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 I'm inviting you to listen in to the first 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 Gillernter.
The discussion was inspired by Professor Galernter's 2019 essay Giving Up Darwin, A Fond Farewell to a Brilliant and Beautiful Theory.
In the essay, Guler points to Meyer's 2013 book Darwin's Doubt for convincing him that Darwin had failed.
Galernter also points to Berlinski's book the Deniable Darwin as essential to his change in thinking.
And so Robinson brings them all 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.
Here in part one, the trio evaluate Darwinian evolutionary theory and explain why it fails.
They begin by explaining what was beautiful about Darwin's comprehensive and well argued synthesis.
But its beauty, says Meyer, is rooted in 19th century science, not what we've learned in the 20th or 21st centuries. So the discussion then moves into the mathematical challenges to Darwin's theory.
The Cambrian explosion is discussed, as well as the probability of an unguided process producing the amount of new information necessary to facilitate that great infusion of new animal forms.
Then they discussed the problem of combinatorial inflation, the idea that the number of combinations that would produce a functional protein is exceedingly rare in sequence space.
It's why a blind process such as natural selection acting on random mutations is vastly more likely to fail than to succeed in connecting the dots required for the diversity of life we see on Earth.
Here now is Peter Robinson introducing his guests, Dr. Stephen Meyer, Dr. David Berlinski, and Dr. David Gerlender.
[00:02:39] Speaker D: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge. I'm Peter Robinson, shooting today in Fiesole, a town in the hills above Florence, Italy.
With me today, three guests. David Berlinsky is a philosopher, mathematician and author who has lived in Paris for a couple of decades now and is now the editor of the International Review of Science. David Gallarenter is a professor of computer science at Yale and the author of a number of books, including most recently the Tides of Mind Uncovering the Spectrum of Consciousness. Stephen Meyer is a philosopher and author. He directs the center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute, a think tank in Seattle.
Here's what brings us together in the Claremont Review of Books. This past spring, David Gallarenter published an essay titled Giving Up Darwin.
Stephen Meyer's thoughtful and meticulous book, Darwin's Doubt, convinced me that Darwin has failed the Deniable Darwin and Other Essays, a book by David Berlinsky, is also, quote, essential.
David Galahinter. David Berlinsky, Stephen Meyer. Welcome.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:03:50] Speaker D: All right, definitions.
Darwin's book is on the Origin of Species. And to quote from David Gallarenter's essay, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances. Changes to fur density or wing style or beak shape. Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can explain the big picture. Not the fine tuning of existing species, but the emergence of new ones. Close quote.
Okay, I'm a layman. I know nothing. Start by convincing me, somebody, that you're not just defining the term species to Darwin's disadvantage.
Who wants to take that one, David?
[00:04:40] Speaker B: There really is very little disagreement on the issue of what a species is. And I think it doesn't have to be a technical term. I think virtually any alert child knows when he passes from one species of.
Of pet creature to another species or whatever.
Yeah, a cow or a sheep or something like that. This is part of our innate view of the universe.
Nobody wants to define anything to Darwin's disadvantage. I think you're looking at three scientists here, and I think every one of us has appreciated. I speak only for myself, but I'd be surprised. Appreciated the beauty of what Darwin did.
It certainly was no joy to conclude that Steve was right. It was no joy for me to give up a beautiful theory and one.
[00:05:33] Speaker D: Such thing, beautiful is aesthetic. So there's something subjective about it. But explain that. Why did Darwin strike you as beautiful?
[00:05:41] Speaker B: You know, each year of my life, I am less convinced that there is anything at all subjective about beauty.
[00:05:48] Speaker D: Oh, really?
[00:05:49] Speaker B: The fact that here we are in Florence and every single person is. And the city wants to see the Michelangelo self portrait I mentioned to you? And the slaves in the Accademia and the great paintings in the Uffizi? People come from all over Asia. People come from Africa, they come from all over the world. There's spectacularly little disagreement. I mean, there are disagreement about theorems and topology. Also when people say, I believe the proof, I don't believe the proof. There's disagreement about everything in human life, but I think less about the greatest art than about any other subject.
Beauty is something that I think scientists tend to agree on to use as a pointer in the direction of truth.
Darwin's theory struck me as beautiful insofar as it explains big things by generalizing little things.
You mentioned the change in the density of fur on a creature with fur, the shape of the beak of a bird or of a feather of a bird.
