"Darwin's Doubt" with Stephen Meyer

hello hello hello hello there are still a number of seats down in front this event was sold out but not oversold so if you'd like to be on the next flight we can't help you but I just want to make sure everybody has seats if there's a seat near you would you would you raise your hand stand and just sing a song if you don't mind just all right all right well why don't we yeah the seats here all right well I'm going to leave it to you but let me then officially say welcome to Socrates in the city thank you for coming as you can see are you are you George Gilder we've been expecting you how are you George now you know you're not speaking this evening but you're going to be speaking soon very soon there's a seat here for you if you don't if you don't mind nobody's looking at you don't worry that's that's the George Gilder yeah yeah okay well as I hope you know I am thrilled about this evening for many reasons not least because we are sold out I do have to say that you know to be sold out is always a good thing and I don't mean that you're you know sellouts I mean that we're you understand what I mean it's not like when Billy Joel did uptown girl kind of sellout right it's it's a good kind of sellout thank you thank you Greg um all right so I guess that's just a warning that if you're registering for Socrates we actually do sellout we're not we're not kidding well if you cannot come to Socrates in the city as you can see by the thousands of cameras we're doing our best to film all of these in HD and put them on the web as soon as we can get them edited or the editors in the room no pressure but as soon as we get them edited we get them on the web and we want to get these wonderful conversations out to as wide an audience as possible speaking of who is in the room actually George Gilder just announced himself and and we have my friend Jay Richards is here also these are in my mind future Socrates in the city speakers I hope that they can afford I hope they can afford to accept our extraordinarily low honorarium but in any case but I I have to say speaking of who is in the room we we have one of the most brilliant authors of recent decades and now you're all thinking I'm talking about myself I'm not I wouldn't put myself in that category publicly but and I'm not going to I'm not going to say who it is of course but I will give you I will give you his initials I can say his initials there Tom Wolfe you know you know Tom Wolfe the man in the white suit seated right here I hope yeah when you become an icon people will embarrass you there's just nothing you can do about it it's tough I when I heard that Tom wolf was going to be here I immediately I got nervous I immediately ran out and bought a bespoke suit for the evening um and it's very expensive but obviously I'm going to return it tomorrow uh honestly before I talk about Steven Mayer who is our very special guest for the evening I just had to say one more thing about Tom Wolfe and I just said this to him and he doesn't mind I hope he didn't he pretended not to mind but uh he wrote a book he's written many books obviously many huge books the right stuff bonfire of the vanities don't applaud he's very shy but there's a teensy-weensy book that he wrote called the painted word which I had the great great joy of reading a number of years ago and it's it's less than a hundred pages it is like most of his stuff just ridiculously entertaining but what it does is it nails I mean kills dissects the world of modern art so spectacularly brilliantly that there's really nothing more to be said ever on that subject uh I when I found out that he was going to be here I found nine copies of the book so that those of you who sprint to the book table can get that and maybe he'll sign it for you but if you can't get one of those nine copies honestly it is just ridiculously wonderful and it's also I would say definitive as I think I said a moment ago in what it says it's just you'll read it you'll know what I mean you'll never go to MoMA again yes I'm looking at you and it is it's just ridiculous it's ridiculous so thank you for allowing me to embarrass you sir all right it's so you can open your eyes now it's over I I want a button before I talk about Steve I want to thank the Discovery Institute and especially the McLellan foundation for making this evening possible as I've said over and over again it's not easy for us to do these events they're expensive a number of you have been generous with us over the years and this time I do want to acknowledge folks at McClellan and Charlie Phillips for just making this possible so thank you so much well and now to the to the man of the hour the man of the week um mr. rich little no I almost said mr. Steven Meyer have trouble with it with the mr. and dr. the other day this is not a joke I meant to say Doctor Who and I said mr. hoo it's the less successful brother of Doctor Who I looked it up on the internet but no tonight our special guest very special guest is dr. Steven Mayer if you didn't know he is one of the founders of the so-called intelligent design movement so we know that he's terribly brilliant but you may also know that he's terribly brave because the ID movement has by its very existence threatened many of the most beloved tenets of the powerful scientific establishment and those in that powerfully entrenched establishment have taken every opportunity to try and strangle this baby in the cradle so to speak but they have not succeeded indeed the baby in the cradle managed to get out of the cradle and first crawled and walked and is now in fact running hither and yon merrily spreading havoc and for your monks ideologically calcified materialists everywhere and of course we're going to talk about that a little bit tonight but what exactly is the ID movement well I'll ask Steven wire in just a moment in the meantime let me tell you about him he graduated from Whitworth College in Spokane is that said Spokane Washington I get that right thank you with a degree in physics and earth science and worked for an oil company as a geophysicist his bio says he worked in seismic survey interpretation but at one time or another haven't we all done that I would say most of us in the room have worked in that one time or another not a big deal but then he got a huge scholarship to get a PhD at Cambridge University in the history and philosophy of science and this is no joke that extraordinary and life-changing scholarship was awarded to him by the Rotary Club that is true right I'm not just playing that for Laughs no not the Shriners I heard somebody say that here the Shriners of course typically send their people to Oxford that's just this it's their tradition yeah so um dr. Myers thesis at Cambridge offered a methodological interpretation of origin of life research and well of course after that he was off to the races here we are he founded the Discovery Institute Center for science and culture in 2002 and is now among other things their director some of you know dr. Myers previous book signature in the cell abbreviated SITC and I will sue you oh I will yeah I that thing in the New Testament about not suing the Brethren that's that's I'm a dispensationalist that ended that ended when John died I think so I'm free to sue you and I and I will sue you in any case and the book signature in the cell he examined the mystery of the origin of life that book was named one of the top books of 2009 by The Times Literary Supplement of London which I would say is about a staggering a mainstream endorsement as one is likely to come by it's almost as if Danny DeVito or Cher had praised the book it's that it's that big it's that mainstream of course other brave souls in academia and elsewhere it gave it tremendously good reviews and of course was very controversial dr. Thomas Nagel professor at NYU praised the diffusive lee and called it a careful presentation of a fiendishly difficult problem for his honesty dr. Nagel was widely excoriated by the scientific establishment and I think since dr. Nagel is at NYU we want to invite him to speak at Socrates in the city I think we'll enjoy that so perhaps somebody can give me his information but very brave to do for an NYU professor I think dr. Myers latest book and the one will focus on this evening is of course titled Darwin's doubt which has already been a New York Times bestseller and again brave souls in the academic world have stepped up to offer it high praise dr. mark minimun paleontologist at Mount Holyoke writes it's hard for us paleontologists to admit that neo-darwinian explanations for the Cambrian explosion have failed miserably Maier describes the dimensions of the problem with clarity and precision his book is a game changer dr. George Church professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School writes that a typo Harvard Medical School really what's he what's he doing now he he wrote that Darwin's doubt represents an opportunity for bridge building rather than dismissive polarization bridges across cultural divides in great need of professional respectful dialogue and bridges to span evolutionary gaps and I might add yeah sure okay so format tonight I will interview dr. Meyer for about 40 minutes and then we'll have some time for Q&A that's where you come in I hope we'll have microphones set up here before I bring them up I should say that in 2008 dr. Meyer famously appeared with Ben Stein in the documentary expelled no intelligence allowed some of you may know that know him from that he's also been widely featured on innumerable TV programs all over the spectrum and you may have seen his most recent appearance on The Suite Life of Zack and Cody how about a warm Socrates in the city welcome for dr. Steven Mayer in your words and it's kind of funny to ask the founder of something what what does intelligent design the movement mean well the theory of intelligent design is the idea that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained by a purpose of intelligence rather than an undirected material process such as in the realm of biology natural selection acting on random mutations now that's a mouthful to kind of a definition but I can unpack that a little bit one way to do that is to contrast intelligent design with that specific meaning of evolution that the theory was designed to challenge okay there are three meanings of evolution three basic meanings one is change over time and that can refer to the fact that life is different now than it was a long time ago we do not have the t-rex running down Fifth Avenue we don't have trilobite s' out in the Atlantic Ocean things things are different now than they used to be that change over time concept can also refer to the observable modest changes that we see taking place in the structure of organisms the famous Galapagos finches when the weather patterns changed in the Galapagos while back is documented that the the birds with slightly longer beaks did better than the ones with shorter being so you got a cyclical variation in the shape and size of beaks so that's also an idea of change over time or evolution in that sense and and those the meaning the idea of change over time is not really contentious or disputed second meaning of evolution is it would be futile most and young earth creationist well possibly you know they're all right they're not allowed into this but well they would they're ready but a question of how how long the timescale was involved and I'll change those a but the basic idea just so everybody's tracking the basic idea of change over time that life forms have changed over the millennia eons is not generally disputed not generally to spend that intelligent design we're certainly not disputing everything absolution right would say that that happened right exactly second meaning of evolution