[00:00:05] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent Design.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Today, Philosopher of science and bestselling author Stephen Meyer invites us to join him for an intimate conversation with one of his dearest friends and longest standing colleagues, Dr. David Berlinski. The occasion for the exchange was a recent Insiders Briefing held in Cambridge, England.
Dr. Berlinski is a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, and the Universite de Paris. He is author of numerous books, including A Tour of the Calculus, the Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's Gift, the Deniable Darwin, and Signs After Babel.
In this first half of the conversation, Meyer begins by recounting a dinner meeting he had with Berlinski in 2004. That wasn't long after Richard Sternberg had been hounded out of his job at the Smithsonian Institution for daring to publish a paper by Meyer supportive of Intelligent Design. Meyer and Berlinski had some doubts about the momentum of the ID movement, but by the end of the evening, Berlinski had managed to encourage Meyer that the future indeed looked bright at Meyer's beckoning. Berlinski also walks us through the harrowing story of how his parents survived the Nazi threat during World War II and immigrated to New York, where Berlinski was born and grew up. He shares how he learned mathematics and when he began to take interest in the mathematical challenges to evolutionary theory. When he finally got around to reading on the Origin of Species in college, he was underwhelmed, calling the book Long Winded, digressive, and unpersuasive.
And he wasn't alone. Respected thinkers like MIT's Murray Eden were also asking hard questions about Darwin's theory.
Let's hand over the MIC now to Dr. Stephen Meyer as he welcomes his friend and colleague, Dr. David Berlinski.
[00:02:18] Speaker C: It's my pleasure to introduce one of my dearest friends and longest standing colleagues and to, in a sense to invite you all into the kind of conversation that he and I often have.
There's a lot that goes on out front in the discussion of these deep issues that we've been considering. And there's a lot of conversations behind the scenes about strategy, about what we think is really going on, about what's going on in the world. And I deeply enjoy and have long enjoyed my conversations with David. Sometimes they're late at night because of the time difference, but we're in always, but today we're in the same time zone. And David, as I understand it.
Unusually, you got seven hours of sleep last night.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Unbelievable. Although I'm whipped by jet lag coming.
[00:03:12] Speaker C: Over from Paris with the one hour time difference.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: Oh, it's a killer.
[00:03:20] Speaker C: Well, I thought we might start our conversation. I kind of want to. David has a fascinating story, and what I really want, what I'm most excited about doing this morning, is sharing not only his life story, but something of his life's work and giving some snapshots of that.
I've long admired his writing. He's incomparable, many people have said. Also incorrigible, some people have said. But, David, I thought we might start the story in the middle and then double back to your origin story.
You and I had a meeting in 2004 that we both look back on as being very seminal. And I wonder if you could share what you remember of that meeting.
[00:04:07] Speaker A: Sure. I mean, we were both in Washington, dc. I can't quite remember why we were in Washington, dc. My parents lived there. Maybe that's why I was there. And we got together at a French restaurant. It's all I remember. Dark, looming, tenebris, French restaurant. And we spent about three hours talking about the past and possible routes to the future. It was kind of a low point psychologically, in a corporate psychological sense. Neither of us really had the feeling that there was a considerable amount of momentum behind the movement. We weren't sure which way to go. We really weren't sure of achieving any kind of notable success. It was kind of a pivotal moment. I mean, everybody has these kinds of moments. This was a corporate, social, psychological pivotal moment. And from that moment on, we both assured one another the future was, in fact, incandescent. It was bright, it was rosy, and it would succeed. And it all came true. And that was so. What was so remarkable about that? That moment? Dark winter moment in 2004.
It was like a parabolic curve that finally reaches the axis and begins ascending all over again.
[00:05:20] Speaker C: And as I recall, it was soon after the Richard Sternberg affair, if you will, which is more the. Sometimes it was referred infamously as the Meyer paper. It was the paper that he accepted, maybe.
[00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember the affair, but I didn't realize it was so close.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: It was right after that, and he had gotten really badly beaten up by that. I think that's probably why we were feeling a little down. I mean, it was a breakthrough to get a paper in that. In that peer review journal. And we'll tell a little bit more about that story because it also involves a breakthrough that Doug Axe had The same year. But we were feeling down nevertheless because though we'd had a couple of key breakthroughs, we were.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: I can't quite remember how the discussion went. I do remember we were both kind of moaning and groaning and accelerating the moaning and groaning in each other until we reached the axis and began moving upward and said, you know, there's really no reason that the impediments we imagine to this kind of scientific program are real. They can be vanquished, they can be eliminated. And to be perfectly honest, it's now 2024. I'm just astonished by how right I was.
