so thank you very much Deb for introducing me and for the invitation it's a great pleasure for me to be here I've really enjoyed the talks I'm sorry that it's finishing actually because I was really enjoying it and we're going to hear more do you know you can hear it yeah yeah so I'm I'm a professor of theoretical physics in Oxford I actually this is my the street that I cycle on every day I live just down just down here and my office is right over there actually is pictures from 1890 but it really hasn't changed at all I can still nothing was changed as in Oxford um so it's one it's a great pleasure to be there and teach there I think first row physics has other advantages or disadvantages depending on the situation so if somebody you meet somebody at a cocktail party and they say what you do and you say I'm a professor of theoretical physics that usually ends the conversation just not says that's nice when you're an airplane so I fly a lot and I usually I either went to sleep or work and so somebody next to you they say what you do I said in physics that usually ends the conversation if it doesn't I say I really like equations how about you they're not gonna stop them I say I relate the Dirac equation what's your favorite equation and if they get beyond that then I probably should have a conversation so what I want to speak about today is I'm gonna talking about science I realized that this audience is quite broad when I wrote my abstract I had in mind really the participants in our ECF program so I was gonna do something more technical but I'm gonna do something more technical anyway but I'm gonna wave my hands a little bit more but the main the main point I want to get across the main the one kind of big point want to get across is that in this discussion about evolution it were there's a very large number of hidden assumptions assumptions under the surface the classic iceberg type paradigm now there are you know whenever we have conversations across cultures whether that's religious cultural scientific cultures or different religious cultures different scientific cultures we're used to the kind of superficial differences so may give you one actually practical example if you ever come to visit in Oxford so in the UK these things are called trousers and when I wear under my trousers are what people call pants so if you're an American and you come and you say I like your pants so don't don't do that that's a superficial difference between culture and I I'm from Holland originally I grew up in central Africa I lived in the u.s. living you can and crossing cultures and I see these superficial differences all the time but there are also deeper more subtle differences so number of years ago I was running an alpha course for international students an alpha course is a kind of introduction to Christianity course and it has various talks and this one talk which is called who is the Holy Spirit and it's where you introduced the concept of the Trinity and so I had a very wide range of students from a wide range of of kind of backgrounds I gave what I thought was a really good talk on very clear talk on the nature of the Trinity and the who the Holy Spirit is and one of the students are very brilliant Indian student came up to me and said dr. lui I really enjoyed that talk I was a very very good talk and I was feeling feeling really good and he said now explain to me again how does one become a Holy Spirit's now why do they think that well he came from a Hindu background and the idea of God with him and so all a lot of things I was saying he is heard in a very different way so part of what I'm gonna try to tell you about when I speak about the sciences sometimes we talk about science and when we use words we can get confused and and the meanings can be conflated so why do I as a physicist work on biology I started out in quantum physics and kind of drifted over into biology but one of the reasons I moved into biology is actually perhaps superficial perhaps not this is a movie that I saw and this is the actual movie from kg numba in Osaka it's a bacterium bacterium swim with little flagella on the back and this is a video he it's a little animation of how the little motor that spins the splurge alum works so there you see the little proteins coming together in perfect 3-dimensional symmetry and this is an amazing little piece of nano machine you can spin at a hundred thousand rpm you can stop in a quarter of a turn I have a colleague in physics who measure the torque of this thing which I made they're absolutely spectacular little pieces of nano machinery if I find one that I could see and hold in my hands I'd assume was made in a factory some very complex thing made it but these things make themselves there is no factory inside the bacteria making these things if they just float around and they just stick in exactly the right position every time the first time I saw that I thought well that is just amazing how how does that work and so I asked some of my colleagues and they said well they kind of waved their hands I thought no no no that's not now I'm gonna understand how that works so I started working on this problem of self-assembly and I guess your board during my talk here's a little thought you have ten times more bacteria in your body than you have cells in your body before your rush the fact is probably several pounds of bacteria that you have in your body so before you rush off to the hospital or try to go on a quick weight loss routine they do all kinds of good things they synthesize vitamins inside your most of inside your guts we took them out of you you would be ill in fact we were learning this microbial it's incredibly important to make you you so you're not just