Darwinism on Trial

I'll start tonight back at one of those universities that Don told you about that I graduated from the University of Chicago and will go back to the year 1959 1959 was a great year for Darwinists because 1859 was the year of the publication of the Origin of Species Darwin's great classic so 1959 was the centennial year and as that year came around prominent Darwinists around the world thought that it ought to be commemorated with a grand gathering of evolutionary biologists so arrangements were made and it was held at the University of Chicago and the centennial gathering that proceedings have been published in three volumes is perhaps the greatest commemorative event in the entire history of the theory it was a triumphal occasion the theme was one of conquest it was one of the theory having prevailed over all opposition's and now becoming the central explanation of the history of life the most honored speaker on that occasion was Julian Huxley grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley who was known as Darwin's bulldog because Darwin being a retiring man ill-health Huxley took the lead in debating the theory and advancing it in public Julian Huxley wasn't just somebody's grandson however he was a very prominent evolutionary biologist one of the founders of what is called the neo-darwinian synthesis or synthetic theory which is simply the modern contemporary version of Darwinism combined with Mendelian genetics but Huxley wasn't only a biologist he was a statesman the founding director of UNESCO the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization who set it on its path for better or worse but that's another subject I won't in two he wasn't even just a biologist in a statesman he was a philosopher the founder or would-be founder of a new religion of evolutionary humanism and so as I say he was the most prominently featured keynote speaker at the event I'm gonna read to you just some excerpts from what he said on that occasion and I gave this introduction be tuned to his remarks because I want you to realize that these were not casual remarks tossed off idly they were enthusiastically received statements of the leading figure of the Darwinian movement at its centennial says Huxley future historians will perhaps take this Centennial week as epitomizing an important critical period in the history of this earth of ours the period when the process of evolution in the person of inquiring man began to be truly conscious of itself this is one of the first public occasions on which it has been frankly faced that all aspects of reality are subject to evolution from atoms and stars to fish and flowers from fish and flowers to human societies and values indeed that all reality is a single process of evolution in 1859 Darwin opened the passage leading to a new psychosocial level with a new pattern of ideological organization an evolution centered organization of thought and belief man's destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of this planet in the evolutionary pattern of thought there is no longer either need or room for the supernatural the earth was not created it evolved so did all the animals and plants that inhabit it including our human selves mind and soul as well as brain and body so did religion evolutionary man can no longer take refuge from his loneliness and the arms of a divine eyes father figure whom he himself has created nor escape from the responsibility of making decisions by sheltering under the umbrella of divine authority nor absolve himself from the hard task of meeting his present problems and planning his future can't shelter himself from these things by relying on the will of an omniscient but unfortunately inscrutable Providence finally the evolutionary vision and is enabling us to discern however in completely the lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era now it would seem that we're dealing with something more than just a scientific theory we're dealing with something that explains where we came from the meaning of life that sets our goals that decides our destiny that promises a new religion and although those are particularly fulsome particularly triumphant our remarks particularly ambitious remarks similar sentiments occur throughout the Darwinist literature I'm going to focus on some of the issues that are raised by the things Huxley said and I'm going to focus on it particularly in terms of certain questions of vocabulary and words and that might help you to understand why it would be that a lawyer or a legal scholar would be taking up the subject I'm very interested in words and how they're used and how keep people can be confused or even deceived if words are used loosely vague definitions shifting definitions that can carry an argument by confusion and I'm very interested in assumptions the assumptions that lie behind arguments the concealed assumptions the things that aren't said but are silently they are implicit in the argument now for example why did Huxley insist that evolution excludes creation the earth was not created it evolved he said many people would say well these are consistent in some way you could create by evolution couldn't you well let's take a look at that at first what's creation and second what's evolution now creation is a term that is used in very funny ways in our public discourse creation or creationism when you see it in the newspapers or in a scientific textbook or perhaps hear it on a public television program it usually is referring to a specific proof the position sometimes called creation science which is in a very ambitious position based on a very literal reading of the book of Genesis it asserts that creation took place only a few thousand years ago that it took six 24-hour days in a day of rest a single week and that ensured it was thus sudden abrupt a creation of things pretty much as they are now that's one meaning that one could give to creationism as and I say that's the usual one but creation also means something much broader much more general something that is in fact perfectly consistent with some definitions of evolution creation could simply mean that we are here as the products of an intelligent creator that brought about our existence for a purpose in this case there wouldn't be any necessary objection to saying that the process took billions of years and that it was gradual rather than abrupt it would still be creation if our existence in that of other living things was due to the conscious purposeful activity of a creator now the trick in this is that what Darwin of science will tend to do is say we have refuted creationism narrow-sense by arguments that satisfy us and they've never mind for the moment what those arguments are or how satisfactory they would be to you but the point is that having refuted creationism narrow-sense we will now treat it as if we had also refuted creationism broad sense so that's what Huxley had in mind of course was that the creation that was refuted by what he called evolution while not simply the biblical fundamentalist version of creation but any notion of a creator bringing about our existence for the purpose so what we're dealing with something much more than a Bible science conflict or something much more than the duration of the creative process now similarly what is evolution that's a parallel question when creation and evolution are paired often evolution is defined either very broadly or in such a manner that it doesn't seem to talk about anything that's tremendously important from a religious or a philosophical sense thus for example representatives of the Darwinist educational fraternity and debating they of sometimes said well what evolution is is change over time things change well why not I mean big deal who cares about anything as general and vague as that who would even care to dispute it and what what important statements is is that to making often evolution is described as change of any kind even very minor change is what is often called in the jargon of the field microevolution one gets examples such as that there are variations in the beaks and Tails of finches in the Galapagos Islands these seem to have developed diversified after migrating from the mainland well very well who objects to that but certainly evolution in that sense a narrow form of diversification within the type is not the kind of thing that leads one to launch into the kind of address that Julian Huxley gave at Chicago at 1859 it doesn't promise a new religion it doesn't get rid of God or the Creator it doesn't have great philosophical implications what evolution really means to the Darwinist leadership such as Huxley is a completely naturalistic and materialistic process that accounts for the entire history of life and excludes design or ultimate purpose from the entire field of nature how that is it states that we are the product of purposeless natural material processes and that all of life from its origin up to the present time and all of its vast complexity and diversity can be explained on that basis and therefore should be explained on that basis and that's why as Huxley said we get rid of the creator and we go on to promulgate the new religion now the the proposition was very succinctly and classically stated by George Gaylord Simpson another one of the founders of the neo-darwinian synthesis who was present at that time in his book the meaning of evolution so here's the meaning of evolution according to a Simpson although many details remain to be worked out it is already evident that all the objective phenomena of the history of life can be explained by purely naturalistic or in a proper sense of the sometimes abused word materialistic factors they that is the objective phenomena the history of life they are readily explicable on the basis of differential reproduction in populations that's natural selection and the mainly random interplay of the known processes of heredity that's random mutation the other major element in the Darwinian picture therefore Simpson concludes man is the result of a purposeless and natural process that did not have him in mind now we get to the metaphysical religious conclusion and we see that that conclusion is not something new that's tacked on at the end it's something that's really a restatement of what went before what a life and particularly humans are the result of materialistic factors random mutation and natural selection therefore life human life and life in general is not the product of intelligent purposeful factors simply to say the same thing in other language now so one can see that the Darwinism or the theory of evolution that is metaphysically important that's philosophically important that's religiously important is this grand theory that describes the entire history of life in materialistic terms but because the same word evolution is also used to describe very vague statements or very specific and relatively unimportant phenomena you can easily become confused and I run into this all the time that biology at professors will well write or you know say well but there are these variations in the beaks of finches there are species on the Hawaiian Islands which are similar to members of the same families as somewhat different species on the mainland's you say so that's evolution so what's the problem you know we've proved evolution well you