[00:06:33] Speaker C: There was a memorable phrase from the dinner that I took away, which was, David, in a way, sort of was almost a commissioning. He said, discovery Institute needs to be and can be the preeminent heterodox scientific think tank in the world.
[00:06:48] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that.
[00:06:49] Speaker C: And that's been a kind of guiding light for us.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: I think it's important. I think that's an entirely feasible goal. I mean, look, we all know there's certain kinds of goals that are unreachable. It's pointless to say we're going to unify general relativity and quantum anything like that. String theory. We're not going to finish off string theory, because no one is, because these are really inaccessible goals. But it's the essence of political wisdom, of which I have none. And Steve has quite a bit to fix on goals that are difficult, imponderable, but not inaccessible. I think that's exactly what's taking place right now. Not inaccessible.
[00:07:26] Speaker C: Well, that's great. Let's double back now to the beginning of your family story, because it's something that has.
It just seized me.
Your parents were very accomplished musicians.
[00:07:39] Speaker A: They were from Leipzig in Germany. They were born in Germany. They were native German speakers. They had educated in Germany. They went through the entirely traditional German musical training, which is a ferocious kind of musical training. Both my father and my mother told me that from the age of 5, 5 or 6, they practiced the piano 10 hours a day, every day until the age of 15 or 16 when they began performing. And not only that, they went through a very, very elaborate training in musical theory, harmony, four pound harmony. There were expert contrapuntalists, and my father was a student of a student of a student. I mean, endless lineage of Bach himself. So this is a very august, distinguished tradition. And they both look forward, they did look forward to becoming classical German musicians until the rise of Nazism, which made that impossible. And in 1932, my father could see the handwriting on the Wall because he was very active even as a young man in the anti Hitler, anti Nazi movement. He saw Hitler many, many times. And he told me, one look at Hitler's face told him, don't stay in Germany. Don't stay in Germany. There's nothing good.
And he's.
[00:09:00] Speaker C: As I recall, there's quite an extraordinary story about how they actually were able to get out of.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: They fled Germany by taking a vacation boat in the North Sea filled with SS men. It was a vacation for the ss and they were on board. They made their way ultimately to Paris on a student visa. And they lived in Paris, attending the French musical conservatory from 1932 to 1941. In 1939, my father joined the Foreign Legion because in France, if you join the Foreign Legion and you spend five years in the Legion, when you get out, you and your spouse are entitled to French citizenship. And they thought. My mother and my father, they thought French citizenship because of the massiveness of the French army was the only thing that was going to protect them from. The Nazis were rampaging in Europe, already had conquered Poland. And unfortunately, the French lost the battle. And my father was demobilized from the Foreign Legion. And then every right to live in France was withdrawn from both my parents.
My parents fled on foot to Marseilles.
And in Marseille, they made contact with an underground organization headed by Varian Fry, whose name may mean something to people here, who provided them with the necessary papers. To leave France in 1941, you needed an exit permit to leave France. You needed an entry permit to enter Spain. You needed an exit permit to leave Spain. Entry permit to enter Portugal. An exit permit to leave Portugal. That's where the ship left from. The Marquis de Camille left from Portugal, not France. And then you needed a US Visa. All fiendishly difficult to obtain. It took them nine months to obtain the necessary documents during the entire period.
[00:10:58] Speaker C: Is this with the help of Arian Fry. He's a rather famous figure. He was connected to Eleanor Roosevelt, I believe.
[00:11:03] Speaker A: Yeah, he was appointed by Eleanor Roosevelt, asked by Eleanor Roosevelt to intercede with a certain number of refugees. This was not an official refugee program.
It was bitterly unfair that they selected the people they thought would be of most benefit to the United States. People like Hannah Arendt, for example, and.
[00:11:22] Speaker C: Many highly educated or accomplished Jewish scientists, musicians, artists and the like. And your parents were among those that they.