your human genome you're also your bacterial genome you're your combination - so while I'm speaking to you this process is happening inside of you millions and millions of times right now and it takes about 20 to 40 minutes for it to make machines are roughly the time of my talk this is happening inside of you now for a physicist the problem is that this system is way too complicated your physicists tend to we say that you know physics is work is really solid hard science and it gives a bit fluffy we call it chemistry that gets more fluffy we call it biology and after that it's here be dragons what we really mean is those problems in chemistry and biology are too difficult for us to solve and so we just push them off to other people and so this is too difficult way difficult Act there's a lot we don't know about it so I decided to work on something simpler which are viruses so viruses are actually also self-assemble they're what they are is little shells with DNA or RNA inside and they have these really cool little shapes like this first one you see is made of 12 Pentagon's the next one is made of 12 Pentagon's in 20x iggins if you take a modern soccer ball I should call you not football but soccer ball round one you'll see that they are stitched in this way so nature got there a long time before us you can take these little shells put them in a test tube change the solution conditions and they'll fall apart into individual little units you change it back and they'll pop right back into a whole bunch of little balls so that's cool so I thought I'm gonna think about that so I spent about five years with one of my PhD students working on it and we can wear this little model here which you see these are little particles there's little virus capsids they will have to move completely randomly so they just move randomly with no guidance at all you said let's move around like they do in solution and if you wait for a little while you see that they spontaneously form these little shapes as we hope they would so that's really cool we've understood something this would be the emulate something about this self-assembly process and the reason it's interesting is because the number of ways that these things can come together which is wrong is hyper astronomically large the number of ways they can come together that's right is just one and so it's interesting to think mathematically how do you find that one in that very very large set of shapes another way of thinking about this work and thinking about yourself because your self assemble this is happening in your body at many different levels all the time how does that work well it's like taking a Lego blocks putting in the Box shaking it and out comes a pretty form train I could do that I could make probably a lot of money on the toy markets where I tell my funders when they want some some kind of application for my research that's how I make toys but science is fun and when the great things about being a scientist today is that I'm paid money to do this a few generations ago I would have to be independently wealthy to spend time thinking about this but now I saw this movie I thought that's interesting I start thinking about it and people pay me money in fact I should say it's mainly tax money for it I say thank you very much all of you here in the audience your taxes are paying for me to think about that and why do we why do we spend your tax money in that kind of a whimsical way well it's because many of our greatest discoveries have come out of this kind of curiosity driven research so if you get your worried a little bit me it's not so much your attack is all the Brits in here it's your taxes thank you very much that's where it come from I also got interested in not only the question of how do these things assemble but how do they are they design how the genes make things that self assemble and so I started thinking a little bit about genes and there's all kinds of interesting things about genes so we share 15% of our genes with E coli bacteria we share 70% of our genes with frogs if you kiss one and it becomes a prince you share close to 100% we hear ninety-eight percent of our genes with chimpanzees or 96 percent depending on how you count that's interesting what makes us different then in fact my parents are biologists and I grew up in Gabon in central Africa and when I was small we had a pet chimpanzee birtija in case you can't see the difference that's chimpanzee and that is me my mother says we look different but we behave remarkably similarly we start so what makes us different it's a good question what makes us different well it's not actually number of genes so here's number of genes a number of organisms a bacterium has about 4,000 this little fruit flies through 13,000 these two little worms made of only a thousand cells have between nineteen thousand five hundred and twenty three thousand five hundred genes this Homo sapiens my little daughter has on the order of 20,000 genes less than that little worm which is quite amazing in fact that's a slightly worryingly this little water flea has 30,000 genes a lot more than my daughter or than me and rice which would be eating later today I think we'll have can have between 30 2015 genes so these simple organisms have a lot more genes than we do that's kind of why is that how can they have so many genes surely I'm more complicated than rice I think I am okay I probably don't taste is good but I'm more complicated so why does that have so many genes that's kind of thing well you start pushing that thought a little bit further and thinking about the genes in your own body so every single cell in your body has exactly the same DNA but here I've got a whole bunch of different cells