is the idea of common ancestry and that can refer to a universal common ancestry the idea that all organisms are connected by what Darwin called descent from modification from this one single simple form simple primordial form way back when or it could be a more limited thesis that certain groups of organisms are related by common ancestry but the Darwinian idea was that the picture the history of life is best represented as a as a kind of Tree of Life and he he actually drew a tree in the origin to depict this where the branches at the top of the tree represent all the forms of life that exists today the trunk or the root of that tree represents that first primordial form and the ones that only made it halfway up are the ones that got extinct so it's a it's a visual depiction of his idea about the history of life and and intelligent design is not challenging that either although there are advocates of intelligent design who are skeptical about that right and there in fact are assigned other scientists we're not a user so you'd consider even common descent to be a theory not necessary it's an attempt to interpret certain facts that we have left behind and certainly no one saw that whole history so it's a reconstruction based on the facts that are left behind and it's one of many possible reconstructions but it's it's not what intelligent design is challenging either the intelligent design is challenging the third meaning of evolution and that's the idea that there is an unguided undirected process known as natural selection acting on random mutations that has produced all the forms of life we see but also has produced the appearance of design that all biologists acknowledge or nearly all biologists acknowledge Richard Dawkins world's foremost spokesman for so called neo-darwinism the modern textbook version of darwin's theory says that life is that biology rather is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose how clever of them it's it is the counterintuitive nature of the Darwinian idea that things look yes they look design that beautiful structure of the coiled nautilus or those intricate molecular machines or the the chambered structure of the heart well it's it's plumbing and wiring many many things in biology look as though they were designed but the idea is that they were produced by an undirected unguided process that produced the appearance of design so they would say natural selection has the power to mimic the natural selection mimics the powers of designing intelligence but it is not designed or guided in any way that's the leading proponents of Darwinism will say that we have design without a designer we have the appearance of design because that what is called blind Darwinism well sometimes it's called the blind watchmaker hypothesis after the title of one of Dawkins's famous books and so intelligent design is challenging that and the title or the the term intelligent design was selected intelligently if you will to make clear which of those three meanings of evolution we're challenging explicitly we think things that there are certain features of biological systems that were actually designed and you can tell by examining the scientific evidence a so just so that everyone's tracking with you and so that I'm tracking with you I'm going to repeat back to you what you just said but not tonight not because I think that in the popular well popular culture these distinctions are never clearly made you would get the idea that there are two theories one theory is that we were created 11,000 years ago and Shazam here we are the other theory is the scientific theory that says everything happened by random forces and that we evolved out of the primordial soup and here we are and there is absolutely no God involved in that process but what you're saying now and obviously what I've read about is that there there are so many variations between those two polls and so intelligent design as I understand it is says that yes this happened there were trilobites four billion years ago and things have quote-unquote evolved things have changed maybe I want to use the word involved because it's a little bit loaded but things have in fact changed we can see this we can observe this in in the fossil record basically but blind Darwinists neo-darwinism at lea no designer or intelligent agent of a no agent it was just utterly random and it was something that Eric I prefer the term undirected or mindless okay because and and and why well because you could have something that's random that appears to be random to us that actually has a hidden hand behind it and the darwinian x' insist that the appearance of design is an illusion all right if it's an illusion it follows logically that the process that produced the appearance of design was not mindful it was unguided and undirected right and so that's the crucial tenant and the this idea is actually hard baked into the logic of Darwinism when you go to the third chapter of the Origin of Species Darwin uses an interesting analogy to artificial breeding experiments that you know ranchers and farmers have been doing from time immemorial where where a farmer Rancher could choose a particular trait that he wanted to see maximized or enhanced in the you might think of sheep in the far north of Scotland and if you wanted a knight woolly or greed of sheep you would you would select the wiliest males and the Woolies females to breed and Darwin would and then generation after generation you'd get woolly and woolly sheep this is a well-known phenomenon nineteenth-century biologists knew all about this Darwin came along and said well what if he had a series of very cold winters such that all but the wiliest died out wouldn't you get the same effect and so he proposed natural selection as an alternative to artificial selection to intelligently driven selection so the mechanism was meant to exclude a designer in the very way he formulated the theory and so that's so that's been the big issue design or no design designer apparent design well I guess what I find so fascinating by this and one of the reasons I was so happy to get you to come here is that it's ironic I would say at least ironic that the scientific establishment today is as hidebound in a way and as said earlier calcified in their ideology that they're not even willing to be slightly open to the possibility that there might be an intelligent force and so they have been tremendously dismissive as I understand it of the intelligent design movement I mean you lived this why do you think that is well I have a friendly debating colleague who is a Darwinist Michael ruse who says that he's written an important book in which he explains that Darwinism is function is something of a secular religion for many scientists and many scientists I think that have had difficulty distinguishing what you might call materialistic philosophy from the enterprise of science itself so if you have a theory that has non materialistic implications or which challenges a theory that does have decidedly materialistic implications there's an implied threat to a deeper worldview or metaphysical understanding of reality and I think all of us respond when our fundamental belief systems there are challenged sometimes with some passion so their objections are irrational and religious I wouldn't say they're irrational but I think that the level of response is that the passion of the response is understandable from this because of the big issues that are in play are you naturally this kind or do you just realize that you haven't you have to be diplomatic I have to say no that it's the more the more I have looked at it I've been staggered by the well how do I put it the lack of scientific rigor in that kind of thinking or maybe say I can't give him a number of it you know some of the the week my book was released it was released on his eBook this room most recent one June 18th earlier than summer by three o'clock in the morning there were about a dozen of these one-star hostel reviews and some of the turns of phrase were just choice mendacious intellectual pornography right steaming pile of pseudoscience at it and that kind of thing so by people who clearly had read the book very carefully and the day after the book was released there was a 94 hundred word review on June 19th the book is 400 pages plus with notes and and so you could this is struck a nerve there people lying in wait so well I'd say that's a compliment I think that the other thing that one hears and also I have heard it is that this is not science and and and what these people seem to do and again I you don't have to take a position on what you believe but the idea that that they're so closed-minded that they would simply say it's not science and are unwilling to discuss it I guess I wonder what they think science is because if if logic and evidence leads you to surmise that yes perhaps there was intelligence behind this that there's design it's it's illogical and a scientific conclusion so to say that you can't you can conclude anything but that is is just strange to me and it seems to me that they have this idea that anything that kicks against that shakes up this materialist radiology really religion is unacceptable and so they say it's not science and because most of these folks are part of the powerful scientific establishment they can they can say that so I guess I want to ask you what to you what what is science to you well this is part of what I I studied in my dissertation years in Cambridge that it turns out that there's a lot of talk about the scientific method but it turns out there are there are actually many different scientific methods and I studied very intentionally or consciously the the method that Darwin used in reconstructing the ancient past discussions of biological origins are in the end discussions of Natural History and there's a particular method of scientific reasoning that scientists use when they're trying to study events in the remote past you can't make a trilobite re-emerge under controlled laboratory conditions so the kind of science that physicists or chemists do in a laboratory is not going to be applicable to studying the ancient past what Darwin did was pioneer essentially a method of forensic science where the clues that are left behind are used to reconstruct what happened in the ancient past and he had an important rule of reasoning which was that if you're trying to explain an event in the past you want to invoke causes which are as his mentor Charles Lyell put it now in operation want to invoke causes that are known to have the power to produce the effect in question now I had become fascinated in the mid 80s with this problem of the origin of biological information it turns out that organisms are chock full of digital codes stored in the DNA molecule and other forms of information stored elsewhere and there is a complex information processing system at work inside organisms that allows them to function and survive so if you want to build a new cell if you want to build life in the first place or if you want to build an animal you have to have the evolutionary process would have to produce a great deal of information but that was the very question that was bringing a lot of evolutionary theories to a point of impasse and so I began to think about this what is the cause now in operation that produces digital code that produces information and I realize there's only one and that causes intelligence or mind in other words what we know from our uniform and repeated experience the basis of all scientific reasoning is that intelligence produces information whether we find it in a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or a section of software code whenever we find information and trace it back to the source always come to a mind not a material process