see you prove something very very narrow and then claim to have proved something very very big and important so what's the key element in Darwinism in the Darwinian theory of evolution what's the really important part what's the thing that needs to be defended and examined now a major part of what I've been trying to accomplish in writing the book Darwin on trial and in giving these lectures is to provide a vocabulary and a way of thinking that enables us not to be confused by the shifting terminology that enables us to focus on the issues and see what needs to be proved and then see whether it has been proved or whether it might even have been disproved in order to do that we have to have specific language and we have to have a specific focus so I'm gonna use I'm gonna stop using the term evolution or even the term Darwinism now and I'm gonna focus on what I will call the blind watchmaker thesis now this I've taken from the title of a famous book by Richard Dawkins the eminent English a zoologist and a poppy author of The Selfish Gene as well as the blind watchmaker and person who is generally regarded as the leading proponent of a classical Darwinian theory that is the strictest version of the Darwinian theory today the blind watchmaker thesis is aimed at answering the following problem and I'll state the problem in Dawkins own words Dawkins begins his book by saying biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose that is to put it in only slightly different words one could say that if you just look at the living things a Dawkins opinion is they appear to be created they appear to be the product of a creative designer but says Dawkins this is an illusion they aren't really if you know the truth because we know today that they are the products of random mutation and natural selection this process which he calls metaphorically the blind watchmaker and again in Dawkins language natural selection is the blind watchmaker blind because it does not see ahead does not plan consequences and has no purpose in view yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watch maker they impress us with the illusion of design and planning so the blind watchmaker thesis then which is simply the Darwinian mechanism is aimed at explaining the thing that most importantly needs to be explained which is the appearance of design and purpose and living things the blind watchmaker thesis is something much more specific than evolution as you can see because one can contrast it for example with the picture of evolution which is shown in Stephen Jay Gould the famous book recently very prominent book that some of you may have seen wonderful life where he is writing about what we call the Cambrian explosion which is the sudden and apparently unprepared appearance of the phylla the invertebrate animal phyla in the Cambrian rocks with no indication of ancestral connections to anything that went before there was some single celled animals that were in existence said before but are the complex plants and animals that appear suddenly without evolutionary links to these earlier forms so as Dawkins said of that they appear to have been just planted there as if they were created instantly but of course he says that's not really the case and Gould describing this a phenomenon says that the I came that it used to be thought that this was the result of an artifact of the fossil record that all the ancestors all the media intermediates a universe of ancestral forms were there but thou Gould says there's no good reason to believe that they seemed to have appeared or suddenly and and either if there were any ancestors in between these single-celled forms in the complex forms any intermediate forms they were they weren't they weren't ones we can identify and there don't seem to have been so many of them in fact you can't find any now one can call that picture evolution you say because new forms have appeared and they have the same DNA code some features in common with the earlier forms but there is no mechanism nothing that describes how the designing was done and to get complex animals like insects and all sorts of forms one has to do a lot of designing or have something that can do the job so the so we're focusing tonight on this crucial element in the theory the blind watchmaker thesis and Dawkins gives a the best possible defense of it I have on high authority Francis Crick the Nobel prize-winning co-discoverer of the structure of DNA advised all persons who have any doubts about the Darwinian theory to read Dawkins book and believe it in his own words he said if you doubt the power of natural selection I urge you to save your soul to read Dawkins his book the language of spiritual combat is apt here he's trying to save your soul from the alternative of Korea well is the blind watchmaker thesis true can mutation and selection really make complex plants and animals from very simple predecessors ultimately from nonliving chemicals though chemical evolution involves separate issues can step-by-step mutation and selection build complex organs like wings eyes kidneys and brains and did they in fact do so you can ask this question two ways can't you one you can say can they do it to scientific evidence indicate that it's possible and second is did they do it does the historical evidence of the fossil record indicate that things actually happen that way well let's take an example I this one that Dawkins the uses and I'll I'll read it to you because I think it it's it's it's purely illustrative obviously we can't go into a wealth of evidence in a single lecture one can only use an illustrative example so I'll try the example of how Dawkins explains the evolution of the wing he's thinking really of the bat wing rather than the bird or the inn's or insect wings because the bat is one of his examples that he uses in the book so he asks how do how did Wings get their start well here's the answer the blind watchmaker answer many animals leap from bow to bow and sometimes fall to the ground especially in a small animal the whole body surface catches the air and assists the leap or breaks the fall fall by acting as a crude aerofoil any tendency to increase the ratio of surface area to weight would help for example flaps of skin growing in the out in the angles of joints now it doesn't matter says Dawkins how small and Unwin like the first wing flaps were there must be some height call it H such that an animal would just break its neck if it fell from that height but would just survive if it fell from a slightly lower height in this critical zone any improvement however slight in the body surfaces ability to catch the air and break the fall can make the difference between life and death natural selection will then favor slight prototype wing flaps when these small flaps have become the norm the critical height H will become slightly greater now a slight further increase in the wing flaps will make the difference between life and death and so on until we have proper wings and that's the story of the wing now you know these stories by the way are regarded with a certain sardonic air at least behind closed doors and even in Darwinian circles and they're called sometimes just so stories you know how the elephant got his trunk how the tiger got his stripes and this is how the bat got his wings now I want to look at some of the logical flaws in the scenario and by the way those of you who have had evolutionary biology courses either here or elsewhere or familiar with this subject it'd be interesting to know I hope you'll think about how much of this you've heard about how much of this has been you know sort of clearly brought out the difficulties with the blind watchmaker thesis or how much of this will be new so let's start by looking at the logical problems with the thesis now to do that I'm going to make a quick move to an argument that is always advanced in favor of the blind watchmaker view by Darwin himself by Dawkins and by everybody else that's done this and this is the argument from the analogy to artificial selection that is the the what one doesn't see these things developing in nature and so the Darwinist argument will say well by analogy we'll look and see what human breeders have done in breeding plants and animals and we'll say that nature can do that and more so here is Francis Crick again I always like to pick very prestigious names to quote and to use so that everybody knows you're not picking on small fry making an argument that Dawkins the Darwin himself and all his successors relied on and here he is I'll quote he says Dawkins in the blind watchmaker gives a nice argument to show how far the process of evolution can go in time available to it he points out that man by selection has produced an enormous variety of types of dog such as Pekinese bull dogs and so on in the space of a few thousand years here man is the important factor in the environment and it is his peculiar tastes that have produced by selective breeding not design the freaks of nature we see preserved all around us as domestic dogs yet the time required to do this on an evolutionary scale of hundreds of millions of years is extraordinarily short so we should not be surprised at the ever greater variety of creatures that natural selection has produced on this much larger timescale now that's the kind of argument that seems very very persuasive to Darwinist Minds including the very best ones but there are some things that are really wrong with it obviously wrong clearly wrong now first as is pretty well known all dogs in fact form one biological species they're all chemically inter fertile they can't interbreed and by that definition by that usually used definition of a species an isolated reproductive community they aren't very single species now I don't want to place too much emphasis on that because for one thing it would give the impression that if one can find an example and one actually can in the plant world where one can find breeding mutations that cross the species boundary in this reproductive community sense that you've solved the problem of evolution but that isn't really the major point the major point is that the degree of variation and diversification which you get within dogs or anything else gives out after a period of time and it gives out not because you've run out of time not because you don't have enough time to continue breeding Great Danes until they get as big as elephants and then turn into elephants but because but because they stopped changing they stopped going bigger when the limits of the capacity of the gene pool are exhausted and thereafter the the the attempt to get ever and greater freaks gives out so now the dogs species happens to be an unusually plastic genome in the sense that one can achieve a great deal more variation in size and shape among dogs than one can among many other kinds of creatures but even in this example it goes only so far and no further and the limitation is not time the limitation is the end of the variation now this is well known the Darwinist answer to it must be that mutation supplies new capacity for variation but then the question is does that really happen or is mutation a kind of materialist version of miraculous creation something that must appear because we need it and we couldn't get anywhere without it but that there's no independent evidence that it