a skin cell a nerve cell a white blood cell a fat cell I got a lot more of those after the all the food this this time at this conference and so every single one of those cells have exactly the same DNA but it looks completely different that's kind of interesting every cell in your body has the same DNA but they look and be different so how does that work well so these are the three conundrums why are the cells in our bodies to a difference if they all have the same DNA and why does the number of genes correlate so poorly with the complexity of an organism and why do different organisms share so many genes so those are kind of questions I was thinking about what I've been thinking about and they're great puzzles actually it's really interesting so why is that well one of the reasons why this seems like a conundrum is because we think about perhaps in the wrong way we think about them as blueprints like architectural drawings you can look there and grab this and it does this and does that you can kind of draw and out comes the organism but that can't quite be true because the same DNA makes all these cells that are completely different and some very big drawings like a drawing of rice give something relatively simple and some relatively small drawings like the ones that make us give something pretty complicated so what's going on the sort of old view of how genes work is that a gene is a blueprint for making a particular part of an animal so if there's a million different kinds of animals out there then there should be a million different kinds of blueprints but it's not really the case it turns out that even in two species that look completely different like a mouse and a housefly they both have the same gene that says make an eye so how come the results are so different the basic idea is simple genes aren't blueprints they're switches individually they don't do much but if you have a master switch they can turn on other switches and groups then you can do something useful by plugging different combinations of stuff and in the same master switch you can get different useful results that fit different needs so that gene that says makenai is just like this power strip switches other genes on in groups so that something useful can happen like growing an eyeball and depending on the combination of those other genes the end result might look like this like this but the master gene is always the same and that's the connection between Evo and Devo which lets us understand both much better one of our body part or develop you hit the master switch want to change a body part to fit a different need or evolve mix up the plugs and that wasn't so hard was it so hopefully that's one piece of science you'll take with you that genes are not blueprints they're like switches and just like your transistor in your computer you can rearrange the switches I can do a wide range of different things that's exactly why how every cell in your body is different because the switches are turned on and off in different ways so here's a little picture of some of the switches in an e coli bacterium every dots is a gene every line is telling you who turned somebody on and turn somebody off it tells you the logical interactions between them or what you can immediately see is the number of ways you can draw those lines is enormous so you could have a small number of red dots I make lots of lines and get something very complicated from this and it's this is basically the logic of life so there's something really beautiful about this kind of dance that's happening inside of you all the time with these genes turning on and off making different things making eyes making all that kind of stuff it's really something extraordinarily beautiful much more pretty I think a beautiful than that old-fashioned picture of a blueprint now why am i interested in this as a physicist you may wonder well it turns out that you can take this and turn it into really beautiful equations will be a very large number of them and so in my lab we're studying these equations and we have all kinds of hopes that there's something very simple underlying them and at the moment those are mainly hopes but we have some clues that there might be something underlying them another little interesting thing to think about in this kind of metaphor I've given you one metaphor gene switches rather than jeans as blueprint that gives a much more dynamic and interesting picture you can also think yourself well could you make almost anything with DNA or are there certain things that are repeated so why do we share so much DNA with other organisms for example well one of the in the video they described described one gene that um turns eyes on and off it's called pax6 and in fact if you tick that gene and put it in the bit of a fruit fly that makes wings the fruit fly will try to make an eye on its wing because which is on the eye yeah that's a key a human I gene they put into the wing of this fruit fly so you can do all kinds of interesting things in this way well this tells us that a lot of the way that we can evolve is not just by changing the genes but by changing the way the genes are interacting with each other by changing the little lines of logic and the fun thing about this field if you if you're interested in this is that they they have cool names like sonic hedgehog shaven baby and tinman so maybe I since I'm in the Midwest I can ask what do you think tinman is related to any guesses very good they're Wonderful Wizard of Oz Tin Man who had no heart exactly very good Satan man is the gene that you need to make hearts so there's another a little picture that the idea that that's evolution you kind of go in any direction in this kind of random way it's