Is Intelligent Design Defensible? Michael Behe Says YES!

is intelligent design defensible uh what about the argument from the mousetrap and irreducible complexity can this still be defended today well these are very important questions that relate on so many different world views and we have a guest with us today if you follow these discussions you will recognize him dr michael b he has written a number of books in this regard and specifically his book now it's been 25 years darwin's black box really helped kick off some of the discussion about intelligent design so dr b he we really appreciate you coming on and be willing to answer some of the questions related to your book in the intelligent design movement thanks sean it's my pleasure to be with you looking forward to it so you have a new book that's just come out called a mouse trap for darwin tell us what makes this book unique and what you're trying to accomplish in it yeah it's it's a collection of essays i've written over the past 25 years since darwin's black box first came out and as you know there have been a lot of objections and counter arguments and i have addressed all of those in different venues at different times and i thought it would be good to collect them all into one book so that it's more easy for critics to read it and see that i've actually addressed all of their objections already and it'll be good for supporters of id to read as well in case they have been if they've been wondering about some points as well we're going to get into some of the nuts and bolts of it but this is a 500 plus page book and i'm not a scientist so i would say to readers that this is not a beginning book it's intermediate it's very readable but it's also going to challenge you to understand some of these issues so whether you believe in intelligent or rejected if you want to be caught up on where the discussions are i think your new book dr b he does a great job of getting us there now let me let me ask you a kind of controversial statement that showed up in uh in the book and you said this you said the eclipse of darwinism in the scientific community is well advanced explain what you mean by that and if you still hold that view even though you said it some time ago yeah yeah i certainly do still stand by it it's it's acknowledged by many people uh i would estimate anyway about a third of even evolutionary biologists uh don't think that darwin's theory is a whole story uh that there are groups of people pushing other ideas not intelligent design but other ideas about how life might have arisen and and developed for example some people point to something called niche theory about how organisms interact with their environment and others talk about epigenetics that is there are machines in the cell which modify dna in real time and maybe that has something to do with evolution other folks say well the machinery that modern molecular biology uses to do experiments on dna much of it is actually derived from the cell itself so if we can do experiments on dna maybe the cell itself can in a non-darwinian fashion so uh there is there's a website it's called i think it's called the third way uh which is put up by very prominent biologists and philosophers and other academics arguing explicitly that darwin's theory has been overblown and that we have to look elsewhere for ideas so the the newspaper magazine assertions that oh we've got it all settled that's incorrect well that so what do you think it's gonna take for the larger scientific community to recognize that darwinism is done if you say a third of it are questioning what would it take for them to go you know what we're past this well that's a great question uh because it's more a question of sociology rather than of science because as i said most people already say we're or a lot of people already say darwinism is on its way out and i i think uh probably it'll take a couple of big name biologists to respected by the whole community who aren't uh who aren't known to be religious or or such uh to come out and say you know darwinian processes just can't account for this and neither can any other process so far uh advanced and i think that that will have the big impact when when somebody inside the community uh says it's it's time to move on then then i think other people will join in that that's really interesting to to hear and that makes sense we're here for those of you who's joining us we're here with uh dr michael beahy author of famously darwin's black box has a recent book out called a mouse trap for darwin and we're going to be debating or not really debating we're gonna i'm gonna be posing some of the challenges to him and hear him respond to some of his work but first i have a question for you that is more theological than it is um scientific but in this text i'm just curious where you would go this you said quote i agree that the darwinian mechanism rightly understood is theoretically compatible with christian theology can you unpack what you mean by that uh i guess uh first of all i'm not a theologian of course so i'm kind of wigging it i'm like the guy on the next bar stool giving you my impression about this but if i unders but with the darwinian mechanism says that uh with random changes and natural selection you could potentially build new things well you could imagine god uh setting up the universe so that functional systems are so close together that a mutation here or mutation there would snap things together and give functional new functional new functional uh systems and you can also imagine that he set up the universe in the knowledge that it would proceed to give and