Darwin can explain those things by principles of natural selection. And when he says, well, we can go from these little changes, a beak is three inches as opposed to three and a quarter inches. We can use the same mechanism by which we explain that to explain why there are sheeps and cows, why there are monkeys and also orangutans and why apes are different from monkeys. The fact that we can explain this huge question of where species came from, the origin of species using the same mechanism that will work for tiny variations in the fur of a sheep or the beak of a bird is one aspect of what makes the theory beautiful. I mean, other people look at it and from different perspectives.
[00:07:44] Speaker D: Just quickly because I want to go into the arguments against. But did you have the same response? Does Darwin strike you as beautiful?
[00:07:50] Speaker A: Never for a minute.
[00:07:53] Speaker D: Stephen.
[00:07:54] Speaker E: It was a comprehensive synthesis and so from the standpoint of what scientists look for, it had an appeal. It was also a well argued book, the Origin of Species. But it was well argued on the basis of evidence that was known in the 19th century and not the things that we've learned mostly from the 20th and 21st.
[00:08:14] Speaker D: Okay, we come to that now again from David Galleranter's essay. Quote Darwinian the fossil record problem 1 the fossil record Darwinian evolution, I'm quoting you, is gradual step by step. Yet in the Cambrian explosion of around half a billion years ago, a striking variety of new organisms, including the first ever animals, pop up suddenly in the fossil record over a mere 70 million years. Close quote.
Now 70 million years seems to be plenty of time for all kinds of surprising things. To this layman explain why is the Cambrian explosion such a problem?
[00:08:53] Speaker E: For the Cambrian explosion was something that.
[00:08:55] Speaker D: Such a problem that it even began to convince this man.
[00:08:57] Speaker E: Yeah, it was a problem that even Darwin was aware of and he wrote about it in the Origin of Species. He said it was inexplicable on his view of.
But he felt that the future fossil finds would fill in the missing ancestral forms that were evident. What happens in the Cambrian is you get a huge number of what are called the animal body plans, where a body plan is a unique configuration of body parts and tissues and they arrive very abruptly in the fossil record without discernible connection to earlier precursors or earlier ancestors. In the Precambrian record, if this wall.
[00:09:33] Speaker D: Were the side of a canyon, halfway.
[00:09:35] Speaker E: Up we'd see you have a stripe of rock, and in that stripe you'd find a whole bunch of new forms of animal life.
[00:09:42] Speaker D: And in the layers underneath, there would be no intermediate nothing leading to that, any discernible connection.
[00:09:47] Speaker E: Right. And so the Cambrian explosion itself has been differently dated. But increasingly, the date that David used of 70 million years is a very generous date for it.
The age range is actually narrowing as a result of additional findings. It's now about 10 million years is the increasingly accepted date. And there are major explosions. In one Chinese scene, there's 13 to 16 different major groups of animals that have arisen in a 5 to 6 million year window. It's incredibly abrupt geologically when you consider the age of the Earth is four and a half billion years. It's also very abrupt biologically because there is a mathematical branch of Darwinian theory called population genetics that allows us to calculate how much evolutionary change we ought to expect in a given amount of time. If we know things like the mutation rate, the generation time, the population sizes, and 5, 10, even 70 million years is a blink of an eye in terms of those. The calculations that can be made for what are called waiting times, and the expected waiting times for the amount of change that's evident in the Cambrian, blow out the time scale, if you will.
They're hundreds of millions or billions of years. So this is a really unexpected event, both biologically, mathematically, and geologically, on a Darwinian view of things.
[00:11:05] Speaker D: All right, back to David Gellarenter. We move from the fossil record. I'm coming to. You go nowhere.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: I'm patient.
[00:11:11] Speaker D: Thank you, David Galahinter. Darwin's main problem is molecular biology.
Now, this is complicated to me, but. But I'm going to continue quoting your essay and then ask somebody to unpack it. For this layman here, for this layman who can't tell a cat from a dog, apart the species treat me as a very slow student. Quoting.
I'm quoting you. What does generating new forms of life entail?
Many biologists agree that generating a new shape of protein is the essence of it.
Argument step number one. Argument step number two. And inventing a new protein means. Means inventing a new gene.
You want to give me the overview on that one?
[00:11:57] Speaker B: Steve is the real biologist.
[00:11:59] Speaker D: Life means new life. New form of life means new protein means new gene.
[00:12:04] Speaker E: Well, I'll explain it in terms that would be familiar to David. If you want to give a computer a new function, write a new program for it to accomplish a new function, you've got to give it new code. And the big discovery of 20th century biology, following Watson and Crick in what's now called the molecular biological revolution, is the same thing is true in life. You want to invent a new form of life, you've got to have code in the form of the information inscribed along the spine of the DNA molecule. And we're learning and other forms of information. So you need the information to build the protein molecules that service the different types of cells. And then you need additional information to arrange the cells and into the body plans. And so the Cambrian explosion is an explosion of biological form, but it's also an explosion of biological information.