[00:11:29] Speaker A: Yeah, but the massive Jews perished. There was 75,000 French Jews that did not escape. And most of them were exactly like my parents. They had come from Germany or somewhere else in the east, they did not have French citizenship. That was the crucial ingredient, having French citizenship. The French were scrupulous about protecting their own citizens, Jews or not. They refused to hand over French Jewish citizens to the Gestapo. But if you didn't have citizenship, temp, you were gone. 75,000 dead at Auschwitz. And that story was repeated many times. Many, many times. And growing up in New York, I really grew up in the inward neighborhood of New York, northern tip of Manhattan. It was overwhelmingly German speaking, German, Jewish speaking. My physician was German speaking. The dentist was German speaking. All the people, the grocers were all German speaking. The grocer actually had emigrated to the United States before the First World War. And the delicatessen was a pre. Imperial. An imperial German delicatessen. Probably impossible to find the same thing. It was just filled with what in Germany it's called Schweinert, that is pig food.
It all seemed very natural to me, looking back on it. I mean, the cardiologist in the audience would have an immediate convulsion thinking of the kinds of foods I ate as a child.
[00:12:51] Speaker C: So, David, so, 41, your family has fled on foot to Marseille. Where are you at this time?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: I was born in February 1942. My parents arrived in the United States two months earlier. So you were Spanish conceptual. I like to think of a very glamorous Spanish conceptual.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: It's just an extraordinary story. So you are. You basically make this transatlantic crossing in utero. When you're born in the United States.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: Don'T forget one of the things. This was in 1941. This was the last passenger ship to leave Europe.
And it took six weeks to cross the Atlantic because the entire trip had to be done zigzagging across the Atlantic to avoid American submarines, English submarines, and German submarines, all of which were menacing. It was an endless trip. But my father told me that after real severe malnutrition, the Foreign Legion and then Marseilles, there was no food in Marseille. They had no money.
The ship was a luxury liner, was stuffed with food. And they said for the six weeks in the face of death, they did nothing but eat.
[00:14:11] Speaker C: Draw dirt. And though your family escaped, many members of the extended family did not.
[00:14:18] Speaker A: My mother's father perished.
He was left in Leipzig because he refused to leave his mistress. German Christian mistress. He refused to leave her. And 1943, the street they lived on was called Rosenthaleschwasser, the Street of Roses. And the Gestapo picked him up. We have the entire transit records. Shipped them to Riesenstadt and from there to Auschwitz. He was immediately killed in Auschwitz in 1943. We have all the documents, but my father's family lived on the Polish side of that divide. And the entire family was destroyed. Entire family. We're talking about 81 people.
[00:15:01] Speaker C: As I recall. Was it one of your father's. Was it father's brother who had made it to England and who.
[00:15:06] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:15:07] Speaker C: He at one point gave. Got word to you that it was to your father it was time to get out.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, my father's brother was a very successful English businessman. I don't know exactly what affairs he was involved in. Very successful. And at a crucial moment, he sent a telegram to my father saying, get out, get out now.
There was just sheer luck that they were able to get out because so many people couldn't get out the exact time my parents were crossing the Pyrenees. The writer Walter Benjamin was crossing the Pyrenees on foot, and he committed suicide because he couldn't get an entry visa into Spain.
These are stories. There are endless stories like this. Endless stories. I think people who have not grown up in this environment have no idea. Everybody knows about the central catastrophe of the Second World War, but not everyone understands the cultural catastrophe. Not only the catastrophe of those who are forced into exile and unable to flourish, like virtually all of the writers, but the cultural catastrophe that happened to Germany itself.
Both victim and victimizers were destroyed by Nazism. Both were destroyed. There is no such thing as Germany today. There's a state called Germany. That's it. Where they speak something like German. That's it. That's all that remains.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: But the rich culture that exists.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: Gone. War, it's just gone.
[00:16:27] Speaker C: Yeah.
Well, let's move on to the early part of your life then, because you were born in the United States, February 5, 1942.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:37] Speaker C: And then eventually you end up going to.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: Is it.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Was it the Bronx Science. Is that where your high school?
