Jonathan Wells Presents His Book Zombie Science

[Music] [Music] you you my name is John West I'm a vice president at Discovery Institute and associate director of its Center for science and culture on behalf of Discovery I would like to welcome you all here including all those who are watching from around the world on the Internet we are coming tonight from Seattle's award-winning Woodland Park Zoo established in 1899 the zoo attracts more than a million visitors a year and it helped pioneer the approach of presenting zoo animals in more natural habitats it's a delight to be here for that event tonight discoveries too is a nonpartisan nonprofit educational and research organization our headquarters is here in Seattle that we have fellows and staff around the country we have programs in technology policy economics bioethics education that we were probably most notoriously known for our Center for science and culture which is the institutional hub of a new generation of scientists other scholars who think there's evidence in nature of intelligent design we sponsor educational programs and conferences we underwrite research we produce documentaries in podcast and we produce articles and books we are here tonight to celebrate the publication of our newest book zombie fans by biologist Jonathan wells it's the long-awaited sequel to dr. wells book icons of evolution icons of evolution really is one of the landmark books in the contemporary scientific debate over Darwin's theory it masterfully showed how much of the evidence presented in textbooks about Darwin theory is outdated misleading or just plain wrong and well showed this by copious and careful citations to the mainstream peer-reviewed scientific literature indeed each of the books chapters were peer reviewed by fellow scientists including those who support Darwin's theory it's because that book was so meticulous that it was the book that couldn't be ignored and it was reviewed by many leading science journals including nature science and the quarterly review of biology icons of evolution led to corrections in several biology textbooks perhaps most notably a textbook co-authored by the president of the National Academy of Sciences and by Nobel laureate James Watson who discovered the structure of DNA their textbook featured heckles faked embryo diagrams which was exposed in his book talk about embarrassing for them not well our cause of evolution also inspired the story in The New York Times titled biology text illustrations more fiction than fact although The Times article was directly based on wells brook and referred to on well it was based on wells Brooke it was clearly talking about wells they left out the name of the scientist who raised the criticisms and the name of his book the tans model of course is all the news that's fit to print I guess the name of a scientist whose critical of Darwin's theory isn't fit to print according to The Times despite the time censorship though which sort of in retrospect seems amusing would continue to get out and the book was eventually translated to polish check Chinese and Japanese and while many of Darwin's defenders hated the work many other scientists have their eyes open one of my favorite comments comes from the canadian geneticist at the university of calgary who wrote death in my role as an active researcher and teacher i have found the book icons of evolution challenged my assumptions and presented a reality check it has encouraged me to be more discerning and honest about what constitutes the body of scientific knowledge an equally important what is fiction I have found it refreshing to consider teach and discuss the icons in light of the information that Wales is provided in doing so I have not felt my friend to the continuity compromised indeed it has encouraged many of my students and me to take a fresh look at science without which I feel contemporary science is in jeopardy of stagnation Jonathan Wells was a true iconoclast smashing the false idols of those who prefer dodge marta following the scientific evidence wherever it leads I'm absolutely delighted tonight we get to hear from Jonathan was himself about the sequel to icons of evolution zombie science more icons of evolution they just keep coming back a final bit of introduction on a more personal level I've had the privilege of knowing Jonathan where around two decades he's all around one of the nicest kindest most self-effacing people you could ever want to be he's almost as nice as his wife Lucy and that's saying a lot Jonathan's character is all the more remarkable when you understand just how much of a to potion and nastiness has come his way because he's been willing to stand up and stay the darwinian emperor has no clothes Jonathan has intellectual courage and in fact he's only had the courage of his convictions which I think comes clear in the following short video which you get to see for the first time produced by Rachel Adams on our staff [Music] [Music] last book I read that wasn't directly related to evolution was 1984 and even that turned out to be you know very relevant I used to love reading Ian Fleming books James Bond you know I don't know I I think when I when I get tired of staring at my computer screen and typing or moving my mouse I do J saw puzzles you know that the pieces fit together is it there's a picture that makes sense and if I stick at it you know the pieces all go together something else I'd like to do is feed birds we have quite a bird population around our house it's a small town not big city and we have bird feeders out back and I keep them well stocked and I just enjoy watching the