[00:00:01] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Is the Intelligent Design movement a short lived phenomenon that has come and gone? Or is it a vibrant research program that's just warming up?
Welcome to Idea the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Thanks for being with us today. You know, I am delighted to bring Casey Luskin back to the show with. We are talking about a book called Designer Science. And we also have an episode where we started this conversation and Casey unpacked a fabricated quote that made it into this book by an historian named Christopher Howell. And we unpacked what that looked like.
But in part two, we're going to look at some of the omissions that were not in this book. This book should have been a lot longer, but it wasn't and it missed a lot of the most recent history in the last 20 years of the Intelligent Design research program. So, Casey, welcome back.
[00:01:05] Speaker A: Good to be back with you, Andrew. Yeah, Enjoying this new studio you've created. His first podcast was great. This is very comfortable place to do this.
[00:01:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I must say it's awesome to have this.
So here we are. Now, you have spent quite a lot of time writing a critical review of this book, Designer Science. Can you, can you start? First of all, for those who don't know you very well, tell us what you do at Discovery day in and day out and then pivot to what this book was about and who wrote it.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Yeah, so I'm associate director and research director of the center for Science and Culture. So that means that I basically don't sleep. But no, I do a lot of different projects, primarily managing and overseeing our research program, but also working with a lot of scientists and our staff and, and together we manage quite a few different research projects of scientists who are looking at the evidence for intelligent design.
Also do a lot of speaking, teaching, writing and that kind of stuff. But my job is as boring as most other people's jobs are. A lot of the time where I'm keeping track of things on spreadsheets and managing people and doing zoom meetings and sending emails. So when people ask me what I do for a living, I usually just say I send emails and I do zooms.
[00:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, you work so hard. Now tell us just very briefly what this book is, who wrote it, and then we'll get into some of the things that left out.
[00:02:27] Speaker A: So the book is by C.W. howell, who is a historian that got his PhD from Duke University in 2001, I believe on the history of Intelligent design. And he came out with A book that was published about a year ago September ish of 2025, published by New York University Press, titled Designer A History of Intelligent Design in America. And the book claims to provide a, quote, full length history of ID.
This is much like his PhD thesis, which promised to give, quote, the first full length historical overview of the Intelligent Design movement. However, I have to say that although it's not the worst history of ID ever written, and the book does get some things right, it's definitely not, you know, it could have been a lot worse. It's still very, very problematic. The book falls far short of its goal. It actually omits and explicitly denies the vast majority of the scholarly innovations of Intelligent design over the second half of its history, namely from about 2005 during the Dover Trial to the present.
So, for example, he states in the book, quote, Since 2005, ID has hardened into a more inflexible ideology and its leading thinkers and writers have doubled down on the same arguments they've made since the 90s.
Yet he then barely talks about the growth of ID's research program since 2005. He's not saying he never does, but we'll talk about this more. But it basically constitutes a very, very tiny percentage of his book. Later in the book, he's writing about ID books and he says that, quote, nearly all of the material produced by IDs leading lights after 2005 were recapitulations, replications and restatements of prior arguments. So you can kind of get the gist here. The idea is that since the dover trial in 2005, ID has not come up with anything new. It's a stale movement. I think one reviewer in Christianity Today called it a flickering flame. It's basically a movement that has nothing new to offer. It's dying out. It's old, it's boring, and it's stale all. And so, given that he promises to give a, quote, full length history of id, you would expect an accurate, objective and full history of ID and especially its science research program. That really is the big story, I think, of ID since the Dober trial. And again, I'm not saying that he never talks about it, but it's such a small portion of his overall discussion of ID that he makes it sound very unimportant and really tiny. And we'll talk about how he often will demean it immediately after mentioning ID research, then make it look like, well, this is just ID is really all about politics or religion or activism or whatever. This is really a small little thing.
But Hal seems to be unaware of the vast majority of new and even not so new science behind id. What the scientific research has showed, what we're writing in our books, what the research is showing and all this information.
I mean, if he wanted to find it, he didn't have to, like, dig into our secret archives to find a lot of this stuff. Okay, We've been very public about all this. It shouldn't have been that hard to find. And so for some reason, I don't know exactly why, he just seems totally uninterested in reporting on the full history of ID, especially when it comes to ID science and the new scholarly ideas Idaho's come up with over the last 20 years.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Wow.
Well, okay, so give us a flyover of some of the omissions. Now, does he talk about the scientific research program at all of Intelligent Design, or does he cut it off after a certain year?
Give us a general idea of the omissions.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Yeah. So Hal will on occasion briefly allude to ID's research program, but to appreciate how little time he spends on ID research in the book, consider this one statistic. Okay, we talked about this very briefly in the last podcast, but the book has about 500 bibliographic references, which is pretty good. You know, like he's clearly done a lot of homework. Yet only two of those 500 or so bibliographic references are to peer reviewed pro intelligent design papers. So that's basically about 0.4% of Hal's bibliographic references are to peer reviewed pro ID scientific papers. This basically means he's giving ID near negligible coverage in the book. And I think that that percentage probably is a pretty fair depiction of how much time he spends talking about ID research. And what are those two papers, by the way? Well, one of them is from 2004.
It's in the Journal of Molecular Biology. That was Doug Axe's famous paper where he talked about the rarity of the beta lactamase enzyme and found that it's very, very difficult for a random protein sequence. The likelihood of it producing a functional enzyme is something like 1 in 10 to the 77th. Okay, so very, very rare to produce this functional enzyme. The other paper he talks about is also from 2004. This is the other very well known paper by Stephen Meyer, which was published in the volume Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
Hal mentions Access paper in the body of the book, but never actually cites Meyer's paper in the body.