[00:16:44] Speaker A: I went to elementary School. P.S. 52, P.S. 81. 98, something like that. And at the time, Bronx Science was kind of a beacon on a distant hill. Every parent wanted their son or daughter to go either to Bronx Science or another comparable school called Stuyvesant because they were supposed to be academically excellent. There was a test you had to take in the eighth grade. I still went through eighth grade. Not a junior high school system. I took the test in the eighth grade. I got in, and all the kids around me got in. And I spent four years at Bronx Science. It was theoretically supposed to be a school that stressed science, science and mathematics. In fact, what it did was it got a lot of bright, talented kids together and left them alone. Pretty much alone. That's what it was, except for one unforgettable course in Euclidean geometry taught by Mrs. Mason. I can't remember a thing about Bronx High School science, except I learned to smoke there, and that was a valuable acquisition.
[00:17:48] Speaker C: Some distinguished graduates of Bronx Science, Shelly.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Glashau, Steven Weinberg, Nobel laureates. They were two years before me or three years before me. It's got a lot of very good people coming out of there, but no thanks, really, to Bronx Science.
It's one of these curious things. When you get a group of hungry, bright young kids.
Generally they do okay. Generally. Not always, but generally.
[00:18:16] Speaker C: So the environment itself was helpful. So then you went on and did your undergraduate at Columbia and then PhD at Princeton, and your PhD was in philosophy. Many people see you mentally, as a.
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Mathematician, it was philosophy, logic. But when I got to Princeton, I had never taken a math course at Columbia. I studied medieval history at Columbia. That and playing pool. Mainly playing pool.
But when I left Princeton, these were the old days. Whenever jobs were like lilies of the field, you could just pick them. You have Princeton PhD, you could go wherever you want. Those days are long gone.
I took a professorship at Stanford, which was at that time, this was 1966.
A sleepy university in a valley filled with fruit trees. It was certainly not the technological powerhouse it is today. And I became very close friends with a mathematician, a Berkeley graduate whose subject was mathematical logic. We enjoyed each other's company immensely and we decided to collaborate. And that's how I learned mathematics, actually doing it. I shouldn't confess that, but that's really the truth.
[00:19:29] Speaker C: So, yeah, that's interesting how many people have established themselves in a subject that they actually didn't formally study. We would talk a little bit about Francis Crick and how he became the biologist, but he didn't have a PhD when he made the DNA discovery, and he was working in physics besides. Nothing to do with biology.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: But I don't know if today, in 2024, it would be quite as easy, say, to go into theoretical physics without a real background in theory. I mean, the subject has become very ornate, very, very bureaucratized.
It's like a multistory building with a single staircase. If you don't go up that staircase, you're not going to get to an upper floor.
Mathematics is still a little bit more open. Every now and then I hear of a complete amateur doing something very significant in mathematics. And every now and then I read about someone in a ninth Rate at school who's doing nothing but teaching, coming up with an astonishing discovery. The last one was a guy named Zhang Z H A N G, a number theorist. And he was biebering away in New Hampshire with just an obscene teaching schedule. 900 hours of teaching a week. And he said he was passionately devoted to mathematics. In his spare time, he kept working on this problem. It's a fairly complicated problem in number theory. It's not a trivial problem. And he solved it. And he sent it off to the premier journal. And they said, unbelievable, we finally have a resolution of this problem. Where are you from?
Nassau Community College in New Hampshire.
But it was true. Needless to say, he's now at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He got out of the community college.
[00:21:11] Speaker C: Read the story.
[00:21:13] Speaker A: It does happen.
[00:21:14] Speaker C: That's fantastic. Well, let's talk about your teaching career. So you went to Stanford, right? And how did that go? And where did you go next? And what was teaching like?
[00:21:23] Speaker A: Well, it was a very sleepy place in which no one was expected to work at anything beside their real estate portfolio.
I mean, you go to the faculty lunchroom. Everyone was talking about hot properties, renovation.
Nobody, as far as I could tell, outside the math department, nobody was talking about teaching, academic work, publishing. Publishing just struck people as unusual. After three years, I decided I really didn't want to spend my life cruising up and down the Bayshore Freeway. I lived in San Francisco at the time. My father told me I was out of my mind. They offered me tenure at Stanford. I turned them down. He said, you're not my son.
That's all he had to say. And I joined McKinsey & Company, a management consultant firm in New York. And I worked there for a year on a variety of management. I knew fairly quickly that I was not designed by.
[00:22:19] Speaker C: For the corporate world, the deity to.
