Dr. Meyer Debates Paleontologist Charles Marshall on Premier Radio

hello welcome along I'm Justin Bry your host for unbelievable this Saturday afternoon between now and 4:00 we're aiming to get you thinking this is the talking shop for Christians and non-christians we do all kinds of debates history philosophy theology the Bible today it's science very exciting program for you and I'll be telling you more about it in just a moment's time let me remind you that unbelievable is part of your Saturday lineup of programming that aims to get you thinking and straight after Today's Show between 4: and 5: you can join me again for the profile interview my guest today is Pete Greg the founder of the 247 prayer movement so look forward to that between 4 and 5 this afternoon don't forget though you can find unbelievable this program and many past programs and extra resources at the website that's premier.org do/ unbelievable let me introduce today's topic and my guest you're unbelievable well today we're debating intelligent design and The evolutionary record asking does the explosion of life forms in the Cambrian era uh provide evidence for intelligent design over Evolution um what is the Cambrian era well if you don't know you're about to find out um Darwin's doubt is the name of the new book by Steven C Meyer he's a leading intelligent design theorist with The Discovery Institute and it's all about the explosive origin of animal life and what Steven believes is the case for intelligent design that emerges from it well in conversation with Steven today is Charles Marshall he's professor of biology at the University of California in Berkeley and has written a scathing review of the book and of the intelligent design movement generally in Science magazine he's titled it when prior belief Trump's scholarship so we're in for a good debate today I think uh this is always an issue that has great interest I know to listeners um so it's good to have both of you gentlemen on the line today um we let's just briefly say hello first of all to Steve Steve um thank you for joining me today it's great to be with you Justin um Steve uh it's been a while since your last book maybe a couple of years um since signature in the cell you're you're back with another controversial Blockbuster aren't you um we're going to find out all about it in a moment's time um good to have you on the show today just a brief hello as well to Charles Marshall yes and for me as well okay Charles um thank you for coming on the show today good morning a pleasure to be here yes well it's morning for you afternoon for us but um that's right thank you very much for for being on the show um we're going to be finding out about your your views on this as well um so appreciate you joining me on the show today now just um a little bit different to normal on the program today we're actually going to be giving over the whole show to this debate we just felt there was so much to talk about we'll dispense just for this week with our normal feedback uh of your views at the end of the show so um in the first part we're going to give plenty of time for Steven to outline his issues and uh to outline the the thesis of the book really and then for Charles to give a sort of Fairly detailed response and then we'll we'll launch into the discussions thereafter so um Steve first of all um take us back to um the title of this book Darwin's doubt what is that actually referring to you bet it well it refers to uh concern that Darwin raised about the evidential record in relation to his own Theory um the the the doubt that he had was not so much about whether his theory was true but whether it could explain a particular class of evidence uh known as the the Cambrian explosion and the Cambrian explosion refers to an event in the history of life when we find a uh discontinuous or abrupt appearance of the first major group groups of animals and Darwin was aware of this in his time and what the book does uh in in fact and he he acknowledged that this was a uh uh it posed a as he put it a valid objection to the Views here entertained uh he of course expected that the fossil record would show the gradual emergence of complex animal life from simpler uh pre-existent forms and he also expected that the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation would work very slowly and gradually on small incremental variations he realized that if the variations from one generation to the next were too large uh they would cause deformities and the or resulting organisms would die and terminate The evolutionary process so he envisioned a very slow gradual process producing complexity and yet the fossil record and the Cambrian Period attests to this very abrupt appearance and U and so he acknowledged that this was a as as I said before a valid objection to the Views here entertained in his Victorian English so this was the doubt that he had that was the doubt and what the book does is not so much focus on the history of that though I tell an I have an opening chapter that does but I really Trace that doubt and show how it's grown up to produce a significant conceptual difficulty in evolutionary theory uh not just about the missing fossils but also uh a problem in fact I look at two mysteries in the book The the first is the problem of the missing fossils the missing ancestral forms uh that were expected on Darwin's view but I also look at what I think is the more profound and uh significant difficulty which is the the U the difficulty of macro Evolution or uh putting it in slightly engineering terms or bio engineering terms it's the question of how would you how would the evolutionary process build these complex animals it's the essentially the question of what caused these things to come into existence and and and this is treading fairly different ground in a way to what you did in signature in the cell which is all about origin of life and and how did before any kind of evolutionary process kicks in where did this information that that started it all off come from this is well it's linked but but but a little bit of a different sort of scope yeah there there there's a connection because in the second part of the book which is really begins to outline the main argument of the book um I I described the the informational requirements of building a a cambrain animal and um and and the great discovery of the second half of the 20th century in Modern Biology is that is that information is is running the show in biological systems that you need information to to if if you want to in the first book I showed that if you wanted to build a uh the first living cell from simpler or pre-existing chemicals you had to have information you had to have the information in the in the DNA but the the same thing is true at the higher level if you want to build new forms of life from simpler pre-existing forms of life there are informational requirements and uh and so since since Watson and cric since the the their their CCS Fame sequence hypothesis in which he uh proposed that the the four um chemical bases along the spine of the DNA molecule are actually functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language or digital characters in the section of machine code we've realized that uh at the very least we need this digital information to build the proteins uh that are in turn necessary to build um specific cell types which are in turn necessary to various tissues and organs and finally body plans when we get to the Cambrian Period what we have arising are novel body plans but you can't build a body plan without at least genetic information and I show in the book that there are uh there other forms of information in living systems as well uh forms that are now being called epigenetic information by people in developmental biology and you need both of these types of information to build an animal so the the The crucial question that the Cambrian uh brings into focus is what caused the origin of the information necessary to to build these complex forms of animal life and and just just to give us an idea for those of us who aren't familiar with the Cambrian explosion um what kind of creatures suddenly appeared on the scene and and how were they very different to what we have previous to that in the fossil record well the um uh Darwin was aware of of two main forms uh the fame trilobit which fascinated me as a as a child um with its uh compound eye and uh articulated ex exoskeleton with the three distinct lobes uh he was also aware of brachiopods a b valve with a complex um internal anatomy but uh pretty much we now know and this is one of the things that has made the the mystery uh even more mysterious is that most of the major animal body plans uh first arose in the Cambry and one of the great finds in China has shown now that even fish go as far back as the Cambrian Ain ofms arise in the Cambrian uh you just go across the range of the the known Fila The largest division of biological classification which correspond roughly to Unique uh body plans where a body plan is a unique arrangement of body parts and tissues and um um by you know there's various ways of estimating this but uh uh in the book I made a careful count as best I could from the various technical papers on this and uh if there are 36 known filo roughly and one way of counting um 27 of those have been fossilized 20 of those first appear in the Cambrian there are three other F that are in the Cambrian that appear a bit earlier in the pre-cambrian so it's very a pattern of pervasive discontinuity as far as these higher level forms arising yes and and so the question you ask is where are these missing fossils if the evolutionary story is is right and that that's that's the first third of the book and it's an in that was the mystery that in Darwin but what I what I really get to is what we've already talked about how do you build the essential question is how do you build these animals how would the evolutionary process generate all that information that's necessary to build those forms of life and and we're talking about 530 million years ago sort of the the Cambrian explosion when all these new forms came and yeah 530 to 520 that's a typical dating for it there's some um uh subjectivity in this depending on how many separate events people want to Define as as uh the explosion uh but that that's a uh the the that most often times attracts the attention of paleontologist so having question whether Neo darwinian processes as it were can can account for all this new material body plans uh the genetics involved in in getting to that point um what what's your positive case then for intelligent design on the back of that well may may I first explain