It only appears in the bibliography of the book. Beyond that, Howell ignores nearly all Pro ID scientific papers published since 2004 and has zero of them in his bibliography. Only to claim therefore that ID hasn't produced anything new essentially since 2005. Okay, so it's very easy to claim that somebody hasn't done anything since 2005 when you just ignore everything they're doing. Okay, wow. So. Or at least hasn't done anything new.
So the reality is his claim does not match the real world that we live in. Okay, that's just the facts. At the time this book was published about a year ago, around 300 peer reviewed priority papers had been published and over 150 were summarized on our public list of peer reviewed pro ID articles on Discovery Institute's website.
So that basically means that Hal covered maybe about 1% of IDs peer reviewed science in his book. And remember, this is supposed to be a quote, full length history of intelligent design and he's just giving almost negligible space to ID research. And again, these peer reviewed papers, they were not hard to find. We've summarized a long list of them on our website. It's all public information.
Let me give you just, there's so many examples of things he left off. So let me just give you one poignant example because he does talk a lot about Bill Dembski and Robert Marx. Both of them are in the bibliographic, in the bibliography, and they're mentioned in the book.
Dembsky, Marx and also Winston Ewart, one of their colleagues. The three of them have published some two dozen peer reviewed scientific papers on evolutionary informatics and intelligent design from the late 2000s to the present. Okay, they really started to go full board publishing these papers I think around the year 2008, 2009 or something like that. But yet not a single one of these two dozen or so peer reviewed papers from Dembsky, Marx and Ewart and their colleagues, not a single one is cited in designer science. But it's not as if designer science ignores Bill Dembsky. I mean, I think that the book contains over 25 entries to Dembsky and or Marx in the bibliography, and yet not one of those entries is to one of their peer reviewed pro ID scientific papers. It isn't even, none of these are even in the bibliography whatsoever. Winston Ewart, who is one of the close collaborators of Dembsky and Marx, a very prolific researcher who's published or co authored or authored somewhere around 20 peer reviewed priority publications. He isn't even in the index of Howell's book. Winston has played a very major role in the development of ID scholarship. Science thinking over the last 15 or 20 years, there are literally hundreds of other interesting peer reviewed pride scientific papers that Hal similarly ignores. So it's literally, I mean, these are just gargantuan omissions that belong. And you know, I'm not saying you have to sign all 300 of these papers, but, you know, zero since 2005 in the bibliography. And then you claim that we haven't done anything new since 2005. What kind of a history book is this? Okay, I just, I just don't understand this. So he shows almost, no, I'm not saying zero interest in ID's research program. There is occasional mention of it, but it's usually just to dismiss it. Maybe we'll get into that. But he shows almost no interest in exploring the ID research program. And he basically pretends as if a history of IED need not delve into that whatsoever. Hardly at all. So it's just really, really unfortunate. And again, it left people with this misperception that I d is this, quote, flickering flame. That's what a reviewer in Christianity Today characterized ideas that after reading Hal's book and reviewing it. And so I just think it's very unfortunate. It really is a disservice to people who really want to understand what is going on with intelligent design.
[00:11:22] Speaker B: It's almost like, you know, up to 2005 was left off the subtitle, you know, because there doesn't seem to be much going on after that. And seeing that, you know, the science is the lifeblood of such a program.
Can you give us an example of how Hull might have mentions the science but then moves on or dismisses it as something unimportant to the program?
[00:11:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, again, as I said, it's true that HAL will occasionally briefly allude to ID's research program. He does this a couple times.
And so, for example, in one case he actually includes a short quote from an article that I wrote in 2011 about Pro ID scientific research in peer reviewed publications. But then he immediately after that asserts, quote, ID did not disappear after Dover. Its scientific projects continued, but cultural and political campaigns became the dominant focus. So he's trying to make it sound like, well, nothing to see here. ID is really all about politics and cultural issues. Again, later in the book, he tries to tie ID to politics and activism. He says while there have been efforts at mainstream or elites mainstream like scientific enterprise, in the establishment of journals, the publication of findings, the, the funding of lab work, as with biologic There has been a far stronger strain of defiance, anti establishment rhetoric and the denunciation of experts qua experts. So that's this quote from his book that's really the strategy. Briefly mention the science so people can't say that you completely ignored it, but then immediately switch gears and claim it's really all about politics, religion, activism, culture war stuff and really go into no detail whatsoever about what ID science is really saying. And we just see this pattern in the book.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, I can see the dismissiveness there and the quickness to move on and not unpack the science. I'm thinking of, you know, what about all the arguments of Stephen Meyer, for example, the scientific arguments that he includes in all three of those books that came out after 2005. Does Howell unpack the books and the arguments that have been contained in them?
[00:13:27] Speaker A: Well, let me give you a great example of this. We got Darwin Devolves up there at the top. I don't know if you if it's actually in the view of this camera angle, but Darwin of Oz is a book that was written by Michael Behe in 2019.
And let's talk about what Hal says. We'll get to Stephen Meyer's books. Let's talk about Darwin Duvalls first because I think this is a really interesting example.