[00:22:22] Speaker A: Become a management consultant. First, because I knew absolutely nothing about management. Second, because I couldn't even manage my own life.
And third, because when I was involved in a corporate project, I found it horribly boring.
I don't know whether these are to my credit or not, but after a year I said, I gotta get out of here. And they were very good about them. You know, we made a mistake in you, you made a mistake in us. No hard feelings.
And after that, where did I go?
[00:22:53] Speaker C: A little more teaching?
[00:22:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Rutgers. I joined the faculty at Rutgers. Rutgers in Newark. They were nice enough, nice enough kids, but, you know, they viewed my particular philosophical concerns with just astonishment that anyone could think of spending any time on these issues.
And After Rutgers? Oh, yeah. I spent a year at the Department of Biology at Columbia as a postdoc, and another year in the Department of Mathematics as a postdoc. Those were great years.
[00:23:23] Speaker C: So eventually you connect with someone named Schutz.
[00:23:28] Speaker A: Oh, that was. I published A book in 1974 called On Systems Analysis, on the Limitations of Certain Mathematical Methods and biological, social and political Sciences. And I don't know why I sent it to Noam Chomsky at mit.
And Noam Chomsky, he was very, very, very nice and charitable and generous. He wrote back saying, they're very interesting, but the person you really should meet is Marco Schutzenberger.
[00:23:59] Speaker C: That's how you met Marco Schutzenberger. Through Noam Chomsky.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: Through Noam Chomsky. And he said, I'll write a letter of introduction if you like. And he did.
[00:24:07] Speaker C: So by 74, you were writing books on mathematics.
[00:24:10] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:24:11] Speaker C: Even though that hadn't been your field, but you picked it up when you were complete. Yeah.
[00:24:15] Speaker A: And Schutzhund Berger in Paris wrote a wonderful letter back, inviting me to come to Paris to talk for the summer.
So I went out to Paris, and I liked Schustenberger immensely. He was a very, very distinguished French mathematician, but he himself got into mathematics exactly the way I did. He was trained as a psychiatrist. He had a medical degree. He never had a mathematical degree. And he got very interested in statistical questions with respect to medicine. He spent a year at Harvard in the Department of Public Health, Department of Medicine, Public Health and something like that, and he invited me to Paris. He was then a man in his, I think, in his 40s, 50s. I can't remember exactly how old, but unbelievably charming, just incredibly charming and incredibly alive. Vivacious, loquacious. He was unstoppable in conversation, which is a good thing and a bad thing. Unstoppable in the sense that his conversation was rich, interesting, full of French culture. He had a profound memory, a profound gift for French poetry, which he would recite aloud, was beautiful. Also a profound gift for reciting aloud English poetry, which was just monstrous, hilarious.
He tried to recite the waistline for me in English. Just incomprehensible.
But Schutzenberger said we should write a book together. I said, okay. And he arranged a fellowship for me at the University of Paris in Jersey. And when I had finished up whatever I was doing, I spent a year trying to write a book with Schwarzenberger. Of course, the book never went anywhere because, I mean, he had the attention span of a Flea.
He would start one subject and then 10 seconds later would think of an interesting. And it was an interesting thought.
I was fascinated by the conversation. But after four hours, I looked at my notebook. There was nothing.
And we spent the whole year like that, just having a great time.
[00:26:20] Speaker C: It's the academic world at its best, right?
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Oh, at its finest.
[00:26:25] Speaker C: Well, you're filling in background for.
[00:26:27] Speaker A: Excuse me, did I tell you about my teaching schedule?
[00:26:29] Speaker C: No.
[00:26:30] Speaker A: I was supposed to teach. I was supposed to teach mathematics at the University of Paris at Justia, and I came to Marco at his office to get my schedule, and I said, you know, here I am. You know, I'll have trouble in French, but I'll learn how to address the students. He looked at me like I was out of his mind. He said, david, we've scheduled all your classes for two in the morning.
Two in the morning? I said.
He said, yeah, that's when I schedule my class.
I said, marco, does anyone show up? He said, no, not me either.
I never.
In the whole year, when the French government was paying quite a handsome salary for being a professor of mathematics, I never saw a student. Never one.
[00:27:17] Speaker C: Well, that's that.
But something good did happen.
And you're filling in some background for me because. So Markle came out of. Out of medicine.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Psychiatry.
