their expected evolutionary tree. And look, I'm not necessarily saying that you're, you're not allowed to invoke epicycles or auxiliary hypotheses to explain or explain away data that isn't fitting your model as scientists do this all the time. But I think we do have to look at what's really going on with common ancestry now is that we have a theory that is essentially in crisis. You've got all this data that conflicts with the predictions of common ancestry so that you have to invoke all of these secondary hypotheses, these epicycles, so to speak, to explain why the data, why this is happening, and why common ancestry is not false despite all the data that it did not predict very well. So I think this puts the Dawkins test in a very difficult and precarious position because so much evidence is basically failing his test.
Speaker 2 00:24:50 Okay, so we should welcome these proposals and these attempts by scientists to, uh, understand the data, but we also expect that honesty, right? We need, we need honest answers to what they're seeing.
Speaker 3 00:25:02 Yeah, and I think that there are quite a few evolutionary biologists today who would say that, you know what? They're not sure if a tree is the best description of the history of life. Some people have even suggested that there may have been multiple origins of life. Many people are on the cusp of questioning common ancestry at certain levels or at certain degrees. Um, I'm not saying it's fully being rejected, and certainly many evolutionary biologists fully still are committed to common ancestry, but I think that there's an awareness growing that it's a theory that's in crisis.
Speaker 2 00:25:31 Huh. Very interesting. Well, do you expect Dawkins to come clean on his test? I mean, would it look good for him to do so? He's been cherishing these uh, ideas for a long time. Can we seriously expect that he would go back on it now?
Speaker 3 00:25:44 You know, I, I can't predict exactly what Richard Dawkins is going to do. I'm not a mind reader. I think that he is obviously been very strongly committed to evolution for his whole life. I believe he's now in his eighties, if I'm not mistaken. So I don't know if he's prepared to, you know, question some of these very cherished worldviews and, and scientific ideas that he's held for most of his life. My hope that he's open to questioning these ideas, that's what science is supposed to do. It's supposed to be willing to say, look, the, the data is not fitting my model, so I need to rethink my model. And I, there's a lot of evolutionary biologists today who are rethinking these questions, and some of this is in some of the papers that I cited in the blog posts that we put up. So, so yeah, I would, I hope, uh, professor Dawkins will do that. If not, I know that a lot of younger scientists are willing to question this. Just this last week I went through and admitted our summer seminar, 2023 attendees, and we have quite a few biology PhDs who are young scientists up and coming, who are very willing to question the reigning paradigm. I'm really excited about that. And it's really encouraging to see scientists who are willing to think outside the box and ask hard questions. So I, if Dawkins is not willing to do it, I know there are other biologists who are.
Speaker 2 00:26:58 Okay, well, Casey, that's about all the time we have, but I want to thank you for talking about this issue. I think your article's great, and I hope Richard Dawkins does come and, uh, admit some, some of the things that he's been talking about and just share that honesty. This is his own litmus test for intelligent design, and we want him to, to come clean.
Speaker 3 00:27:17 Well, thanks a lot, Andrew. Appreciate the great questions.
Speaker 2 00:27:20 Absolutely. Well, listeners, you can find
[email protected] or just dive into our extensive archive of shows wherever you get your podcasts. For ID the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott, and that was Casey Luskin. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 00:27:36 Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org. This program is Copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its Center for Science and Culture.