birds and when I look at them I think how could anyone possibly any rational person possibly think that these creatures evolved without guidance [Music] I am an ex-con yes I spent a year and a half in prison in the 60s the 1960s I was drafted in 1964 having dropped out of college I spent two years on active duty with the US Army was separated to reserve status in those days the obligation was for six years total I did two years active and then I had four years of reserve obligation so by then the Vietnam War had escalated quite a bit I was called back by then I was a transfer student at Berkeley quite the hotbed of anti-war activity in those days so I wrote a polite letter to the command and said I'm sorry I can't do that I can't come back I can't put on the uniform again and gave a big speech on the steps of Sproul Plaza at Berkeley the news media were there and I announced my intention not to serve anymore so I thought they would come arrest me very quickly but they waited until things died down and about two months later I was leaving my apartment in the morning streets were all quiet and a big black limousine roared up and three men jumped out and threw me in the back seat it was like something from a grade B movie and he drove off to the Presidio stockade and I spent the next year and a half in prison at the time I was opposed to the Vietnam War I as I look back I think I was mistaken in my evaluation of it I mean I think it was badly conducted but at the time I didn't see the danger of communism which I came to see later actually shortly after getting out of prison but I did what my conscience told me I should do and I've never regretted it after I was arrested I was in the Presidio stockade in San Francisco for four months since I had sworn in my letter to the army not to put on the uniform again and they wouldn't let me wear my civilian clothes I had to spend those four months in solitary confinement wrapped in a blanket when it was time for them to ship me to Leavenworth where I did the remainder of my prison time they forcibly put the uniform on me and took me to the airport in those days they transported prisoners by civilian aircraft to the prisoners in my situation but because they weren't sure whether I was going to take the uniform off in a public place they sent three guards with me not knowing whether I would cooperate of course I had no plans and not cooperate at that point I knew I was going to love and Worth and that was the end of it and I hadn't put the uniform on myself when we got to the airport and we were walking up to the gate the two ladies behind the counter turned white as a sheet I heard one of them say to the other my god three guards I figured that was the thought I was a serial killer or something I got a kick out of that [Music] [Applause] thank you thank you for braving the weather and the Seattle traffic looked to come here tonight I'm really quite honored so zombie science in 2000 I published icons of evolution in which I pointed out that many textbook images about Darwinian evolution used to convince students of Darwinian evolution misrepresent the evidence and I concluded that much of what we teach about evolution is wrong well the book attracted rave reviews I should have known I thought my goodness what have I done but those reviews were not filled with lavish praise but with furious denunciations some critics accuse me of stupidly trying to discredit evolution simply by listing a few textbook mistakes here's one example because there are emissions simplifications and inaccuracies in some general biology textbooks obviously the modern theory of evolution must be wrong this is the astounding line of reasoning that is the backbone of Jonathan wells as icons of evolution this is even better these two guys worked for the National Center for Science Education which is militantly Pro Darwin a lobbying organization they called me the wine expert Wells reminds us of those kids who used to write letters to the Superman comics many years ago dear editors they would write you made a boo-boo etc etc well did it really affect the story wells cannot hurt the story of evolution like a petulant child he can only throw catch this is a characteristic actually of many of the criticisms I got in those days so were the icons of evolution just textbook boo-boos here's a real one of the textbook booboo this was in a physics textbook in 1997 that's a picture of the singer Linda Ronstadt with a caption underneath identifying her as an atom of arsenic or sorry a silicon crystal to which an atom of arsenic has been added on the very next page there's a picture of a silicon crystal with arsenic added and the caption says triodes are used in microphones to amplify sound obviously the captions had been mistakenly switched and the publisher corrected them the state in the next edition but what if the identification of Linda Ronstadt as a silicon crystal were reproduced essentially unchanged year after year and in many different books not just this one what if the identification of Linda Ronstadt of the silicon crystal was consistent with other material in the books promoting the theory that life is based on silicon rather than carbon and finally what if the pictures are defended as correct even after the evidence has shown that life is not silicon based well that's what happened with the icons of evolution year after year they reproduced in textbooks many textbooks not just biology textbooks they're part of a systematic pattern explicitly aimed at promoting Darwinian evolution and they are defended vigorously nastily even by the scientific establishment even after the evidence