Hal writes on page 167 of his book, quote, nearly all of the material produced by IDs leading lights after 2005 were recapitulations, replications and restatements of prior arguments, notably Michael Behe's the Edge of Evolution and Darwin Devolves, unquote. Okay, so he's saying that basically Darwin evolves is just a recapitulation of prior arguments. Since Dover, there's nothing new here going on in Darwin Evolves. If you know the real history here, Andrew, this is just stunning. Okay, first of all, Behe's book the Edge of Evolution, which Hal mentions there, and Darwin Evolves, they're both post over books. In the Edge of Evolution that was published in 2007, Bee for the first time tries to rigorously investigate exactly how many coordinated mutations Darwinian evolution can produce. Something that's highly relevant to defending irreducible complexity, but not a topic that he had explored in his previous book. You know, what exactly is the limit of what evolution can do? A very, very important and interesting scientific question, but something that he had never really explored in any of his prior work. But I want to talk more about Darwin Evolves. That was again Behe's 2019 book. And in that book he presents an entirely new thesis. I actually went back to both Darwin's Black Box, Behe's first book in 1996 and the Edge of Evolution just to make sure, nowhere in those books does he present a thesis like what he presents in Darwin Evolves. And the thesis is basically that yes, the Darwinian evolution it does happen, but when it happens it tends to break and diminish function at the molecular level rather than building new function at the molecular level. And here's a key part of the book, Darwin Evolves, that book was actually based upon an argument that Behe first developed in 2010. So after 2005. And it was an argument Behe developed in a peer reviewed article he published in in the mainstream scientific journal Quarterly Review of Biology. And in this wonderful review paper that Behe wrote, Behe actually looks at numerous scientific studies that have looked at Darwinian evolution being in action at the molecular level. And he says look, when we look at what these studies are finding, they're showing the breaking of features at the molecular level. So he calls this paper experimental evolution, loss of functioning, mutations and the first rule of adapted evolution. And again, this paper was published in a very well respected mainstream scientific journal, Quarterly Review of Biology in 2010, long after the Dover trial. Okay, when supposedly according to Hal, we're not doing anything new. So HAL never mentions this peer reviewed scientific paper in a mainstream journal that Behe published. But this paper basically becomes then the basis for the Darwin devolves. And in Darwin Evolves Behe basically expands this thesis that Darwinian evolution tends to break features at the molecular level, finds more examples, publishes a whole booklet treatment of this question of what Darwinian evolution can do at the molecular level. And it's all originally based upon this peer reviewed paper he wrote in a very, very well respected mainstream scientific journal. So HAL recognizes none of these innovations, neither Behe's peer reviewed paper nor his entirely novel argument that was expanded in a book that was derived from that paper. And instead he tries to paint these books as if they represent failures of ID trying to break into academia. How actually says these books were printed by popular and not academic presses. Okay, so he's trying to make it look like Darwin Evolves is a failure for IID's attempt to break into academia. Nevermind that, you know, scientists write books by trade presses all the time. This is not strange. But if your thesis is that ID is failing academically, wouldn't it be important to mention that one of the books was actually an expansion of an argument that was first Published in an important peer reviewed scientific paper in a mainstream journal. Of course that's what you would want to do. But for some reason Howell could not say, well, or didn't say, that both the paper and the book broke new ground with novel scientific arguments and that the book was based upon a peer reviewed paper in a mainstream journal. Why didn't Hal mention any of this? I don't know, but presumably it's because it doesn't fit with his thesis that IDE has nothing new to say. So. Well, we can get into Myers Books if you want, but this is just, I think a very nice example of the kind of omissions, the kinds of things that HAL is failing a document in order to support this thesis that, that ID has done nothing new since the 2005 Dover trial.
[00:18:23] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, it's really hard to miss those things, you know, unless you're doing it on purpose. That is actually one of my favorite, you know, arguments, new arguments of intelligent design in the last, you know, five, six, seven years is that, I mean it's just astounding that Darwin Devolve's you know, thesis knocks me off my feet, you know, and I've been around this stuff for a while.
[00:18:45] Speaker A: I love it too. Cause it's actually very intuitive to understand.
For a winning evolution, it's going to follow the path of least resistance. And I love the example. Mike Behe lectures most years at our summer seminar and he always gives the same example. He says, let's say you've got a car and you want the car to go faster. Okay, well there's different ways you can make the car go faster. You could completely rebuild the engine, make it go from a four cylinder to an eight cylinder engine, which would require a lot of coordinated changes to get all those parts to work right. You've got to add all kinds of new spark plugs and camshafts and blah blah, blah. That's going to be a really complicated rebuild. It will make the car go faster. But what if there's an easier way to make the car go faster simply by say, throwing the back seat out of the car? Okay. Getting rid of all the junk in the truck, ripping off the side view mirrors. Okay. Those kinds of things can make the car go faster by just getting rid of stuff you don't need. And so if Darwinian evolution is most likely to follow the path of least resistance and, and it's far, you know, far more mutations to break a few things to make your improvement happen to help you to survive and reproduce better than to suddenly build a new complex feature. That's the path that Darwinian evolution is going to take. So it's a very intuitive thesis. It makes sense, and it's backed up by a lot of data. And B, he did a great job really marshaling evidence for that thesis in his paper. And then later in the book.
[00:20:04] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Now, just very briefly, does he treat Meyer's books seriously at all? I mean, all three of these came out after Dover.
[00:20:14] Speaker A: It pretty much is the same story. Okay. And what's interesting is that Hal. So when I say the same story again, he's claiming that Meyer's post Dover books were just recapitulations of old things in ID literature. There was nothing new being presented, and he's just ignoring all the new arguments and new ground that Meyer is covering in those books. But here's what's interesting, how repeatedly labels ideas anti evolution. It's kind of funny. One of the endorsers of the book said that Hal is so wonderful because he doesn't use labels. He uses the word anti evolution as a label over and over again in the book.