especially me uh and uh so if you consider that to be darwinism which you know i'm sure you could get some arguments about then i think that would be okay so that's what i would think of as darwinism rightly understood but i don't think the scientific evidence uh is compatible with that that makes sense for those of you watching i'm not sure why the video is a little bit out of sync with the audio but you're coming through clear uh so we're able to track that's no problem maybe it'll it'll catch up with the internet wave here in in a moment now i'm curious we're 25 years out from the release of darwin's black box what surprises you most looking back about a quarter century from the release of that book well uh it it surprises me initially when i wrote the book i thought that my arguments would be slapped down within a couple months because some uh folks in the field would say didn't you see that paper that would that was published you know three years ago in this journal which shows how uh darwin's mechanism can do this or that or the other thing and astoundingly nobody did that and um the even prominent scientists you know very world famous scientists said things like oh you're not allowed to say things like that or maybe maybe in 25 years we'll have the answer but it turns out we don't have the answer in 25 years and so i guess the thing that surprises me most is that nobody seems to care i mean i in my in my book darwin devolves which was published a year or so ago i had a an afterword in which i looked at the examples that i discussed in darwin's black box and showed that they still nobody's even tried to explain how a darwinian process could produce the blood clotting system or the flagellum and so on uh and yet people go along their merry way scientists do and don't pay it any attention every now and again the most you hear about intelligent design is some denunciation in the in the science literature but nobody nobody says you know this might be you know this might be true one of the differences within the intelligent design community is whether or not you believe in common descent i'd be curious a two-part question for you make a distinction between common descent itself and the mechanism of what drives evolutionary theory and then second i'd love to just hear why is it that you believe in common descent as a whole what convinces you that there is common descent okay uh okay first the distinction between common descent and the mechanism turns out that charles darwin was not the first person to propose evolution in the sense that organisms today are descended from organisms in the past the number of naturalists had proposed that before him but they all had teleological or guided forces to account for the changes in life one one that many people might have heard of is uh um uh what's his name the uh there was a frenchman who proposed that say giraffes necks would get longer by them striving to uh eat the leaves higher on trees gotcha and uh so it was kind of teleological it was nature exerting itself or some uh inborn guidance darwin's claim to fame is not evolution per se it's that he proposed what he thought was a uh completely a teleological completely mechanistic unguided unintelligent uh process to you know move life along and that was of course random variation or random mutation as we say these days and natural selection uh and so the second part of your question is why do i think common descent is true um yes i'm i'm close to one of the few in the intelligent and assigned movement who do think that and i guess one what one of the big reasons is that i don't care much about common descent uh just because as i said you know the mechanism is is different from the idea of common descent and if you think about it common descent is kind of a trivial statement it just says that well there were ancestors in the past and then they gave rise to descendants that are around us now and maybe very different descendants but it doesn't say where the ancestors came from and it doesn't by itself say how in the world such fantastic uh transitions could happen so in a sense it's it's pretty trivial also the the idea of natural selection darwin's own idea uh i also think that's trivial you know it's it says that organisms that are more fit to their environment will tend to survive well okay great you know who's gonna who's going to gain say that in my view 99.99 of the philosophical maybe even theological and certainly scientific uh importance in darwin's theory is in the idea of random variation or random mutation that is utterly random changes can be fed into natural selection and produce the exquisitely designed exquisitely made organs that we see in modern organisms and if you constantly it's been my experience that if you that darwinists will be happy to talk with you all day about common descent and they run like vampires from you know garlic if you ask them how a random process could produce these wonderfully coherent uh elegant systems we find in life and especially in the cell so i keep my i keep my argument focused on just that and i am happy to grant common descent for the purposes of discussion uh in my view it doesn't really matter and again i'm not much of a theologian so i don't i don't have any strong opinion about about that that that's fair that's really helpful i appreciate you you clarifying where you're coming from on that by the way those of us uh just join us we're here with uh mike obihi uh you probably know who he is from his writings on intelligent design and we're talking about his latest recent book a mousetrap for darwin and we will be taking some questions if they