not really true it uses switches it uses units that can really shape every change and there's something I think more pretty and interesting about that picture of evolution now I've been using the word evolution slightly loosely to now and I think really um we should ask what we mean by the word evolution what do we mean well that's actually a really really important question in this whole discussion because the word gets used in a very wide range of way and I think a lot of the confusion comes just from this kind of semantics so the first way the evolution is used is as natural history the idea that the earth is old and that's simple organisms proceeded more complex organisms now it's important to realize that that was not what Charles Darwin was trying to describe the knowledge that the earth was all the knowledge that if you looked in the you dug down into the earth you found fossils and different layers was known well before Darwin so there's nothing about Darwin that's really about this no one was trying to explain how it happened but he wasn't really trying to say that it happened and interestingly for those of us in the church this is the source of the vast majority exegetical issues there are worries about Genesis particularly are not actually linked at all to evolution Doronin evolution they are linked to natural history so they're really linked to geology and archaeology and maybe you know a few related fields of that type and the tech general issues are pretty obvious um you don't need modern genetics to worry about them so for example Adam and Eve Cain and Abel were farmers they lived in cities in fact there were cities right after when Cain grew up there early cities around very clearly that's difficult to imagine much longer than say ten thousand years ago or even just by looking your archaeology you don't need Norway Normans largely irrelevant to these kinds of worries that we have about how to interpret um Genesis and we'd be in a little bit of a pickle as Christians if the Genesis text was really a made me I'll call a journalistic reconstruction of what happened a little bit like you know queried Luke he starts by writing to his dear friend Theophilus to give an orderly account of what happened if that was what the beginning of Genesis was like then we'd be in trouble that's not at all what it's like in fact it's hugely um it's hugely a structure in all kinds of complicated ways and so thinkers are worried about this or thought about this or used it to bring out actually the richness in there for a very long time so here's Origen about very famous church fathers like heterodox who wrote almost 2,000 years ago nineteen years ago what man of intelligence I will ask we'll consider that the 1st and 2nd and 3rd day in which there are said to be both morning and evening existed without Sun Moon and stars or the first day was even without a heaven and who could be found so silly to believe that God after the manner of former planted trees in the paradise eastward in Eden I do not think that anyone will doubt that these are figurative expressions which indicate certain mysteries to assemblance of history now I'm not bringing this up because I'm saying we ought to agree with origin in fact there's lots of things we shouldn't shouldn't agree with origin I was pointing out that ancient um interpreters immediately saw obvious things in the text like the fact that something more not created to the fourth day and one of the really interesting things about this discussion is that when I speak to a an audience for whom say that idea that the earth is that Genesis is a kind of virtual history is very important and I asked him how many of them have noticed that there's morning and evening morning and evening morning evening and there's no Sailor Moon until the fourth day it's hard to have a morning evening without the Sun the moon a lot of them looked puzzled because somehow they haven't noticed something absolutely glaringly obvious in the text and if you look more carefully the text has all the beautiful repeated structures at many different levels is very clearly a highly structured text my wife who came to faith later in life first time she was told over there poem with Genesis you know what she read again oh the she had exactly the same reaction the origin had which is well clear this is not meant to be a journalistic retelling that's because she came from a background with no Jen brought up within the church they'll have no reason to think about it in a different way it's just really interesting to notice when you talk to people how little they've noticed these glaringly obvious things in the text that's because we overlay onto it a more realistic way of reading we live in a culture that believes that journalistic retelling is the highest level of truth-telling and that's just wrong so in Gabon where I grew up in Central Africa particularly more rural areas it's very common for a rural African person to tell you a very sophisticated story about something that happens often not in chronological order because they're trying to emphasize some they're trying to say something that's really really important that's not because they don't understand chronology no it's because they're much clever in that they're using the language to say something more important so why wear this on the moon demoted to the fourth day well it's obvious people were worshipping the Sun the moon the words that are used there or great your land punishment their physical objects in the sky rather than deities the whole series of things that are being said there they're really quite crazy in fact if I were to say tomorrow is crazy to the audience at the time is if I were to say to you that seven moon