And he's trying to basically paint. You know, when you use a word like that, I think that sort of the implication is that the case for idea is wholly negative. Occasionally, Hal will allude to the positive case for design. But, you know, when you say anti evolution, it. It makes it sound like we don't have anything positive to say. So consider the positive case for design, which was articulated largely for the ID community in books like Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, both of which came out after the Dover trial. Signature in the cell was 2009. Darwin's doubt was 2013. These are highly important developments that help build the positive theoretical case for id. And these innovations go almost entirely unappreciated by Howell. So I want to give a quote from Howell because this is what he writes about Darwin's doubt. And when you hear this quote, we're going to go through just some of the incredible numbers of things that he gets wrong in this quote. So he says, quote, much of Meyer's argument in Darwin's doubt he's talking about was a recapitulation of signature in the cell. Okay, so he's saying that Darwin's doubt was. Was just a recapitulation of signature. He goes on to say, quote, though he. Meyer focused on development of animal body plans and the problem of transitional fossils in the Cambrian era, or lack thereof, he also trod the same paths as before, relying on Doug Axe's work on protein folds and on Michael behe and David Snoke's 2004 paper regarding proteins, genes and irreducible complexity, as well as Axe and Cager's work at Biologic, Meyer directed the reader to to refer back to Signature for a fuller explanation of the argument. Darwin's doubt was largely derived from Signature, but Signature was a rejuvenation of arguments made by facts in the company in Mystery of Life's Origin. So Basically Mystery of Life's Origin was a book written in the mid-80s. So from the mid-80s with Mystery of Life's Origin to signature to Darwin's doubt idea has nothing new to say is what he's trying to say. There's so much wrong in that paragraph, it's just astounding. Okay, so first Meyer develops many novel arguments in Darwin's Doubt beyond just fossils. And these are regarding the origin of new body plans, why developmental gene regulatory networks pose a major challenge to animal body plan evolution. And also Meyer talks about recent discoveries in epigenetics, various sources of epigenetic and ontogenetic information outside of of the DNA sequence and how they apply to id. And he explains why neo Darwinism cannot create new epigenetic or ontogenetic information.
Meyer also incorporates both DGRNs, these developmental gene regulatory networks and epigenetics into his positive argument for design, pointing out that they represent new sources of information which have to be accounted for from an evolutionary perspective.
In chapters 15 and 16 of the book, Meyer offers one of my favorite parts of the book. By the way, if you're wondering why, I know a lot and I'm really excited about Darwin's Doubt. I was basically Steve's research assistant when he wrote that book. Okay, so it was his book 100%, but I walk every mile alongside of him and it was a lot of fun to do that and I think it was a great book. So chapters 15 and 16 Meyer offers a fantastic review which I think is still very current and had never been done buy an ID book before. that time reviewing what we might call these post Darwinian models of evolution. These are models of evolution to reject that basically random mutation, natural selection are doing all the work and they're looking for other ways to try to explain evolution. These include models like self organization, natural genetic engineering, neo Lamarckism, evo devo neutral evolution, symbiogenesis, et cetera, et cetera. And in those chapters of Darwin's Doubt, Steve Meyer goes through these other post Darwinian models and explain why they too cannot explain the origin of new complex features. And Meier ties all this together, saying, none of these mechanisms, none of these models, account for all the new information that needs to be explained to produce new animal body plans such as those that arise in the Cambrian period.
And he says that the only known cause that can generate all this information is intelligence. He goes into a lot of detail. It's not like just a, you know, intelligence can do this. He actually goes through very, very detailed arguments of the nature, the hierarchical organization of animal body plans and nature of genomics and the nature of the way organisms operate to explain why intelligence is the best explanation, because they have properties that we see in many human engineered technologies and designs. And so these are new arguments and. Or important new addition to ID arguments that Meier wrote in Darwin's Doubt, and Hal mentions none of them. Instead, he just says, it's a recapitulation of signature. If I'm getting a little bit animated here, forgive me, on the one hand, I've had too much Diet Coke. On the other hand, you know, I love these arguments. I think these are really powerful arguments. I was with Steve Myers. He developed these arguments. And it was really exciting to see ID putting forth this very strong, positive case. And yet, for some reason, Hal just wants to argue and wants to claim that there was nothing new in this book and it was just a recapitulation of Signature, which was a recapitulation of mystery, of life's origin. We'll get to all that. Okay, so there's some more. We're just beginning here. Okay, just to be clear, there's quite an irony here. When Meyer wrote Signature in the cell, that was 2009, critics attacked him for only dealing with the origin of life and not addressing the Darwinian evolution of life. Because they claim that, yeah, it's the natural selection mutation mechanism, the Darwinian evolution of life, that really explains how new biological information arises. So that wasn't the topic of Signature in the Cell. Signature in the Cell was a book about the origin of life before you have replication, before you have natural selection, which requires replication, being able to take over. Okay, but when Meyer wrote Darwin's Doubt, he says, I'm happy to do what the critics are asking me to do, to talk about Darwinian evolution, natural selection. So when Meyer wrote Darwin's Doubt to address the evolution of life, the evolution of animal life, you know, you can agree or disagree with the argument, but he covered a lot of new topics in Darwin's Doubt that he never covered in Signature. But now, after he wrote Darwin's Doubt. Now he's being accused of, of doing nothing new. So you know, he's saying it's just a quote. This is according to hell. It's just a quote recapitulation of the book Signature in the Cell. So I guess, you know, you probably remember some of this, Andrew. I guess with I D critics, you just can't win. I mean, remember when people said, you know, why didn't Steve Meyer talk about Darwinian evolution, natural selection in Signature in the Cell? Because we know that's how it produces new information.