the the some of the critical cases just stating that there are informational requirements doesn't explain why Neo Darwinism has had such a difficult time accounting for that so if I could just wedge in an an answer to a question you didn't ask and then come back to that absolutely help yeah and and let's take for example the the both genetic and epigenetic requirements um to build a new Gene turns out to be a very difficult thing as a result of of a by relying on random mutation a simple analogy makes sense to us out here in Redmond we've got Microsoft here if you start changing at random uh sections of a esta computer code um you're are ask yourself a question are you more likely to degrade the information that's there or to generate a new uh software program or operating system well obviously it's it's the ladder you're you're going to degrade the information now the question is why and and the answer is that in all typographic systems uh whether we're talking about digital code or the alphabetic system of the English language it turns out that there are vastly more ways to rearrange the relevant characters that in in in a way that does not perform a function then there are to arrange the characters in a way that does perform a function and uh mathematicians and uh computer scientists who became interested in the the whole issue of uh evolutionary theory back in the 1960s began to raise questions about the plausibility of the darwinian mechanism because they realized that this this tendency to degrade information with random changes was it really a significant problem but the question was essentially how rare or how common are these uh functional sequences among all the other possibilities and in the case of DNA you've got instead of zeros and ones or ABC and G you've got the the chemicals that we represent with the letters atg and c and uh it turns out that the functional sequences of bases in a DNA molecule or the functional Arrangements of amino acids in a protein are fantastically rare uh and another illustration to get this across if you've got a com ation lock U and you've got four four dials on it and 10 digits uh you've got 10,000 possibilities but we could all agree that if you have a a Thief who comes up finds a bike and he knows he's got you know several days to work on this he can he can by chance eventually find the combination but using the same principles of probabilistic reasoning you could also we could all also agree that if that same lock had 10 dials on it with 10 billion combinations that in that same per perod of time it would be much more overwhelmingly more likely than not that that random search method would it would would likely fail well it turns out that the the the Rarity of functional genes and functional proteins to the corresponding what's called sequent space of possible Arrangements of the relevant uh constituents is I is vastly more improbable than our tend dialog it's for there have been various modes of estimating this by protein scientists and uh molecular biologists but uh one recent estimate had put that number at one and 10 the 77th power for a relatively modest uh uh section of a protein called a protein fold and so what happens is when you run the math you're in the same situation as the thief who's only got you know a few hours to crack the the tend dial lock even evolutionary deep time is not sufficient to search the the possibilities so it becomes in the same way vastly more likely than not that the mutation selection mechanism would not find this new gene or protein in the time available and If if the mechanism is more likely to fail vastly overwhelmingly more likely to fail than the hypothesis that that's how it was done is also more likely to be false and so that's the the bottom line there is that the mutation selection mechanism is not an adequate mechanism for generating the information that's necessary to build just to service the proteins let alone the higher level stuff and and so is your conclusion then on the basis of of all of that it doesn't appear that darwinian selection on random mutation so on can account yeah my conclusion is that the mutation selection mechanism is not an adequate uh mechanism for generating the new digital or genetic information necessary to build the proteins that are in turn necessary to service cell types and and organisms and in that sense is is that then why you turn to intelligent design to a designer because no I think there's a positive case for that the other thing I just flag quickly is that that's only one of five arguments that I make in the book against the darwinian mechanism it's got big problems and and the problems at the higher level of of building the epigenetic information are probably even more severe and they are the reasons that there are many uh leading evolutionary theorists who are saying things like Neo Darwinism has no theory of the generative it can't account uh for these these higher levels of information um just just in in 60 seconds then outline your you're trying to get me to the positive case for intelligent design okay the positive case is actually based on uh two things the evidence of of the the the infusion of information required to build these animals in the history of life but also based on our knowledge of the cause and effect structure of the world there's a great principle of reasoning that D Darwin pioneered in the Origin of Species and he said that when when you're trying it was called the veraa principle and he got it from LEL and before that from Newton lel's way of saying it was that that we should be looking for causes now in operation the present is the key to the Past what we see producing certain if we want to explain an event in the remote past uh we should look for a cause that we know is capable of producing the effect in question and uh as I studied that uh historical scientific methodology as as a grad student in England um it it hit me that this applied directly to the question of design or no design uh the key thing that needs to be explained in the origin of living systems is the or origin of the information that makes them possible what do we know from our uniform and repeated experience that uh is a sufficient cause to produce digital code or hierarchically organized forms of information as we find them in in animal life or circuitry or control networks which we also find as crucial elements of animal life all these features that make life so phenomenally interesting and complex um are also things that we know arise from one and only one type of cause in our experience of of the cause and effect structure of the world and that cause is intelligence there's a famed information scientist Henry quer who was a Pioneer in applying information science to molecular biology and he said that the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity and of course that's right if we see digital code in a software program or a hieroglyphic inscription or information embedded in a radio signal or a headline in a newspaper if we Trace information back to its source we always come to a mind not a material process so by applying the same principles of of reasoning that Darwin used in the Origin of Species and in fact in the book I use the same method of reasoning he used a method called the inference to the best explanation okay where the best explanation is the one that invokes a cause known to produce the effect question you conclude yeah we can conclude that intelligent design is the best explanation explanation in the informational endowments that make complex life possible great okay well we we've we've heard that the the broad case uh sketched out there and we're going to obviously hear the other side of this argument now um as we bring in uh Charles Marshall he's a professor of biology at Barkley the University of California has written um a scathing review of the book that we're talking about today Darwin's doubt by Stephen Meer um so we're going to also want your responses to today's program and let me just say that if you'd like to get in touch you can do that by emailing me unbelievable premier.org do.uk plus of course you can get in touch via the social media uh Facebook Twitter all the links available as ever from The Unbelievable website where you can find this program uh pass it on to friends subscribe to the podcast and everything else loads of interesting programs every week here on unbelievable that you'll want to listen to go to premier.org do/ unbelievable unbelievable with Justin Bry okay time to hear the other side of today's argument uh Charles Marshall joins me now on the line um Charles thank you for being with me today yeah you're you're most welcome great to have you um just very briefly would you like to sketch out um your background and and um uh how you um sort of have come to the position you hold at Barkley Oh you mean in a professional sense or an intellectual sense well uh are they mutually exclusive um I yes both if you would um so so my myself I think um somewhat like Stephen actually um I've been fascinated by um how the universe unfolds the way it structures it's captured by imagination as a as a young child um my training in fact following that was um in physics mathematics physical chemistry modern history zoology and paleontology I felt that it was important to have a fairly comprehensive grasp of the sciences and the humanities if we are in fact going to understand very hard and very interesting problems um so my bachelor's degree was in physics and Mathematics and then I always paleontology and then I felt that molecular biology was going to be key to understanding something that Darwin knew nothing of in his day and we really need to understand and inject down knowledge of molecular biology and developmental biology into our evolutionary understanding if we're going to understand in more detail how life unfolded in space and in time um and so I engaged in both MO work uh both as a grad student and then as a postdoc um and then I worked my way through jobs to my current position here at the University of California Berkeley sure well let's talk about the review um because you you reviewed for Science magazine um Darwin's doubt it appears to me that you object to both the way the science is represented and to the overall project of the intelligent design movement yeah so let's start let's start I think where where Steven started with uh the cambon explosion itself and so um I'm going to jump somewhere slightly different to start off with in in in Newton's day one of the great buried next to to Darwin in Westminster Abbey um we did not know about radioactivity fusion fision and so it was difficult to understand where the energy of