or in fact it is astrological data to control our lives because that was what the intelligentsia thought at the time so once you understand that you realize the text as much more interesting and rich it's just fascinating to me that we get ourselves so caught up in these kinds of arguments and I think the arguments have to do a lot less with the surface issues a lot more with under the surface questions a kind of a a dulling of our senses or richer ways of thinking and talking about history that's the first question so I think a lot of what we talked about a lot of what are very very esteemed colleagues in theology and biblical studies were describing to you our issues having to do with largely with geology and archaeology what Darwin really gave to us was a mechanism for why that change happened and how it worked so what he said is there's variation so you have offspring that are different from you we actually didn't know about genetics that came only later so it's different than offspring and then that can be selected and it's really not much more than saying something quite simple oh if your offspring are different from you and the difference makes one of your offspring have more children and if that's heritable that over time the one the thing that makes them have more children will be the eventually dominate in the population we use a very fancy word natural selection survival of the fittest all those kinds of metaphors but really all it is is a little piece of mathematics if one of my children has two children and their children - children each and well as four children and four children then after the next generation of two grandchildren's had for the next one sixteen eight it grows much much more quickly in one stream than the other that's all not that's what survival of the fittest really is and that was a brilliant idea and then he came of course it has a lot of implications for how life is connected together how it to one another but for unknown t-that's the principal and Christians by enlarge are very happy with this principle so for example as I'll show you later this is the principle that your immune system uses to have a small number of genes to be able to respond to a very large number of different pathogens use them a method of random variation it randomizes antibodies in order to grab on to antigens it's this we see this in bacteria all the time we have this you know we see bacteria can evolve all kinds of different things the Christians all agree that God created this mechanism the only difference is that Christians did may disagree often about whether this mechanism explains the change over time that we see in the fossil record for example I think that's an interesting question does it explain that does it not explain it the scientific question to some sense it's not to me obviously that directly has a lot of exegetical biblical implications once you think about it a little bit more what it does have implications for is kind of natural theology so natural theology the idea that I look at nature and extract some knowledge about the divine there does have an implication or it seems to at least as partially because the words that are used words like random purposeless survival the fittest which I just mentioned to you before so I'm gonna go back and touch on this little board explore it that's evolution number two evolution as a mechanism to describe change over time everyone agrees including most Christians that that is something is that God created the question is is that enough to explain the large scale change over time that's an interesting question the third kind of evolution is evolution as a big-picture worldview I've kind of linked to scientism this is like the quote from George Gatorade Simpson that Jeff used yesterday man is the result of a purposeless materialistic process that did not have him in mind he was not planned or original Dawkins perhaps the rules most famous natural a theologian he looks at nature and says a lot of things about the way the world ought to be or the world the world is or the way God doesn't exist but he says essentially Dora made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist now my own take on this would be and I'm gonna say this very briefly you can ask me is that dated Simpsons Dawkins and the vast majority of popularizers of this type engage in a really naive and populist kind of natural theology extremely simplistic and so they look at the natural world and then say oh this tells me something about what God is like what happens in that case they're often thinking about God as some kind of in some kind if God exists the God they don't believe in is a kinetic morphus God you know an animal like us only bigger and smarter what's not the God that I believe in that's not the God of classical theology God who is the sustainer and creator of all rose not an animal like us not somebody who's like us but just a little bit smarter at something someone completely and utterly different and I don't actually I think that the way that the dynamics of the rhetoric work in our Christian circles goes a little bit like this you an ordinary person the pews here a popularizer of biology make evolutionist ik scientistic claims like your man is a result of purpose purposes process you think that's wrong because we're made by God and I would say you're entirely right and so you think well that guy must be wrong the danger is if you then try to attack his science thinking that by attacking a science you're gonna undermine his philosophical arguments you're actually kind of playing into his hands so we'd repeat that again I think that's essentially the dynamic so people I think I think people are rightly incensed by the way that