relate to the larger topic uh ask your questions and we will pose them for him would be a lot of fun all right here's one one statement that you make in the book you say viability related to the viability of non-darwinian mechanisms you say while each new idea usually can explain at least one area of biology reasonably well none seem any better than darwinism itself in accounting for the whole can you explain what some of these other mechanisms are to account for this change and why you think maybe just one or two prominent ones and why they lack to explain the complexity and diversity of life in particular these complex machines sure one neat uh mechanism is something called niche construction spelled n-i-c-h-e so some little corner uh a niche of the biological world and the idea there is that darwinian theory says that organisms are shaped by adapting to their environment but in niche construction they point out that for many organisms the organisms actively shape their environment they're not passive pawns in uh under the control of the environment and a swell uh example of that um is uh is the african termites there are termites in africa that can build termite mounds 30 feet high really crazy huge and and they construct them to be ventilated they have holes to let air in and out to regulate the temperature the humidity and they raised the next generation of termites not in the environment at large but specifically in the termite mound that they themselves created so essentially they are adapting the environment to themselves rather than themselves to the environment uh and you know that's that's a wonderful point i think it's great but it kind of stops there that they don't go on to explain where termites came from in the first place uh they don't say how this would cause any say molecular events to change uh and so it's an interesting idea and it it does present a problem for darwinism but it does not explain how purposeful systems like the termites themselves could have come about another example is something called natural genetic engineering and that has been proposed mostly by a man named james shapiro at the university of chicago and he writes that well you know cell biologists and biochemists when they do experiments on systems like cells and so on oftentimes manipulate the dna of these organisms clone things and and other stuff by using tools enzymes from the cell itself enzymes proteins tools that can cut dna at specific places that can take it and insert it into other places and you can add pieces of dna here and there to direct it to do some things certainly not the cool things that the cell does but many interesting things and he says well if we can use the tools of the cell to do these experiments why can't the cell itself use those same tools to to help evolution along and that's an interesting idea too it's very nice but uh it's pretty much intelligent design he says that the cell is purposely putting things various places and because it wants to evolve because it has a plan and so he's kind of ascribing intelligence to the cell itself and even worse in in my view is that he doesn't say where these tools came from in the first place where did the enzymes come from that can cut the dna and clone it and replicate it and so on so it's kind of a chicken and egg situation because it needs the tools to make changes and uh and if you think that darwin's mechanism is sufficient to come up with those tools in the first place which he doesn't dispute then why can't it be clever enough to do everything else too so so all of these and these are just two there's a handful of other examples too but all of them suffer from the same problem that darwin's theory does and that is that in order to get complex functional systems you got to put this piece here and that piece there and another piece here you have to arrange them purposefully and nobody has been able to get purpose from an unintelligent uh source so i think uh intelligent design theory is is uh still the the top of the uh the top of the heap as far as explanations for for life so if i were to sum up what you're saying a number of scientists are questioning the darwinian mechanism natural selection acting on randy mutation but have put forward a number of additional or different mechanisms to describe the process but in your assessment they still fail to account for the irreducible complexity nature of machines we see in biology and they fare no better than darwin's mechanism does is that a fair summary yeah it is and i should add that uh we've got evidence that they don't do even as well as darwin's mechanism uh in my second book the edge of evolution i discussed the evolution of a resistance of malaria cells to a chloroquine an anti-malarial drug and i point out that in the in its journey before it evolved this resistance uh there were 10 to the 20th you know an astronomical number of malarial cells in the world that could have evolved or could have mutated or something to produce some really snazzy new molecular machinery and it turns out that when the changes conferring chloroquine resistance onto the malaria word discovered they were just two crummy little changes in a pre-existing protein in the malarial cell so that i think was just straight pretty much uh micro darwinian micro evolution you didn't see any niche construction you didn't see any uh natural genetic engineering you didn't see the involvement of any epigenetics or anything else so i think i myself personally i think darwin's mechanism explains more than the ones that are trying to replace it you wrote this in the book you said the most profound insight which