And that fact gives us a way of grappling with this question that Darwin didn't have, because we know something about what it takes to generate information in our high tech digital world of computing.
[00:13:05] Speaker D: Right. I have to say that David Gillerter in his essay goes very easy on Darwin. First he calls the theory beautiful and says how sad he is to have to dismiss it. And then he says this molecular stuff, Darwin couldn't have known that, couldn't have nobody. So tell me if you tell me if I've got it more or less right. In Darwin's time, it was good enough to imagine that the basic unit of life, a cell, was like a little brick of Jell O. It was an undifferentiated, quite uncomplicated thing. And you could imagine putting many, many, many of them together and getting different forms of life. Is that roughly fair?
[00:13:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it was good enough for Darwin. It's probably good enough for us as well. But it's not true. That's the big problem.
This cell is an unbelievably complex bit of machinery, unfathomably complex. And we haven't understood its complexity at all. Every time we look, there seems to be an additional layer of reborbative complexity that needs to be factored into our theories. Don't forget the eternal goal is to explain the emergence of this complexity.
[00:14:13] Speaker D: Yes.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: And if we're continually behind the curve because the complexity is increasing every time we look, that eternal goal is also receding from view. Not approaching it's receding. It's becoming more and more difficult to construct a theory for that.
[00:14:30] Speaker D: All right, now somebody give me some notion of the math here.
Things are more complicated than Darwin knew.
We understand that producing new forms of life now means not Just new shapes, new activities in which life engages, but a prior code. Or is that fair? You're the man who knows code.
[00:14:56] Speaker B: You know the mathematical element of this. Not of population genetics in the complex, sophisticated, predictive sense that C was referring to, but just the simple issue of the code. It is remarkable for young people to learn in high school, it was remarkable for me or in elementary school to learn that proteins, molecules are assembled because there are codes. There are codes in the nucleus of cells that spell them out character by character. Codon by conon. They this codon means this amino acid, and the next one means that, and the next one means that.
But the mathematics. The mathematics underlying these codons is very simple. And Darwin could perfectly well have understood if he had the facts. Each one of these positions has to be occupied by one of 20amino acids. Okay, so you pick one of 20 guys for this position and one of 20 guys for this position.
[00:15:55] Speaker D: You talk about visualizing a string of beads. Yeah.
[00:15:58] Speaker E: Like, as you're building a protein.
[00:16:00] Speaker D: So you have four different colored beads, roughly.
[00:16:02] Speaker B: I'm building a protein out of amino acids, and I'm doing it by choosing the amino acids one by one by one by one by one. And I have 20 choices each time.
Now, if there are several hundred of these things in the string, in the bead, in the necklace, it's a big necklace that wraps around your neck 18 times. So there are several hundred or five times, whatever it is, that's a huge number of possible choices. The number of ways in which you can arrange the emerald followed by the ruby followed by the opal followed by the chunk of platinum and another ruby and another ruby and a diamond and an aquamarine. The number of ways you can arrange that is huge. Grows exponentially as the string gets longer.
So even when the string is short, even if it's a cheap necklace for your very first girlfriend and it's all you can afford, it's still. There's an astronomical number of choices. And Darwin could easily have computed that. He just didn't know about the amino acids. He didn't know about the necklace. He didn't know about the string. It's not the mathematics that stumped him. It's the biology. The mathematics is simple. A high school student can compute how many choices there are. If there are 20 gems for position number one and 20 gems for position number two, and you have 60 gems altogether.
[00:17:28] Speaker D: And the task. Here, let me.
[00:17:31] Speaker A: It's 20.
[00:17:33] Speaker D: Try to mute. So I'm quoting from your Even.
[00:17:35] Speaker B: You can even.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: I got it.
[00:17:37] Speaker D: You Got it Right.
I'm quoting.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: Even mathematicians can understand it.
[00:17:43] Speaker E: This. David Balinsky has a memorable phrase to describe this mathematical problem. He calls it the problem problem of combinatorial inflation.
[00:17:49] Speaker D: Yes. Yes.
[00:17:50] Speaker E: As the required length of the protein molecule grows, the numbers grow exponentially. They inflate exponentially. And so the odds of a random search finding the one that makes the pretty necklace, to use other David's metaphor, drop precipitously.
[00:18:09] Speaker D: And in this huge, unimaginably vast universe of possible combinations, the number of combinations that would produce a useful protein is what?