[00:27:29] Speaker C: Psychiatry. So he had a biology background. So he begins.
[00:27:32] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, very profound.
[00:27:33] Speaker C: You. And he began to talk about the application of math to some biological issues, in particular, the evolutionary questions. Well, was he one of the first to think mathematically about Neo Darwinism?
[00:27:48] Speaker A: That's a good question. I mean, it's an historical question. So I don't want to give you a superficial answer. I don't know whether he was one of the first. I do know that 1965. 66, he and Murray Eden.
[00:28:00] Speaker C: Murray Eden, whom we met, Murray, two years later. Right.
[00:28:04] Speaker A: Murray Eden was a professor of electrical engineering at mit. Super smart guy. Very, very smart and just the polar opposite of Marco. He was very sober, very discreet, very responsible. Marco would say and do anything, insult an incredible variety of ethnic, social and religious groups, and nobody held it against him at the time.
He had spent a year at some southern college in one of the southern states. And he said, you have no idea how abysmal. What does Southern say? Mississippi, maybe. That's where. You have no idea how abysmal. Mississippi is a Friday evening entertainmentist to electrocute a pig. Can you imagine today? He wouldn't last a second in cancel culture. He wouldn't last a second. But. But he was oblivious. He was Oblivious.
He also had a fascinating background with respect to the Chinese revolution. Did I ever tell you about that extraordinary 1947? Marco told me he fell passionately in love with one of the women deeply involved in the Chinese revolution, not far from Mao at all.
And he said in 1947, he faced the decision to enter that maelstrom at her side or stay in France as a Frenchman. And he said, I decided to stay in France. She disappeared. She vanished into the revolution. And that's why Marco survived. But he could not take the step of entering into a revolution in which he did not believe. He certainly knew what was going to happen in the Chinese revolution.
[00:29:44] Speaker C: It's fascinating.
[00:29:45] Speaker A: That's the kind of person he was.
[00:29:47] Speaker C: So he and Murray Eden were prime movers in the Wistar conference that was held in Philadelphia in 1966. Mathematical Challenges to Neo Darwinism. You met Marco in 74, a few years. That's after that had happened.
[00:30:04] Speaker A: But I had read.
[00:30:05] Speaker C: You'd already read that?
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:07] Speaker C: Was this part of your conversation with him about the experience?
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Sure. When I had spent that year at the Department of Biology at Columbia, I don't know how it came about, but I got hold of a copy of the Wistar symposium thing. I think it looked rubbishy at the time. Manuscript was fraying. But I read it. I was fascinated. They said, nobody's talking about these things.
But in fact, my interest in Darwinism was antecedent because at graduate school in Princeton, my graduate school roommate, Daniel messenger, who's a very good philosopher, just a philosopher, said to me, do you know anything about this book, the Origin of Species? I said, darwin never read it because at Columbia it was completely unknown. Nobody ever mentioned Darwin's book at Columbia. No one ever talked about evolutionary biology. The course I took in biology was comparative anatomy. In comparative anatomy, they put a reeking dogfish on a plate, a dead dogfish on a plate in front of you, and you had to dissect it for six weeks. And when you were finished with that and in reeking of formaldehyde, you went on to another organism and dissected it. That was my introduction to biology at Columbia University in 1959.
I had talked about it with Daniel and he said, why don't we read the thing? You know, what an idea. Read a book like that? But we did. And at the end of it, I said, you gotta be kidding. This is what biologists are championing is their great theory. It's a long, windy, digressive, unpersuasive book. And Daniel said, yeah. Maybe, but that was the origin of my incredulity. And of course, I could find no one at Princeton who was remotely interested in Darwin's theory of evolution. When I was doing my studies, it was 64, absolutely not on anyone's horizon.
[00:31:51] Speaker C: And how did the concern about what's now called the mathematical challenge to neo Darwinism arise? What was the mathematical angle on this that you were discussing with Shoups?
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Murray and Marco had similar but quite distinct questions to be raised.
Murray Eden had simple questions about combinatorial mathematics and the combinatorial explosion. If you have a group of letters, for example, say you have 100 letters and you talk about all the different ways you can arrange them, you get an explosion of possibilities, real large number of possibilities. But the curious thing in combinatorial explosions of this sort is only a very small subset seem to mean anything. I mean, take a sentence like we hold these principles to be self evident that all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator. Certainly nailed. Blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a long sentence. If you take the letters and say, well, how many different kinds of symbolic constructs can you make? It's very big, it's very big. But on the other hand, the number of meaningful combinations, hey, that's very small.
