[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: Greetings. I'm your guest host today on ID the Future. I'm Robert J. Marks and if you enjoy this podcast, consider joining us over at Mind Matters AI where I host a weekly episode about natural and artificial intelligence. That's Mindmatters AI. We're not here to talk about that today. We're here to talk about our guest Charles Thaxton and the re release of his classic book which he co authored with Walter Bradley and Roger Olson called the Mystery of Life's Origin. The release of Mystery of Life's origin in 1984 could be marked as the beginning of the modern ID movement. The authors of the book were, as I mentioned, Charles Thaxton, Walter Walter Bradley and Roger Olson. The Walter Bradley center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence is excited to announce the re release of an updated version of the book.
Now a lot has happened in science since the original publication in 1984.
The original analysis of Thaxton, Bradley and Olson has held strong.
This is confirmed in the new edition of the book by additional chapters written by luminaries such as biochemist extraordinaire Jim Tour, philosophy of science expert Steve Meyer, astronomer Guillermo Gonzales, biologist Jonathan Wells and physicist Brian Miller. There's also a great introduction by David Klinghofer that outlines the history of the effort of putting together the book. Our guest on ID the Future today is co author Charles Thaxton. Dr. Thaxton earned his doctorate in physical chemistry from Iowa State University. He did a postdoc in the history of science at Harvard University and another stay at the molecular biology laboratories at Brandeis University. Charles, greetings. Thank you for being with us today.
[00:02:03] Speaker C: Well, thank you, Bob.
[00:02:05] Speaker B: Look, there were three authors of the Mystery of Life's Origin and I've learned by listening to you and Roger Olson and Walter Bradley that you had three different specialties that you bought together in kind of a magic mix to write such an authoritative book. What was the general specialties of the co authors and specifically what was your contribution?
[00:02:26] Speaker C: Well, I was a chemist and wrote the chapters dealing with the experiments and the analysis of the experiments and a lot of the background material for the history of origin of life studies and that sort. And then also Roger Olson wrote the chapters dealing with the early atmosphere and the early earth itself and also the chapter on protocells. At the end of the book, Bradley wrote all of the chapters dealing with thermodynamics. Those were three chapters that were very significant.
Usually thermodynamics is not very well placed in most Origin of Life books.
And yet it's extremely important and we wanted to place it front and center as really essential to understand.
So Walter Bradley did an excellent job. I thought of putting those parts together.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: Now, there was a guy named Buell, yes, I believe John Buell. And he was kind of instrumental in putting you guys together. He was kind of the manager of the team. How did you become involved in the book?
[00:03:28] Speaker C: Well, I had been involved in Boston for several years, and after I finished my postdoc at Brandeis, I had heard about Probe Ministries in Dallas that were doing some of the same kind of things that I was already doing on a local level in Boston area.
And that was going into university classrooms and speaking on a variety of topics, issues that I felt like I knew something about and could address.
But prom was doing it full time, many universities. And so I was considering joining them. And I did.
And the first thing happened after I arrived in Dallas. Well, John Buell, who was the director of the, of the science part of the program, I guess you'd say, dropped a manuscript on my desk and said, I'd like for you to read this.
Tell me what you think.
Turned out that was a manuscript that Bradley and Olson had actually written for John at the foundation for the purposes of possible publication. So I read it and then we discussed from there and I told him I liked many of things in it, but where was all the chemistry that needed to be there?
So that's how I got involved to put the chemistry in.
There was some already, but I didn't think you dealt with it sufficiently.
[00:04:41] Speaker B: So you were the third person to become involved in the book, is that right? Because Bradley and Olson.
[00:04:46] Speaker C: It was not my book.
Bradley and Olson. I'm not sure who actually. I guess Bradley is the one who wrote it and then sought Roger to help him. And then after they put that together, giving it to John, and then John asked me to read it since he knew I was a chemist. And I read it and made my suggestions and he suggested I come along the ride with. He went down to Texas A and M. That's where Bradley had just come for being a professor there from being at the Colorado School of Mines for some years.
And also that same weekend we went down, Roger Olson happened to be there. I really never did find out why he was there, I believe, but it just sort of all happened. It came to happen in one day on Saturday.
We spent the whole day together and outlining what we were going to do in the book and went from there.
[00:05:35] Speaker B: Well, that's pretty exciting stuff. One of the exciting things is that initially in 1984, you decided not to go with a Christian sort of publisher. You went for a mainline scientific publisher. And I think that that was probably a big deal and might have been very difficult to do.
Were you involved in finding the publisher, or was that a Buell or how was that done?
[00:05:58] Speaker C: Well, I think it was kind of a community effort. I mean, Olson, at that time had already joined a private company and Bradley was just getting started at Texas A and M, and neither one of them had much time on their hands. And I was just a new man in the project and had plenty of time at Probe, where I was working.