and so I realized that by using Darwin's own method of reasoning and his key principle of scientific reasoning we could make a very rigorous scientific case for intelligent design so when people say it's not science I want to say well why it's based on scientific evidence and we're using us an established method of scientific reasoning in fact the very method that Darwin used if the theory of intelligent design isn't scientific by that same logic then Darwin is one-half Darwinism would have to be excluded from that same designation I'm sorry could you repeat that you said you were fascinated by something in the mid-eighties I remember that I it's funny in the mid 80s I was fascinated with the rythmics I don't know if you've heard of them in any case well before we get to your book now I wanted to actually have to be honest that was not fascinated by the rhythmic sat all two before we get your book I want to ask you about irreducible complexity that's another one of these terms that gets thrown around what you were just saying essentially is that the things that exist these organisms that exist are too complex probably too complex to simply have appeared and it seems that something with that much complexity that much information and when you say information you mean well digital code yes Watson and Crick 1953 they elucidate the structure of the famous double helix yeah the DNA molecule four years later Crick proposes something called the sequence hypothesis which is it was the recognition that there are four chemicals they're called bases that run along the spine of the DNA function like alphabetic characters in a written language for digital characters in the machine code and and since then we've learned that that information is directing the construction of mechanical parts that's what helped me but so before Watson and Crick we didn't know any of this right and so it was much easier to Oh what have we done to better sky work okay good I'm gonna sing is it okay well what you're saying I I just want to want to be sure in other words before Watson and Crick we did not know about the vast ridiculous amounts of encoded information to DNA we didn't know about the hyper graphic or alphabetic or digital I mean any of those terms are apt okay why we have an animation online which shows the DNA molecule it's the brighter the helix structure but along the interior of that molecule there are these four chemicals and the chemists I represent them with the letters ATG and seen depending upon their arrangement right the molecule is conveying information for building different types of proteins and proteins of little machines themselves that do all the key jobs yes I mean I remember at Francis Collins spoke a few years ago when he was talking about this and that just the level of complexity is to bring to that is just absurd it's it's it's beyond our ability to comprehend and now that we know that it seems generally implausible that this just happened that things of this level of complexity just happened and so but then there's something else related I just want to want to get this out of the way before we leap into your book but explain this concept of irreducible complexity right the case for intelligent design is not so much made in the negative as well it's so complex it couldn't have arisen by an undirected process it's really made in the affirmative by noting features in living organisms organisms that we know from experience are produced by one and only one type of cause one of those features is digital information okay okay that's the argument that I've developed might be he has developed a separate argument from the presence of a feature that engineers recognize they engineers sometimes talk about integrated complexity he calls it reducible complexity and that is a feature of systems where wherein you have a great deal a great number of parts right and if you remove any one of those parts the whole system ceases to function right so it could not have evolved it's not a gradual process it had to be put together or it wouldn't work intermediate stages on the way with he makes famous this little and I kid you not it's a rotary engine that's inside the cell wall of bacteria it's called a bacterial flagella motor it's high tech and low life and it's got 30 proteins made of 30 protein parts it has no rings bushings a driveshaft a hook like propeller that protein that functions like a propeller and it rotates at a hundred thousand rpm can change direction on a quarter turn it's amazing machine and what has been discovered by the biochemist working on this machine is that the the 29 part the 28 part the 27 part version of this is non viable it doesn't perform any function Darwin said that natural selection selects functional advantage it preserves those things that pass on a vantage in the competition for survival well these intermediate stages have no functional advantage and so you couldn't build this up gradually and that's a big part of this our game I want to ask you about your book do you mind not at all because we've got a lot of copies here we got to move some product the book has done well it's very very impressive it's called Darwin's doubt tell us what does that title mean well Darwin in contrast to the rhetorical excess of some of the modern neo Darwin as which are Dawkins if you find someone who's skeptical about evolution they're either ignorant stupid wicked or insane you know or one of his ex-wives who were all of the above yeah yeah I mean I don't know but they taught me an acting class back in high school to let the the laughter let's Elektra good I wasn't saying anything funny anyway he he he said that no we were talking about I've no idea the threat he's good I think Melville was the third wife yeah and let me see-oh you I know you're saying about Darwin's doubt it's a book he wrote right yeah in con in contrast to Dawkins and crew Darwin was actually very modest in his expression he acknowledged difficulties with his theory and he had a very significant doubt about one particular class of evidence it was called an event in history of life called the Cambrian explosion ok so what is the Cambrian explosion you were probably just going to tell us yeah the Cambrian explosion is the the geologically abrupt or sudden or discontinuous appearance of most of the major groups of animals in the fossil renders happened around 580 million years ago 530 million is a 5-step say 580 yeah but so in other words that evolution was not a smooth process or whatever happened the change of life forms was not a smooth process the Cambrian explosion says that suddenly roughly 530 million years ago wham all kinds of things happen so really is not gradual and that's why they call exactly that second definition of evolution was the idea of gradual evolution as represented by the tree of Larry slow so right out of the chute you've got something that's challenging one of the meanings of Darwin's theory it also challenged his idea of natural selection and recalled the natural selection and random variations because his he envisioned the mechanism of natural selection and random variation working very slowly and gradually he recognized that if there were big changes from one generation to another you get deformed organisms so the changes had to be very small and incremental which meant the process needed a great deal of time and what he saw and yet what he saw in the fossil record was this abrupt appearance of these major groups Darwin saw this Darwin saw even in his day we right he saw this right now he expected and hoped that the subsequent fossil finds would fill in those big gaps but as I show in the book the the the the gaps have gotten more pronounced and the discontinuity is is more pervasive okay so yes as time has passed we since Darwin write a fossil record has in fact shown the opposite of what he hope the ancestral precursors have not turned up in the Precambrian layers and in the Cambrian we've discovered many more exotic creatures with lots of intricate organs and structures and body plans that were unknown to Darwin that have been discovered in that same seam of rock all the way around the world the most dramatic finds of which are in the burgess shale and canada and amazing find in southern china you know in the in the last couple decades so what are so the explosion has become more explosive basically okay a frightening yeah well okay so why is the book titled Darwin's doubt he saw this he saw this and what the book does is tell the story of that doubt and it traces that doubt it's up to modern times and shows that the problem that Darwin recognized has become more acute in two different respects first the fossil missing what I call the mystery of the missing fossils has become more acute as we've discovered all these new forms of Cambrian life and all of which are also missing ancestral forms but the second mystery that I address in the book is that I think a deeper mystery it's essentially an engineering problem and so the second part of the book is subtitled how to build an animal and we what we now know about the centrality and importance of information both digital information and other forms of information to building animals poses this really difficult problem how can natural selection acting on these random changes random mutations generate whole new stretches of functional genetic code imagine a computer program that's performing an important function in your computer and then imagine randomly changing the digital bits then ask yourself a question are you more likely to by doing that produce a whole new operating system or computer program or are you more likely to degrade the information that's already there since the 1960's there's been an immense skepticism of mathematicians computer scientists and other engineers about the efficacy the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism because they don't see how random changes in typographic characters is going to generate a whole new functional sequences of information so but if there is debate among people in the Academy about these kinds of things why are some scientists or why is the establishment so dismissive of intelligent design in other words what is the internal debate and how does that play out well I think it's it's hard to speculate about you know the motives that people have for some of the extreme reactions that they offer to this but I think what you put your finger on before about the the prior philosophical commitment to a materialistic form of science is one of the reasons because this idea that there is there that there is a purpose of intelligence behind some of these key features we see in life clearly challenges the the matter the materialist view it's a mind over matter view of reality in other words the internal critics people who are saying this doesn't make sense are not saying what we think we've got a solution there's an intelligence behind this instead what they're saying is we don't know and we assume there's a materialist answer that will itself very interesting letter from a very prominent scientist I won't mention him by name now but what are his initials you did that trick once tonight and he it was after after the publication of the first book signature in the cell and he said I entirely agree with the scientific analysis you've done even the RNA world which was the hot chemical evolutionary idea he said is is going nowhere and everyone knows it he said but he said and I'd like to say more publicly about your book but he said I'm committed to a materialistic solution to this problem so your science is right but we differ philosophically it was he was saying and I think that is that is actually the this the basis of a lot of the the difference is a very cordial and respectful guy but a lot of people who are not are I