natural theology plays it you see that in secondary schools the way that the average non-christian high school biology teacher teaches biology they smuggle the stuff in left right and center it's incredibly unhelpful and the reason why it's so powerful is because it uses a very naive kind of populistic natural theology that's also shared by the average person on the street whether they do or don't believe in God and so it's kind of a it's two sides that are holding each other up I think it would be much more helpful if Christians had instead responded by saying well look whether or not evolution one revolution - are true these the conclusions you're drawing from don't at all follow in the way they do and if you cut that I think our discussions would be a lot less fraught and a lot less we'd be a lot more relaxed about how thinking about these kinds of things so let me just give you one example of this kind of scientism I call it and actually example that doesn't link to evolution at all because I think it doesn't really matter whether you undermine natural structure somebody's come around one tomorrow and say I've shown that the whole dorm was wrong all along variation that reduction don't just explain the change over time it's not going to change this problem that we have with evolutionism or scientism so here's a very great on biologists and physicists actually originally Francis Crick in one of his recent books but not long before he died here about you your joys your sorrows your memories and your ambitions your sense of personal entity and free will or in fact no more I call this nothing but the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules this is the classic kind of Shibboleth of scientist you're nothing but the things that you're made of and this is essentially what evolutionism is about you're nothing but the product of a process over time which random in all kinds of the metaphors attached to it the question is is that true does even Francis Crick believe that so I'm gonna have a little um with do apologies to the Crick estate I'm gonna have a little thought experiment on Francis Crick so um practice Crick imagine the lights are low he's sitting up at the top of that that beautiful place we were yesterday looking out but he's got all for himself because if you have a little project a lot of money you can take it for itself as a beautiful young lady that he's trying to woo and some point she says to me Oh Francis we've been together for quite a long time but do you really know who I am do you know what I'm made of now all the men in the arts on the realize is a very dangerous question normally you try to steer the conversation away in this track but she doesn't work and she keeps pushing on principle Francis says okay I do know what you made up you're made of chemicals in fact the average human has enough phosphorus for 2,000 matches and I've ironed for one nail enough chlorine disinfectant swimming pool and a FAQ for ten bars of soap at this point you would probably get a slap if he tries to dig himself out by saying well no no I meant a point one bars of soap he's not going to get any further and the reason is obvious because you're not nothing you're made of chemicals but you're not nothing but the chemicals you're made of there's many different levels of meaning that we attach to ourselves as people and I don't think that Francis would do that howdy friends Crick would have done that um because I don't think he's a consistent thinker in these kinds of ways what's another example of why it's difficult to extract meaning from nature let me give you another example that's more recent so here's a very famous quote in Richard Dawkins book The Selfish jeans jeans swarming huge colonies safe inside gigantic lumbering robots sealed off from the outside world communicating with my torturous indirect routes manipulating it by remote control they are in you and me they created us body and mind and their preservation is the ultimate rationale for our existence so here you see a very kind of classic nothing but you're a type of argument being played out but here's the interesting point even if you were to believe this is nature that unambiguous can you extract interpreter so easily so here's denis noble was in fact there's another famous biologist in Oxford was in fact Richard Dawkins thesis examiner in a book that he wrote in 2006 called the music of light was actually looking at among others the beauty of the interconnectedness of all the genes that I showed you earlier he said well I can just take that same metaphor and turn it upside down genes are trapped in huge colonies locked inside highly intelligent beings molded by the outside world communicating it right with it by complex process sees to which blindly as if by magic function emerges they are in you and me we are the system that allows their code to be read and the preservation is totally dependent on the joy that we experience your producing ourselves we are the alteration al for their existence and Dennis tells me that he's asked Richard can you find an experiment that would adjudicate between these two interpretations which are radically different and there is none that's just an example to show you that doing this kind of natural theology is very very difficult it's highly the the interpretation is highly ambiguous and that's not a new idea you see very famously probably the most famous and brilliant theologian of the 19th century in Britain was John Henry Newman who said on this topic I believe in design because I believe in God not in God because I see design and more recently Alister McGrath has tried to kind of revamp natural theology and as a way of seeing and the arguments really are that