has shown that Darwinian evolution and the icons are false now a big ambiguity here is what we mean by evolution it has several meanings one is simply change over time which nobody disagrees with least nobody that I've ever met another meaning for evolution is minor changes within existing species again I've never met anyone who disagrees with this we can see right here in this room that it happens farmers have been observing it for centuries it's not controversial at all but what about the origin of new species organs and body plans well this is called macro evolution to distinguish it from the micro evolution I just described by the way that distinction was made by a Darwinian evolutionary biologist years ago well certainly new species organs and body plants have originated in the history of life I don't know anyone who denies that but the problem comes when we use Charles Darwin's theory to explain macro evolution as due solely to unguided natural processes and he wrote in the Origin of Species that his book was one long argument basically against creation by design for Darwin without the S all living things were produced by unguided natural forces he wrote in a letter later I would give absolutely nothing for my theory of natural selection if it require miraculous additions at any one stage of descent so Darwin's theory is materialistic what is science well there are different meanings for science one the one that I prize most is empirical science that is seeking truth by formulating hypotheses and then comparing them with evidence we have an idea we check it against the evidence in the real world and decide whether the idea is correct or we have to change it in a sense we're all scientists in this regard but another meaning of science that's become especially popular since Darwin is materialistic science that is seeking natural explanations for everything explanations in terms just of material objects and the physical forces among them well okay that's that's not a dishonest enterprise but the problem comes when someone engaging in that thinks that everything actually has a natural or materialistic explanation logically speaking if I want to seek material explanations at some point I might say if I were honest well you know what I don't have an explanation for that maybe it's just beyond my method but in practice unfortunately today many scientists believe that there are material explanations for everything and if they just persist in trying to find them they will well that led me to define another kind of science zombie science by that I mean assuming that everything can be explained that realistically and then persisting in telling materialistic stories even after the evidence has shown that they are false and this unfortunately happens quite a lot in icons of evolution in 2000 I wrote about ten images common in biology textbooks that were used to tell the materialistic story even though by 2000 they had been shown to be misrepresentations of the evidence the miller-urey experiment darwin's tree of life homology heckles embryos Archaeopteryx the fossil bird with claws are with teeth in its beak and a long tail peppered moths Darwin's finches four winged fruit flies fossil horses and the eighth to human fossils actually drawings mostly well I'm not going to go over all of those here tonight but I will touch on four of them just to show you what has happened to these so called textbook boo-boos they're all still with us the miller-urey experiment in 1953 Stanley Miller in the lab of Harold Urey simulated what scientists then fought was the early Earth's atmosphere this was an honest experiment Lilly was not out to trick anybody the atmosphere he used contained methane ammonia hydrogen and water vapor and used an electric spark to simulate lightning so there's the spark the water would boil here the gases enter here spark and then the results would accumulate down here and after a week little analyzed these this brown tar and found some amino acids which are the chemical building blocks of proteins and this was widely touted as a step and explaining the first step in the origin of life this showed how the building blocks of life formed on the early Earth that's the way it was advertised by 1980 however geochemists had concluded from many kinds of evidence that the Earth's early atmosphere consisted of gases emitted from volcanoes and that any hydrogen that might have been there being the lightest element would have escaped the Earth's gravity into space so here we have a comparison to the miller-urey gases water vapor methane ammonia and hydrogen lots of hydrogen here including lots of free hydrogen and the volcanic gases water vapor nitrogen carbon dioxide carbon monoxide a lot of oxygen here and a few other trace gases as well well in 1983 Miller himself with a colleague tried using a carbon monoxide carbon dioxide atmosphere to produce amino acids and they found that the glycine which is the simplest amino acids acid of the twenty some some amino acids our bodies contain glycine is almost the only amino acid produced from carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide atmospheres and then only if they added excess hydrogen well remember that was the first thing to disappear in the early Earth according to geochemists so they had to add excess hydrogen just to make this work and if they wanted anything more complex they had to add methane as well so by 1999 it was clear that the experiment didn't work this is Freeman Dyson nerves experiment was supposed to be a true simulation of prebiotic that is pre life chemistry on the primitive earth but now nobody believes