is pretty powerful to say the most profound insight of modern science is that life is based literally on machines made of molecules so number one you say it's the most profound insight number two literally machines made of molecules i'm not a scientist but one of the pushbacks that i've seen is that that's not really a fair analogy that we're reading something into nature that's not there that they're not actually machines what's your take on that well uh they're wrong uh and uh they if you've ever looked at a a picture of a flagellum a bacterial flagellum which many people have who follow these issues uh you can see it's it's an outboard motor it looks like an act or motor it has a part that spins around that pushes against uh pushes against water and a mother rotates it and so on and if you look in the dictionary the definition of a machine is something that has an assembly of parts that uses energy to do some specific tasks and that's that matches the flagellum and and lots and lots of other things in the cell to a t what's more uh i would say to the folks who say that's not a machine i would say you know well are you a vitalist you know what is this mysterious you know substance that you think you know these are made of the uh flagellum and other molecular machines are made out of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen and nitrogen and phosphorus the same carbon and oxygen that we see everywhere else there's nothing spooky about it their only difference between inorganic elements and what they how they are in the machine is the way they're assembled just like say for a lawn mower a lawnmower is just composed of steel and plastic and maybe some electrical parts if you had a lump of steel and a glob of plastic on your lawn and you had a can of gasoline next to it that's not going to cut your grass you have to have it arranged correctly and everybody admits that's a machine now if you made that out of proteins it would still be a machine so i disagree uh strongly with those folks who who don't think of that biological machines as real machines one of the objections i hear frequently is that intelligent design is not falsifiable and i read one in the book you're responding to um kind of a critic who said if we disproved one example of design then they would just move to another example of design and it got me thinking and correct me if i'm if i'm wrong on this that for intelligent design to be true all there has to be is one thing that's designed but on the opposite side everything has to be explained by natural processes so it does seem to me if we found a way to explain the flagellum through natural processes it wouldn't defeat intelligent design and maybe we could move on to another example endlessly um what would be your response to that is that fair uh yeah it is but with some some caveats here yeah i think c.s lewis was uh or maybe it was uh gk chesterton who said that uh science you know this uh uh somebody who follows scientism can't admit one little miracle into their worldview but a christian can happily say that much of nature proceeds according to law and that's the case i would say to the person who said that well if you nonetheless there's lots of machines around in biology so if we through great labor show that this machine could be produced by darwinian processes you just go to another so you know you're not playing fair and i would say well okay maybe we can talk about this you know when you show that any molecular machine could be produced by darwinian processes so far and especially as i talk about in my book from last year darwin devolves darwinian processes proceed mostly by degrading old machinery so that doesn't work as well or it doesn't work at all from what it did it does not create new stuff and this is pretty constant over lots and lots of different situations i would also say that if a darwinist showed that a complex machine of a certain degree of complexity could be achieved by a random mutation natural selection then i myself would assume that anything of that degree of complexity or lesser complexity could be could be also done by darwinian mechanism not necessarily greater complexity but lesser if if somebody showed that the flagellum uh could be produced by uh darwinian processes i would be i would look pretty silly saying that well hemoglobin can't because it you know gotcha so uh but nonetheless uh darwinists haven't been able to show that even something called a disulfide bond could be produced by their uh by their mechanism and a disulfide bond as i explained in this uh recent book darwin devolves it's kind of like a hook and eye latch you know if you take a hook and you put it into an eye and you can kind of latch a door shut that's kind of a basic a basic example of something that needs cooperation one of those two elements won't do it you need both the hook and the eye to come together the hook by itself doesn't do it the eye by itself doesn't do it and it's been calculated that it would take an extremely long time just by random processes to come up with such an element and that so that's it's kind of like darwin is saying you know kind of puffing up and and saying ha ha my theory can explain a an outboard motor that's no problem you say okay well tell me how that hook and eye latch on the shed where the motor is stored tell me how that came about he says well you know you'll have to come back and and talk to me later we're still working on that so if they can't explain kind of the flip side of my contention that i would accept anything simpler if somebody showed that something more complex could be made by darwinian processes the