[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Hello, I'm Andrew McDermott. Today, my guest is writer and speaker Kirk Durston, who holds a PhD in biophysics, a master's in philosophy, and undergrad degrees in physics and mechanical engineering. Durston has published several papers in peer reviewed science and philosophy journals since the 1980s. He has studied the possibility that meaningful information in general, and genetic information specifically, is the fingerprint of intelligence. His PhD work involved developing a method to identify and measure functional information in biopolymer sequences and to see what that information does in terms of protein structure.
One of his current research projects involves working with a team of scientists to develop software that can help us better understand the sub molecular structure of proteins and how they fold.
When he's not studying protein folds, Durston enjoys family nature, photography and experiencing the remote wilderness. Kirk, thanks for joining me today.
[00:01:16] Speaker C: Well, thank you for having me. I'm glad to be here.
[00:01:20] Speaker B: Absolutely. Well, today we're kicking off a three episode series with you, exploring a series you recently wrote, actually, that looks at the differences between three major categories of science.
You put it as experimental, inferential, and fantastical or science fiction. Today, we'll focus on your thoughts related to experimental science. First, can you tell us why you wrote this series? What are the big picture ideas you're trying to communicate here?
[00:01:48] Speaker C: Well, over the years, as I spent time in various science departments and read what people were accepting as true in the general public sphere, I had serious reservations about a lot of the things that people just accept as fact, the layperson on the street, so to speak. But the question was, what was it about 21st century science that disturbed me or that I found that I had red flags with? And as I thought about it, I realized that actually 21st century science is not just one homogeneous, monolithic practice. It actually can be broken down into at least three categories, and some would break it down into two others to three.
And not all of those categories are equally, let's say, scientific, so to speak, as it were. Some of them are, can be trusted. Others, well, you have to have a little bit of a skeptics approach to whether those results or what their inferences are. And then there's a whole other area of science that's really not much more than science fiction or philosophy of science. So the big, the main idea I wanted to communicate to the general audience is that blind faith in 21st century science can be badly misplaced.
But to know where to put your faith in science, you have to have a better understanding of how science breaks out into these three categories with experimental science as being very trustworthy, with some exceptions, I'll get into in a little bit, inference science can be trustworthy, but on the other hand, you can take huge leaps there that are probably false and then fantasy science, where basically it's just interesting. It's more akin to science fiction. And once a person begins to be able to analyze scientific claims in the media and sort them into one of these categories, they're in a better position to know how to approach them, how much credibility to put in them, and maybe how to test them.
[00:04:03] Speaker B: And that's why reminders like this are so great for us. Just to, as you say, help categorize things we hear, and we're hearing a lot these days. We're getting information from all directions, a lot of it from science sources and from the media, trying to share what's going on in science. And we really need this, this skill to be able to separate into these categories. So tell us, how do you define experimental science?
[00:04:30] Speaker C: Okay. Experimental science is what I would say is the most trustworthy aspect of science. It can be extremely trustworthy, provided people aren't I, you know, massaging the results or fabricating things. But I would define experimental science as the process of doing real experiments and or making real observations that actually give actual results. And those results can be published, and then other people can look at those published results, do the same experiments and reproduce those same conclusions or reproduce the same results. And so, in other words, it's held accountable by the requirement that it's reproducible and it can be verified by other scientists. Now, if you go through that entire process, including the verified by other scientists bit, then you have something that is one of the most trustworthy endeavors of humanity.
And the reason I say that is that is that final step of reproducibility by other scientists or other people.
So that's basically it. It's essentially the scientific method where a high degree of accountability is required in virtue of it, of the requirement to be reproducible by other people.
[00:05:54] Speaker B: So it's an area of high accountability.
[00:05:57] Speaker C: Yeah, high accountability.
You can publish a paper, and this has been done. And quite recently, there's been a lot of papers found to be not reproducible. Well, you know, that doesn't look good for a scientist to produce results that are actually not reproducible, even though a lot of that still happens today.
[00:06:19] Speaker B: Well, you say that in decades of time spent in the sciences, you haven't come across a single example of conflict between experimental science and faith. Can you explain that?
[00:06:29] Speaker C: Yeah, so I, you know, when I. When I began as a naive first year physics student back in the 1970s, I had a pretty naive view of science. It was the gold standard for knowledge and truth. And as time went on, I began to experience some red flags with some things in science that might conflict with faith. For example, I know that there's different views on this, even amongst those people who have, you know, have a faith in God. Regarding the origin of life, for example, there's different views. And I. And I do mention that. However, in my own view, I felt that which was more of a christian perspective, that God had been involved in the origin of life. But of course, that was just, you know, a belief held in faith not due to any results or science or anything else. So as I encountered various, and there weren't that many, but at various things that might question the things that I held to be true or by faith, that is what I noticed. I began to notice something. And that is all of the things, all of the areas where there did seem to be a bit of a conflict between the things that I held to be true by faith and what science was saying. Every one of those seemed to fall into inferences that people had made, given certain observations and results, but they had inferred a conclusion that actually we cannot reproduce.
And I should clarify, we cannot reproduce it, not because necessarily it is false. It's just that the sheer magnitude of the experiment, or we cannot go back in time to actually reproduce that very thing. In those situations, we simply cannot reproduce it. And that's why we have conclusions that we infer. And that's where all of the.