[00:18:20] Speaker E: Exceedingly rare. Exceedingly rare. And this is what we didn't know until just the last couple decades. There was an extraordinary conference in the 1960s held by, convened by a number of MIT scientists, some of whom David knew very well, Murray Eden, Mark and Schustenberger. And they were the first to see the mathematical problem with Darwinism. Their conference was called Mathematical Challenges to Neo Darwinism. But at the time, they could compute the number of possible arrangements, but they didn't know at the time how many of the arrangements would result in functional proteins that would do a job in the cell. And so they didn't know. They couldn't exactly measure how hard the search would be on a random basis. Especially the computer scientists, Murray Eden and others knew that based on computer science, if this is functioning like a true linguistic system, it's going to be. It's unlikely that you can do a random search and find a meaningful string of characters in DNA that will produce a meaningful protein. Okay, but people didn't know. In the 1960s, by early 2000s, there had been a number of different experimental measures of the rarity of the functional genes and proteins versus all the gibberish sequences.
[00:19:41] Speaker D: Right.
[00:19:42] Speaker E: And for a short. For example, just one result. For a short protein, 150amino acids long, the ratio is one protein that will fold into a functional structure compared to 10 to the 77th gibberish sequences. So the ratio of functional to non functional is 1 over 10 to the 77th power.
[00:20:02] Speaker D: Okay, so. So functioning proteins are extremely rare.
It's very hard to imagine random mutations leading to functional proteins. Except that. And here I quote Dr. Gillarenter again. But the theory understands that mutations are rare and successful ones. Even scarcer Darwinism knows this. To balance that out, there are many organisms and a staggering immensity of time. Your chances of winning might be infinitesimal, but if you play the game often enough, you win in the end.
Correct?
[00:20:35] Speaker E: That's the theory.
[00:20:36] Speaker B: That's the question. Do you play it Often enough.
There's always an often enough. And the question is, does the history of life with which Darwin was concerned allow you enough chances to make it at all probable, let's say, or even possible that you'll hit on. Statistically that you'll hit on one of those amazingly rare necklaces that folds up into a protein that can be stuck in a cell and actually doing, doing anything. I'm not a biologist. And so I look at this and say, yeah, sure, there's enough time. You know, there's been a lot of creatures on earth and life has gone on for a long time. But when biologists look at this and try and nail it down and figure it out, try and make a guess, try and use heuristics to make a guess, like using the number of total bacterial lifetime as a measure of the number of total mutations. We're playing with the. The point is, from whatever angle you come at it, the answer is no, there has not been enough time.
The number of throws we've had is too puny even to talk about, doesn't even approach puniness, and certainly is nowhere near reasonable.
So we would get that if we had a reasonable time, but we don't. We didn't. We haven't.
[00:21:54] Speaker D: So let me just be very explicit for my little Winnie the Pooh bear sized mind.
You are saying that Darwin is unlikely to have to be able. It's unlikely that species arose the way Darwin said, or you are saying it is impossible. Darwin was just mystic, lovely man, beautiful idea.
[00:22:14] Speaker A: There's hardly a difference. There's hardly a difference. Unlikely, impossible. We're talking about odds that are so prohibitive.
If you wish to say it's impossible, fine, I'll defend you saying it's impossible. If you wish to say it's highly unlikely, I'll be in your corner as defense attorney as well. But there's no practical difference.
We've known about things for hundreds of years. You get a million monkeys at a million typewriters, all of them typing at random. We know they're not going to produce the collected works of Shakespeare in anything like a reasonable amount of time. Time. It's like that wonderful episode of the Simpsons. Do you remember? Mr. Burns has a million monkeys typing in a million typewriters.
They're going to produce the greatest novel ever written. He pulls out one sheet of paper and says, it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. You stupid monkey.
[00:23:09] Speaker A: Stupid monkey.
[00:23:12] Speaker E: Or to put the Discussion down even lower. The Jim Carrey film where he's trying to get a date with a young lady he fancies and she tells him to go away, says, well, what are the odds a girl like me and a guy like you could get together?
Not good. And he says, what do you mean not good? Like one in a hundred. And she says, like one in a million. And then he says, but if there's a chance.
[00:23:35] Speaker B: So you're telling me there's a chance.
[00:23:40] Speaker D: Yeah, I read you.
[00:23:45] Speaker E: Here's a precise way of cashing out this probabilistic argument. If you have 1 over 10 to the 77th power is your ratio. But then you have every organism in the history of the planet and we can estimate that about 10 to the 40th organisms.