flip side is if darwinists have trouble explaining something simple then we can take it as given that they don't know how anything more complex than that could have arisen and they ha they have problems explaining even the simplest degree of cooperativity uh in life that that's that's really helpful i i appreciate that clarification let me uh let me ask a question i've i've followed you for 25 years read your book you know i wrote the book with uh dempsey a few years ago i understand intelligent zion we have a chapter on an irreducible complexity and i've noticed that you've gotten criticism from say young earth creationists old earth creationists atheists agnostics pretty much everywhere as far as i can tell and in some ways that's a compliment that a lot of people have taken your ideas seriously and even alvin planiga one of the greatest philosophers of our day who i have just unbelievable respect and appreciation for offered a criticism of some of your ideas in his book where the conflict really lies would you be willing to state kind of what his criticism was and then what your response was to that yes uh uh dr planinga whom i also admire very very much i've talked to a number of times and so on he uh was commenting on a point made by another philosopher of science whose name escapes me uh and the other uh oh i'm sorry it's elliot sober elliot silver a well-known philosopher for science at the university of wisconsin he said well you know the the thing about saying something was intelligently designed is that if you look at a protein you don't know whether or not a designer would want to make that protein so you have to have some indication to say that well a designer not only is needed but would want to make that protein and since that we have no good idea what even what god would or would not want to do we can't argue for that and uh alvin planiga pretty much uh agreed with that he says yeah that's that's right you would have to know whether or not uh somebody wanted to make that and i disagree i mean they are great philosophers but i myself have never been able to see the force of that argument so let's switch analogies and say suppose you're on a hike and you turn a corner and you look up and you see mount rushmore okay anybody who looked at it would say holy moly look that's designed and along the other direction comes eliot sober and he says how do you know someone would want to make mount rushmore and so unless you know someone would want to make mount rushmore you cannot uh you cannot say that it was in fact designed and i think i think that's incorrect uh you you come to a conclusion of design based on the arrangement of a system itself by what i've noted is the purposeful arrangement of parts when you see parts arranged this is put here and that's put there and that's put there because when they're there they can interact and and do something some function that is the criterion for design and i think elliot sober and alvin flanago too were in the back of their minds thinking how do we know god would want to do this and we and they say well you know we don't know if he would like to make proteins or not but the the scientific design argument is not a philosophical argument for the existence of god it's an argument that this had to have been designed that biol biomolecular machines had to have been designed again it's like landing on an alien planet and finding machinery you know a cool laser or something that does something wonderful and you don't see anybody around there and uh so what do you say gee it's a natural phenomenon no you'd say well i guess some intelligent agent was here and made this and he's not around anymore we can't identify him additionally i think that the eliot sober argument doesn't even come to grips with the idea of design suppose that suppose that you go around the corner and see mount rushmore and you say who would want or make that who would want to make mount rushmore and here comes some other guy around you know and he says ah i did it i made mount rushmore i'm not going to tell you how i did it or anything like that but i did it how would you know he was telling the truth uh how how do you know that um he in fact did so especially if you don't uh um especially if you didn't see him doing so how would you know that he uh was responsible for it and and how would you decide i've got all sorts of thoughts going together sure sure here's a here's a key question to ask yourself okay we look at mount rushmore and we look at say mount everest and most people think mount everest is pretty cool but they don't ask who designed it they look at mount rushmore they immediately say who designed that why do they even ask that question what is it about mount rushmore that even makes them suspect that it might be designed in the same way with a protein or the bacterial flagellum why do we even think that it looks designed and it's because we see these purposeful arrangements of parts so i think the identity of the designer and its motives for making it and stuff they might be interesting but they are down the line from the conclusion or at least the strong suspicion that some thing was purposely designed so okay so so so down the line means whether we know why or who designs something we can recognize design because of the meaningful arrangements of parts then it begs the question who or what is the designer so that's true for mount everest or not mount rushmore but that also would be true if we found some design that was completely different on mars we don't know who we don't know why but the arrangement of parts first could be designed then it follows who did it