there is no view from nowhere you always look at the world from a particular point of view and so you tend to interpret it from that point of view and therefore theologians like Newman or Mart or many others have been hugely suspicious of the natural theology progress particularly of the naive populist versions of it because almost always what we're reading into nature or out of nature is what we ourselves puts into it and that is fundamentally the problem with a very large amount of our kind of science popularizing it's a kind of natural theology that puts into you know the world what they've already they were rethinking in the first place instead what Alistair has been trying to do to reinvigorate it a little bit is to use a phrase from CS Lewis I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen not only because I see it because by it I see everything else and they are going to be if I start from a Christian way of thinking about the world I look at the natural world does it resonate better with that way of starting then if I start from a purely metaphysically naturalistic way there is nothing but Athens molecules does that make more sense of the world and that way you might be able do some kind of natural theology but what you can't do is look at it and in unambiguously interpretive so that's the second kind of point I really wanted to make for you the natural theology is difficult and a lot of our problems with evolution have to do with sounds natural theological interpretations by Christians and non-christians in the last bit I want to talk a little bit about the word random so Oh Charles Darwin why did on earth did you use the word random it's my lament and the reason for that is because the word random is actually has all kinds of overtones purposeless is the most common one but the whole assumes anything you know I'm not random she say to the average person you are made by random mutations they don't like that is random seems you have no meaning or direction no purpose at all now Christians could still easily live with a lot of randomness there's a there's a lot of has to do how do you think about God's sovereignty there's definite on 'pls in the scripture of you in the word random very famously um Oh actually but just examples of it in Scripture I want to give you a few examples by that word is perhaps more complicated and we have to think about so here's a piece of biology so proteins are long polymer chains like strings in your body but if they're all strings they can flop around they don't really do that much what you want them to do is to fold into this world of X well well-defined three-dimensional structure and what they do amazingly they can fool the exactly same structure or almost the same structure many times over and over again repeatedly I know I think about school but take a piece of string rub it in your hands and see if you get exactly the same shape each time you don't get something different every single time so screen called 11 tall paradox by a sigh reserved until a biophysicist MIT who pointed out that if you just take say a string of 150 ma massive just a small protein assume that between every single unit you can have maybe 10 different angles there's 10 times 10 times 10 to 10 10 2015 different possibilities the time would take the search all these possibilities is lower longer than the age of the universe now clearly there's a paradox so how does that work and in fact if we only found our proteins fully formed then this paradox would seem very powerful and a norms unassailable argument for the fact that God had to do miracles and natural history in order to make these things but that's not what happens we can do this experiments and what we think is that in fact the reason why these proteins can always find the same shape is because that search through all possible configurations is not random at all what happens when you pose the question like Leventhal does is that you're it's a little bit like saying this like having a golf course and a blind golfer who's trying to hit a hole now if the hole is here on this flat bit then the probability that he'll hit that hole with a random whack is indeed extremely small so that's the truly random search and it wouldn't actually happen but what happens what we think happens is that it that the proteins are more like at the bottom of a little free energy funnel so if you always you hit the ball somewhere here's no matter where you hit it it'll always roll down to the bottom point of golf was that easy but you see what I'm saying so this search is actually not random that search is not in a random at all and so what's the reason why that paradox has this power is because an assumption then slipped in under the rug that the search is random that's not true there's not random in fact in that picture I showed you of those self-assembling virus caps so that's exactly the method that I use I use this kind of energy landscape method to design my capsids and as I said before this is also the system that um your immune system uses to use to use this random variation to bind to antigens now what I wish Charles Darwin would have done is not use the word random but use a technical term called stochastic so those you're not scientist stochastic is a term that physicists and mathematicians and engineers use for processes that are random in one way or the other is random that we don't know what the outcomes are and in fact it's been much better to say that we have stochastic mutations stochastic variation that is then selected upon in fact the interesting thing is if you do if you're any kind of engineer or a physicist or mathematician you'll know that if you try to calculate a complicated integral by just