actually appears on schedule remember in that example of that little squirrel or whatever it was Mouse or squirrel or whatever that was trying to become a bat that the wing flap mutation has to appear on schedule each time to make it a bigger and bigger so now the question is then what is the evidence that this appears and in fact this is well known to be one of the real weaknesses of the theory mutation is wished for but not demonstrated now that's one thing that's wrong with the analogy the analogy rightly understood shows the limits of change not the infinite capacity of change but there's something that's just as important that's wrong with it and I think Crick is aware with it because he tries very unsuccessfully to deal with it you'll recall the sentence where he said here man is the important factor in the environment and it his it is his peculiar tastes that have produced by selective breeding not by design the freaks of nature we call domestic dogs now see behind that is concealed a real problem which is that selective breeding to the extent it produces these freaks of nature does so because human breeders are conscious intelligent age with a purpose who apply their intelligence considerable intelligence because breeding isn't easy to select a for a predetermined goal they're trying to get the greatest size possible if it's cheap maybe the greatest wool production the greatest milk production whatever feature they're trying to get they select for pursue that goal relentlessly and of course they have to protect their creatures from the natural environment natural selection which would preventing any of this from happening if you didn't take very good care of the freaks of nature I'm indeed the specialized breeds become extinct rapidly if the creatures are returned to the wild so that what one sees in the analogy to artificial selection is it's really the opposite of what it's represented it is in fact design acting within the limits of the capacity for variation of the genetic substance of the creature particular kind of creature that you're dealing with it's purposeful design pursued with intelligence and skill for a goal even so it achieves only change within limits and yet this is the proof or a crucial item of proof that unconscious because you know the blind watchmaker isn't just lying the blind watchmaker is unconscious unconscious material forces can take a bacterium and given enough time I change it into a human being proves the opposite what it really proves is that even with intelligence what only gets a change within limits now there's more problems than that we haven't we've hardly even started with the problems with the blind watchmaker scenario another problem is that in this scenario a heavy weight is placed on the qualification that other things must be equal this squirrel whatever I'll just call it that to give it a name that is falling from height H will be benefited by a proto flap you know a little bit maybe enough to make a difference if other things are equal but of course one of the things that that proto flap is likely to do is cause some awkwardness in grasping as the thing climbs trees and swings through the branches so that it's a it's a typical law of change of any kind that you often get more than one effect at the time so that the limbs which are in the process of changing into wings through the development of these flaps if we imagine the process to occur in the first place our apt to become awkward for grasping and climbing before they become very useful for even for gliding let alone fly so other things aren't equal if in fact the the change causes a greater incidence of Falls it's not going to be adaptive now this a process can be extended enormous ly because one has to imagine that as as change in one direction a specialization occurs it may well be accompanied by other kinds of change in the organism that are not as directly connected to the flap as the there's that example that I've just used in case this change is accompanied by a thinner winter coat or a lowered sperm count or something like that the animal is not going to leave more offspring simply because it has some a greater ability to survive a fall now this is a particularly important because as I'm sure many of you are well aware it is not the case that one can isolate a gene for this particular characteristic that has no effect on anything else or at least that that's the general state of things and in fact one feature which is relied upon very frequently for explanatory purposes in Darwinian circles is called playa trophy which is the tendency of a gene to have multiple effects so that a mutation may have several different effects and one would not know whether it was going to increase the ability of the creature to have more offspring unless one knew what all the effects were and their features which is why by the way so many people will speak of natural selection as fundamentally a tautology it can be formulated in ways that it isn't a tautology but in most applications the only way to judge whether a mutation is helpful in that sense of and the only important Darwinian sense of having the creature leave more offspring than it otherwise would would be to find out whether it left more offspring than it otherwise would it that would be - that is whatever leaves offspring that comes to dominate the population must have been advantageous by definition but in most cases it's impossible to specify those features in advance because and certainly it's impossible to specify the kinds of mutations that would provide increased offspring so we have yet another problem with the blind watchmaker scenario we have the problem we don't know whether the mutations arrived and don't in fact have any evidence that they do or will we have the problem that the effects of natural selection have been wrongly supported by showing of what conscious purposeful selection can do and we have all the problems of multiple effects now we can add to that one further problem which I think is probably the most decisive one in dealing with the theory which is that the historical record the fossil record is simply not consistent with this view of evolution that is even if we assume that something called evolution happened that we'll agree to call evolution that is that new things appeared somehow and things developed out of other things one has to take heroic measures heroic ad hoc hypotheses in dealing with a fossil record to get anything like a Darwinian picture of evolution outside of it now this is an important point to understand if evolution is going to have the meaning that Dawkins and Crick and Huxley and Simpson gave to it evolution has to include the blind watchmaker thesis evolution without it you see doesn't doesn't solve the problem of design but if it's going to have the blind watchmaker thesis it has to be step-by-step evolu by tiny micro mutations which accumulate by natural selection that at least has to be the general picture that that is to say what will not do in this sense is large-scale macro mutations that change things all at once well why not well Dawkins is very insistent on this for the same reason that Darwin himself was which is that if you are going to postulate that new design features appear new body plans appear in a single generation leap by a macro mutation you're postulating a miracle not a scientific event the level of complexity it's like producing a a jump of an entirely new kind of designed product in the in a wink of an eye an example I was using in a discussion recently was it's like imagining that a glitch in your computer takes your WordPerfect word-processing program and turns it into Microsoft Word now you know all of this has to happen at an electronic surge or something like this now that's a miracle Dawkins and Darwin before him get rid of the miracle by saying that if the miracle happens in small enough stages tiny micro mutations and they are preserved by cumulative selection then a complex structure can be built little by little tiny step by tiny step without pre-existing intelligence without a designer that's the key thing so evolution in this sense is inherently a gradual step-by-step process and so don't be fooled when somebody says well we can have evolution without having Darwinism without having the extreme gradualism associated by it because an evolution could occur in big jumps well it may be it could conceivably but then one doesn't have the satisfactory explanation for the design problem and which is why Darwin was so insistent on sticking to gradual step by step tiny step by tiny step evolution in the in the teeth of heated criticism now why do get the heated criticism well it's because what I've already indicated the fossil record then and now doesn't show anything like that what it shows pervasively is that although new forms appear in different kinds of rock as in the Cambrian explosion the Cambrian rocks they appear suddenly a fully formed and without a trace of the step by step lineage from pre-existing forms there are some claimed exceptions to this they're all debatable in my judgment they're covered in chapter 6 of my my book interestingly they're in the vertebrate sequence all the important ones leading up to human beings but pervasively it's agreed by all of the authorities the feature of the fossil record that is most prominent is stasis that is things appear and they stay the same they stay the same for millions of years sometimes hundreds of millions of years until they become extinct or until a present day if they're still with us like the horseshoe crab and the shark through eons of history when and vast environmental changes that should have produced enormous Darwinian change if change occurred what one finds then is that is is a total absence of examples of step by step change and what I think is even more significance this tendency of things to stay the same and not to change in any directional or fundamental way so one has to assume in order to uphold the blind watchmaker thesis that the vast evidence of the intermediate forms in a case of the Cambrian explosion the whole universe of transitional intermediates between the single-celled forms and the comp and the dozens of complex animal phyla that appear thereafter that this must have existed and disappeared it's invisible it must have been there because if it wasn't there the theory wouldn't be true and similarly with for example mammals we have this value within the single class of mammals we have this vast variety of whales and bats and elephants and monkeys and humans and horses and and so on and all of these if the theory is true to send it step by step from some primitive land dwelling mammal that step by tiny step changed into a whale on the one hand and a bat on the other through to a lineages well if it happened the evidence is pervasively missing now I think the criticism of the blind watchmaker thesis is devastated and it's not original with me if somebody wants to criticize this lecture or the or the book by saying well this is all well known we've heard that before I'm delighted because indeed I think that these are matters which it only takes a bit of digging to bring out and know about and it is by no means some idiosyncrasy of my own that I am persuaded that the blind watchmaker thesis is false many prominent evolutionary biologists have