think they're less aware of their own materialistic premises in a way they're conducting well those of us who are non scientists and I'm an extreme non-scientist are really unaware of the debate within the world of science and other disciplines we it's not the sort of thing one reads about in the New York Times or wherever it's just not the thing the kind of thing we've been that we would normally be made aware of or would be aware of and there's this general sense in the culture I think that this has all been decided and figured out and there isn't much debate that the sciences is settled so to speak and you know move along there's nothing to talk about that's what got me into it when I was at a particular conference where the the problems in origin of life studies chemical evolutionary theory were being discussed and I had after two science majors as an undergraduate been under the impression that all the science was settled but it's it's far more interesting than that in the new book I one of the themes I tell a mystery story but there's a there's a kind of a journalistic expose involved in the in the story as well because I show that there's a huge disparity between the public presentation of the status of modern Darwinian theory by people at the New York Times or in all the major science organizations have committees that pronouncements on this by the public spokesman for theory like Richard Dawkins or Jerry Coyne so there's a huge disparity between what they say and how they present them the theory to the public and what's going on in the peer-reviewed scientific literature and by that I don't just mean biology generally I'm even talking about evolutionary biology and one of the things I do in the book is I look at at sit there are six new theories of evolutionary biology that have been proposed in just the last few years by scientists who are breaking with the textbook orthodoxy of neo-darwinism some of them are openly calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they recognize that the that the mutation natural selection lacks the creative power that has long been attributed to it let me simply say wow that's that's pretty amazing actually it's a story that hasn't been told well I mean none of this is told I was amazed just a few years ago I wrote a book of apologetics and I was looking into some of this and I was staggered to find that the some of the stuff that I took as gospel truth I mean most of us in school someplace saw the famous heckle drawings the ontology recapitulates phylogeny which shows that in in embryo form all these different animals look exactly the same and it shows that you know that we sort of we come from a common ancestor or whatever and you know I learned that those drawings which are so famous and ingrained in and so many of our minds were basically fudged and and are no longer accepted and I was just amazed because it's you know finding out that you know Pluto is not a planet which I just did yeah that's her and and oddly in that case they were known to be fraudulent from since in 1894 the famous Cambridge embryologist Adam Sedgwick Sedgwick had exposed that almost a century ago Stephen Jay Gould thought this was just an appalling recycling of bad science in our textbooks so I mean yeah I mean 1894 I was not in school then it is pretty amazing the same thing with the the famous I don't know if it's still there at the Museum of Natural History the eohippus do you know what I'm talking about the horse see that the horse sequence I don't even know if that's still there anymore but it seems that it was same kind of thing basically fudge that it's not necessarily something that happened I mean any of this kind of stuff was big news to me I have to say and then the idea that there are these big gaps in the fossil record also not exactly something that's taught in the schools at least not where I went to school well and what you're finding in the peer-reviewed literature is this engineering problem as I refer to it you know is really what's what is generating a lot of skepticism among evolutionary biologists because the complexity of these systems just let me try one little technical argument see if we can make this clear it's really fascinating to me there are these to build an animal it turns out that you not only need all this genetic information but there are circuits and these circuits are crucial to getting the right cells to differentiate getting cells to differentiate from each other and go to the right place as you're building an animal is it unfolds from embryo to adult but there's a problem as we've done as developmental biologists have done experiments on this circuitry they're called developmental gene regulatory networks they find that even modest alterations in these circuits have catastrophic catastrophic effects but to build a new animal you need new types of circuitry to make sure that there's the cells and the other type of animal get to their right places so to build one animal form from another you need a new type of circuit but you can't alter the original circuit without destroying the animal during its development and you have these kinds of problems I look at four or five of this these types of really intractable engineering problems confronting the evolutionary mechanism and it's one of the reasons that so many top line evolutionary biologists are themselves looking for a new approach not necessarily intelligent design but they're saying this this neo-darwinian approaches is failing us well before we go to the to the QA I just want to ask you a couple quick things but the first one I guess is where do you see all of this going because when you have this paleontologist from Holyoke saying that this is a gear book as a game-changer there seem to be you know cracks in the dam it seems clear that this you know unified front is not as unified as it once was and it seems to me that there's a possibility of some shifting around but what what do you see is there hope that people in the Academy might accept some of this I mean it seems hard for me to believe but I'm just getting some signs of hopes I'm curious from your point of view what do you think well I think it's actually a very exciting we're not hearing about a lot of it the media and I think the the metaphor you used of attempting to kill to kill the baby in the bassinet was you know exactly right in the 2004 2005 when the the work on intelligent design broke into the public awareness through the media there was a big trial in Dover and Wired magazine did a cover story on us and a lot of media attention the official line media line was our narrative was this is a faith-based idea Time magazine had a cover story that was the is a faith-based idea but the idea is actually based on science scientific evidence and a scientific method of reasoning and what's what we're now finding is that there is a growing subterranean dissent against Darwinism and many of those scientists are getting in contact with us and there's a growing network internationally of scientists who are contributing to this intelligent design research program we've talked mainly about how the evidence might point to a designer or how it might challenge Darwinian evolution but once you're convinced that life is a design system it leads to experiments and a different way of looking at life that may have what scientists call heuristic value it may lead to new discoveries one of the predictions that we made for example that was different than the Darwinian prediction was the prediction about so-called junk DNA and last fall it was confirmed by this massive encode project that the junk DNA which was thought to be the detritus the leftovers from the trial-and-error mutation selection process turned out to be importantly functional just as the ID proponents had had predicted so we think this leads to in really fruitful directions of for new science and we're seeing an awful lot of scientists coming to us I'd Lee especially Europeans some very high-profile European scientists have have sort of joined ranks and so I think there's a it's a I'm very optimistic that the this materialistic ideology is losing its stranglehold on the practice of science I'm aware of the junk DNA findings because I follow Discovery on Twitter I just want to say that and yes I do and I guess I want to ask what I mean what is Francis Collins's view of the junk DNA story do you know I mean what does he come out he when he wrote a book in 2006 the language of God in which she made some arguments for the second meaning of evolution common descent based on on the non functionality of certain genes that were present with us and present with chimps and the argument is look if these things aren't performing a function and their president like in appendix right I mean yeah something like that or you genetic it down for us like an appendix it has no use but it just ended up there because that's that's what happened and clearly it wouldn't happen God was not design us with an appendix why would he do such a thing yeah and you wouldn't have you wouldn't had to now that you're here why would he and and the idea is you wouldn't have in two different organisms to essentially broken genes that aren't doing anything unless they had a common ancestor and since Collins wrote that book in oh six a lot of this has come out some of it in under his direction he's had his name on a number of these scientific papers that have established the functionality of many of these allegedly broken genes or sections of junk DNA so I think a lot of those arguments have to be reassessed and it's an interesting dynamic area of scientific conversation but clearly that the main Darwinian argument I mean I got this right before I published signature in the cell there were people writing papers saying well the if the genome is designed if the information in DNA points to an intelligent designer why is so much of the genome junk right and it turned out not to be so in fact what's fascinating to me is that over all that none those non protein coding regions of the genome are not junk at all but they function much like an operating system in a computer that are regulating the expression of the data files they are regulating the timing expression of the of the information that does build build proteins so what we're looking at is a really sophisticated information processing system in even the very simplest cells since I mentioned Francis Collins I just remembered another question I want to ask you I get confused when people talk about theistic evolution I'm going to the impression that theistic evolution means that people believe the process of evolution happened but that God directed it but then when somebody says intelligent design it sounds like the same thing where would intelligent design differ from so-called theistic evolution well it really depends on which meaning of evolution is being affirmed by the theistic evolutionist the first meaning of evolution change over time is is something that certainly met you it's perfectly coherent to merge that with a form of theism certainly God can cause change over time God could also even cause continuous gradual change over time though there's increasing evidence that life on earth did not emerge in a gradual in a completely gradual way where I think the concept of theistic evolution breaks down is when you try to merge theism with the idea of an unguided undirected process not even God can direct an unguided undirected process because as soon as God is directing it it's no longer undirected but what wouldn't they but wouldn't it I mean it's kind of like saying you know if I roll the dice right did God make it say you know Snake Eyes in this case right um or if he didn't maybe he didn't but he knew that it would be snake guys in other words couldn't that be the case