normal quadrature as the number of variables grows the dimensions gets larger and larger you um it gets harder and harder and harder to solve the problem but you can do is use what random methods like Monte Carlo methods where you randomly flip a certain thing and then you select on it and if you do that well you can solve much larger more complicated problem so it's classically used all the time in in in physics and engineering in fact it's used to price your stock portfolio it's used to design bridges as you send buildings it's used everywhere that's a stochastic process it turns out that that process is the most efficient way of solving these high dimensional problems so given that that's the way the world works it's not that surprising that if god were to create the world he will use a stochastic process because it is in fact the most efficient way of searching through a very high dimensional space which is what evolution essentially does so although I said you should enter more anthropomorphize gods if God were to create a world that makes itself then that would be the way that you would do it so I think back to my lego analogy imagine I gave you a fully for train you might think it's cool but if I give you that box that I shake and out comes a fully formed train even the train has a few scratches on it and maybe wanted to pieces missing it would still be much cooler and effectively it's a sarcastic process would be the one that makes it so that suddenly if if only Charles Darwin had used the word stochastic variation I think a lot of our worries and in fact a lot of the kind of metaphysical implications that people like Gators imps and others attach to evolution with partially at least fade away I'm getting close to the end of my talk um and I want to talk about one more type of non randomness in evolution very briefly this is more for the people that I arranged the next in the experts in it which is in the classical argument for evolution there's two steps variation and natural selection and Darwin didn't really know where variation came from was partially rediscovered by my countrymen who DeFries who rediscovered Mendelian genetics and he pointed out that natural selection explains the survival of the fittest but does not describe the arrival of his describe how variation how mutations give you a particular kind of variation of things that you can select in the classical modern synthesis which is a fancy word for combining genetics and evolution during an evolution for a long time people thought that evolution was primarily a natural selection so the variation was largely unordered and isotropic so it could go in any direction more or less with equal probability so if you have a mutation in your offspring Orica likely be taller or shorter than you the population gets told over time that's because selection has selected it well a number of us have been saying is that perhaps that's not true perhaps some mutations are much more likely to make you go one direction than the other and then given that the variation is highly biased then it may be that in fact some of the changes here over time have to do with the structure variation I'm gonna skip over some of the slides which are a bit more complicated well just show you one so one thing we do know is that many mutations are a neutral that is to say they don't do anything that to the phenotype to the outcome that we know of fact that's what we use to get phylogenetic trees we look at neutral mutations so if I look at the space of all possible genotypes or possible sets of genes there's a lot more of them than there are possible outcomes and so the question that a lot of us have been asking is if I look at some the set of all possible genes and the set of all possible outcomes or they were as equally distributed or do a certain subset of outcomes have the vast majority of genes mapping to them and that would be a different kind of non randomness that would be saying that even though the mutations are random the outcomes that natural selection can work on may not be random and I'm going to jump I put some extra slides in just in case I would I would have extra time but of course I don't and so what I just want to tell you is that if you want to read more about this is a really wonderful book let's just come out by a someone I know very well and Rose Wagner University of Zurich who's not a theist by any stretch of the imagination but a very very good scientists who looks this question of the arrival of the fittest and in my own work I've been working on these questions and claiming that a large number of the patterns that we see list in simple systems can be explained by the non-random variation whether this has any impact on natural theology I don't think so except that hopefully it will weaken the the strength of some of my naturalistic colleagues use the randomness in in of variation to make or metaphysical claims I think it's interesting thing to think about so if you want to read more about that and you're interested in evolution in its details and I recommend Andres s book and if you're really into nitty-gritty you can look at my two most recent papers alright so in conclusion the first thing I did that you know is that science is fun the evolution is beautiful I think I hope I'll show you something about that's really beautiful interesting that metaphor should be used with care particularly the word random I think should be replaced with her stochastic and that would soften some of our arguments and I also think that we probably don't understand enough about evolution to do very much natural theology even if we are so in kind and last but not least I want you to remember that these are trousers and not pants thank you