so this objection has it backwards that's right and you may not be able ever to find out for example the statues on east on easter island when when european explorers first laid eyes on them they immediately knew they were designed but it took centuries to figure out who or how or when or why they were designed and so those are separate questions and the nice thing about concluding that something was designed is that you come to that conclusion based simply on what you're looking at right now what's the evidence right before your eyes you don't have to dig into history or uh uh interview people to see uh what they think uh it's the uh it's the system right in in front of you there's some great uh discussion going on in the kind of the chat room here and one question was do you believe god created the flagellum out of thin air and i think the implication is if you haven't explained how god did it then you can't rightly conclude that god actually is the one who designed it so what would your response to that be i i would disagree i i think that uh first of all i i don't know how god designed the flagellum and for myself i stay away from the word create because create especially if you're thinking about it as creationx nihilo that's a religious uh term a theological term and i'm a biochemist i'm trying to stick to just the physical evidence there's no there's no um reason to think that god or a designer could not have made a flagellum over time you know preparing this part here and preparing that part here and uh guiding this over that way and guiding this the other way uh so there's no no reason that uh that it couldn't have been a long time even building on previously existing uh the question is how did this coherent uh machine get assembled in the correct way so that it can have this this uh function uh if you if you here here's another silly analogy but uh if you uh went down the street and you opened a garage door because you saw that it wasn't unlocked and maybe you wanted to see what was inside you opened it and there was a uh a nice car maybe a uh a tesla or something and uh little did you know is that an hour ago god created that car x nihilo okay you would be able to tell from looking at the car that it was designed you know right away it was designed but you don't know how it was designed it could have been made in a factory could have been made by ordinary auto workers and that's the way most cars get made but this one just happened to be created nonetheless you don't know that but you do know it was intended you do know it was designed so the flagellum for all i know it could have been created in a puff of smoke but there's no it's not necessary to conclude design it might have been prepared for and developed over a long period of time but that would require guidance okay one of the uh works that you reference quite a bit is richard lenski and uh just one of the eminent scientists of our day and the work that he has done uh with bacteria can you explain the work that he has done why it's significant and what follows from this work for naturalistic processes to produce you know sophisticated machines sure yeah richard lenski is a professor of microbiology at michigan state university and way back 30 years ago he undertook an experiment that has developed over time in 1990 he decided to take a flask of nutrient broth say essentially some water with sugar and some other chemicals in it and he added some bacteria a bacteria called e coli which is used commonly in laboratories and he let the bacteria grow overnight in the flask and there was enough sugar in it for the bacterium to go through about seven generations because they're so small they reproduce quickly and there were about a hundred million bacteria in the culture again because they're so small and he came in the next morning and he took a small amount of that culture that had just gone overnight and he put it in another flask with pure or fresh culture and let it grow overnight then another seven generations then he came in the next day and did the same thing and again and again and again for decades for the past 30 years wow it turns out that yeah he's dedicated yeah it it turns out that that the bacteria has been growing now for about 70 thousand generations and there have been trillions of bacteria which were born and died in his laboratory and he did it just because he wanted to see how they would change how they would evolve and within months after he started the experiment he noticed that the bacteria were starting to grow faster maybe about 20 percent faster than they did before so uh this was due to some mutation but he didn't know what mutation it was because back in 1990 the tools the technical tools did not exist to be able to track down the mutation that was allowing the bug to grow faster and it wasn't until about oh a dozen years later that the uh that the techniques to sequence dna were becoming more common and cheaper and so on and he discovered that that that mutation the original mutation that allowed it to grow very very fast was due to a several genes in something called the ribose operon which holds genes for proteins that metabolize the sugar called ribose they were destroyed they were blown apart they were uh deleted and they didn't have that capability anymore okay and for some reason for some reason that made the bacteria grow faster than they otherwise would so here was the startling uh notion the startling idea people it had before but this brought it home i think with great force is that a helpful mutation can be one that destroys pre-existing genetic information and the long and the short is