with theistic evolution isn't that what they say wouldn't they say that look yes it's random on one level it's random and maybe that's why you objected the word random earlier but it's random but but God knew that it would go this way and you're saying that well in a sense the key question for theistic evolutionists and and their there are forms of theistic evolution that are consistent with intelligent design if God is directing the evolutionary process to a propitious outcome that is a form of intelligent design right so then the argument is really only over whether that directed form of evolution is continuous or more episodic okay and that's in the metaphysical sense not a really big big disagreement but the what I've been calling for is more clarity in the use of this term because it can mean so many different things depending on on on whether talking about evolution number one two or three the three the three meanings that I was talking about I guess I'm just fast and here was another one other key point though many theistic evolutionists are saying that the mutation selection mechanism is God's Way of creating right and what I show in the book is the mutation selection mechanism has very limited creative power and so for theists who are looking for a way to harmonize science and faith this is a losing strategy this is like the Catholic Church backing the Aristotelian cosmology just before Galileo came along when you have leading secular evolutionary biologists saying that that mechanism is a very limited creative power but when a quote that I like is a biologist who says that natural selection explains the survival but not the arrival of the fittest it explains the little stuff but not the origin of whole new body plans or circuitry or genetic information and so it's it it to me seems an odd time for the push within the religious world to baptize Darwin and say this is the way God did it when the when the scientific establishment is while not open to a theistic or an idee perspective is still very much becoming disenchanted with the Darwinian mechanism a so so people so you would say that that people of faith who are saying that you know we believe in evolution this kind of evolution you're saying that they're they're backing a loser and they think it makes them cool you know to back this particular loser because they don't think it is a loser but you're saying that science itself is going to show that this can't work is already increasingly doing so absolutely yeah and so it is a losing horse absolutely okay all right well I want to open the conversation up to the folks who've come but we welcome your questions and I should say up front that dr. Maier has asked that your questions if you don't mind be true or false questions just to just kind of move it along to move it along here I love when there are no questions look at this now you know what will happen let me predict ah let me predict that in a moment at the end of this when we're out of time there's going to be eight people at each microphone this always happens thank you thank you go ahead Mustapha and Thomas Kuhns book he talks about paradigms and how you can articulate paradigms through experiments and my question is with intelligent design how do you articulate this particular path assuming that it is a new scientific paradigm how do you articulate it through experiments the reason why I ask the question is speaking to laypeople and I'm a laborers myself and not a scientist when you speak to laypeople about intelligent design you see this look on their face like you're not intelligent but then when you spent them I know that look yeah whatever yeah when you speak to them about evolution no matter how mathematically impossible it may seem you sound intelligent because there's this you know sort of mechanism that we have grown to believe in as the evolutionary process wait it doesn't seem to be a mechanism for ID so what what is the testability of intelligence absolutely question I address this in great depth in both books but first a question the point about mechanism the the methodological imperative of historical science is to establish a cause for events in the past and causes may be mechanistic they may be material but they may be ultimately mental they may be the result some types of effects only arise from conscious or rational activity if someone to walk into the British Museum and look at the rosetta stone and say isn't it wonderful what wind and erosion did we would say that person has missed something important in the causal story of those inscriptions and so while intelligent official just before you get to four it so the rosetta stone did not just happen it was produced by an intelligent agent just one of the cause yeah so we're offering not a mechanism but an alternative kind of cause but having but then that raises the question of testability how would you test that and there are two aspects of every scientific theory there are one aspect is explaining the facts we already have and one is making predictions about new facts turns out that intelligent design does both and the first much of what I've done is work on the first problem we've got a whole suite of different types of evidences and I show that intelligent design provides a better explanation of those already known facts than undirected material processes of various kinds and in doing that I use a method of reasoning that Darwin used known as inference to the best explanation where the best explanation is one that cites a cause which is known to produce the effects in question so when we're looking at an inference to the Past cause one of the key tests is is that cause is the test of our uniform and repeated experience in the present is the cause that we're citing known to produce the kind of effect that we see a geologist for example in my state Washington on the west coast might go to Eastern Washington see a layer of ash and say HM how do I explain that white ash among the in the Palouse soil well different hypotheses might be proposed maybe it was a flood maybe it was an earthquake maybe it was a volcanic eruption which one is best using Darwin's method well it's the volcanic eruption because what we know from our experience is that volcanoes produce that effect whereas floods and earthquakes don't so there there's a different type of testability for historical scientific theories having said that intelligent design also makes discriminating predictions and in the epilogue to our one of the appendices to signature in the cell the first book I lay out ten separate predictions that id makes that are different that are different that then the predictions that a competing evolutionary model would make one of them we've talked about already the prediction about the non-coding regions of the genome being functional rather than junk so it and I have a colleague Doug axe who is heading up our lab the biologic Institute who's doing all kinds of really interesting experimental work so a lot of people just they need to kind of take a lap around the block whether it's here about this and then it starts to make a little more sense so I'm just shot the rosetta stone didn't just happen that's the first I've heard what about Mount Rushmore cuz that's a same deal yeah really wind in a rosin baby wind in a row down wave erosion see it's amazing how nature plans and schemes yes sir so if we accept your axioms and agree with an intelligent designer I'm curious your argument as to why or if that intelligent designer is necessarily a benevolent deity versus say a vindictive group of aliens who are taking bets on how many antelopes are going to be eaten on the Serengeti on a random Tuesday or a grad school a grad student on Andromeda my debating partner Michael ruse always has excellent question and notice though in the way I formulated the argument scientifically that I'm basing the inference to design based on our uniform and repeated experience in the present of those causes which of which we know that are capable of producing information or irreducible complexity or circuitry or the kind of things we find in organisms because we know from our experience of being conscious agents we have experience in the presence of what minds can do but the method of reasoning that I use does not get you past the affirmation of a mind simpliciter in other words some kind of mind with the capacities there that are similar or analogous to ours that but it does raise a second-order question that goes beyond the use of the scientific method as to the identity of the designing intelligence that might be responsible for the origin of life or the origin of animal life and there are different possibilities at the close of the ben stein film that Eric talked about Richard Dawkins of all people actually speculated that perhaps there is a signature of intelligence inside the cell but if so he said it must have been produced by an eminent intelligence within the cosmos which itself evolved through strictly material processes Ben Stein called out the ABG hypothesis anything but God but I hold in that second-order deliberation to a theistic view because I see evidence of design not only in the history of life but I see it from the very beginning of the universe built into the fabric of the universe itself in what the physicist referred to as the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and of the initial conditions of the universe and I think where as you might be able to invoke an imminent intelligence within the cosmos to account for the design we see in biology clearly no being within the cosmos could account for the the design we see built into the very fabric of the universe itself from the beginning and so I think that overall when you look at the range of evidences of design that we see we have Jay Richards here who's written on evidence in physics and planetary astronomy I think that the best explanation is a theistic design hypothesis but I say that that's a second-order philosophical conclusion rather than something that flows out of the scientific method that I use in the books I normally say this in stockton city i forgot to say it earlier but both questions have have not been too long but we want to limit them to about fourteen syllables if you can hang get the hang of that questions we're fine at the ends and I want to know not sure I know and I want to say well we've been doing fine so far but there's going to be couple of monologues happening if unless we warn against it and yes that the question must be phrased in the form of a question so go ahead sir do you think the so-called young earthers completely lack a scientific method or perhaps so they just misinterpreting the facts because some of them seem quite intelligent but they're very some very intelligent young earth scientists and I just happened to hold a different view on the age of the earth earth and the age of the universe there - there's a kind of typology here that might be helpful everyone who accepts their young earth and old earth creationists and both both of those schools of thought like intelligent design because if you're a creationist there was a designer right but if you accept intelligent design it doesn't it doesn't follow that you necessarily affirm young earth creationism or older with creationism the question of design or a parent design is essentially an age neutral question and so while I don't hold the young earth view I can see how someone might affirm intelligent design and have a different view on the age question than I do thank you yes every once in a while I see a triumphalist headline that says evolution has been proved in the lab and you'll have one more time more time right so like in Michigan State they went through 31,000 generations of e.coli and then a strain emerge that could metabolize citrate or applause