There weren't that many, but the ones that were. The seeming conflict between science and faith seemed to fall into the inferences that were being made. None of them were falling into actual experimental results.
And I see science as the discipline that humans use to figure out how nature works, and that's experimental science.
Experimental science comes up with a hypothesis, tests it out, and if that works, if we can actually reproduce, we get the results and we can reproduce those results. We're a little more confident in piecing together a picture of how nature works. And so as I began to think about these things, I realized I can't think of anything I have seen in experimental science over the decades. Literally, that poses a red flag for anything I might hold in faith.
The. Everything seemed to fall in to conclusions that were arrived at by inferences from observations and other experiments, but they were conclusions that had been inferred not actually results of experiments, and consequently, we cannot really test the conclusions.
And that's where I started to see the conflict arise in there.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Why are the results of experimental science often prone to corruption?
[00:09:55] Speaker C: Okay, short answer, human nature. There have been a couple of articles, actually, more than a couple. I have a bibliography of probably a few dozen articles now, and several of those in peer reviewed science journals, pointing out that at this point, science has a serious problem, and it's experimental science that has the problem, and that is that the majority? By majority, I mean over half the papers published in peer reviewed journals, particularly in the field of biology, hematology and cancer research, they cannot be replicated.
And the first major one was in nature in 2012 by Begley and Ellis. And what they did is they sent a number of landmark papers in hematology and oncology off to independent labs to see if they could be replicated. They found that 89% of them could not be replicated. So the question was, was this just kind of like an anomaly? And in 2017, five years later, Nature published another article. And basically conceding, and I'll quote, numerous studies, most recently in psychology and cancer biology, have confirmed that failure to replicate published findings is the norm. Keyword here is the norm. That is, this is normal. This is what you would expect is that a paper published in that field, those fields cannot be replicated. So why would that be? Back to human nature, they use the phrase perverse incentives to explain why many of these papers can't be reproduced simply. There's competition for funding, there is the pressure for academic advancement and prestige. And so the more papers you have published, the more academic prestige you have in the field. And also, when it comes to funding, you need to produce results if you want to experience continued funding in that field. And so if the results aren't there, there are what nature called perverse incentives to maybe massage the results slightly or the statistical analysis slightly or outright fabricate in maybe the minority of cases, but a lot of cases, it's tweaking and massaging to get the kind of results that will help you get funding for the next funding application. So basically, it goes down to human nature. Now, back to my statement that I think experimental science is the golden standard here.
So all of these papers, the golden standard was not complete until somebody else tried to replicate the findings. And at that point, the golden standard became complete. And that's where we found that 89% cannot be replicated, at least in that paper, in nature of 2012, but 11% could. And so it's that 11% that emerges out of the rubble of accountability from independent attempts to replicate the findings. That 11% is now, in my mind, I would say that's golden, that can be, that's trustworthy. We can bank on that, those 11%.
[00:13:12] Speaker B: Are you surprised that it's so little? Or would you expect that, given how.
[00:13:16] Speaker C: Many studies, I actually was flabbergasted that the number of papers that could not be reproduced was 89%.
I was just agog.
That's not. But I have other papers here that cite other figures, like 80%, and this is in science. But one has to remember that often in psychology and sociology, a lot of those papers are being published with the idea that they're taking a scientific approach in their studies, and their same reproducibility problem emerges there due to the same perverse incentives.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Well, it's good to get to the bottom of that and see what's going on. Before we close this particular episode, I wanted to take just a moment briefly to ask you about your work studying proteins. You suspected decades ago that functional information is the fingerprint of an intelligent mind. So how has your research and study over the years borne that out?
[00:14:18] Speaker C: At first, it was an intuitive, it was, it was intuition, and it had to do with something about the mind and intelligence that and its ability to produce information that was highly useful and meaningful. So at first it was intuition. And I, I had read at some old papers, Hubert Yawkey was one of the first papers that got me thinking along these lines. And it occurred to me that first of all, the information encoded in DNA is digitized. It's all in basically four letter code, if you will. And therefore it would be a beautiful candidate to explore, to see if it in turn, that the information it contains is actually useful or meaningful, or functional. When I use the word meaningful, it may not be meaningful to human beings, because it's not really necessarily intended for human beings to understand like we would a novel or a physics textbook. But is it meaningful to the cell? And instead of meaningful, I would prefer to use the word functional. So it became important to somehow develop an ability, or the method, to measure functional information, and then apply it to biopolymers such as DNA and proteins, to test and see if there was a significant amount of information there, not just, you know, a small, trivial amount that could be accidentally produced, but a significant level.
And when I did that, it began to become pretty clear that protein families require a substantial amount of functional information in order to encode them into the genomes.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: Well, we will revisit that. And in our next episode, we'll look at discussion of what you mean by inferential science and kind of compare that to what you've talked about today, experimental science. But that's all the time we have for today. Thanks for your time, Kirk. I appreciate you coming.
[00:16:15] Speaker C: My pleasure.
[00:16:16] Speaker B: Well, you can listen to other episodes of ID the
[email protected], or on your favorite podcasts app. Until next time, I'm Andrew McDermott for ID the future. Thanks for listening.
[00:16:31] 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 intelligentdesign.org and idthefuture.com.