Well, the whole point of Signature in the Cell was to talk about the origin of life. How, how do you get the information in the first life before you have self replication, before you have natural selection?
So then he writes the book that they told him he needed to write and now he's being told he didn't do anything new. It's just amazing. Anyway, so going back to that paragraph where there were all these problems where Howell was describing Darwin's Doubt as really just recapitulating rehashing a lot of the scientific arguments that were in Signature. Okay, so apparently I think this is really what's going on. Hal knows too little about ID science to appreciate what was actually new in Darwin's Doubt that did not exist in Signature in the Cell. There was a lot of new ID science, ID research that Steve Meyer wrote about in Darwin's Doubt that he did not write about in Signature because this was actually research that was published in the years after Signature was published and before Darwin's Dow was published. Okay, that's pretty fine. Yeah, I mean, I know this. Well, I'll tell you why I know this in just a minute. But so Hal briefly alludes to the 2013 book Darwin's Doubt as quote, relying on ax engagers work at Biologic. Okay, this is literally all Hal says in the entire book about the entire body of research that Doug Axe and Gager and other scientists did at Biologic Institute. Okay, so if you're saying, well, oh, Hal did mention the research at Biologic, this is all he says that like little short, maybe six word, brief blurb, he goes into no detail about it whatsoever. Okay. And then he says that by doing so, by relying on Axe and Gager's work at Biologic, this method Meier quote, trod the same path as before in Signature. The problem is that Hal doesn't realize that the work from Biologic Institute that Meyer talks about in Darwin's Doubt, it was all published from 2010 onward. It had not been published when Meyer wrote Signature in the Cell. And I remember this actually because as Steve Meyer's research assistant, I said to Steve, Steve, you need to talk about the new ID research that is coming out from Biologic Institute that you weren't able to talk about Signature because it was published after Signature. And I think you should give readers a little tour of the newly published ID research that's coming out of Biologic Institute, the research by Axon Gager et al at Biologic Institute.
And I encouraged Steve to do this and I thought that he had a really nice review of a lot of that research in Darwin's Doubt. But none of that was in Signature because none of it existed at the time that Signature had been published. So for example, Darwin Stout, pages 250 to 253. Myers cites and discusses research by Gager et al 2010, Gager in Acts 20:11 and Acts 20:10. This was all novel research laboratory experimental and theoretical research that was published out of Biologic Institute published after Signature that showed ID extending new arguments that was basically challenging the evolvability of new proteins. And it's important to understand why this research that Biologic Institute was doing post Signature published post Signature was so important.
In 1996, we might recall that Behe wrote the book Darwin's Black Box. And that book argued that there are many complex molecular machines that are irreducibly complex. Okay? And critics immediately said, well, we know that we can evolve irreducibly complex structures by co opting parts from elsewhere in the cell. And this co option model basically says you can take a protein, you can retool what it's doing and suddenly import it into a completely new machine to perform a completely new function.
This is called co option borrowing parts from elsewhere in the cell, retooling them to do new functions.
What Biologic Institute wanted to do is they wanted to put this CO option model to the test and they wanted to ask how hard or easy is it really to take a protein, change its function and then cause it to do something that is totally different or even just modestly different? So they were doing research on proteins and they actually showed that it is very difficult to take a protein and retool it to perform some kind of a new function. This body research goes entirely undescribed by Christopher Howell in his book, even though it was very, very relevant to the debate over iodine evolution. And when Meyer talks about this in Darwin's Doubt is very relevant to questions about whether or not new complex genes and biological features can evolve during the course of the Darwinian evolution of animal life. So Meyer is citing relevant evidence. It's all brand new, it's all post signature. And yet Howell is saying the exact opposite, that Darwin's Doubt is just a retread of the arguments and Signature, even citing these papers, claiming this was all stuff from Signature in the Cell. And it wasn't. It was never mentioned in the Signature in the Cell. So another error, Hal is correct that Steve Meyer did mention that behe and David Snokes 2004 paper in both Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt. Now, for some reason, I don't know, Hal never mentions the fact that this was a paper that was relevant to questions about protein evolution that was published in a very well respected mainstream scientific journal, the journal Protein Science. Why Hal never mentions this, I don't know. The paper is not even listed in Hal's bibliography. Okay, but he makes it sound like that paper was a major part of Meyer's argument and Signature. So then when Meyer mentions it in Darwin's Doubt, again, he's just recapitulating old arguments and that is not what happened. In fact, in Signature in the Cell, Meyer barely mentions this paper. He cites it only once, briefly, along with multiple other papers in a single footnote to make the point that there were several other Pro ID scientific papers that had been published since his 2004 paper in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. Okay, and then he gives in Signature, this paper by Behe and Snoke. No further discussion. Okay, so it really plays only a very, very minor, tiny part of the argument overall in Signature in the Cell. And he's just making the point that, yeah, there have been other peer reviewed priority papers published other than that one paper he wrote in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington.
So in Darwin's Doubt, in great contrast, Meyer actually spends quite a good deal of space. In fact about two pages he spends talking about the Paver Behean Snoke 2004 in protein science, elaborating on its arguments and explaining the implications of that paper. How hard it would be to evolve new proteins or protein regulation sequences that require two or more mutations to be present before you get some advantage. It's a very relevant paper.