the sun came from and so it' be easy at that point to say look we have no known mechanism at this point in time to explain the origin of the sun's energy would be exacerbated much worse if he actually knew how old the universe was and one could then stop at that point and say well there's some sort of external agency to the universe that's feeding it that there's no other option now if you if you trust the process of science trust our ability through persistent commitment then eventually we discover things that now make the Apparently in non-sensible sensible I take you back to Plato of course where sensible as the world of cause and effect and so I've been interested in the question of whether or not we're fundamentally missing something in the C an explosion it's uh happened a long time ago half a billion years the evidence is a little thin because it's half a billion years old we don't have living organisms from that particular point in time and so I've always been Keen to read people who come from outside of the scientific tradition because sometimes when people have alternative commitments sometimes they hit upon weaknesses in the thinking internally because we get blind to things that we're just used to seeing every day so I I've been following the sort of the creationist in its previous incarnations now intelligent design um literature in the hopes that maybe they point to something that's just fundamentally like wow we really can't solve that problem and we've been blind to it because we just get used to the way we think about things so I was very interested in Reading in in Reading Steven's book for that for that matter um so I read it I enjoyed it he writes very well he's worked very very hard um but as I got through the book I found myself struck by the fact that the model that he exposes for the camon explosion is kind of a 1980s model of the way genes operate um now if been in 1980s which is where I was as a beginning graduate student I would there's an interesting problem I need to work on that in fact I did do that with my born again Christian undergraduate Mentor in Australia asking the question well can we explain the Cayman explosion of animals um with our current understanding of the way development operates um so we've made an enormous Pro uh progress since those 1980s um and the the key thing thing that was in my opinion missed in Steven's book I mean he discusses it but dismisses it is that when I was a lad the 70s and 80s we were fundamentally taught that the new body plans had to be built with new genes a helicopter's built with one set of components a computer's built with a different set of components and so every new animal body plan had to be built with a completely different set of genes and it seemed rather spectacular and amazing that all of those genes would be invented simultaneously across many many lineages simultaneously so that's sort of the invention of genetic information sort of argument through a whole series of revolutions many of them winning Nobel prizes many of them having very very deep implications for the Health Sciences for understanding of our own biology it becomes apparent that the number of genes required to make animals is modest in the order of 10,000 the genes that are critical to morphology just a thousand or so for hardly any of them and then staggeringly staggeringly the the animals all use essentially the same genes just deployed slightly differently we have the same genes that set the developmental programs for making eyes we share the same genes for making our front ends from our back ends our upside from our downside and all of a sudden you go wow there isn't anything like the need for massive genic Evolution to understand the C explosion as one might have envisioned in the 1970s ' 80s and well before that In Darwin's day and so I felt a little frustrated because I actually discussed this in a review that I wrote in 2006 summarizing and integrating some of this information and and you know Stevens the first third of his book um I mean I really enjoyed reading it and it's it's good scholarship and it looks like good science it's a description it's not really science a description of the science and then I found that I outlin this these arguments and it's completely missed in the book the whole emphasis of the book is centered around the origins of brand new genes to explain the Cambrian explosion and yet the papers that i' had written and people like Jim Valentine and Shan Carol and Eric Davidson and Doug Owen suggested in fact that isn't what we currently believe is required for the Cambrian explosion so I'm not sure scathing is the right word I mean if you viewed the scaving when fair enough but just speaking as someone committed to understanding the Cambrian explosion I found myself disappointed that the arguments that were made in the papers that he cited weren't the ones that he confronted directly he confronted as a different set of problems that I think har back to an older age and I attributed it and it's always dangerous to attribute to things to people you don't know to the fact that he's he's not a biologist he a philosopher um and it's very very hard to keep up with the the the the fire hydrant of new conceptual data that's coming in we're going to have to take a quick break uh and we've heard both sides sketched out to some degree I I will let you come back just briefly as well um because I want to ask you about your your general concern that that you outline in that review there Charles that this is essentially sophisticated god of the gaps approach um is is what uh it boils down to um but we'll we'll do that in a moment's time and of course Steven will respond we're talking about intelligent design on the program not not something uh We've covered in a little while but um certainly has come back into the headlines with the release of Darwin's doubt earlier this year by Steven Meyer um it's all about the origins of animal life um in the Cambrian explosion as it's sometimes called and whether it lends evidence to the case for intelligent design over Evolution uh and I'm joined by the author Steven Meyer um on the line from um Seattle today uh Charles Marshall is in California and he's a biology professor at Barkley University there and uh he's talking about his views on this uh whole area and his response to Steven Meers so come back in a moment's time for more here on the program that aims to get you thinking unbelievable you're listening to unbelievable on Premier Christian radio welcome back to unbelievable it's Saturday afternoon uh we're doing a scientific discussion today in the area of intelligent design is evolution the full story of how animal life in all its variety came to exist in the world today well uh Steven Meyer has written a contoversial new book Darwin's doubt in which he claims that the explosion of many forms of life in the Cambrian explosion some 530 million years ago uh can best be attributed to the agency of intelligence uh we simply can't understand and uh account for the variety of animal life that suddenly appeared on the scene um by normal sort of Neo darwinian processes of evolution and so that's all outlined in great detail in his new book Darwin Stout Charles Marshall is Professor of biology at the University of California Barkley and he's written a review of the book in which he uh questions much of the science that uh Steven Meyer has brought into the picture and indeed the intelligent design movement overall and of course as ever I'm looking for your responses today so if you'd like to get in touch then do contact me unbelievable premier.org okay we've also got the Twitter and Facebook accounts operational if you want to do it that way @ unbelievable JB my Twitter handle facebook.com/ unbelievable JB if you want to get in touch that way all those links and more available of course from the website premier.org do.uk unbelievable where you can find Today's Show and many others indeed and we are going to be reading uh towards um the end of our discussion some of your questions that you sent in Via Twitter and Facebook as well see what my guest Charles Marsh and Steve Meer have to say about those I promised to allow just a little bit more time for you Charles um just as you sort of conclude your opening remarks as it were because um as well as obviously critiquing whether Steve has dealt with the current science properly your your overall concern is that essentially he's picking holes in evolutionary theory um and then inserting God into those gaps so so just speak on that if you would just for a moment yeah so first of all um I'm I'm going to correct your wording slightly that's all right is I and I I Mis I miswrote my My article what I should have said is a is um intelligent designer of the gaps okay as stepen has has pointed out um argument for God it's an argument for an intelligent designer and so I think what's really interesting to me is the the analogy that whenever there is sort of Rich information content that there is a mind behind it is very interesting but Steven said something very interesting in these opening remarks there which is when you trace back through all the processes that have produced the radio waves or the computers you can find the presence of a mind when you can trace back through all of the material processes that have generated the computer or the radio signal you can find the presence of a mind so what's critical here is that when we build our objects that are intelligently designed or not so intelligently designed there's an incredible infrastructure associated with those objects you don't have this tiny little piece of matter somewhere that grow and proliferates and turns into a computer you have an enormous number of factories and people and mines and Railways and cars and aircraft and Communications coordinating the arrival of all these component parts that are then assembled into the computer or the radio station so to me the fundamental analogy between a human-built object and life is just completely off base okay what is remarkable about about life and ORS me and clearly all Steven ORS all of us is that you start off with a a single cell and then it builds from the bottom up not the top down assembling little components nucleotides and amino acids and assembles this remarkable structure one of the key differences there two key differences between intelligently designed human objects and life the first one is that um life actually Grows Where our objects do not life constantly rebuilds itself um human-made objects do not and the second thing that's incredible is that when you take a human-made object the pieces are not interchangeable so if I take the famous blind