said essentially the same from Richard Goldschmidt the Berkeley professor of genetics who said evolution must proceed by big jumps with hopeful monsters to Stephen Jay Gould Harvard professor of today who in a 1980 article said that the neo-darwinian synthesis is a general theory as a general explanation is effectively dead despite its persistence is textbook orthodoxy to many others who have who have said that they believe in evolution in some sense but it must occur by some other and unknown process but none of this criticism is mattered none of these acknowledgments and in fact some of the people Gould is an example who have pronounced the death of the Darwinian synthesis at other times retreated into its arms now why well that's going to take us to another word I've talked about what is creation and what is evolution I want to talk a bit about what is science because you see it's possible to set up a definition of science so that the Darwinian theory simply has to be true so if the evidence doesn't really matter so that the blind watchmaker thesis or something very much like it I simply has to be true now what is science well yes Oh science to me when I think of that and I think what many people we think of empirical research you know we think of fossil studies we think of all things people looking at things through microscopes and electron microscopes doing repeatable experiments and that sort of thing but science is also often used to describe a kind of philosophical system and this is particularly true with respect to evolutionary biology now the elements of that physical philosophical system are as follows because science studies only what is natural and material only natural and material causes can exist because anything else would be outside of science now of course for the first place what this does is it takes a limitation of science and turns it into a dogmatic statement about the universe because science only studies certain kinds of things those are the only kinds of things that need to be considered now that's the element of naturalism one might say in the definition of science that many people use now the second element is that the business of science is providing ever more improved naturalistic explanations now what this means is that when a theory like the blind watchmaker thesis is proposed and is plausible enough to receive a certain level of acceptance within the scientific community it becomes established as the paradigm and after that point it cannot be simply dislodged and discarded it can only be improved and so a typical Darwinist response to negative criticism of the kind I've made is to say what is your alternative you see if you were serious in this business you wouldn't just be making negative criticisms you'd be proposing new mechanisms you'd be proposing if the eye and watchmaker mechanism is an adequate ones which are now that of course says in effect that we don't know isn't an acceptable answer we have to know at any given point we can acknowledge that our answer will be improved in the future but it can never be discarded and anyone who doesn't understand that doesn't understand how science works and believe you may I have heard that phrase many many times in fact I've said that when I finally passed from the scene I want that carved on my tombstone they all said he didn't know how science works I know how science works you assume what you want to assume and then you say it's fact now I don't feel bad about it people saying I don't know how science works because this has happened to some very eminent scientist Pierre Grasse the president of the French Academy the most prestigious zoologist in Europe wrote a book called the evolution of living things in which he took the line that well evolution in some sense must be true but the Darwinian theory is totally and completely wrong and against the evidence and it's just false and we have to start all over again and look for something else theodosius dobzhansky who along with Huxley and Simpson was among the founders of the neo-darwinian synthesis reviewed Grasse his book and said he doesn't understand how science works he's the most knowledgeable zoologist you know in Europe but he doesn't understand how science works because science works by improving the paradigm and to discard the whole thing in the hopes of finding something new someday is contrary to the whole scientific method well now you see if you put this all together something like the black watchmaker thisis just has to be true because we only admit naturalistic explanations some naturalistic explanation must be true this is the best one we've got today that's it I mean once you have reasoned that far you've come to the answer and no matter how many holes you're shooting the thing it doesn't really matter it's still the reigning paradigm a purely negative a criticism is ruled out and so one can uphold the theory simply on the logic of science against disproving arguments however powerful now I know gate and indeed that is a you know the sense in which it's true it isn't that I don't understand how science works is that I don't agree with with the rules that are imposed by some people in the name of science and I rather insist that we must keep open the possibility that our favorite theory is simply wrong and we don't know the answer to how all of these wonderfully complex biological organisms could have been now people are able to be cloud your understanding by proposing tendentious and argumentative definitions of science because the word science is intimidating to people and understandably so we live in a great age of scientific technology I mean science produces things like polio vaccines and rockets to the moon and atomic weapons and so on and that's got to be right Lee is tremendously impressive to people and so they tend to think that a philosophical position which is associated with the scientific enterprise must be as valid as the impressive technology of which it provides and I think that's been what has really kept many people from using their critical intelligence on things that come in the name of science this was particularly strong back in 1959 where we started you know in the in the day is right after the birth of atomic energy when I think the prospects for technology seem more limitless than they do today but they still are of course very very impressive however there are two things I think which our century should have taught us about science not just one one is the one I've just mentioned scientific technology is so impressive you know that you've got to be impressed by but scientific technology the impression that the what's impressive about scientific technology refers to the parts of science that are established by repeatable experiments that's what keeps scientists honest that's what keeps them on track it's not that they're better than the rest of human beings it's so they've got to demonstrate their results and their and the experiments have to be repeatable now as an example to illustrate this let me just tell you a hypothetical story based on this Challenger Space Shuttle disaster it's not the actual story but it's a hypothetical story based on it that suppose that you're you have an laboratory which is designing the seals which seal the engines and protect the craft from blowing up on a launch and all of the PhDs and Nobel Prize winners in this laboratory and corporate vice president's with all their authority assert that the seals will work but somebody I don't know what the office-boy are office girl or the mailman or mail person or though you know whatever somebody of low standing in the enterprise says they won't work if the temperature is - called the crack and the thing will blow up now we know that if the thing is the next week is shot off the launching pad and it blows up on the way into space we know who is right and who is wrong and the fact that there were tremendous credentials and tremendous cultural power in the people who said it wouldn't blow up doesn't mean a thing because it did blow up that one person however humble however lowly is right and that's what's so wonderful about the experimental method it has to work at the end of the day but now suppose that we did this Challenger spacecraft enterprise a little bit differently you know the u.s. is running into budget problems is the state of California we can't really afford the fuel anymore but on the other hand we can't cancel a program because all the contractors that you know go out of business and the workers would lose their jobs and politicians would lose the elections so we keep the program going but we save money by not sending it off into space we build it this is not so implausible you know we may get to where we're doing this we build it and then we hold a meeting of all the scientists and engineers that worked on it and they agree by consensus whether it would have worked or whether it wouldn't have now the seals work don't they everything works you vote for mine and I'll vote for yours everything works and if we can see this process extended over any period of time we can imagine at the end of it we're going to end up with a spacecraft which is pretty unlikely to get off the launching pad if the fuel crisis has ever survived and we intend to fire it off that is we're still having a scientific process but it's one which depends upon subjective judgment consensus of the experts rather than the crucial experimental testing and that of course is what evolutionary biology is like it's excusable I'm not saying this to condemn the field because what else can they do when you can't do the experiments to see what actually happened can't I check things but excusable or not isn't the point the point is it doesn't have the same reliability now that's a second lesson I should have said there were three lessons because I'm gonna give you a third lesson about science from this century we've seen that scientific technology is tremendously impressive and we've seen that's because of the experimental process and repeatable experiments we've also seen something else that's just as impressive in a negative way which is that philosophies tend to attach themselves to science and they borrow illegitimately legitimacy from the success of scientific technology what do I have in mind I have in mind of course Marxism the science of society and a Freudian psychoanalysis the science of the mind of both of them really offshoots of Darwinian thinking works were accepted as science because they employed scientific language and borrowed the prestige of science but they did not rely on the same kinds of method and are now thoroughly in discredit in terms of their scientific status now as Darwinism science like that experimental science that sends the Rockets off into space or is it science like the Marxism and Freudianism well if you I don't know if you in any of your course so you probably don't use the evolutionary biology textbook by Douglas Fatuma of the State University of New York at Buffalo because I think some local products are involved in another arrival product but Fatuma is a textbook which is one of the leading ones for college evolutionary biology students if you look at the introductory chapter he says proudly Darwin did for biology what Marx did for society and Freud for the science of the mind he advanced the program of