And Meier does elaborate on it in Darwin's Doubt. And even though he barely even mentions it in Signature, this brings us finally and fourthly to Hal's statement that in Darwin's Doubt, Meier quote, simply directed the reader back to Signature for a fuller explanation of the argument. Okay, the context here is supposed to be ID scientific arguments regarding the evolvability of proteins and irreducible complexity. And once again Kyle has made a simply false statement. I went through Darwin's doubt and I cannot find any instance anywhere where Meier refers reader back to signature to learn about any scientific point, such as Doug Axe's research on protein availability or other ID work on irreducible complexity. There are a number of chapters 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 where Meyer covers topics like protein evolvability and signature in the cell is never mentioned in the body of any of those chapters. There is one little very brief citation to signature at the beginning of chapter 10 to learn about Dawkins famous you know, methinks that it's like a weasel simulation. And another citation at the end of I think it's chapter 12 to talk about Dembski's universal probability bound. And another very brief endnote citation in chapter 12 to make a minor historical point. But basically that's it. We when Meyer is talking about these scientific topics of protein evolvability, he never refers readers back to signature in the book Darwin's Doubt to learn more about those topics. So when we dig into Howell's citation to justify his claim that Meyer is just referring readers back a signature in Darwin's doubt, we look at those pages and yes, Meyer does reference signature in those pages and he does refer people back a signature.
[00:36:11] Speaker B: But.
[00:36:12] Speaker A: But none of those pages are where Meyer is talking about ID science.
In those pages of Darwin's doubt where he refers people back to signature, he's talking about sort of how to make an inference of the best explanation. And he's talking about really philosophy of science and the epistemological testability of intelligent design. And so the one place where Meyer says in Darwin's doubt quote readers may wish to consult signature in the Cell form a more detailed response to these specific arguments. He's talking about philosophy of science and the testability of id, epistemologically speaking, not ID research. This is much later in the book, long after he finished his discussion of ID research on proteins and irreducible complexity, et cetera. So Meyer did review and discuss then newly published ID research in Darwin Stout. Yet Howell fails to recognize any of this and instead he spins the book as it's just an old rehashed material with no new ie science talked about in that book. So now we want to pivot to mystery of life's origin because remember, Howell is sort of saying that Darwin's doubt was simply a rehash of Signature in the Cell. And Signature in the Cell was just a rehash of this much older ID book, Mystery of Life's Origin, that was published in the mid-1980s. Okay. And again, the idea is that there's nothing new to see here. All IDE ever does is rehash old arguments. Okay, so Mystery of Life's Origin.
Yes, that was a book published by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger olson in the mid-80s. And to say that quote, as Hal does, signature was a rejuvenation of arguments made by Thaxton Co. In Mystery of Life's Origin. That's kind of like saying that anybody who's written about evolution since 1859 when Darwin wrote Origin of Species is just rehashing what Darwin wrote. Okay. Like you can talk about natural selection while adding new concepts, new evidence, new arguments, you know, to bolster that that idea. And that's exactly what Signature in the Cell did. And Darwin's doubt is doing. Yes, there was a key innovation that came from Mystery of Life's Origin. In fact, I mark the Mystery of Life's Origin, which I believe came out in, in 1984. I actually marked that, Andrew, as the beginning of the modern ID movement. Why is that? It's the first time that you have scientists who stayed in the ID community afterwards arguing that a mind should be the cause that we invoke, intelligence should be the cause that we invoke for explaining the origin of new information. Okay, now that was based upon 80s science. It was valid then. We knew that there was information in DNA even back in the 80s. So it was a valid argument.
But so much more ground has been broken since then.
Signature in the Cell was written in 2009. Stephen Meyer goes on to get his PhD from Cambridge University on the Philosophy of Historical Sciences and how that applies specifically to the origin of life. A lot of what you see in Signature in the Cell is actually based upon Meyer's PhD thesis, bringing out how we can make a scientific argument based upon information in life to the argument for design based upon the methods of science.
This is old news to anybody that these ideas were part of ID from the beginning. But Signature covers many new developments in origin of life thinking, including RNA world self organization and updated treatments about protein evolvability. And a bunch of research that basically post dates Mystery of Life's Origin in Signature. Meier also provides much material explaining how how we detect design by making an inference to the best explanation. So to suggest that Meyer has nothing new, post Mystery of Life's Origin in his book Signature in the Cell, again is just ignoring what Meyer's talking about. It's just incredible. I mean, at some point somebody has to say something new. It didn't all happen in Mystery of Life's Origin. And Howell is just ignoring point after point after point that Meyer makes in these books to claim that it's just a rehash of old material.
[00:40:10] Speaker B: Wow. Yeah, I just keep thinking, wow, as you're listening. Thing after thing. So much missed. And it's just disappointing that it didn't make it into this supposed comprehensive history of the intelligent design movement.
[00:40:24] Speaker A: And he's just making false statements. I mean, it's just not true what he's saying.
[00:40:27] Speaker B: Right, right.
Yeah. Well, what about books related to the origin of humans? I know we've published on that in the last 10 to 15 years. Does Howell reference that at all, mention that development?
[00:40:42] Speaker A: Yeah, so exactly, Andrew. That's a major innovation that happened since the 2005 Dover trial, the time during which IID has done nothing new, supposedly since the Dover trial. We have published a number of books that broke new ground for ID on the origin of humans. First, there was Science and human origins in 2012 that I co authored Ann Gager and Doug Axe.