genetics came out with fruit flies that could fly around levels of oxygen that would be deficient for earlier populations could you just articulate and clarify what is being proven and what is not being established the dinies experiment really excellent question there is a distinction in evolutionary biology between what's called macro and micro evolution and the very oftentimes if you make that distinction in an actual discussion people will accuse that you have using creationist terminology but this is terminology within the discipline itself and that the short quip I I cited a minute ago natural selection explains the survival but not the arrival it explains small scale variation of the kind these experiments demonstrate but it does not account for fundamental innovation in in body plan anatomical structure and that's that sort of thing so the kinds of things that are trumpeted as proof positive are very minor modifications that are typically being achieved because of variations in pre-existing genetic information and they're drawing on pre-existing sources of genetic information whereas macro evolutionary change the origin of whole new animals in the Cambrian period requires huge infusions of new genetic information and and so it's a really a different a different kind of phenomenon I'm not sure that we'll get to all the questions I didn't say this earlier but meant to as well that we always try to end on time it Socrates in the city just so you know that you don't have to sneak out we will end certainly by 8:15 so yes sir oh I'm sorry yes yes had a question both Darwinist and young horse creation is to have a positive model of how life was produced is it within the scope of ID of ever producing a positive model it seems like up until now has been more of a negative criticism of why Darwinism cannot be very glad you asked that because the argument is often missed portrayed as a fallacious argument from ignorance if you know the informal fallacies from logic or an argument from personal incredulity but the straight and I discuss this objection head-on in both books the argument for intelligent design is a positive argument based on what we know about the cause and effect structure of the world not just a critique of the inadequacy of the material stick mechanisms I do critique those mechanisms because the argument is formulated is an inference to the best explanation and to claim best you have to show that the competing explanations are inadequate but you also have to show that there is a basis in an experience for invoking another kind of cause and and so the kind of cause that is invoked to account for for example the origin of the information necessary to build the Cambrian animals is an intelligent cause conscious and rational activity and we invoke it because we have knowledge of what conscious and rational agents can produce in particular we know they can produce information digital information in other forms which is the crucial feature of living systems that has to be explained so it's an argument based on our knowledge of cause and effect and our knowledge of the evidence of biological systems not just our ignorance of an alternative to neo-darwinism thank you these questions are all very intelligent and we could really use some dumb questions so please you know something just keep it simple I like what's your wife's name or something I read a terrible review of your book and of all places in National Review and it was performed by a non-scientist neo-darwinism Alief Ines his home at the Huffington Post correct and I had had to then go and read the discoveries Institute response it up which was very thorough but I just wondered if you had any background information to how this happened to a respectable one of the most respectable conservative publications around like National Review well political people that farm books out for book review are usually doing things on cultural and political issues and so this guy is in fact a hyper-partisan he does right at the John Farrell is his name he's good writer but he is not a scientist and rather than engage any of the really serious arguments of the book that we've been discussing tonight he took issue with a single ellipsis and attempted to show that I was guilty of quote mining or taking a quotation out of context and I had 753 scientific references in the book and so when I first read the review skimmed it on the iPhone you know driving home I thought well yeah not a good policy ha how fast were you drive yeah I thought well I'm perfectly happy to you know publish an errata and if I mischaracterized a particular scientists it didn't really bear on the argument I was making but I got home and read read the review carefully and then I read the scientists at paleontologists named John Marshall and what what and I found I suddenly was incensed I didn't get this guy wrong at all that I had a block quotation and the first portion of the quotation was about something called the artifact hypothesis an explanation of why the fossils are missing in the pre-k pregnant Precambrian layers the second part was also about the artifact hypothesis in the second quotation helpfully amplified the first standard scholarly practice I then he faulted me for not quoting another passage and that passage was he said was put the whole thing in a different context it was about an entirely different topic and it was entirely appropriate that I should have excised it is it was about the duration of the Cambrian explosion a different technical matter so it was really a poor review especially poor because it didn't address the main arguments of the book and I would have welcomed spirited or thoughtful criticism of those it just didn't come I mean actually to throw my own two cents in on that asking why would a wonderful magazine like National Review do something like that and by the way rich Lowry is often here is he here now the editor of national view maybe could you know is a Marshall McLuhan in the audience he can answer that but I think oftentimes what happens and this is why I'm interested in this on one level is that it's a cultural debate it's not just a scientific debate and there are many people who would say well oh I'm conservative but I'm not that kind of a conservative you don't think I believe in that stuff and I think there probably many people whether they think of themselves as libertarians or you know particularly sophisticated conservatives they would dismiss anything that is let's say social conservatism or any conservatism that or any view that would would invoke a deity they're just uncomfortable and so I'm not I'm not so surprised I'm dismayed but I'm not so surprised that let me review what about let me defend National Review because I got an email just before we we came over for the event from another in our NRO writer who's going to do a piece on the book he's very excited about it so they'll be they'll be teaching the controversy as we say within the pages of n R which is a great policy on things like this but I also want to speak to the the social anxiety that that surrounds this issue there is this stigma and stereotype that anyone who's questioning Darwinism is doing so in fact this is the dominant narrative that if that you know when Darwin came along it was after centuries of people believing in a divine creator then there was this overwhelming scientific evidence that overthrew that idea and anyone who questions Darwin now is doing so because they're an insecure religious fundamentalist and one of the things I try to do in the book is show there is a really interesting scientific basis for the dissenting opinion that is now bubbling up all over the place in the scientific community and that that narrative is just simply if it was ever true it's no longer true and and the social you know it's the image of the white shoed bible-thumper from a very rural place who drools you know and careful because they're two in the back yeah but they're always they always show up they're wonderful people but but you don't you just don't they're clear assume very very scientifically sophisticated and and descent and it needs to be heard as part of the discussion the other thing I'd say is that I think many of the policy and cultural magazines they sense but don't entirely entirely recognize why this issue is important to everything else they care about the Wall Street Journal had a great cartoon a little while ago in their salt and pepper cartoon you know that they do on the op-ed page and it was a hapless guy before a judge and he says not guilty by reason of millions of years of evolutionary selection for aggressive behavior your honor and it's a funny cartoon but actually I went back and looked at this the first instance of what's called the diminished responsibility play the you know I did it because I was insane was actually made by Clarence Darrow in 1924 in the famous Leopold and Loeb case the the thriller murder case two young University of Chicago college students killed a twelve-year-old boy for the thrill of it to show their independence from booze while morality and they were convicted at the point of sentencing the sale you sent out Darrow and he argued that yes they did have defective moral machinery but they had such a defective moral machinery because they were the product of an unguided undirected mindless evolutionary process you know not not Flip Wilson the devil made me do it Flip Wilson you know my evolutionary history did I just can't tell you how I love the fact that you Reverend Flip Wilson you've made my night okay go ahead sir could everything have been designed in if to what I'll call the primordial soup where all the radiation you know even the Cambrian explosion could have been programmed front-end loaded front-end loader a way that you know one or two cell embryo can radiate into a very complicated you know organism excellent question I'll try to be brief since we're running out of time but that's that's entirely a matter of the empirical data it could be either and there are proponents of intelligent design who think everything was front-end loaded at the beginning of the universe others who see it at the beginning of life I actually hold the view that that there were multiple infusions of new information along the way there's in the interest of time there is a video of the under 30s at our office who are tech whizzes have created a YouTube channel of videos and there's one on this very question could the design that we see in evidence have been front-end loaded could you explain the origin of life from the fine-tuning of the laws of physics at the very beginning I think there's a good scientific reason that you couldn't there's not enough information in that fine-tuning to account for the information you need to build a cell so I think we're looking at multiple infusions of information if you will but to explain why we take a little more time than we have tonight but I'd refer you to that video it's a great question and it is an open question for people who are open to considering design it's not a one size fit all there's different models of intelligent design that that scientists are developing many people right now are looking into the works of album planning as a philosopher of science right and if I'm not mistaking you how I write and philosophy of science and and many people seem to have this view that you and him and kind of like antithetical oh you know in in some ways of like either because he believes in like guide evolution and you know well yeah let me clarify his position because we just had a lout to the I've known him since the 80s and he's been really a friend of the ID movement what his main work in the in the philosophy of science has been challenging this principle known as methodological naturalism that says that scientists