materialism and mechanism so I endorse professor Fatima's analysis of this and would suggest that we treat Darwinism to the skeptical critique which we've already given to Marxism and Freudianism now we started this lecture by seeing that the Darwinian theory is something that goes way beyond science it's a philosophy it's a religion it's a metaphysical system that purports to explain everything and that explains everything really in the way of the logic of how things ought to be how they it seems they must be if you follow a certain logic rather than because of any airtight or even less than airtight evidentiary support now when my book Darwin on trial was reviewed in nature one might have expected that the world's most prestigious scientific journal would refute the errors of this upstart lawyer who dares to write about biology would bring forward the evidence of the blind watchmakers prowess that I had presumably ignored the reviewer in nature didn't do anything of the kind didn't really challenge me on scientific grounds at all the reviewer in the world's most authoritative scientific journal challenged the book on theological grounds and he committed all the logical errors that I'm talking this is professor David Hall the Northwestern University I'll just read you a couple paragraphs from his review critical ones so what kind of God can one infer from the sort of phenomena epitomized by the species on Darwin's Galapagos Islands now this is a reference you know you'll recall to microevolution to those variations in beaks and finches and turtle shells but now what kind of God is epitomized by the beaks and finches of variations fascinated let's take a look he says Paul continues the evolutionary process is rife with happenstance contingency waste death pain and horror millions of sperm and OVA are produced that never unite to form a zygote of the millions of zygotes that are produced only a few ever reach maturity on current estimates 95 percent of the DNA that an organism contains has no function a certain organic systems are marvels of Engineering others are little more than contraptions when the eggs that cuckoos lay in the nests of other birds hatch the cuckoo chick proceeds to push the eggs of its foster parents out of the nest the Queen's of particular of parasitic ant have only one remarkable adaptation a serrated appendage which they use to sawed off the head of the host queen whatever the God implied by evolutionary theory and the data of natural history may be like he is not the Protestant god of waste not want not I think Hall thinks that's a biblical doctrine he is also not a loving God who cares about his productions he is not even the awful God portrayed in the book of Job the god of the Galapagos is careless wasteful indifferent almost diabolical he is certainly not the sort of God to whom anyone would be inclined to pray now host logic you see in the review was that since the world of nature as shown by evolutionary theory and junk DNA and so on to him decisively refutes the existence of God the blind watchmaker therefore must be able to create and Johnson skeptical arguments can be set aside without meeting them on merits I mean that's that's the inherent underlying logic so what one sees here again is confirmation of the essential point that I've been making that what Darwinists have been doing is engaging in theological speculation in the name of science that they have used traditional arguments like the argument from evil really here or which would be the subject of another lecture to reply to to say that well we don't want to believe in a creator we rule a creator out we don't like the idea of a creator it would interfere with science that would be an evil creator given the way the world is and so the blind watchmaker must be able to create now what I think is really very unfortunate is that this theological argument becomes understood as if it were science but this isn't what we go to biologists for for expertise in the existence of God for philosophical arguments based on evil for examples of imperfect design that Stephen Gould says centerpiece argument against the deity and therefore for what he calls evolution which must mean the blind watchmaker thesis what we ought to get and expect from scientists is science that is to say careful skeptic confirmation or dis confirmation of the central thesis which is whether blind natural forces can do the job of creating now I'm very happy to concede that once we dis confirm that thesis as I'm convinced any fair review of the evidence will do we'll be left with no answer to the problem of design but there also plenty of problems left I mean as I've said the problem of evil and so on deserves separate treatment and so there may be philosophical reasons and difficulties with the Creator and all of that and they can be discussed but of course the philosophers and the theologians even those of a creation centered viewpoint ought to be invited to participate in that discussion the atheists shouldn't have a monopoly of it and be allowed to make selective reviews of the evidence and arguments without anybody having an opportunity to reply you know it if I could think of one thing that I would like to think of as the model for my own work for my project what I'm trying to accomplish I finally ran into it the other day the perfect statement of it in us in a statement I read which is attributed to johann wolfgang von goethe the german literary and philosophical evolutionary figure i haven't a source for this i hope it's a fennec quote but i'm doing i'm accepting it on faith for the moment and it doesn't really matter because it's a you know the it's the expression that that counts and it really summarizes my view of what we've had in Darwinism here's what Goethe said a false hypothesis is better than none at all for that it is false does no harm at all but when it fortifies itself when it is accepted universally and becomes a kind of creed that nobody may doubt that nobody and may investigate that is the disaster of which centuries suffer that of course is when science turns into religion and misappropriates its success with experiment to support dogmatic statements that are way outside the province of science it ought to be and are being effectively challenged at last thanks so very much and now it's time for question here Wow dr. Johnson in the February issue I believe of the Scientific American Journal they had a article on Stanley Miller in Sidney Fox and their theory how they created life in the laboratory did you read that it was a February 1991 I'm I think I did read an article in the Scientific American about a year ago science well what is the one it seemed like they said that their theory is no longer valid and I was curious if someone has proposed another theory late well let me sort of it just explained briefly how I see things as standing in the field of origin of life I'm you know and I can refer you to there's there's a really good literature on this available but basically as of that year 1959 when the Darwinian Centennial occurred it appeared to the scientific community that the problem of the origin of life had been all but solved by an experiment done at the University of Chicago by Stanley Miller within the laboratory of Harold Urey as of the miller-urey experiment which essentially showed that if you put a certain combination of chemical gases and creating an atmosphere that might or might not be like the one that was on the early Earth and sent energy through it you could produce certain chemicals including some amino acids which are used in constructing proteins and this was seen as a partial confirmation of what's called the operon halt dein thesis which was that the amino acids built up in a prebiotic soup and then somehow combine to form some living form which thereafter evolve now the the the the the the paradigm has been attacked on every conceivable angle the literature on this is very good there's a book by a convinced a scientific materialist robert shapiro called origins a skeptics account of the origin of life in 1986 that I highly recommend and then by somebody you know sort of on my side of the issues by three people Charles sax and Walter Bradley and Roger Olson called the mystery of life's origin which is excellent it's a more technical level people without any scientific background might have some difficulty with it and there's some other good books and articles as well including that Scientific American one a something we're thinking about the same thing now what's happened today is that the field has collapsed into a series of rival paradigms all of which are mutually inconsistent one that's gaining ground is that clay silicon crystals somehow evolved and then genetic material came and took over Sydney Fox so you mentioned says well proteins evolve first and then somehow DNA and RNA involved in them and then you could get this operation the cell going the until very recently the most popular view is while RNA came first but now there have been articles just devastating the RNA first thesis the field of chemical evolution as it's called is very much in a in a process of paradigm crisis and mutually inconsistent hypotheses and yet the scientists involved in it generally are very confident that they're about to solve it and they'll give you a statements like that and there's an easy it's easy to understand why because you see they all assume that the problem of the evolution of life from the first replicating macromolecule line has been solved by the blind watchmaker thesis and that being the case since it was all virtually solved in 1859 with you know details added later on how can it be that our much more powerful science of today will long be stymied at taking the final step now I believe you'll see that the thinking problem here is that the blind watchmaker thesis isn't true and I think that this form of science is actually the modern version of alchemy that just as the alchemists could not concede in turning lead into gold they're going to succeed in turning nonliving chemicals into into life without the huge infusion of intelligence whether you know natural or supernatural so that's my view of that subject and as I say there's quite a good literature on it and it's no longer just sort of repeating the party line of the scientific naturalist but is actually critical now I was wondering what did what's your view on the still structured structures such as the appendix and man or the wings on bees the partial yeah vestigial organs I I didn't hear it exactly at first well a number of these turn out to have functions and I don't know if that's going to turn out to be the case with everything it's a but it's perfectly possible I don't have any tremendous opposition you know to considering the possibility they're they're genuine vestigial organs that have somehow survived some process of change in development which you could call evolution I'm not convinced of course that just because something is said to be a best digital organ at one point in time that it really doesn't have any function because a function may later be discovered so I don't I don't really know the answer to all of those cases but it doesn't seem to me that whatever the answer might turn out to be would would substantiate the blind watchmaker thesis you know which as I say is a really important proposition