[00:33:09] Speaker C: So you got big circle of possibilities.
[00:33:12] Speaker A: But a very small target. Yeah, and that's very interesting geometrically. It's very interesting because you have a big circle of possibilities and a small target. You should be astonished if your arrow hits the target each and every time. The arrow is there, the target is there, the possibilities are vast. There is something interesting happening. The arrow goes where it's supposed to go each and every time. Well, Murray Eden was talking about that in terms of protein evolutions, proteins are these.
I mean, they're absolutely crucial for life. And they're made of 20amino acids. Think of them as beads on a string. Think of them as elementary words. Think of them as letters if you want. Just think of the small combinatorial units, and there are 20 of them. And sometimes they're arranged in chains, 250 beads in length.
[00:34:01] Speaker C: That's a lot of be or more or more.
[00:34:04] Speaker A: Yeah, anywhere from 100 to 400 can be. Whoops. Okay, this is better. When I hold it in my hand, I've noticed that.
And the question is, how many different possibilities are there? And the answer is roughly 20 to the 250th. Now that's, that's a real big number. Real big number.
How many, how many elementary particles are there? 10 to the 80 or 10 to the 81. I think if Doug X were here, he would tell us.
[00:34:33] Speaker C: Doug X is zero, I think 10 to the 80.
[00:34:36] Speaker A: 10 to the 80, yeah, that's roughly correct. Roughly correct. So just consider 20.
This one.
[00:34:46] Speaker C: Carry on. We'll take last time he counted. Oh, OK.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: Mon vieux.
[00:34:56] Speaker C: Hey, Doug, we're telling the jokes up here.
[00:35:03] Speaker A: But Murray, he didn't want to go beyond the evidence. He wanted to have an honest confrontation with the evidence, which was very difficult even in 1966, because while at Princeton, nobody paid any attention to Darwin in the wider world, the wider biological community. Darwin, although in fact almost always ignored in terms of what he actually said, was widely revered as a deity and maybe the fundamental problem biology solved in 1859.
Now it's all just a matter of working out the details. And Mar even said, well, wait a second, you've got this combinatorial space of 20 to 250th possibilities and, you know, doesn't look like they're all going to work so good. Looks like most of them are just going to be so much sludge in a biological system.
How did life find its target? And he said there are only two, two possible answers. One is the target is highly specified and it knew in advance exactly where it wanted to go. Just the way when I left Paris, my target, London, was highly specified. It wasn't an accident that I didn't land up in Berlin. It was by deliberate design I got to London. That's where I wanted to go. That was my target. The other, and I think equally interesting, is from a mathematical point of view, all those possibilities have a certain kind of topology that is a certain geometrical structure, not necessarily geometrical, but like a geometrical structure. And there are distinguished paths. And so life trying to figure out how to reach the space of functional proteins, at least had a roadmap in front of it, and the roadmap translated into actual paths through the wood. And he said those are really the only two possibilities. As far as he could see. The Darwinian answer, random variation in natural selection simply was combinatorially impossible. That was Murray Eaton's point of view and he was very good and he had a parting Javit biologist.
He said, certainly evolutionary biology is in a pre Newtonian, pre Galilean phase, where we could say, yeah, well, the planets seem to be held in their orbit by something, and we don't know what that something is. That is, nobody had any idea of Newton's laws of motion, say in 1500. So that's exactly where we are in biology. And I think he was dead right. That was exactly where we were in Biology in 1966.
Marco had similar, but I think less complete but perhaps more profound remarks to make, but in the same spirit.
[00:37:43] Speaker B: In the same spirit that was Dr. Stephen Meyer and Dr. David Berlinski in conversation at a recent gathering of Discovery Institute colleagues and supporters in Cambridge, England.
Don't miss the second half of this dialogue in a separate episode as Berlinski discusses the books he has written, his career in teaching, and some of his memorable experiences critiquing the Darwinian paradigm.
Learn more about Berlinski's work and order copies of his
[email protected] that's davidberlinsky.org for ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for listening.
[00:38:22] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign. Org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