[00:24:00] Speaker D: So you define bacteria, little tiny things, everything. Every mosquito, every bacterium.
[00:24:05] Speaker E: Yeah. Every time one of those replicates, there's a possibility for a mutation that could search the space of possibilities. So you got 10 to the 40th possible mutations against a search space 10 to the 77th strong.
[00:24:18] Speaker D: Right.
[00:24:19] Speaker E: So if you do your exponential math, you end up with.
What it means is you can search 1/10 trillion trillionth, 1/10 trillion trillion trillionth of the possible combinations. So in that case, are you more likely to succeed or fail? You're overwhelmingly more likely to fail to find one of the functional combinations, even taking into account every organism that's lived on earth. And that means that the Darwinian hypothesis is overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true.
[00:24:49] Speaker D: It just didn't happen. Okay, one last piece of the argument here that you mention.
There are other pieces in this book, of course, and in David's book, but here's one last that you mentioned in your essays, compelling to you, David Gillerner, to help create a brand new. And this is the question of mutations proving harmful at least as often as useful. If I have it right. To help create a brand new form of organism, a mutation must affect a gene that does its job early in the development of the life form and controls the expression of other genes that come into play as the organism grows. Evidently there are total of no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.
Somebody explain that one to me briefly.
Who wants you start.
[00:25:45] Speaker B: And Stephen will, if I'm.
If I want to direct the assembly of an animal that I've got to get in there early, before they finish putting them together, putting all the hoofs on and getting the wool on.
If he's a sheep, I Like sheep. I have to say I have to get in there early before they start building them so they don't accidentally build a mouse or a leopard or a zebra. I have to say, look, there's going to be. Sheep get bones this high and we need a nose about this big and we need sheep ears and we need hooves, if sheep have hooves, I think they do. We need wool, get all this stuff together. So I've got to act early now if I'm going to. Now if I'm going to create a new species, I'm going to mutate and instead of building a sheep, I'm going to build a little horse, because horses come in sheep size. What are they called?
[00:26:41] Speaker D: Well, anyway, they're called Shetland ponies or.
[00:26:43] Speaker B: Whatever to do that.
There may be a mutation that makes me order purple wool or the wrong color hooves or a stomach that won't quite fit. But a mutation that is going to recreate the creature in such a way that it's a different creature is, biologists tell me, and farmers tell me, almost certainly likely to be fatal. I mean, a mutation that makes a huge difference and starts putting the head on backwards, it starts giving him 17 tails or, or too many internal organs or forgets the blood or something like that, because this is right early on that I'm acting when I'm doing tremendously important things. And if I make a slip at this all important stage, I'm not going to make a little error in the density of the fur. It's going to be a big error in the design of the internal and the external that makes its creature what it is.
That's an informal, intuitive explanation. Steve can give you, or Dave can.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Give you a good argumentative disjunction. If you talk about major changes, if they come late in development, they're not going to make a difference. The organism is already constructed, may have more lavish eyebrows.
If they come early, they can't make a difference because inevitably they destroy the organism.
[00:28:08] Speaker E: Too many things downstream depend on those early cell divisions.
[00:28:12] Speaker A: So we are faced with a real destructive dilemma. Late no good. Early no good. Well, when we've sort of exhausted the.
[00:28:20] Speaker D: Possibilities, and I'm sure that David Gelertner wants to stick up for Darwin one more time and say he couldn't have known this.
[00:28:27] Speaker B: This is not an attack on Darwin as a man or a thinker or a scientist, but it's the job of science to figure out what guesses are right and what are wrong. Scientists are paid for making guesses and not for making right guesses. But for making interesting, plausible ones. And if scientists, after the guess has been made, don't do their job, don't investigate the guess, don't do their best to figure out is it true or false, then we are false to science and we're betraying science.
[00:28:56] Speaker C: That was Dr. Galler's comments closing out the first half of this intriguing conversation on the limits of Darwinian evolution.
Now, are all three men in sync when it comes to intelligent design?
No, so be sure to stay tuned for the second half of this conversation.
In part two, Dr. Meyer makes a case for intelligent design as an adequate replacement for Darwinian evolutionary theory. Berlinski and Gerlenter explained the difficulties they have in accepting Meyer's concept of intelligent design.
Find out where these thinkers differ and where they find common ground in the concluding half of this discussion, available in a separate episode. 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. And if you'd like to read or listen to Professor Gillenter'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.
[00:29:59] Speaker B: Visit us at idthefuture. Com and intelligentdesign.
[00:30:03] Speaker C: Org.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