So I began full time to delve into this project, this book.
That's really how it happened. But after we put it together, it didn't sound like a book. It sounded like three separate books kind of jammed up together.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:06:34] Speaker C: We realized we needed some help and we sought the advice of several people and realized that it needed to be taken all the material and start again. So that's basically what we did.
[00:06:45] Speaker B: So you did. You did a second rewrite? Totally.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Actually, we had three total rewrites.
[00:06:50] Speaker B: Oh, my goodness. That's very interesting.
[00:06:52] Speaker C: I thought that's why it took so long to do it.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: I thought one of the things very interesting about the book is that everything theological was regulated to an epilogue where you outlined all of the difficulties, in fact, the impossibility of the starting of the first life, and then you looked at the explanation. One of them was intelligent design. I think there was also things like directed panspermia and chemical evolution, which I think today has been pretty well discredited.
Once you published the book, what sort of feedback did you receive from the book? I'm sure it was both positive and negative. Tell me about some of the feedback you received.
[00:07:31] Speaker C: Well, actually, for the first year, hardly anything really. Oh, we didn't hear a word. In fact, I was wondering whether or not the book had actually been printed.
[00:07:40] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: The publisher told us and said, don't worry about it. Is it a book like this?
It really takes a year. And it was almost a year to the day. And all the reports began to come back almost at once when they flooded door opened.
We started getting dozens of reviews and letters and everything. But it all came pretty much at once after about a year.
[00:08:02] Speaker B: And what were the reviews like? Were they largely positive? Were there a few negative? Were there people that were striking out against you because they say science and religion doesn't mix?
How were those reviews?
[00:08:13] Speaker C: I was pleasantly surprised that most of the ones we received were in the positive category. I was expecting an avalanche of negativity, but there were a few of those. But for the most part, even the negative ones were helpful. And I was really blown away by that.
[00:08:30] Speaker B: I think the interesting thing, correct me if I'm wrong, but the negative reviews were not about the science.
They were about your epilogue. Nobody really criticized the science, which was strong.
[00:08:42] Speaker C: There were a number of prominent people involved in the Origin of Life community who basically focused on the epilogue and let their philosophy be known.
They were not happy with that. But as far as the substance of the book, it was, you're right, there was very little in response to that other than the positive ones who were very happily surprised that we could give a thorough examination of the subject and not be polemic like they were probably expecting.
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that that was probably part of the genius of the book. And one of the reasons it was so well received and also the reason that it's stood the test of time is because you chose to write it that way.
So again, the Bradley center is re releasing the Mystery of Life's Origin. It's available in Kindle and print
[email protected] where you can buy this book and you can buy every other thing in the world, but it's available there also. It's being republished by Discovery Press. Now, Charles, you were also involved in some other things which were rather controversial since the printing of the Mysteries of Life's Origin. One of them was the Book of Pandas and People.
And your book caused quite a stir. Could you tell us about that?
[00:09:58] Speaker C: Well, actually, the Pandas book was the first book, an attempt to try to put intelligent design ideas applied overall to the subject of biology. We introduced in the Origin of Life book that we did, Mystery, we introduced a critique, a basic approach, and we basically tried to find authors who we felt could carry on that approach and apply it to biology. And happily, we knew already of Dean Kenyon, who was biology professor at San Francisco State, who had written a forward to our book Mystery.
And he had written a book on the Origin of Life that was kind of the standard for some years for what chemical evolution means. And it was communicated to university students.
And I used that book myself as a. As a standard for what we were going to try to give the other side of the story that that book gave.
And So I contacted Dr. Kenyon and told him about our project and asked if he would consider reading it. And I was very happily surprised that he said, yes, send it on. So we did.
And we found out after we went out there to visit that not only did he respond well to it, but he agreed to write the forward to our book because he had already come to the conclusion that we had independently of us.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:11:28] Speaker C: So I was very pleased about that and happy to have him write it.
[00:11:31] Speaker B: Now, Kenyon was a former major proponent of chemical evolution, that it was chemicals in some way evolved to form the first life, and his mind was changed. Is that true?
[00:11:46] Speaker C: Well, I'm sure there were a variety of influences that came down. Yes, but I'm not really sure what the major influence was. I never did actually talk to him about that, other than the fact that I know that there was one of his students that had some influence, and he had read our manuscript and he had read other works that were critical of chemical evolution. But at least I was happy that we came along at the time we did, in order to be able to have him write the forward to it, because you're right, he was a very prominent figure in the origin of life community, and he had changed his understanding. And he told me in that first conversation we had in his office in San Francisco, he said, I've been planning to write another book on this subject, but since you've already written this, I'll just give my students your book.
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Really.
[00:12:39] Speaker C: So I was very happy about that, too.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: So you saved Dan Kenyon a lot of work then, I guess, right?