that 30 years after his well 25 years after his uh experiment began he tracked down about three dozen different mutations that helped the bacterium grow faster or compete in its environment and they were all ones that either destroyed or at least degraded the genes in which they occurred and i that's uh that's pretty much the the big point of my book darwin devolves uh is that it's a lot it's really easy to break a gene practically any if you have a gene probably 99 of the changes in it aren't going to help just like 99 of changes in your computer uh will not help if you take a hammer and hit it here or there or the other place not going to help so but they occur very very fast and ones that would happen to help it somehow give it some new feature well they're comparatively rare and just as a matter of speed you'd expect the uh the degradatory mutations to arrive much faster and if by chance breaking some gene gives you a uh an advantage then natural selection will make that spread through the population so the interesting thing is that now that we can track down these genes pretty closely it turns out that darwin's mechanism of random mutation and selection is actually powerfully devolutionary it easily breaks genes and destroys things and and if that helps that spreads rapidly through the population i i used this image before if you think of a ship in a storm and it's going through and and it's got a leak and it's got you want to get to port you know what's one of the things you can do to to help ensure that you make it to a safe harbor well you can throw overboard some heavy machinery or you know okay computers or tv sets or tractors or whatever and that'll help you'll survive to live another day but of course you're missing your tractor and your computer and so on so i i argue at length in the book that this is really the death knell on theory but uh but some people disagree we've got time for just a handful more questions here if you want to load him in for dr b he will try to get to him in the next few minutes we have um let me ask you one other practical example i've heard raised a lot relates to polar bears and an evolution that's taken place in polar bears can you explain what that is and why you don't think it challenges your ideas of id okay well uh i started out that book darwin evolves with the example of polar bears which are thought to have descended from grizzly bears brown bears over the past few hundred thousand years and in these days scientists can easily sequence the whole genomes of entire species and turns out that some scientists have sequenced the grizzly bear dna and the polar bear dna so groups were anxious to compare the two to see what mutations had occurred that allowed the polar bear to adapt to the arctic and the most highly uh the most uh strongly selected gene the one that helped the most was one which broke a gene involved in uh pigmenting it the polar bear is fur so that it doesn't uh it doesn't become pigmented like brown bears fur and so it's white okay okay well that's great but it's it's a degradatory mutation the second one is a gene involved in lipid metabolism and fat metabolism turns out that of polar bears eat a lot of fat from seal blubber uh you know a large chunk of their diet is that and not so for grizzly bears they eat berries and whatever and so one of the the second most selected gene uh was involved in lipid metabolism and the people who looked at this said that the mutations were very likely to degrade or destroy the action of that gene so i use a polar bear as an example uh of devolution evolution by devolution uh to start off that book now of course uh some scientists challenged that they said i was i was incorrect and um they pointed they said that well the prediction or the people who published the paper on polar bears they just used a computer program to say that these uh that these uh mutations were likely to uh damage the proteins uh whose genes they were in and i said sure you know that's what i said in my book this is you know this is uh right this is a pro this is a computer program that's used widely that's reliable and so on uh and i said you know you can't do many experiments with polar bears they they tend to you know take umbrage uh and uh so uh if you use this computer program nonetheless proteins are easy to disturb to break they were predicted to damage it and the folks essentially argue that no no no you've got to show that this is damaged and i went back and forth with these folks a couple times and i showed that in a mouse model mice are easier to work with than polar bears in a mouse model if you break that same gene the same analogous gene that is mutated in the polar bear then the mice become resistant to a high fat diet that is they can eat a lot of fat and they they don't get the symptoms that mice with the normal gene have it might be you might say to yourself how in the world can that happen well think of it this way suppose that normally all the fat you eat and all the cholesterol too goes in through this particular portal but in the damaged gene the portal no longer can allow cholesterol to go in so it doesn't go into the bloodstream in as much uh quantity as when the gene is functioning and so it doesn't form plaques in your arteries and gum up your circulatory system and where it goes when it doesn't make it into the bloodstream is unknown at this time but if it's stopped from going there it might stop the damage that it otherwise would cause and apparently it doesn't cause uh sufficient damage going somewhere else to uh to make it fatal so um i should say that scientists don't object to when anybody uses