of evolution something else some other kind of process of development and change might have occurred and they might be Mike you know conceivably be relics of it that's the best I can do with that professor Johnson you've given us a very articulate and lawyerly view which is a character really I'm afraid of both science and evolutionary biology let me just make a couple of quick points most of the evolutionary biologists that I know adhere to or profess belief in and work through a pop Aryan view of falsification indeed they're not simply trying to work as many Marxist and Freudians have but in point of fact they consciously attempt to falsify their their hypotheses secondly in point of fact there is a very good test of evolutionary theory by natural or evolution by natural selection and in fact there have been some prominent people who have been trying for many many years to falsify it and you know what it is it's group selection in fact David Wilson at the State University of New York at Buffalo has been trying for many years to to falsify natural selection thirdly there are in fact some very sound empirical studies that have been carried on for more than a decade that mimic the process of evolution and they have nothing to do with artificial selection and they have independent tests which allow them to in fact show that finches as it turns out are in fact maximizing their reproductive success and behaving in ways that absolutely boggle the mind in fact they facultative Li select or selectively engaging infanticide fourthly it's well known I think there's one or two people oddballs around that in fact natural selection is not a tautology and as I just mentioned if in fact you can come up with some evidence for group selection you'll get a Nobel Prize and then some I thought you said that group selection was well established so nono groups actually is not lowest oh I thought in fact if you can show your group selection is operative in the natural world I guarantee you'll get a Nobel Prize why would I want to do that I own this because if you can show that the group selection works then we won't have to worry about evolution by natural selection any longer that's another form of natural selection it's at the group level rather than the individual it's not a form I'm sorry it's not a form of evolution by natural selection is evolutionary biologists is there a question you have in mind sir you know I'll just say that you know the idea that there is such a thing as natural selection and that it has some effects or that there is such a thing as adaptation in the sense that finches or any other number of creatures do some remarkable things that advance their survival is not controversial the question is how you get finches in the first place and but of course of course if finches or humans are born which are severely defective for example they do not survive absent intrusive medical care and you can call a natural selection is totally uncontroversial the question is the creative power really the important thing you know isn't so much the selection it's the claim that mutations add massive amounts of new genetic information by purely random processes that's the thing that there really isn't any evidence of you had quote here where you said you assume what you want to assume and then you say it's a fact that was my that wasn't a quote that was my own off-the-cuff observation well that would be my observation about religion not science religion makes up stories and then the Scopes Monkey Trial was about passing laws to prevent other theories from being taught to school children that's assuming its effect well I'll be glad to respond to that as a matter of fact I very much strongly support academic freedom at all levels and the consideration of all hypotheses at all levels in fact that's very much why I'm engaged in this present operation because what we have here is a group which has of people with a strong philosophical agenda which have taken control of the scientific establishment of the science education establishment and are engaging in a program of indoctrination to put over the blind watchmaker thesis without allowing fair consideration of the very valid objections to it so that's what I stand for is open consideration and discussion of hypotheses and objections to them first as far as open consideration discussion I've been challenging Campus Crusade for a debate on this issue for a long time and I simply been told that they're not going to do it but my question is I would have been very happy to debate professor I Alan I need the client he declined why he declined one opportunity I understand he gave this lecture a big plug you mentioned you mentioned at one point that 95% of the DNA is redundant or you call it junk DNA is it possible that over the billions of years of development that the organisms that exist today have reached a plateau where the process of mutation cannot get in to add new genetic material because there is so much junk around the outside and that unless you went back to a simpler more primitive form of DNA you would never see mutation take place and your example of using a squirrel sized mammal as developing wings would be totally misleading because the actual that when the wings first developed would have been possibly microscopic well that was not you know I was really just trying to follow Dawkins example but see I don't have any objection to considering any possibilities what I have objection to is that is the the very thing that you said at the beginning making assumptions and then treating them as fact now the problem I have with many Darwinists including by the way many dear friends and colleagues with whom I have vigorous discussions of these subjects is that their education has trained their minds to think of evolution that's the word they would use as a total system like you know Huxley said it's a single process that explains everything and it's just self-evidently true so that they really can't entertain the possibility that it could be false and now now to see I'm trying to refine it by talking about the blind watchmaker thesis talking about something in a much more specific because what they'll tend to do is give an argument that assumes the truth of the theory you know and this I mean all this junk DNA you can't have mutations today that explains the absence of evidence but it doesn't establish the theory it's based on an assumption that it's true and so you couldn't explain away our the the absence of confirming evidence I think we have to consider the theory independent of any bias in its favor and that is very difficult to do for people who have been trained to think of the theory is just you know self-evidently true and any and any questioning as amounting to unreason the existence of God a fact or just a theory the existence of God I think it's probably predominantly a metaphysical proposition that well if a fact it depends what it what you mean by fact and by theory but that's not a subject I deal with in this lecture I deal with Darwinism I would be glad to give another lecture on that right reasons for the existence of God but I don't want to get into it offhand at night but I said I don't think I can answer that we'd have to determine the terms what his argument about what about contingency can that for example he has the pandas thumb argument which is that carnivory has lost thumbs now and so when panda bears want to hold bamboo they don't have a thumb but they created another bone from their wrist and it's hard to imagine that arising if the panda bear was designed from scratch or as if you believe that he evolved from other carnivores then it seems quite reasonable well I'm very familiar with the pandas thumb argument you know I I have a young friend named Paul Nelson who's just getting his PhD from University of Chicago in this area whose philosophy of Sciences I've written a whole paper on the Gould pandas thumb argument and the many many problems with reasoning in in that way the basic claim is that because the pandas thumb is an extension of the wrist bone rather than you know kind of thumb that we have that it must have evolved by some haphazard process rather than being designed that it's sort of imperfect well this is a very subjective way of deciding things I mean for other things from my point of view because in fact functions very well I don't see that it really settles any question of design but in any event we can't settle a question as to whether the blind watchmaker did everything or whether pre-existing intelligence was observed by simply allowing somebody who has a strong position on that to select a piece of evidence or two and say we'll see this is the kind of thing that looks to me and maybe to you like the product of a haphazard process so now we've established the blind watchmaker thesis we've got to consider all the evidence you know and look at it systematically so really I characterized Gold's argument in this as a theological argument in any case you know he says we look at something we decide if it looks imperfect and haphazard to us if therefore is the kind of thing that we don't think God would have created and therefore the blind watchmaker must be able to do with it it's much like David hulls argument in nature so I I don't you know I I don't say it as valueless it's kind of interesting but it's very far from concluding the matter professor Johnson your lecture through evidence based on evolutionary biology and could you comment a little bit on the mathematical and probabilistic challenges of evolution and what your view on that is well you know I I can I'll tell you as much as I know I hope not more than that because I I'm very cautious in approaching the mathematical issues but there was a great confrontation which is discussed in my book and a number of others in this field that was held in 1967 at the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia and it came about because some professors of mathematics physics engineering that sort of thing we're arguing with some of the leading neo-darwinism I Medawar and so on about the probability of Darwinistic evolution now the real problem behind this as I see it is this you see the mutation has to provide somehow something you know a new design feature the beginning of it step by step and you have to have more mutations all the time the that Darwinian answer it's given by Dawkins and by others is we concede they will say that you can't have wings or eyes or anything like that emerging in one jump because that's a miracle that's statistically impossible do all that design in one thing that's that's like the you know the miraculous transform a information but they say it could be done naturally if you had lots and lots of tiny mutations one after another that accumulated in my way of thinking that's unsound reasoning because while it's easier to imagine any single tiny mutation than a single big one you lose that in the quantity you have to have you have to I'm arriving how many you know all unschedule in the right place where they can be taken advantage of so I think it's very hard to calculate the probabilities of that that they're either incalculable or as I say many have argued that it's supremely unlikely but I don't you know I'm reluctant to go any farther than that in judging the matter because I think it's I think it's