That was sort of our first major foray into human origins. Then you have Mining the Brain, talking about the origin of the Human Mind that came out in 2023 from Discovery Institute Press. And then you have the Immortal Mind that came out in 2025 by Michael Egnamore and Denise O', Leary, also talking about the origin of the human mind. And then a number of peer reviewed pro ID scientific papers by Stuart Burgess looking at the human body and how the human body is actually very well designed. This kind of came out around the same time as the book you design Body by Steve Laughman and Howard Glicksman. I think that book was also 2022, I want to say, talking about the design and the integrated nature of the various systems of the human body and how we see irreducible complexity from the small scale to the big scale of the human body. Really, really great book. So we have all these books and papers coming out about the origin of the human body, the origin of the human mind, the origin of human physiology, and all of this is ignored by Christopher Howell. He basically says that ID is producing nothing new since Dover. He doesn't even give it a moment's notice, a moment's mention. It's completely 100% just left out of the book. Even though this is a major strand of new and novel ID thinking post Dover trial. That is, I think, really important. Showing ID addressing one of the most important scientific topics we can think of when that's the origin of the human body, the human mind, and us as humans. So again, I think it's very unfortunate that all this is just basically ignored by Christopher Howell now.
[00:42:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's really great to, to get that comprehensive review. I'm going to ask you two more questions before we close today's conversation.
The first question is why, right? Why would Howell do this? Why would he leave out all the science of the last 15, 20 years? And then the final question would be, well, really I just want you to give me the history or at least just touch on it, all the things he left out, you know, just a very brief overview. So first, why, why, why did he do this?
[00:43:11] Speaker A: Well, I mean, we need to remember the context of what we're talking about here. Why are we talking about all this? In his book, Hal claimed to provide a quote, full length history of id. And then he went on to say that, quote, nearly all of the material produced by IDs leading lights after 2005 were recapitulations, replications and restatements of prior arguments. And then he said that post over, we simply saw quote doubling down on previous arguments. And I want to expand this quote, he said, Again, since 2005, ID has hardened into a more inflexible ideology and its leading thinkers and writers have doubled down on the same arguments they had made in the 90s, insisting that they were scientifically valid, that the only reason for the defeat he's talking about Dover was ideological prejudice. So I'm not attributing to how ideological prejudice, okay, those are his words. He's wrong about that as well. But given the falsity of Hal's claims and the magnitude of his omissions about ID scholarship, especially when he claims to provide this full length history of id, we really do have to ask why did he ignore such a volume of ID literature? Again, only 0.4% of his bibliographic references are to peer reviewed pro ID papers. He's ignoring.
Not a single peer reviewed paper post Dover does he cite in the bibliography of his book in order to claim that we've been doing nothing new since Dover. So why does he ignore this large volume of ID literature where IDs developed all these novel arguments since the dover trial in 2005? It's very disconcerting. So I can't answer that. Why does he ignore this? Well, I Do know this much, it doesn't fit with his thesis. Okay, so, you know, I have no idea. But I will say this. You know, there were some folks, some of my friends in the ID community urged me to be nice, nice to HAL in my response. And look, I've tried to be nice because I have not. I've tried to acknowledge there are genuine positive aspects of the book. You know, he does quote me accurately. He talks about how Discovery Institute opposed Dover's ID policy. He talks about how ID is different from creationism. Officially, he says ID isn't dead, even though he claims he spends too much time, I think sort of really focused on that question. It's a little bit weird, but you know, I wanna be nice, but I also wanna be truthful and I wanna be fair.
Not just to hell, but also to my colleagues and in the ID community. And we have a lot of great people who have worked very, very hard to develop new arguments, to publish those arguments in peer reviewed scientific papers, in books. And we've developed a lot of very good new arguments over the last 20 years. So why does HAL largely ignore almost everything they've done only to claim that we've been entirely unproductive in producing new arguments during this time? It's worth thinking about. And I don't know why he does this, but I can tell you this much. This book is not a full length history of id. It misses. It's basically, it does a pretty decent job during the first 20 years of ID's history, from the mid-80s to 2005. But since 2005 the book really is quite astoundingly bad in what it misses and what it omits.
[00:46:15] Speaker B: Wow.
Well, so in just our remaining minutes, let's just talk about a few things that were left out that would be in a history of the Intelligent design movement. Just touch on a few of them.
[00:46:29] Speaker A: Sure. So, scientific evidence, what is the state of things where we are today? I would say that from protein science to genomics to design detection. By the way, another thing he leaves off is Bill Dembsky and Winston Ewart's 2023 updated edition of the Design Inference where they come up with new methodologies of measuring specification for complex and specified information. Another post over innovation that actually responds to some previous criticisms of CSI and shows IOD responding to criticisms, coming up with better arguments and actually improving the way we detect design. Again, none of that was mentioned by Christopher Howell. Molecular biology, systematics, paleontology, many other fields. The evidence has consistently poured in supporting ID predictions over the past Couple decades. I just wrote a Series on the 30th year anniversary of the founding of the center for Science and Culture where I reviewed a lot of the evidence supports id. So we are very, very enthusiastic about the state of the evidence. Again, scientific research. In 2016, we marked the advent of the ID 3.0 research program. Since then we published over 200 peer reviewed scientific papers. Over 300 peer reviewed scientific papers to date, over 100 of those papers were published in just the past five to six years.