this anymore except the biology textbooks which all use to persuade students that life had a materialistic origin so they were still being used in 2000 now it's 2017 and it's still there here are three widely used textbooks Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine's got Freeman's biological science majors biology all of them use the military experiment to convince students that scientists have explained the first step in the materialistic origin of life so the conclusion here is the miller-urey experiment like other icons of evolution some of which I'll mention in a minute persists because the science education establishment wants to indoctrinate students in a grand materialistic story of which this is the beginning the icon served to illustrate the story but in every case they misrepresent the evidence this is Amba science moving on to the next icon heckles embryos which John West mentioned for Darwin this was by far the strongest single class of facts in favor of his theory that the embryos of the most distinct species in his case he was thinking of vertebrate embryos embryos of animals with backbones are closely similar but become when fully developed widely dissimilar and in later editions Darwin referred to these drawings made by his German contemporary and speckle in the top row according to heckle we see the early forms of these embryos that's a fish salamander turtle bird and for mammals and they all look like little fish well Michael's contemporaries accused him of fraud for distorting those embryos to make them look more similar than they really are and in fact he did these are drawings based on actual embryos of those five different classes fish amphibian in this case a frog turtle bird and human no embryologists would have any trouble distinguishing these from each other and you can see that in heckles original drawings they were made to look the same in 2000 the other icons came out evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that we should all be astonished and ashamed by the century of my century of mindless recycling that has led to the persistence of these drawings in a large number if not a majority of modern textbooks and he was absolutely right but making those embryos look more similar than they really are was not even heckles biggest misrepresentation early vertebrate embryos actually start out looking much different here's the stage that heckle portrayed as the first and he distorted these to make them look more similar but if we go back to the earlier stages the differences are much more striking and it was Darwin's logic that the early embryos are supposed to show us what we look like as a common ancestor so the actual embryo logical evidence does nothing to help Darwin whatsoever yet years later we still have evolutionary biologists claiming that the embryos are most similar he's Jerry Coyne from the University of Chicago all vertebrates begin development looking like embryonic fish because we all descended from a fish like ancestor totally false textbooks here's a 2013 textbook 2013 using Haeckel's drawings as evidence for evolution now more commonly modern textbooks redraw the embryos in this fashion this is majors biology from 2015 but the point is the same these drawings still never misrepresent the early embryos not quite as badly as Haeckel did but the point is these are what kind of like little fish and then they develop into real fish salamanders birds and so on but remember the earliest stages are over here not even part of the drawing so the drawing omits the early stages because that doesn't fit darwin's logic this again is zombie science moving on to another icon famous one peppered moths peppered moths come in a white variety and a dark variety when the dark moths became more common in 19th century England evolutionary biologists attributed this to survival because of the because they were better camouflaged on pollution darkened tree trunks that is to natural selection so these this is a tree trunk without pollution light-colored the light-colored Martha's here the dark colored Martha's here the argument is that as the trees got darkened by the pollution the dark moths were better camouflaged and the birds ate the light ones very plausible actually the story and photos like the one shown here became common in biology textbooks throughout the 2000s and even now well even if the story were a hundred percent true it would show only a shift in the proportions of two existing varieties that is micro evolution in fact micro evolution is all that natural selection has ever been shown to accomplish yet in the 1980s the same time actually that Miller's early earth atmosphere was discredited it became clear to biologists that peppered moths don't normally rest on tree trunks the soil was deeply flawed and most of the photos including the ones shown here which are from a textbook in 2000 had been staged using dead moths pinned or glued in place yet many textbooks are still telling the story here's one from 2015 uses a drawing rather than a photo but here's one from 2014 that actually uses the same photos again this isn't empirical science nexted final icon for a review of the 2000 I con for winged fruit flies at the top is a normal fruit fly with two wings at the bottom is a mutant fruit fly with four normal-looking wings this is actually produced this was produced in a laboratory of a Nobel Prize winner who combined artificially three separate mutations in a fruit fly embryo to make this fly and it's very impressive but the normal fly has two wings and two tiny structures behind them called balancers that vibrate rapidly