watch maker and you take a watch you can't move the objects around within it so if indeed we were built like Watchers I would have to agree that Evolution would be completely and utterly impossible but the amazing thing about life is that there are all these components that are interchangeable we're built internally utterly differently from the way that the external macroscopic physical world is built that is strings of nucleotides strings of amino acids and those strings are not like the strings of computer code or language I can leave out a word not or change a word intelligent designer for God the actual precise string in written language and code makes an incredible difference to the meaning of it you can't tweak anything much without ruining it but what's spectacular about proteins is that it needs to fold up so that the active site relatively few amino acids can contact say the DNA appropriately so that Gene can be switched on all that matters is that it folds with an inside and an outside that it doesn't bump into anything else that it's not supposed to and then it can get into the DNA so the specif spe it of information in a protein is hundreds of Auditors of magnitudes less than the degree of specificity for a computer code or for written text okay and and so let me let me finish and it comes down to primary commitment primary commitment the primary commitment of the um what's it called The Discovery Institute iddi I'm a little bit dyslexic of The Discovery Institute is to actually undo the moral Discord that they feel that scientific material materialism is introduced into our culture the vehicle by which they're going to achieve that goal is to try to get theistic belief established into the Sciences so I posit that they're not actually all that interested in the Cambrian explosion what they're interested in is inserting a theistic view of science so that they can address the issue that they're really concerned with and they should be it's important and that's sort of how do we live in a moral World in a socially Rich world okay well you've you've outlined a great deal there and I'm sure Stephen would like to respond so I'm I'm going to give you a chance um to to just address some of those issues where do you want to start Stephen um do you want to start with the the the issue that Charles raises initially let's go back yeah let's go back to the science first but I I'd actually first like to also uh uh correct the scathing thing I I appreciated Charles's review it was the fir it was the first uh critical review of the book that attempted to address the main argument of the book and the main argument of the book again is that the the necessary information both the genetic and and higher levels the epigenetic information necessary to build Cambrian animals is the result of an intelligent designer um I I think his characterization of the science though is a bit unfair uh the the 13th chapter of the book looks at not only the the necessary genes but it looks at the High high level control systems called developmental Gene regulatory networks that are involved in organizing the gene products and choreographing the expression of Gene products uh in a in very much in a circuit-like manner and this is this is where I actually in just I I think it's just wonderful to be able to have this conversation I've read I've read Charles's papers for years and he made a very provocative and interesting proposal in his review in science as a way of rebutting the in the central information argument of the book and his proposal was this that these developmental Gene regulatory networks uh could have been rewired by The evolutionary process in the way they acted on pre-existing genes to produce new body plans now there are there are number of things and I think that's the central he was you know I I really reject the idea that the the book has a 1980s VI I was going to say what do you make of that do you believe you are actually interacting with the most sence here AB absolutely not because u i I look at uh the role of Developmental body plan mutations I look at the role of these developmental Gene regulatory networks I look at the need for higher levels of epigenetic information in the book and I engaged the main post neod darwinian models that have been been been developed I I having said that I love the proposal he made because it's direct and it's specific and it's right on point so let let let me address that because I think it's very important in advancing a really constructive conversation here and if you can try and keep the science at a level where hopefully we can all more or less understand what he say do my best um so so in what Professor Marshall proposes is that there was this pre-adapted genome maybe as far back as the Precambrian that had these these genes that tell other genes what to do the regulatory genes and then he acknowledges that there was also in addition a need for Gene novel IES which is to say new genes that make the the the basic distinctive parts of the new animals now that that second acknowledgement is itself a concession that there was a lot a lot of new genetic information needed you can't get away from the need for genes and he he mentioned that most animals have around 10,000 we now know that about 10% of the of the genomes of individual animals are made up of what are called uh taxonomically restricted genes these are genes that are unique to those animals so there's a lot of new genetic information that has to arise even on his proposal but secondly notice that he presupposes a pre-adapted genome back in the presumably the Precambrian so the rest of that genetic information he hasn't explained the rest of that genetic information either he said he's he's just in a sense helped himself to it and presupposed its existence but beyond that the proposal that you could rewire these these higher level Control Systems these developmental Gene regulatory networks that control how the gene products uh differentiate themselves from each other and how cell types differentiate themselves from each other and and and tissues and organs up to building body plans I think it s-c conceals an informational requirement rewiring is a is a teleological metaphor Engineers re rewire things but letting that pass anytime you specify one material condition and and uh and exclude another you're imparting a bit of information rewiring would require a lot of informational inputs um in particular specifically in biology there are these sections next to genes uh called cyst regulatory elements that are involved in in these circuits they would need to be mutated in coordinate in a coordinated way to actually rewire a circuit now that's a very difficult thing to do and we know that because the actual data we have from the experiment and he he mentioned that I I directly addressed the work of Eric Davidson who has shown that the this the central subcircuits of these developmental Gene Rec regulatory networks cannot be perturbed without catastrophic effects to a developing organism and yet to change one animal body plan into another you would need to change these the these Central subcircuits of these these systems one final point on on just his proposal well his proposal was that maybe these developmental Gene regulatory networks could have been more malleable in the past but these developmental Gene regulatory networks are like circuits they are certainly control systems and what control systems do is that they specify outcomes in space and time and biological control systems are exquisitely constrained to specify outcomes in a way that actually gets you a unique animal body plant so the idea that you could have a control system that isn't that's Loosey Goosey that isn't specifying outcomes I think I think is incoherent any control system that doesn't specify outcomes isn't really a control system it's not I don't I I can't understand what a developmental Gene regulatory Network would have been doing if it was not constraining the timing and the expression of networks of genes so so I I think his his commitment to a materialistic explanation has led him to reject a really basic tenant of historical scientific reasoning which is that we should let our knowledge of cause and effect in the present determine our understanding of what happened in the past what we know from the present is you can't perturb these developmental Gene regulatory networks or else you shut down development and evolution terminates but but instead of respecting what we've learned from experimental data he proposes something that's incoherent on on on basic engineering theoretic terms and which is completely contrary to the the empirical data that we have okay well we'll get maybe to some of those other issues around um the general project of intelligent design and on whether there is this the you know I won't surprise you I have I have a different take on whether this is a god of G AR of course um but let let's keep then on this um rather more scientific aspect of the uh developmentally Gene regulatory networks and I'm learning lots of new te technical terms as we go along here um Charles okay you've heard um Steven's response there what do you say um have have you assumed too much are you trying to buy information when it's um not available to you and so on well as as you might imagine I think my answer is I don't think so so um um Steven's getting a little exasperated and I think that's partly a consequence of the fact that we we are coming at this from very different angles um so let me try to answer that question um one of the things that I think is difficult to comprehend is that from an evolutionary standpoint life unfolds and as it unfolds it starts to accrete complexity and sophistication and so the argument that I made in my I had science actually science didn't invite me to write the review I offered to write the review um and they offered me 800 words and only 800 words so I had to be just think as I could that um the argument I made and Eric Davidson made is that those gen some of those Gene regulatory networks were less encumbered at the beginning so let me just deal with let me see if I can attack this problem with something that Steven said which is he can't see how you can take a gene regulatory network from one body plan and change it into the gene regulatory network of another body plan because those networks now are committed to being a fly or a seurin or a jellyfish and I couldn't agree more he's precisely correct but now we get to the unfolding issue if we wind Back The evolutionary clock far enough we have just single cell organisms and then after a while we start to get small Colonial organisms and then after a while