Last year alone, our research community published over 25 peer reviewed scientific papers. It's very exciting to see ID's research program growing. This is why I'm so busy. Okay. In fact, right now I'm supposed to be finishing our research budget for next year. I said I'm talking to you, but that's what I'm gonna do for the rest of the night here, Andrew. So you can go to our research homepage. We have an ID 3.0 research homepage. Learn a lot about many of the projects that we're supporting. But you know, again, very exciting what ID is doing. Totally missed by hell students.
In 2007 we launched our summer seminar on Intelligent design. The goal was to train up the next generation of ID scientists and scholars. And we are doing that successfully. We've now graduated over 100, I'm sorry, over 1100 students from our ID seminars, hundreds of which have earned their PhDs and, and other graduate degrees and many of which have actually gone on to go and get their own labs, become faculty in their own right, get their own labs, and they're now contributing to ID research.
This sort of exciting development in ID not mentioned by HAL scientists. We have so many scientists reaching out to join our network that my team of scientists that I manage at Discovery, we have to do multiple zooms with new people every week over the last few months just to keep up with the intake and, and keeping track of all these new scientists is a lot of work too. We've had very, very good. I've become very good at using databases. Okay. And it's been a lot of work. It's become so unwieldy that we've had to create a very large database tool just to make sure we're not missing people. But our ranks are growing all the time. Media. Now, this is interesting because HAL thought we talked about this a little bit in the first podcast. HAL thinks that media frenzies are really the way to measure ID. I think that's a super official Gen Z YouTube generation way of measuring progress. Okay, so media events, yes, they can drive growth, but they're not the growth in and of themselves. Okay, when Stephen Meyer did all those PragerU videos in 2021 that got millions of views when he appeared on the Joe rogan show in 2023 or you know, other major ID videos on YouTube, these happened because Idaho had already begun to grow in stature to the point that, you know, major media figures like Piers Morgan, okay, when Joe Rogan and Piers Morgan have ID theorists on their shows, it's not that that is driving ID growth, it's reflecting the fact that they're seeing. Look, ID is a cultural phenomenon. It's a scientific idea. It's an intellectually meritorious concept. We should be talking about it. Okay, so it's really not driving the growth as much as it is reflecting the growth that IDs already had. So ID has been on the number one podcast and in the world.
What about in theaters? There was Expelled, which came out in 2008. That was a major post over media event that drove IDs growth. And then this year in the spring, we had the Story of Everything which came out and was in hundreds of theaters around the U.S.
again, this led to another uptick in growth.
So what I can say is that these media events, they're reflecting the fact that ID has grown in stature, the to the point that it's become a major cultural and even academic phenomenon that people want to know about this and they want to see it at the mainstream level.
Books, I mean, we've talked about a bunch of books. We published hundreds of books since ID's inception, including 50 books since 2021 alone. Okay. And these are developing new arguments about the design of the human body, design of the earth, the mind, animal behavior, the design that was needed at the origin of the universe, and methods of design detection. And so much of this work is really exciting, unfortunately goes unmentioned by hal. So the bottom line is that Hal wants to paint ID as the stale waiting movement. And that is simply not supported by the evidence. But more importantly, you know, consider all the evidence he had to ignore to make his case. This book is a highly incomplete history of id. And I don't think it's a book that is really tried hard to understand where ID is at. So I just want to say in closing here, from my heart a little bit, be fair, try to be fair, try to be charitable when you're writing about a subject. I think HAL did try to do that at many junctures. That's why this book has this weird bimodal quality in sort of some of the little things. He gets things right. You can see he's trying to be fair. But on this big picture issue of whether Idea has even done anything new since 2005, I don't think he could have been more unfair. And you don't have to look very far to find evidence that contradicts his thesis. This has been fun to talk about because we got to talk about all the cool things that Idea is doing. But keep in mind the broader perspective. Why are we talking about this? Because this major book from New York University Press very inexplicably claims that IDE has really done nothing new since 2005 and the amount of stuff that it had to ignore in order to make that thesis. I hope this gives you an appreciation of how unfair we get treated sometime by folks in the academic community. It's really quite astounding. So just try to be like the least bit fair to us. All right? We would appreciate that people would actually recognize what we've done.
[00:52:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And if you've heard the things that Casey's mentioned, the future could not be brighter for the Intelligent Design movement. And yet you wouldn't know that if you read Designer Science. So rather than retracting one manufactured quote, perhaps the whole book should be getting retracted.
[00:53:07] Speaker A: Well, I'm not asking for that. I'm just critiquing. I'm just critiquing what he left off so readers can decide for themselves. But I think we presented a lot of evidence that, you know, the book really omits a lot of information.
[00:53:19] Speaker B: Well, Casey, thanks so much for your time. I know you're busy, I know you've got other things to do, but this was valuable just to unpack this. And you've written about this. You've got a whole comprehensive critical review of the book. Where can we find out?
[00:53:32] Speaker A: Yeah, it's on scienceandculture.com I think it's like a six part review. If you really want to read the whole thing, there it is. Otherwise, you know, if it was me, I would just listen to this podcast. But do whatever you want to do.
[00:53:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And to know more about Casey's work in general, you can always visit Casey luskin.com. well, Casey, thanks so much. Viewers, listeners, you know what to do. Go check out the material that Casey's put forth. And we hope you've enjoyed today's podcast. Don't miss the first episode where Casey unpacks the story of the fabricated quotes that made it into designer signs. And then what happened after he raised the alarm about that. So for Idea of the Future, I'm Andrew McDermott. Thanks for joining us.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligent design.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