must limit themselves to materialistic explanations even if they're looking at the rosetta stone or digital information in DNA and he says no there's no presumption of a materialistic explanation we need to be open to all explanations he's making an evolution of much more narrow logical point that randomness might be what we look at as randomness might be there might be hidden hand behind it and so he's also deeply skeptical about the scientific evidence for neo-darwinism so I the the the I think they're very few differences actually between planning and most of the leaders in the ID movement there have been some interesting discussions about this issue of randomness Jay Richards my colleague has had some very good online discussions with Al on these questions I'd refer you to those there are some some slight differences in opinion about the extent to which Darwinism is inherently committed to a materialistic approach and the extent to which it might be harmonized abou if you will with some sort of guidance but if there is guidance to the mechanism that would be a form of intelligent design yeah so my question was are you is there any difference between you and if not which you have said that like it is what is it or is it you know yeah the difference and we had a really good discussion about this and so we're you know we're all learning from each other on it but I think the main difference would be the extent to which the mechanism of natural selection random variation could be understood to be a teleological process could be guided okay and I I think if it is guided then it's certainly a mode of intelligent design just as there are young earth creationist old earth creationists who are proponents of intelligent design there are theistic evolutionist who would also wear that moniker there's a common view if there's a mind involved as a causal agent that's intelligent design whether it's gradual or episodic but there's a technical point about Darwinism Kant is the mechanism of natural selection inherently an unguided mechanism I think it's built into the logic of the argument that Darwin makes in the third chapter of the Origin that it's inherently unguided mechanism because he sets up natural selection in opposition to artificial selection intelligent selection and says look nature can do what the breeder can do and but I do acknowledge that you could have you could see you could conceive of something that looks unguided that might have a mind behind it but when you the real crucial question is that appearance of design that we actually see in the evidence and and if you acknowledge that that appearance is the result of actual design then you're in the ID camp whether you say well God was guiding something or it was more episodic or or creation by Fiat so I think the difference is on that level are there really fine points of logic about what is Darwin saying thank you dr. Maier with the advances in research in the semi cultural acceptance it's growing around intelligent design do you see it being taught in schools at the very least even in loan size a theory with evolution sometime in the near future well it is being discussed with various degrees of openness and or suppression at the university level there is a case right now in ball a Ball State University in Indiana there are two prominent ID proponents in the Astronomy Department there one Jay Richards is co-author Guillermo Gonzalez and the other astronomer there Erica Dean has been the subject of a kind of secular witch-hunt really the Freedom From Religion Foundation started pressuring the university to shut down of course he was doing in on the boundaries of science because he had two books that were discussing intelligent design one Pro one con which i think is just absurd but many many college professors discussing these issues both in science classes and in in philosophy of science classes and thereby exercising their academic freedom in the at the level of the high school curriculum battles where this comes up I think it would be constitutionally permissible I think intelligent design is a scientific theory that has larger worldview or metaphysical locations and I think Darwinism is is a scientific theory that has competing metaphysical and worldview implications so teaching one teaching them side-by-side teaching about these theories without being without trying to indoctrinate students I think would be it should be constitutionally permissible however I think it's imprudent for our side right now to be trying to push intelligent design into the public school textbook battles because there's such confusion about church-state jurisprudence that in error inevitably a sensible policy is going to kick this up into the courts and for us we want our scientists working on the science right now we're trying to prosecute this argument at the highest levels of the Academy not getting instead of getting drawn into cases like Dover where you had the absurdity of a federal judge trying to decide the definitional question of what is science which is properly within the Providence of the the philosophy of science so right now we think it's imprudent to try to force intelligent design into the schools when the Dover trial was in the news 2005 there had been one peer-reviewed article in mainstream science journals advocating the theory of intelligent design it was that new now we're approaching a hundred and at some point the trickle becomes a rivulet becomes a stream becomes a gush and there are just too many scientists doing signs from this perspective to keep it out of the educational system students are going to want to know that we're going to ask their teachers teachers are going to want to talk about it so I prefer to let happen organically than to have a big policy push that's art in our position okay we've got time for two very brief questions and and two brief answers so go ahead I've seen a lot of discussions with scientists on the evolutionary side where they can almost come to grips with the idea of intelligent design but they they define away intelligence to make it seem mechanistic is there a difference I mean is it really the word personal that throws them for loop is there a difference well there you get into some very deep questions in the philosophy of mind and I accept consciousness as I another interesting figure in this discussion is Thomas Nagel who's written a book mind and cosmos subtitle with Oxford press last fall how the neo-darwinian materialist view of reality is almost certainly false and one of the things that Nagel is arguing is that that consciousness is a fundamental feature of the world minds our fundamental features of the world they can't be reduced or explained away by the the movement of molecules in in synapses that that that and and I think that we know of our conscious Minds by direct introspective experience I actually think we know of that better than we know of any conclusion that is rendered to us from science because all scientific conclusions are mediated to us by the senses and through scientific authorities and so any any scientific theory that removes consciousness and and mind as a reality in other words that it's so reductive in materialistic that it eliminates what we know best which is our own reality as conscious agents is is a self contradictory form of scientism and and so for me the notion of any notion of mind which is fundamentally reduced to just an epiphenomenon of matter is actually an incoherent view now I've been asked could you be a physical astounded advocate intelligent design I think that is a possible position but I think is ultimately incoherent because I rejected is Achilles account of the mind-body problem thank you the final question I have to say I didn't even know there was such a word as physicalist I really didn't thank you it's simply the idea that the mind is reducible to molecules actually how physical is different from materialists very similar it's very simple ISM is the is the expression of materialism in in the philosophy of mind or cognitive science okay as Christians the basis of our faith is based on the belief in the possibility of the supernatural from the resurrection of Christ to the virgin birth and the only place where that notion of the supernatural has a problem is in the cosmopolitan West not in the rest of the world per se and could an argument be made with respect to this why does the scientific community reject even the possibility of the super natural as an explanation for things when they recognize for example that there was a paradigm that we had with Newtonian physics that was upset by Einstein where everything changed with that why isn't there an ability to recognize that there might be paradigms that they're not taking into account again showing complexity or things they've not taken into account that might bring in what we would call the supernatural things beyond our understanding why is that unscientific to even explore that possibility but yeah that's a really great and thoughtful question and there's a long story of course and it's the story of the establishment of scientific materialism is the dominant philosophy associated with science much of that occurred in the late 19th century at Darwin giving a materialist account of origins you had marks with a utopian materialistic dialectical materialist vision of the future and Freud giving a materialist account of human nature Skinner other major figures so we've been hit we have in a sense we're working off the intellectual capital of the late 19th century and it's still with us and it's it's it is cracking up and it's dissipating I think many modern scientists some simply are operating in that stream in a very conventional way but others are thoughtful about it we'll argue that we need the materialist methodology to make progress in science and I think here we barely advocates of intelligent design bear a burden of demonstration to show that looking at life in a non materialistic way as a design system can bear fruit in science I think it can I think it already is and I think the history of science interestingly has already shown that if you go back to the the Scientific Revolution to Kepler and Newton and Boyle and Galileo these these early founders of modern science we're operating out of an explicitly theistic framework Newton always gets tagged as being the author of the great mechanistic universe but his understanding of gravity was profoundly anti-materialistic this is the fundamental law for Newton was gravitation he thought it was absolutely mysterious that that there would be action at a distance that there would be a force transmitted through empty space from the earth to the moon for example and in the end he thought that gravity was only explain as an expression of God's quote constant spirit action so the the the theistic view of reality that gave rise to modern science in the period we call the Scientific Revolution was incredibly fruitful and I think it can be and is already again if we think about design is essentially a theistic friendly construct I think that it will be heuristic aliy fruitful and already is proving to be so but I do take seriously the objection of our materialist colleagues who want to see the proof in the pudding thank you very much you know heuristic alee that's the magic word of the evening thank you very much I tell you we could go on and on this is a this is delightful thank you for coming trying to think what we have to say first of all in just a moment somebody's going to whisk a table or something I think up here where does anybody know where the book signing is happening is their table they're all ready okay so if those of you who are interested in having dr. Maier sign your book or the book that you're about to purchase um and please do so thank you for coming