during flight and which stabilize the insect in flight the mutant fly has lost them and the new wings have no flight muscles attached to them so they're just dead weight this fly is a helpless hopelessly disabled it can't live outside the laboratory yet here's Kenneth Miller textbook writer writing in 2008 if we interfere with the genes as the Nobel Prize winning scientist stood for the four winged fruit fly by designer by accident what might emerge is a fly with an extra set of wings disturb biologists to realize that the recipe for building the animal body is controlled by remarkably few genes and that by studying small changes in those they could also show how these genes produce variation which is the raw material for evolution textbooks 2014 2014 2015 photographs of for wine fruit flies similarly used to convince students that DNA mutations can produce dramatic anatomical changes that provide the raw materials for evolution neither miller nor these textbooks mentioned that for winged fruit flies are helpless cripples that cannot live outside the laboratory their evolutionary dead ends not raw materials for evolution not a word about that while we're at it let me ask what candy uh no mutations accomplished we can in fact have mutated a fruit fly embryo as much as we like it's called saturation mutagenesis it's also also put in and done in mice fish and worms and as far as we can tell from the evidence there are only three possible outcomes a normal fruit fly that has overcome the mutations and developed anyway a defective fruit fly like the foreleg fruit fly or worse or a dead fruit fly that's it that exhaust the possibilities so the materialistic claim that accidental mutations and natural selection can explain the origin of new species organs and body plants simply does not fit the evidence so tonight we celebrate the release of a book that talks about some additional icons of evolution I won't say new icons because actually they many of these have been around for a long time as well I just didn't have time or space to cover them in 2000 so I cover 6 in this book DNA the secret of life walking whales the human appendix the human eye antibiotic resistance and cancer I'm just going to touch on these very briefly because the details are in the book that many of you are holding in your hands DNA when Francis Crick Crick and James Watson discovered the structure of DNA in 1953 they went to a local pub where Crick announced we have discovered the secret of life they thought they had discovered the secret of heredity and the secret of embryo development in 1970 a prominent molecular biologist Francois Jaco wrote that an organism is the realization of a genetic program written in DNA sequences the same year his colleague Jacques mano said that with this and the understanding of the random physical basis of mutation that molecular biology has also provided the mechanism of Darwinism is a less securely founded and man has to understand that he is a mere accident pretty powerful but scientists have actually known for decades that organisms are not specified by a genetic program in their DNA many scientists don't even know this that its effect the literature shows it quite clearly in addition to DNA sequence information organisms need other sources of information that are independent of their DNA this may come as a surprise to you but it's true is actually much more to the secret of life than DNA and some of that's described in the book walking rails in Darwin's time two species of fossil whales had been discovered basilosaurus and Dora dine but there were no fossils of intermediate forms to provide evidence that whales had evolved from land animals as Darwin believed led animals come before whales in the fossil record so it appears that whales had to have evolved from land animals in the 1980s a weft sized land animal was announced to be the ancestor of modern whales because it had a bone in its ear that resembled a bone up to that point found only in the years of whales it was named pakicetus or Pakistani whale see this is the Latin word for whale but critics pointed out that there was still a huge gap between pakicetus and true whales so the criticisms continued then in 1994 scientists found a fossil they called ambulocetus Natanz or walking swimming whale and another group of scientists discovered Rhoda Cetus and they announced that ambulocetus and Rhoda cedis now provided the intermediate forms between pakicetus and true whales so in 1994 Stephen Jay Gould wrote the embarrassment of past absence has been replaced by a bounty of new evidence and by the sweetest series of transitional fossils an evolutionist could ever hope to find I cannot imagine a better tail for popular presentation of science as though evolution and science were the same thing or a more satisfying and intellectually based political victory over lingering creationist opposition well eventually some other forms were found and now textbooks routinely show a series of these fossils as evidence that whales gradually evolved from land mammals though the outers in this drawing are completely imaginary actually even evolutionary biologists acknowledge that no one of these forms could have evolved in tune to the next one because they all have features they would have to lose in order to become the next form so they're not actually ancestors in descendants but the text books only didn't worry about that but here's the read all of those so called walking whales remember this is a whale just because it has a certain ear bone it was fully terrestrial we have full terrestrial primarily terrestrial these animals it turns out were