they get large enough that they start to look like the first animals and those first animals that are alive and well today are called sponges and what is remarkable about sponges is that they do not have tissues they do not have organs they have essentially the same set of genes as a dropil and a jellyfish and a human but they do not have tissues they do not have organs and so you have then the genes that have the capacity to make tissues and organs already sitting there and so what we think happened in the cambon explosion is we had different lineages independently acquiring different body plans once those body plans are in place then selection holds them in place and then future genes are added to them making that impossible so it's like having 10 completely different types of building and initially you start off with just the foundation on the on the on the ground and those foundations can look very very different I'm building very very different types of building but once I build the rest of the building on top of it whether it's a skyscraper an aircraft uh an airport terminal a school a house then I can't be messing with the foundation anymore after that so that's the sort of the analogy for the idea that those foundations are so one thing is that they've been later encumbered and the second one is that they all evolve from something that was not yet a complex body uh body plan so does that make sense yeah but but isn't I mean perhaps even you want to just comment on isn't this the point then that that you don't believe that can have happened in the short time scale we're talking about about with the camine explosion well I I think that uh sometimes the metaphorical language conceals really difficult um essentially bioengineering problems I completely agree with Charles that once you have the body plans that natural selection does hold them in place I think that's a perfectly legitimate explanation for what's often called stasis um but I I I watched one of his um uh lectures on online is a very good lecture and uh made me all the more excited to have the conversation but um it was about the this idea that life is has this capacity to unfold whereas watches or or or U humanly designed things don't but I was struck by the the number of cases in which uh Professor Marshall cited these various capacities for self-organization or unfolding but in each case he acknowledged that they had that capacity because of uh because of Prior genetic information sometimes he would refer to that information metaphorically as a few simple rules but but uh so I see that there are you know the that and in in my book I look specifically at the self-organizational theorists uh steuart Kaufman Stuart Newman they they propose something very much like this with uh something they call developmental patterning modules and and and they I think very expertly show that there are there is a kind of inherent capacity for organisms to develop complex and and forms of organization but the key thing is that always that complexity depends upon prior informational complexity prior information I I think that even even in the in the explanation that Charles has just given there he's still helping himself to the informational endowments that make those so I so I I if I can so I think that's a very good point and so what I'd like to not there's a subtle shift in grounds and I'm not trying to deny the point that Stephen just made is is that in his book in his book which I read um the emphasis was on the creation of the new genetic information and he placed that at the time of the cambon explosion and so in my science review what I did is I responded to that specific claim now what Stephen seems to be saying now that he is okay with the idea that in fact that genetic information may have had its Origins um elsewhere and so so fair enough so then you have to address the question where does that genetic information actually have to come from in the first instance and I think that's a very important and critical point and so it's less to do now with the cambon explosion per se it's less to do with Darwin's doubt and the sudden emergence of fossils at the base of the Cambrian it's more to do now with where does the genetic information and the epigenetic information come from that makes animals organisms plants and so I think that's a very very important point H I think that was a clarifying thing about your review too Charles because um I think it is certainly the case as you acknowledge that there is a need for Gene novelty at at the at the point of of the the Cambrian uh but it could well your proposal is also it could well be that the genetic requirements were parceled out in in in phases and um but either way I think you've got to account for that that information and the and where where I objected to your your earlier characterization is that I I I'm myself not a a gene Centrist I'm not a DNA Centrist I I I think that DNA is necessary but not sufficient the information in DNA is necessary but not sufficient to build animals I think you need these higher levels I I've absolutely affirm your uh interest in developmental Gene regulatory networks I've read your papers I love them and the and the epigenetic revolution I think is just an absolutely fascinating thing I think what what when we think about life we I think we have to now reckon on on a kind of hierarchically organized information uh information processing system and information expressing system that is it's just it's a fantastic thing to to begin to really think about in its full complexity so one response to that which is you bet you yeah right precisely and so and so I think you know as as a graduate student one of my um so half my PhD was molecular biology and half of it was paleontology and my biology mentors made the argument over and over again that the organizing principle for life is actually the cell and it's the cytoplasm that sort of controls the way in which the DNA is manipulated expressed packaged unpackaged replicated and of course then cells make organs and tissues and organisms so the central organizing principle of life is in fact at the level of the cell it isn't at the level of the DNA and that's just a common misunderstanding in popular biology because DNA is easy to understand so then coming to this issue of of of sort of genic Evolution where does the information come from so energy flows onto the Earth's surface at a unbelievably steady and continuous rate and the second law of Thermodynamics actually tells us that in energy flow situations that there's increased order and material Cycles so one way of expressing the second law of Thermodynamics is to say that driven systems like the surface of the Earth explore the improbable and then when you have the notion of chemical bonds where there are lots of interchangeable elements amino acids nucleotides carbon atoms that can string out making longer and longer and longer and longer strings so you start to explore the properties of those strings and some of them become functional proteins and a lot of them turn out to be nothing interesting so the fact that complexity emerges on a planet like ourselves is entirely understandable in terms of simple mechanical processes I say I'm a materialist but I would also say that to me matter is unbelievable it's capable of sentience it is capable of Consciousness it is capable of compassion morality so some of the characterizations that I've seen in my review from The Discovery Institute sort of paint me as a a materialist who thinks there's none of these things so that's a different debate so now let's get to this issue of Acts I don't how to pronounce it St what's his last name how do I pronounce let's allow St just to jump in quickly and and then we're going to go to a break in about two minutes so so yeah I think this this second law thing is really important uh there is a branch of thermodynamics called non-equilibrium thermodynamics that looks at what happens when you pump energy through a system I wrote about it extensively in my first book because it's it was a popular proposal for explaining the origin of the information necessary to build the first living cell in the origin of Life debate people like Prine are are important figures but I I think I think most origin of Life researchers have rejected that idea that you can get information from the um from the order through a system because all of the examples of energy flowing through a system producing order are producing symmetric redundant order simple patterns spiral wave currents convection currents that sort of thing the kind of order you get when you you know you you uh drain the bathtub and and you get a swirl um the kind of order we have in biology is not really it shouldn't be called order in thermodynamics terms it's it's it's called complexity or better term is specified complexity or functional information information in order there's a there's a conflation of two concepts there energy I used to have an illustration to get this across to students I had this big U uh uh two plastic Coke bottles that had been put together uh with a a little fastening device and inside was blue liquid with with uh nice little sparkles and if you put energy into that closed system by by moving it in a circular motion it would create a nice beautiful Vortex order but those little sparkles didn't spell anything you don't get in information order aren't the same thing so I don't I don't think that's a a legitimate explanation for the origin of information I go into that in a great deal of detail in signature and the cell we're going to have to um just take another quick Break um when we come back uh despite the fact that I'm sure there's much more we could speak of in the terms of the science and so on um I would like to go to some of the questions we've had in as well to both of you uh in equal measure um from our and Facebook users so uh we're listening uh to two experts in their field discuss the case for intelligent design and evolution and the Cambrian explosion it's all to do with Darwin's doubt the new book by Steven Meer a leading intelligent design theorist with The Discovery Institute Charles Marshall is his critic perhaps it's not a scathing review um and uh perhaps I shouldn't have called it that at the outset of the program but he's certainly written a review questioning um the way Steve has handled the science in terms of um this whole area and indeed question in the the motives of uh organizations like the uh Discovery Institute so come back in a moment's time as we continue this fascinating discussion on the science of the uh Camin explosion where did all those new animals come from was it the result of intelligent