Channel: socratesinthecity

Views: 299,652

Rating: 4.5391746 out of 5

Keywords: Stephen C. Meyer (Organization Founder), Eric Metaxas (Author), Socrates in the City

Id: QiDmtDuMHSc

Length: 85min 47sec (5147 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Thistleknot]

Cambrian explosion

At about 31:00, 35:00 he gets into a scientific example. He challenges junk dna at 46:00

I'm kind of miffed that an appeal to mind is a valid causal argument (I suppose it is aristotles final cause) but maybe that's cuz I was educated w a materialist mindset w newtonian expectations.

Anyways he gets asked a question and answers around 56 min how so believed 'junk DNA' interpreted through the lens of intelligent design has been pioneering new research that shows it isnt junk (i.e. that paradigm is fruitful to pursue).

I'd love to see Dawkins response to his thesis. Mainly he throws intelligent design down as a plausible answer (mind as cause) for fundamental problems in the theory of macro evolution. I recall one video by dawkins dissecting a giraffe larynx but Stephen seems to go more into depth than simply a single dissection.

He uses mind as the source as inference to best explanation (of the 4 letters in dna) encoding (1 hr 5 min)

He's biased against arguments proposing physicalism (1:21:00)

[u/SnapshillBot]

Snapshots:

1. Darwin's Doubt with "Stephen Meyer" - archive.org, archive.today

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