just very hard even to define the terms and I'm certainly not you know in that field and speaking of mutations you talk about micro mutations the when your DNA replicates when your cells replicate it makes a mistake about once every 3 million times and because it's because your DNA is so long that ends up with a lot of point mutations now because 95% as you say of our DNA is extra most of those point mutations don't show up as anything they end up making the same protein they would have in the first place but those point mutations that do show up would then change the animal some somehow and those mutations could stay if they were would be evolutionarily beneficial if they helped the animal live now the only question I really had is that you understood about micro mutations and you said that that macro mutations didn't really happen or that it would be immune the official Darwinist view is that they are not important in you know constructing new forms they might happen occasionally but that they can't be couldn't be relied on ok well the question was was that you said that all these micro mutation would have to show up and help each other but it is proven by watching DNA replicate that it does make millions of replicate millions of mistakes and so that would cause slight mutations and only the ones that were beneficial or that helped each other would show up yes now you know the way I could characterize your point is that it seems to me you are supporting you know the the underlying logic of Darwinist evolution and what it establishes to me is that as a matter of first impression at least the neo-darwinian theory is a respectable hypothesis that is to say you know it's not unreasonable for somebody to advance this as a possibility to say there's a you know it's logically supportable but then one really has to say beyond that did it really happen that way you know can we confirm that this sort of thing actually does produce new complex organs again and again you know the eye exists in at least 40 different separate designs that according again to official Darwinist views would have had to evolve at least 40 times independently so what one has to have is the number of constructive mutations of exactly the right sort that provide all of the improvements that are necessary to to get the eye working in those many different forms and they and in fact they have to provide everything all at once at least to the point of having some basic usefulness to the thing or you know or otherwise it won't help the animal to survive and and reproduce so you know when my I might be you know we I'm perfectly happy to say that it's no wonder that scientists were attracted to this idea and wanted to investigate it hoped it would be true but the question is does it really fit all the evidence when the evidence is analyzed without a bias in favor of the theory so you know I think what you've showed is is what I'm very happy to concede that it was a hypothesis worthy of testing and that the argument of course can still go maybe it still is you say all these things about how Darwinian evolution has to take place in the form of step-by-step micro evolution caused by micro mutations and in your example of the bat you talk about you say that the mutations have to occur on schedule and that's one of the problems with a theory but in your speech you seem to ignore what is the what is regarded as the most important method of genetic evolution which which is sexual reproduction causing recombination yes in other words the ideas are originated by Mendel that the reason you are different from your parents is not because your genes mutated when you were conceived but because your parents genes combined into a new unique pattern why do you fail to address that well I'll be happy to repair that defect right now the recombination by as its term says it recombines what's already there it certainly accounts for why you're different from your parents now that genetic recombination creates you know is what's responsible for the individual varieties within you know the human species but what we need is something that adds something new recombination doesn't explain how bacteria turn into human beings it doesn't and that you know it doesn't explain innovation it recombines what's already there and creates variation within the type your point is it all due respect it appears to me to be a further confusion of the you know the the naturally-occurring variation within the type with the major innovative process that I'm referring to under the heading of the blind watchmaker thesis I would say that given the billions of years involved in the evolution of life that such slow changes is caused by recombination could explain evolution and I would ask another question you say that there's no evidence in the fossil record of the gradual changes that are would be predicted by step by step evolution would you say that human the humans in general have not changed over the last several thousand years that we are genetically identical to our ancestors oh they you know again there is unquestionably variation within the species you know the even the strictest creationist position what agrees that and and and by the way agrees with the the mitochondrial Eve hypothesis it at any rate version of Darwinists theory that all of the you know races and varieties of human beings diversified from an ancestral pair or a small number of ancestors however you know I you want to put that so undoubtedly the variation within the type occurs the the however to produce the question is whether this produces major innovations now you see what you're doing again is is exactly the Darwinist line of reasoning you say well it seems plausible and so it happens there's a lot of time and so it happens we can extrapolate all of that's really just assuming that the area is true that's a real question can we does the same process that produces the variations in the beaks of finches and the Galapagos produce finches in the first place I believe that if one puts that on the table to answer before the entire scientific community and gets them to give it a fair hearing the answer is going to be no and as I say you know it's not like this is some idiosyncratic view of mine it's essentially what Steve Gould said in his 1980 paper and what many others have now whether you're you know you disagree or you're not convinced well at lots of people aren't that's disagreement that's why they have horse races but the that's the point I want to put on the table for argument and I'm confident of prevailing in the ad dr. Johnson I find that many people that believe in evolution don't understand the time problem or the statistical improbability of an evolution dr e a wilder smith and looking at DNA and RNA has demonstrated that problem could you commonly I'm oh I've read Wilder Smith's a work and I find it very impressive and to me persuasive let me say by the way you know I just on the wording thing you know I've taken a vow never to answer a question with the word evolution in it because it's such a you know it's so I'll go back to talking about the blind watchmaker thesis to avoid the micro evolution and all of that but that is persuasive to me I don't know whether it's totally unanswerable or not what I would really be satisfied by what I want to achieve what I'd like to see happen is for arguments like those of Wilder Smith to get on the table and be considered by the scientific community fairly and on their merits they can't be under the present philosophical state of things you see because they're negative arguments and the the answer of the w on skis and so on is no no we want you either to support our theory or improve it not to tell us it's all wrong so I think I think frankly my own opinion is that if those theories were fairly considered if those objections were they would be devastating and would be accepted and that that's the problem but I won't state that dogmatically because I don't you know know of all the possible responses that might be made and if we get the fair discussion then I'm willing to live with the outcome whatever it may be and I'm sure Wilder Smith is too it seems to me that if there is anybody who has ever claimed a monopoly on the truth of existence it's been religion and the reason I bring the subject up is because on your card here you have the place where you can mark if you're interested to talk with somebody about how I can get to know God personally I could mark that implied in that is that somebody's gonna call me back who claims that they know God that I do or they do at all all right you know let me address the subject of religion for a moment it's another word you know I talked about creation evolution science I just want to talk about religion because I think religion is a false category the category I would substitute for religion would be something like basic beliefs about where we came from and what our place in the general scheme of things is now changing the terminology now I need a single where I would realize that's an awkward formulation but bear with me and perhaps you'll see the point that I'm trying to make is that you see everybody has such beliefs and there are different kinds some people say as I would that we're here because of an intelligent purposeful creator brought us into existence for a purpose other people hold a different opinion they say no no no it's half hazard natural material processes no intelligence life is an accent that and you know that's the the the gold position or the Dawkins position now both of those are different opinions about the same topic it's not like I have a religion and Dawkins doesn't you know I have a religion he has science that's a tendentious misleading the deceptive way of putting the thing we both have our opinions about these ultimate questions he's entitled to his view I'm entitled to mine and we're entitled to argue about it and if there's evidence that bears on it it should be fairly considered and many people in the you know in religious matters are dogmatic you know there plenty of dogmatic God believers who I think ought to be less dogmatic than they are but I'll tell you this I never knew what dogmatism was until I started dealing with evolutionary biologists and there's a reason there's a reason for this I've under come to understand the reason I think you'll be able to understand it too suppose let's say Europe I don't say a fundamentalist preacher of some kind or whatever religious extremists if you like whatever you want to say however you want to put it I don't want to yeah whatever words you choose to use and you want to be dogmatic you'd love to really tell people what to think now in this culture you've got to set limits on yourself the reason is is because your family your friends your congregation whatever it is oh listen to the radio they watch television they see some newspapers and they hear a lot of contending views and you know necessarily that there are cultural authorities people you have to take seriously the leaders of science and philosophy and so on who hold a different view so you sort of have to be able to come to grips with their thinking you have to treat it with a certain degree of seriousness even if you'd like to just shut it out you really don't have that it's not easy to do that in our culture but suppose you're a senior professor maybe