design or can we explain it in evolutionary terms uh we'll be back in a moment's time welcome back to the final part of unbelievable with me Justin Bry don't forget that straight after today's program between 4 and 5 here on Premier Radio you can hear my interview with Pete Greg the founder of the 247 prayer movement what an interesting guy what a lot of stories he has to tell not just about the good things but also some of the difficulties he's had struggles with prayer as well well worth tuning in for that between 4 and 5 if you're coming back at the same time next week for unbelievable a very exciting lineup of guests joining me for a program looking at the morality in history of the Old Testament this is in relation to the new Bible TV series that begins airing tonight night here in the UK on Channel 5 and that's going to be airing throughout December it's a 10p part uh miniseries and so we're going to be looking at that uh in the first of a couple of programs looking at this new Bible TV series starting next week I can't dulge exactly who's going to be on the program at this point it's still sort of slightly being worked out but some very exciting potential guests let me assure you you won't want to miss next week's program all right got that don't miss next week's program uh right now time to get into the final part of today's show uh just a reminder no time for feedback at the end of today's show giving it all over to this discussion that we've been having today but we are going to be hearing some of your questions that were put to my guests on today's program you're listening to unbelievable on Premier Christian radio so the third and final part of this discussion on intelligent design the new book by Steven C Meyer is is Darwin's doubt all about the explosion of animal life in the Cambrian era about 530 million years ago and whether it can be explained by naturalistic darwinian processes or whether we do actually need to turn to intelligent design and intelligent agency to explain all these new novel forms of life and all the genetics that would have gone into creating them and and bringing them about well we've already heard um in the first two parts uh a lengthy discussion between Charles Marshall who professor of biology at the University of California Barkley and has written a review of the book um Steven Meer is also on the line from Seattle and so we we're talking about this gentleman and I wanted to bring in some of the comments that have come in from listeners on Facebook and Twitter um for instance um it's put very simply by someone calls thems Godfree World on Twitter uh it says ID isn't a theory it's religious propaganda um and elsewhere um there are others who are asking about the um the nature of the religious Enterprise of intelligent design um talk to me about this Charles your your concern is that we are um dealing with something which ultimately is more about these overarching concerns about God and the place of God in science and and whether materialism is kind of coming to dominate our worldview uh are you personally anxious about religion what what kind of view do you take you're not a believer yourself obviously are you it it really depends on what you mean by a Believer so one of the great sprinters of all time Eric Liddell you know the sort of the Scottish Sprinter was um a missionary went off to China and at one point his his sister sort of says to him she's very concerned that the material world is is enticing him away from God and and Eric says to her God made me fast and when I run I feel God's pleasure and so for me I believe I mean there Steven's characterization of of me is correct that we can understand things like the cambon explosion the emergence of new morphologies through making Maps that's what science is about making maps that are explicitly sort of spatial and temporal we can sort of write down and understand what happened in space and time and I find for myself when I am in that pursuit of knowing in that way when I'm speaking to someone who is religious and I don't attend formal church I'm not formally religious if I was speaking to someone like Eric Liddell's sister I would say I feel God's pleasure now I'm not religious I don't attend church but I think that same sense of spirituality that sense of all of the amazing universe that we live on is exactly the same amongst many of our scientists as it is for I would imagine all Christians Hindus Etc so the notion of spirituality which is clearly a human capacity that I share with with with I suspect almost everybody else well let's actually allow because you just sort of spell it out earlier let's allow Steve to respond well and to your friendly call or your friendly Twitter mate as well um I I I think uh the idea that those of us who are working on intelligent design or motivated by this big cultural project and um attempt to impose theocracy or religious propaganda is re is really an unfair characterization um I I uh have been working on intelligent design The ideas around this back since the late 80s in grad school I started thinking about it when I was a PhD student in the philosophy of science at Cambridge prior to that I worked as a a geophysicist uh I direct a program of research at The Discovery Institute with uh biologists in many subdisciplines we have an independent lab that we've helped to start and um uh Discovery when we were invited to to join was a pre-existing political think tank that did have an ideological orientation it was concerned about the role of materialism in society um but uh people can have lots of different interests and motives I am fascinated by the science I always have been I one of the thing one of the reasons I'm excited about the the opportunity to have this conversation with Charles is that he and I are clearly have a passion for the same subject obviously we have different different point of view about it but um so and and I think it's really important just a basic logical Point uh you you can't critique an argument by pointing to the motive of the person arguing that's the the old genetic fallacy and lots of people have lots of different motives mixed religious anti-religious not no religious at all but one of one of the motives I know of the scientists that I work with is we want know what really happened to cause life to come into existence a basic scientific question let ask and could I just make one final point on this is there's a real important distinction between the implications of the theory of intelligent design and the foundation and what I show in the book is that intelligent design is based on scientific evidence and it's based on an application of the standard method of scientific reasoning that Darwin himself pioneered the historical scientific method so for both those reasons it should be regarded as a scientific theory that it may have larger uh implications for philosophical world VI metaphysical questions we don't deny but there is a clear distinction between the basis of the theory and the implications and and I'm not reasoning from a prior theological premise that's the whole point of intelligent design that's what I was on a different British radio program yesterday and someone finally through sent a question in does he believe in creation or not in plain English you know they were frustrated because I was clearly not basing the the argument on a scriptural Foundation let's let I mean coming back to you Charles at the end of your review VI you write this mayor's book ends with a heartwarming story of his normally Fearless son losing his orientation on the impressive scree slopes that cradle the Burgess Shale the iconic symbol of the Cambrian explosion and his need to look back to his father for security I was puzzled why the parable in a book ostensibly about philosophy and science then I realized that the book's subtext is to provide Solace to those who feel their faith undermined by secular society and by science in particular so you do feel there is a a bottom a sort of religious sort of motivation to what uh Steven is doing despite his protestations that it's it's really the science he's interested in um I think the answer to that is yes I do feel it's there um you know as as as Mark Twain said there's always three truths there's the truth you tell others there's the truth you tell yourself and then there's the real truth um and so so that was you know that I think that statement C I hold by that statement um and my concern is and this is my concern from a scientific standpoint is that we often run into situations in science where where we where the makers of maps maps are an object that we can then pass on to somebody else and when you make a map you often run into situations where you you've got a conundrum I don't understand how this operates or the way that operates and so my my apprehension with with the intelligent design movement is there sort of a leap in say well we've we we've got that sorted for you already it's an intelligent designer the you know some intelligent designer just did it and that doesn't provide any help at all in terms of making a map into the unknown that helps us actually understand the universe that we live in and in that sense because it actually hasn't POS contributed anything positive yet you know the English language consists of about a million words words half a million of those have come from the process of science as we make maps into the unknown intelligent design hasn't offered any new words yet there isn't anything established concrete that you can point to and so so you know in principle it might plausibly in some people's mind be viewed as a scientific theory but Pony up offer us something help contribute to the map of the way it operates in a tangible explicit way science is about making tangible explicit contributions do you want to come back on that Stephen yeah I I I welcome the challenge actually but let me first say about the the two truths I'll or three truths let me give two I I'm quite willing to say that I am uh motivated by the scientific question and I'm also interested in the Deep intersection of the the scientific questions with the philosophical questions uh if intelligent design has broadly theistic implications so be it I think that's fascinating there's nothing wrong with that uh the founders of modern science were motivated by theistic belief I you can't refute a theory by pointing to the motivations I would say minor mixed I have both I have both philosophical motivations and scientific motivations and Theological motivations there are staunch darwinists who want to say that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist I think you have one in your country Justin so um yes