[00:12:44] Speaker C: Well, I guess. But he was one of the ones that we chose to write the Pandas book, and he was very keen on doing that because it gave him opportunity to extend the same line of thinking that we had introduced in Mystery that he was already on to himself and extended into the area of biology. So thanks to Kenyon's thought and work on that, that's how he came involved in the Pandas book.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: Aha. Now, wasn't Pandas and people involved in some sort of litigation somewhere?
[00:13:19] Speaker C: Yes, it was. There was a lawsuit in Dover, Pennsylvania, about whether or not intelligent design could be introduced. And Pandas was front and center as one of the textbooks in the trial because it was the first book that was trying to promote the ideas of intelligent design overtly. Mystery never talks about intelligent design, not until the epilogue. And the pandas picked up the theme and the idea and then extended into it and used the term intelligent design, I think, for the first time in a modern context.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Wow. So that was another pioneering effort that you were involved in. That's really exciting.
Well, Dr. Thaxton, what other things have you been involved in these last 35 years since the publication of the Mystery of Life's Origin.
[00:14:02] Speaker C: Well, by the time the time Mystery was published had been. I guess. I guess it was in 92, 91, 92, whenever the communism fell. At that same time, we had already had the book translated into Romanian, and we had 2,500 copies, I think it was, of the book translated sitting in a warehouse in Vienna just waiting to be distributed into Romania.
When Ceausescu was executed on Christmas Day,
[00:14:32] Speaker B: 1989, I remember that he was a monster, wasn't he?
[00:14:36] Speaker C: Well, he was a dictator, for sure, but his wife was really the villain in that story, I think. But that's another matter.
But she was a chemist. And when we went to Romania to distribute the book, I got the red carpet treatment in a lot of universities around the country as the first Westerner to come in and in many years and speak freely, openly about things.
So that was in 1990, I'm sure. But after we had communism opened up, and we went in, and it went so well that we moved to Czech Republic in 92, really.
And we were there until I lost my leg in 96.
So for the next four or five years, we were traveling all over Eastern Europe and Russia and Germany and many places over in the East.
And then also during those years, I had opportunity to go to Korea, and Bradley and I both spoke at an educators conference in Seoul, Korea. We gave outline of the major ideas in Mystery at that time. I noticed at that point that their response to what we were saying was completely different than we were getting here in this country.
It took me a while to figure it out, but I think the cultural differences accounted for it.
So when we talked about the role of an intelligent cause in development of origin of life, there were many people in Korea, culturally, who were ready to accept that idea, even if they didn't have any evidence for it. And here we were offering evidence, too. So what kind of a situation is this?
[00:16:10] Speaker B: My goodness.
[00:16:12] Speaker C: Then after that, we just decided to live over there. So we did for several years in Eastern Europe.
And then when I lost my leg, we moved back here. And I've been teaching high schoolers for the last. Well, since 97, 98.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: Well, that's. That's pretty exciting. You talked about losing your leg. Do you mind sharing with us what happened to your leg, how you lost it?
[00:16:30] Speaker C: Well, I had cancer.
And I wouldn't all be surprised that people talk about the effects of environment.
Well, in Eastern Europe, it's a very polluted atmosphere in many places, and in the place where we lived, In Prague in the wintertime, you have these temperature inversions and so all the coal dust that they use in factories comes down on the city. Whether or not that had anything to do with it, I don't know. But many people have written on the subject and thought about it and doctors thought that that might be a factor in it as well, I don't know. Anyway, I was very happy when I didn't lose my life in the ordeal. A leg was enough for it to get my attention. It's a. It's a very bad disease.
And since then only had one major effort to going back to Prague.
A dream fulfilled in 2005 when we had the International Origin of Life Conference in Prague and we had over 700 in attendance at that conference. And it was a major, major situation because we were told for four or five years it was there. You'll never get hundred people together to hear anything like this. We don't know anything about that. We don't want to know about that. And you'll never get them together. And boy, how wrong they were. We had over 700 and it was a very, very big day.
[00:17:53] Speaker B: We had that conference well behind the iron Curtain. They had lived so long with the doctrine of atheism, they were just happy to hear about anything other than atheism. And I think that some of the, you know, there were still underground religious efforts happening and that was the spark that led to the interest that we really saw right at the fall of communism.
It was amazing.
Well, Dr. Charles Thaxton, thank you for spending the time with us. We've been talking to Dr. Charles Thaxton. He's the first author for the Mystery of Life's Origin, Originally published in 1984. It's re released now with added chapters that actually show that the original analysis in 1984 has stood the test of time. And it looks like it's going to stand the test for a long time to come. Thank you, Dr. Thaxton. Really appreciate your time and effort. I'm your guest host, Robert JJ. Marks for ID the future. Until next time, be of good cheer.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. ID the Future is copyright Discovery Institute.
For more information, visit Intelligent Design.org and ID the Future.com.