a Nobel Prize winner may I not you don't have to be that but just a senior professor at the University of California and one of its campuses in science rest edges you don't have to take seriously anybody that doesn't think just like you do you're aware that there are people out there who don't but they're just you know members of the less educated classes you don't take them seriously and I've noticed this as a result the notion is everybody that's intelligent thinks like we do you know that that's the notion that's intelligent in the higher university of faculties so that's why you get such a much more powerful dogmatism there and many of the people that one of the tragic things about it is they don't even know they're dogmatic they're perfectly open-minded with respect to anything that's reasonable and what's reasonable is exactly the way they think so if you want dogmatism come to the great universities I'm there I know I've seen it you could trust me okay dr. Johnson it seems I know that you don't espouse either or creation or evolution but most of people's who who would go on the creation side looking to debunk evolution it seems sorry that blind thanks if I I really accomplish that thing yeah we have won my heart make your point I'm we're disposed to agree with you okay it seems you had three major points two bunking that three one is lack of interbreeding of species and the limits of the gene pool elasticity and the major one seemed to be say such as the cambium bloom the two months the two other points may Cambrian explosion yeah can't be an explosion make it impossible for the small animals to go to large ones but you said that's also not only in the Cambrian area but another area let me let me clarify my point cuz I think you may have misunderstood the Cambrian explosion is the most spectacular sort of best known example of something which is general in the fossil record and that is this phenomenon I'm using Steve Gold's language here by the way of sudden appearance followed by stasis now as as gold explains in wonderful life and his analysis of this until he gets into his personal philosophy is very good what you would expect if the Darwinian theory is true is that you see you start out with one life form and then it diversifies and diversifies and diversifies you start out with species and then you get several of those and then you get the higher levels families and orders and finally phyla and you get continual diversification this is what he calls the cone of increasing diversification now what instead you have what you see in the fossil record of the Cambrian era is almost the opposite of that you see all the general divisions the phyla the basic body plans of animals appearing at the start of complex animal life and such diversification as occurs is strictly within those boundaries some of the things that exist become extinct and then in new forms of rock there are new things that appear but it's within those those boundaries now this can be described as evolution as a sort of a sort you know again if one accepts the physical description and and and and so on like that but it's really the opposite of what one we expect to the Darwinian picture I understand that and that's generally true throughout the fossil record ok I'm sorry I'd thought you'd dozen for the way you put it i yeah we know cannot happen naturally then it has happened more than once so taking from a creationist theory if it could only happen through creator then the Creator didn't do it didn't create sudden just once but multiple times over the time well I don't know see there are a lot of different positions on this as you may well be aware there's a young earth you know a complete creation in the know then there's progressive creation there's guided evolution you know of some kind and I don't feel that on the basis of the information available to us now if you look at as simply as a scientific question without bringing anything else into it that you can really settle exactly what happened and one reason why it's hard to settle is because of course even a critic like myself or anyone else that's not you know a critic of the system is dependent upon the data that have been provided by people who have a strong theoretical orientation now my belief is this is a speculation you know it's it's not science it's a it's a speculative hypothesis but about science is that if it if the critique of the blind watchmaker thesis got on the board and if it were successful as I expect it to be if it got a fair hearing and if then the scientific community had to say you know we were wrong about that we said we'd solved that problem then we really hadn't I think it would lead to a reexamination an audit of the books as were in many areas and the facts would be different now this is not something disrespectful of science or really you know outrageous to say it's just saying that a paradigm shift you know causes a whole vast chain of effects and so on and this I think is generally understood so maybe some of the things that we think are true even that I accept as a matter of description aren't all I can say on the basis of what I know of the evidence and what I think is known of the evidence is that the blind watchmaker kind of evolution doesn't appear to be what happened if you look at the evidence as a whole without a bias it seems to be out that settles the most important philosophical claim that the neo-darwinism aid no they haven't you know explained the design and that comes back then in full force but I think there's a whole mystery then remaining about exactly how what happened and how to tie it in with the evidence and I just don't know beyond that and you know then you know so that's that's where I'd have to leave it first of all like say I think you're a very good speaker thank you and convinced most these people like you know grass is red or something like that but but what but I wanna hear what comes after the but I took some notes on what you were saying and I'd like to bring up some points that I think maybe we're inconsistencies and I'd like to see if maybe you know you can you can justify them or something like that one of them first of all your argument about the evolution of wings for example when you said well you're gonna get these proto type flaps and they're gonna kind of get in the way of the ability to grasp okay first of all I'd like to say well it isn't it possible that instead of using arms for grasping on a limb you can use your legs and once you've built up your legs so you can jump well enough your arms are not gonna be used for grasping for example yes citizen saying you said wouldn't get in the way okay I'll be answer that one right away that is a conceivable however remember that that tiny prototype wing flap in Dawkins view just gave them my nudists statistical you know better odds of surviving a fall from a certain height it's by definition a very very tiny improvement that you know but if it makes some difference it's enough so it would also only have to make a small a very small difference in the efficiency of the climbing grasping techniques to cancel that out so in time the animal that couldn't use the the you know the the four legs might develop a greater capacity use the back legs I agree with that but the question is whether or not you know the the disadvantage wouldn't cancel out the advantage now we really can't tell by spinning hypothetical stories that's why they're satirically called just so stories you know the question is how can we confirm this experimentally with fossil history or whatever in in even a single case I think we can't okay try me on one more I know let's see one more since you said I was a good speaker you had some problem the drunken watchmaker right you had some problems with that and you based it on for example with fossil records that show jumps from what natural history you know appears to have made now I don't know taking a stab and you know in the dark I would say probably less than one hundredth of a percent of life that's ever existed on this planet I think left even a record that we can find today not not not even including what kind of continental shifts of you know taking place where now we've got you know biological records completely forever destroyed I I would very very small percentage what I'm so the evidence is just missing yeah so what I could see is why not maybe certain populations of species be existing in a part of the world where there's a lot of volcanic action or anything or they're they're gonna be later submerged undersea so that a lot of change can occur before those same species are in a place where there can be a record it's okay I yeah I've got the question and and it's something I deal with I think very thoroughly in chapters four five and six of the book and to say that of course if you start out with the assumption that the Darwinian theory is true then you can always account for the absence of evidence you know it's been lost it was there but it wasn't fossilized or whatever but of course if you're not assuming that the theory is true then it's a much bigger problem Darwin himself in the origin said I never would have realized how imperfect the fossil record was if if it hadn't occurred to me that it totally fails to provide the transition was required by my theory and never occurred to him to think that this might mean that the theory was false and that that is is true so that's another option one has to consider but beyond that I do agree I think that in any single case you can explain the absence of a record of transitions on the grounds of the fossil record is imperfect and incomplete I don't think that's a legitimate at all however there are an awful lot of cases and there's a tremendous amount of dedicated searching that has been going on by paleontologists who thought they'd be able to document transitions and the result I've got plenty of documentation of this in the book has been failure so I think it's time to consider the possibility that they weren't there now finally this very argument is the reason why I myself place more emphasis on the fact of stasis the fact that once things are there they stay the same because you see that's not a matter of the absence of evidence that's positively documented across the you know a geological column and so it's not a matter of just saying the evidence was lost it's and and if the theory were true you would expect these things to be more or less continually changing although not necessarily at the same rate and and it's the opposite you know in foodimals in that biology to a deletion of a sheet x-play I mentioned before he says the other thing besides that Darwin contributed like Marx and Freud to the program of mechanistic materialism he says Darwin taught us to see mutability and not stasis as the fundamental fact of you know biological life well yeah I did and as a result everybody ignored the fact that the record establishes stasis they just didn't see it thanks very much for your questions challenging otherwise you

Channel: Access Research Network

Views: 11,886

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Keywords: Creation--evolution Controversy (Literature Subject), Darwin, Phillip Johnson (Author), origins, Darwin On Trial

Id: emrBRLZ_JbE

Length: 100min 58sec (6058 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 10 2014