I think I I think we need to just set this the question of motives aside it's not gerine to the the truth of the proposition under debate as to the map question I completely agree one of the things we want from scientific theories is we want them to explain the facts that we already have we want them to have uh uh wide explanatory power and I've made the case for intelligent design based on its wide explanatory power we also like our scientific theories to have implications for other research questions we want them to have heuristic value we want them to make predictions and in the in the end of signature in the cell I laid out uh 10 predictions that are made by the theory of intelligent design and what one of the predictions that we were making back in the 90s that the the Neo darwinists in specifically were were not they were making the opposite prediction was that the non-functional regions of the genome which they quickly dubbed to be junk because they thought the non protein coating regions of the genome were the detrius of the The Leftovers of the random trilinear process of mutation and selection uh we predicted that those sections of the genome would be shown to be importantly functional we acknowledged that mutations are a real process but we didn't think that that if the genome had been designed intelligently that this signal should be dwarfed by the noise that the mutation the junk and it's been a spectacular finding of the last uh decade and especially the last fall with the publication of the encode project that that prediction has borne out and and we think that if you view Life as a design system rather than one that arose gradually through incremental variation Etc there are going to be some things that are where there's no difference in what you would what what you would expect to see but there will be other things that are different in other words you can make discriminating predictions on the basis of intelligent design and that's what the lab biologic is pursuing there are many scientists around the world who are working on intelligent design we have a growing Network and so I welcome Charles's Challenge and I think it's a it's a valid and legitimate Challenge and we that's that's the that's where that's where we intend to go okay well let quick response Charles then I do want to bring another question in yeah go ahead just saying I mean that's where they intend to go so we go there and then we'll talk again in terms of this issue of of whether it's a science not there yet check check out the journal bio complexity there's a lot of really interesting stuff that's uh already being done in I I have and it doesn't hold up in my scientific expence well I disagree with you that's just I know well look look here's another question for you again Steve um um what about um the issue of the actual designer I mean Jerry Adams asks could you explain what you think the nature of the intelligent designer is considering the only intelligence we know of is animal intelligence does this mean he believes the designer to be an animal of some description if not what does Steve imagine the source of the intelligence to be someone wanting to press you a bit further on the nature of the design that you keep talking about who is the designer and do you have evidence for that yeah I think we know of uh let's go back to the quote by Henry quer he said that uh information is habitually associate associated with conscious activity uh what we know as human agents is that we have we have Consciousness and we as human agents we also have rationality and we know a lot about the reality of what it is to have a mind because we have them we know that perhaps better than anything else we know uh indirectly by um even by science because all of our scientific knowledge is mediated through the senses much of it is inferentially based so we know we have Minds we also know know from our experience something of what Minds can do and one of the things that Minds can do is they can they can generate information they can generate code they can generate alphabetic sequences that that convey meaning and thoughts and and perform functions um and so when we find uh artifacts in the natural world in the in the world that we did not create that we know only arise from minds of the kind that we have we can infer that a mind W possessing those capacities that we know was responsible now that's what we can know scientifically um I am a theist I have other reasons for being a theist and I have to distinguish between what we can know scientifically through the inference to intelligent design from broader commitments that that a uh a typical judeo-christian would make about the about the nature of God and the nature of the design well let me allow Charles to respond on that and Charles a question that I think kind of ties into this and in terms of what um Steven has just said there comes from Joshua on on Facebook who says um for um Charles what Meer proposes is is it not just like the seti project I you know the search for extraterrestrial intelligence looking for evidence of a signal an intelligent signal um an intelligent mind out there well do you consider that project to be pseudo scientific as well if you're saying you should only be looking for material causes we intelligence isn't allowed as a factor in in the whole process I'll start with a c and then go back with it okay of course what's happening with the SE thing is they are looking for material evidence so if if you heard Shakespeare being sung beautifully from alpha centor you go good Heavens there's something that is capable of singing Shakespeare from alpha centor wow there it is I recognize it because it's Shakespeare I don't know Shakespeare got evolved twice I have no idea but there it is so I don't think there's any any bearing on on on City whatsoever so that distracted me though from the main point well I I guess isn't the question about setti more that well we we we allow ourselves in in that particular area of science to look for intelligence I know what what it is so so the point is if if we heard the SE signal then we would presume that there was a physical entity somewhere that was intelligent that also had a mind that could produce the signal so this is where the analogy breaks down miserably with the intelligent design thing is yes mind is capable of these things but we build everything in a temporal spatial framework everything so yes Consciousness and mind builds these things but we build it and so the question is how can it be built where are the factories what is the signature and so of course it goes back to the question that that that your your your listener rang in which is what does that mean that the intelligent designer is an animal so the question is at some point they has to be a corporeal body in order to do the designing if we're going to do this in a scientific way that operates in space and time and intelligent design hasn't been able to point to any of those things whatsoever it's it's just the a disembodied notion of Consciousness and mind and the whole point of the darwinian Revolution the whole point of it which made Darwin so hesitant was the fact that natural processes were capable of producing things that looked like superficially things that humans make and as I've argued it's only superficial and when you get into the details my word they're fundamentally different and just to to follow up on that then Matt Crump asks this and I think it also ties in um to Charles at what point would you accept the slightest possibility of intelligence acting to produce what we recognize as DNA the software blueprint you know are you fundamentally closed down to any possible kind of evidence that could suggest something Beyond purely material processes that's a beautiful question that's a beautiful question and so I want to distinguish between a little bit of Sly of Science and I want to use music as an example when you think of a musician a musician is someone who plays music they take the sheet music and they play it and then there are the composers who are creating the music and they do it in a great variety of different ways but in the end you're judged by the sheet music that you produce that you can then as an object pass on to the orchestra to play so we need to distinguish very carefully and Stephen has done this as well between the sheet music the scientific understanding the Legacy which we hope to leave to Future generations and the process by which we create that object that objective knowledge and so for me as an individual scientist one of the reasons why I read Steven's book is well let's see if he can make some arguments that given my scientific understanding of genes the cam explosion the fossil record might lead me to think good Heavens maybe there is a grain of Truth in there let's see let's explore it and so I'm fundamentally open to all sorts of new ideas but you just don't believe you've you've seen the evidence for that well Stephen um we are running short on time now so I'd like to you know start to address this area with you intelligence um what what do you first of all respond to Charles there a couple things from that I I I think that what we know from experience is that Minds generate information whether the mind that generated the DNA was embodied or not embodied is not something that we can necessarily tell uh a disembodied mind is something if we think of God as spirit it's certainly a plausible concept but I I'm not trying to argue for God's existence I'm arguing for a mind the attributes that that provide the causal the causal attributes the capacities that Minds have have it's not my fingernails or my my uh my my physical substrate there's something about a mind that the reason that we have the capacity to imagine to Envision uh things in the future that aren't yet imagination all these endowments that we have as minds are are things that are very difficult to attribute to a material substrate but maybe the mind was embodied maybe it wasn't what from the science we can tell is that we are seeing evidence namely information Rich structures that we know from experience only arise from intelligence if you go into the British Museum and you look at the Rosetta Stone uh you it would someone you and said Gee isn't it wonderful what wind and erosion produced we would think that person daed but what and and this is where I think your your your questioner question is so apt we do recognize the the the attributes of intelligence in many other fields of discourse in archaeology the SEI research program is a good example information is taken to be a distinctive Hallmark of intelligent activity in all these other Realms of experience