protein uh confirmation prediction programs uh in almost any circumstance it's only when id proponents point out that well look look at the implications of this this means that it's easy to break these proteins and that this example of a polar bear which is held up widely as an example of evolution it is an example of evolution but it's evolution by degradation not by making things new and then you're jumped on with both feet and things that or narrowly nobody would blink an eye for now you have to fight tooth and nail just to get people to uh to take it seriously here's a question for you from michael he says you've written three great books and now a fourth which we've been talking about a little bit today uh mousetrap for darwin uh what are you looking forward to exploring and working on next well uh right now i'm just uh going around i'm promoting the the past couple of books but i have in i have a different topic in mind i think for the future i'm not sure when and that is a a detailed discussion of the question of how do we recognize design how do we recognize when a mind has acted that seems to me anyway to be surprisingly difficult for many people to kind of grasp they can do it sort of kind of intuitively but easily get derailed and so i want to write a book essentially showing or arguing for the contention that a purposeful arrangement of parts is the only way that we recognize design and of course we see that in abundance in biology and so i'm just trying to uh get past the what i thought was the easy part of the argument that is how do we recognize when a a mind has acted so as simply as you can what would be the basic distinction between that and what uh what demski has argued for recognizing design with his design filter because he takes a philosophical mathematical approach what would be the most just kind of simple without giving away where you're going in the book too much is the last question we'll have for you what would be the basic distinction you would make in terms of how we recognize it are you going to science rather than philosophy but what would that difference be well it would be a kind of a mixture of science and philosophy because of course science can't work without philosophy everybody has principles they have logic and so on and i hope to show that in design the question is you know we're trying to determine how a mind has acted and science generally doesn't deal with minds nonetheless when you're asking such a question which darwin did darwin ruled out the action of mind in biology without actually um demonstrating his the correctness of his view uh so i'm going to go through simple examples and counter examples and mostly uh it's it's certainly not going to have any hardly any math unlike bill dempsky's stuff okay and i want the thing i want to emphasize is that you don't need calculations you don't need uh anything fancy what you have to realize is that the only thing in the universe that can have a purpose is a mind and so when we look for evidence of minds even evidence that some person who has kind of passed out on the street has a functioning mind is if they can act purposefully if they can put things together if they can put coherent sentences together uh and if well that's the gist of it that sounds fascinating when it's coming closer to coming out let us know we'd love to promote help get the word out however we can um those of you listening uh dr michael b has written his fourth book called a mousetrap for darwin if you're looking for really one book that'll take you back really when you launch darwin's black box to the most recent objections through 2020 and your responses to them this 500 plus page book really captures it so i'd say it's an intermediate text non-scientists can read it but it's the kind of book you kind of got to commit to a little bit and say i want to really understand this issue and get into the weeds so you know i wrote a book on this but i learned a ton by working through this myself i was like oh that's interesting that's helpful even though i follow these debates there were a number of insights uh for me as well so really appreciate you coming on those of you listen don't forget to hit the subscribe button we have some interviews coming up i have a medical doctor coming on to talk about the evidence for near-death experiences we're going to talk about assisted suicide archaeology and the bible have some very interesting fascinating guests coming up you will not want to miss it so hit subscribe notifications and this channel is brought to you by biola apologetics and we've never had you out as far as i'm aware dr b he but we've had your colleagues like stephen meyer we've been talking with bill dempsey about coming out uh teaching a class paul nelson teaches for us regularly maybe someday we can have you teach a class but for those of you interested we would love to partner with you and help train you in apologetics and if you're not ready for a master's program we have a certificate program below you can get a really good discount just kind of for following this channel so we really appreciate you joining us and uh hang on dr b he want to say bye quickly but thanks for those of you for asking great questions and for joining us today it's a great live stream have a wonderful rest of the week

Channel: Dr. Sean McDowell

Views: 5,561

Rating: 4.8078604 out of 5

Keywords: intelligent design, evolution, darwin, irreducible complexity, arguments, flagellum, biology, microbiology, information, proof, evidence, mousetrap

Id: 7oFd4O1DkUg

Length: 61min 20sec (3680 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 07 2021