but in biology we say no we can't go there and I think this is where I think Charles is actually revealing that he has some deeper metaphysical commitments of his own uh the the the move he made in the review where he said Gee these developmental Gene regulatory networks uh yes they they they can't be perturbed but they must have been perturbed in the past is a way it what what he ends up doing there is he ends up jettison the basic principles of the historical scientific U method where we're enjoyed to look for causes now in operation since we don't have causes in operation that can produce the kind of complexity that we need to build a body plan the informational complexity the circuitry Etc we say well maybe things could have been different in the past and I think what that be belies is a prior commitment to at least methodological materialism and what we're doing in the ID movement is saying hey let's not limit ourselves to what uh to just materialistic explanations if the if we have the right kind of evidence the kind of evidence that we know from experience always indicates the prior activity of a mind let's allow our ourselves to consider that as a possibility in part because it provides a better explanation but it also may lead to real advantages for science because if life is a design system it's going to look different it will lead to different experiments um you you you you claim there's a contention there from Steven that you're saying it could have been different in the past in fact I sometimes hear that sort of criticism uh leveled at Young Earth creationists who who use an argument well we don't know what it was like you know back into you know further back when perhaps the uh Decay rates would different and and all the rest of it um same kind of criticism being directed at you there uh Charles what what do you respond um are you jettisoning as he says these these rules of um modern rules of Science and so on yeah well I'm going to go back he's got things historically wrong which is a little unfortunate and and and he also as a non-scientist misunderstands the process we're the composers the process by which we compose is is difficult to understand because each of us does do it individually differently with different motives different backgrounds theistic non-theistic Christian non-Christian we don't really have rules which we have to adhere to like a lawyer to establish reliable Maps into the past or into the future or describing the present James Hutton is the one who established in the geological Sciences of which Darwin was trained the principle of uniformitarianism that says that the processes that operate in today are key to understanding the processes that operated in the past and so as I've indicated life is an unfolding if you take a chick egg it starts off as a single cell and finishes up this remarkable object a chicken so it unfolds and so the things that you can perturb early are different the things that you can perturb late so there isn't a single scientist that I'm aware of that doesn't think that as life unfolds from things where there are no multicellular organisms that the rules of direct interaction and interaction are going to be different so I've already dealt with this earlier in this conversation it is completely bogus to say that if I try to manipulate the gene regulatory Network that's the heart of a body plan of existing film that that has any bearing on what Gene regulatory networks were capable of doing before there were established body plans end the story so it's very very frustrating so we have a clash of cross Crossing in the in the dark where I have tempal that unfold okay quick quick word from Steven and we'll start to wrap things up what I'm saying is that the the the primary epistemological commitment of the historical scientist is to allow what we know best to tell us about what we're going to infer about the past nature tells us that you can't perturb the central control elements of dgrn but since we know those systems but but you're saying since we know those systems you Charles are saying since they have to be malleable to build new body plans then they must have been malleable in the past even though the experimental evidence says the opposite I'm seeing this in a lot of evolutionary writing where there's a where and people even saying I'm an evolutionary non- uniformitarian jettisoning jettisoning what we know best in order to preserve a speculative hypothesis about the past and I think that's that's got things backwards and I think that that's actually a tacit admission especially in the case with the dgrn that nature and specifically biological systems aren't behaving as they would need to behave for macroevolutionary Theory to be plausible well we are going to have to start to draw it to a close Charles do you want to just in in a very quick nutshell um draw up how you how you feel at the end of this this uh wide ranging debate today well in some respects I think I think we are in fact where we were at the beginning which is which is Steven has written his book and I've written my review it's it's not a book link because I didn't write a book link review that we have different um starting points from both what constitutes explanation what the social nature of science is and mean I disagree complete with with Stephen with uh his characterization of my argument um and so I just the frustration I have is that rather than pursuing the leads he's satisfied to stop and so I'm going to finish up with a last little example in his his criticism of my review and in his book when he talks about the origin of new genes he talks about Lysol oxidase and points out that that's a very important Gene that arthropods that is flies and trilobites and things need to make their skeletons and so it looks like a brand new Gene comes into the existence of that film and so a scientist would have said hm that seems to be a problem let's explore that a little bit further and see what happens and so I did that and and what I found is that it's four copies in humans all animals good Heavens it's also in yeast fungi mushrooms so it turns out that this key Gene that seems so important to Steven in the establishment of an arthropod body plan turns out to be ex pre-exist Animals by a long shot it's been simply co-opted to stiffen the collagens to lead to the Kiton and so then you get an amazing Insight wow I see a lot of things that make us different are actually just different tweakings of that are common for all the different organisms isn't that incredible the commonality of all the diverse life we have that's an Insight a a valuable Insight where Steven just stops and says oh there you go there's too much information it's too hard to evolve aha I see a signature of an intelligent designer but I can't tell you anything about it where he operates how he operates what the rules are all I can do is have a weak analogy to things that humans make without offering us anything in terms of what's actually happening in the distance part before they were Homo sapiens we've had a very spirited uh engagement thank you very much for your part in it Charles I do appreciate you coming on and um uh all the best as you continue uh teaching students and um I'm sure supervising phds and all sorts of things over at Barkley but um thank you for being on the program today thank you uh Stephen um again very quick uh summation uh from you as we as we conclude the program you bet um I think Charles took my use of that protein out context I was simply showing that uh that the organisms have Parts lists and the parts lists have to be built by proteins and I acknowledge that if he wants to push the problem of the origin of information back into the Precambrian he's free to do that but that is not solving the problem that's just begging the question notice the question that he didn't answer which is what is the origin of the genetic information necessary to build that protein some proteins he acknowledges arise with the Cambrian animals that's why he talks about the need for genetic Novelties some he says must have pre-existed them in this pre-adapted pre-cambrian Gene set and that I think is the fundamental scientific issue what is the origin of genetic information he doesn't really answer that question he just presupposes but doesn't explain two sources of information and the the the information that arises in the Cambrian and in the pre-cambrian I want to say that that that information problem which is unsolved within a materialistic framework has ready and obvious solution because of what we know from experience about what it takes to generate information that intelligent design all right thank you very much for being with me on the program today uh don't forget if you want to find out more about the book well of course you can go online and and order it um and I'm of course going to link as well to Charles's review and and other things as well from the the website of the program today in the meantime thank you very much both to Charles Marshall and to Steven Mayer for being my guest on this program today discussing intelligent design you're unbelievable if you want to check out the show Show online as ever go to the website premier.org do.uk unbelievable you can find this show download many par shows subscribe to the podcast and much more and don't forget of course you can uh also interact via our Facebook and Twitter accounts @ unbelievable JB to follow me on Facebook facebook.com/ unbelievable JB if you want to like the page and get regular updates thanks for listening to today's program look forward to hearing your responses as well you can email unbelievable at premier.org coming up next week on the show an exciting lineup of guests discussing the morality and history of the Old Testament it's all because of the new Bible TV series which begins airing tonight on Channel 5 here in the UK and throughout the rest of December well I can't tell you at this point exactly he'll be with me but I can assure you it's looking like an absolutely stoning show so I hope you'll come back for that same time next week between 2:30 and 4 and online at premier.org k/ unbelievable if you're staying here on Premier Christian radio I'm going to be talking to Pete Greg the founder of the 24/7 prayer [Music] movement

Channel: Stephen Meyer

Views: 76,937

Keywords: Stephen Meyer, Stephen C. Meyer, Darwin's Doubt, Signature in the Cell, intelligent design, science, biology, evolution, modern evolution, Charles Darwin, natural selection, digital information, Discovery Institute, origin of life, Cambrian explosion

Id: 6yOCpb0wBPw

Length: 87min 10sec (5230 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 07 2014