land animals that had a lot of spent a lot of their time in the water like sea lions and otters that was the structure of their Anatomy the fully aquatic whales up here are actually quite different and the transition between the primarily terrestrial em amphibious mammals and the fully aquatic whales is still missing fully fully aquatic whales actually differ from these amphibious mammals mammals excuse me in many respects some of them a few of them there's actually quite a few our blowholes so these animals all breathe through their nostrils at the front of their snout these animals breathe through holes in the tops of their heads quite different anatomically and physiologically wells have flukes that are not at all like the tails of these amphibious mammals down here are these terrestrial ones down here fruits are very complex structures aerodynamically almost perfect although I mean they're in the water but the flow over them has been determined to be almost ideal they have their own tendons connecting them to muscles in tail here's the tail here's the fluke and so the fluke is actually moved independently of the tail to propel the animal through the water and these these whales some of them can reach speeds of 30 miles our in the water quite fast these are not like the passive flippers of a scuba diver they're active muscles internal testicles sea lions have external testicles but the streamlined bodies of fully aquatic whales have internal testicles well unless these testicles are cooled they're stale and a sterile whale is not a link in any evolutionary chain the system that cools the testicles is quite complex it wouldn't have evolved before the testicles were internalized and yet if the testicles were internalized before the system evolved the animals would be sterile so again we have a big gap here between the amphibious mammals and the fully aquatic whales still a big question mark the human Appendix Darwin said not only is the appendix useless and the modern word for that is vestigial but it is sometimes the cause of death he wrote on the view of descent with modification we may conclude that the existence of organs and a rudimentary imperfect and useless condition like the appendix far from presenting a strange difficulty as they assuredly do on the ordinary doctrine of creation after all why would a creator make an animal with a useless organ so Darwin argued it could be anticipated on his theory of descent with modification but in 1900 British anonymous Richard Berry reported on considerable evidence that the human appendix is actually an important part of the immune system which helps us to fight disease very concluded the appendix is not there for the stijl structure well forget the evidence the 2014 edition of Raven and Johnson's biology tells students that the human appendix is apparently the stijl it is difficult to understand vestigial structures such as these as anything other than evolutionary relics holdovers from the past according to University of Berkeley University of california-berkeley website which was updated last year her life bears the scars of its history including humans our awkward wisdom teeth and appendix are simply historical holdovers that evolution has not managed to get managed to ribosome well fortunately because our immune system might be compromised if it had now you can get by without your appendix if you have to have it removed I had my tonsils removed when I was a kid and we have other systems that can back them up in the immune system but the fact is the appendix is known not just based on Barry's work in 1900 to serve as a part of our immune system it also serves as a safe house for beneficial bacteria we need bacteria in our intestines to digest our food after a serious bout of diarrhea a person may lose all those beneficial bacteria and the appendix can actually recede the intestines and keep that person alive so there are two known functions of the human appendix which are ignored by these evolutionary biologists and the evidence was there for a long time the human eye in the human eye indeed in the eyes of all animals with backbones the light sensing cells which are here shown in blue and green taste away from the incoming light the blue cells are rod cells which are so sensitive they can detect a single photon the green cells are less sensitive but they see color the rod cells just see black and white so these are very sensitive cells but evolutionary biologists look at this and say this is obviously an example of bad design who in his right mind would put the light sensing cells on the side away from the light instead they argue it's evidence for unguided evolution so according to Richard Dawkins any engineer would naturally assume that the photo cells would point towards the light with their wires that is the nerve leading backwards toward the brain he would laugh as Dawkins does at any suggestion that the further cells might point away from the light according to Kenneth Miller who would run into several times here no designer would suggest that the newer wiring connections should be placed on the side that faces the light rather than on the side away from it incredibly this is how the human retina is constructed and like Dawkins Miller argues that this is a result of evolution it's an accident of evolution that leads to flaws rather than a design feature but it has been known for decades long before Dawkins and Miller wrote these opinions that the light sensing cells in the human retina had the highest metabolic rate of any tissue in the body because the demands on them are so high so they need a general supply of blood back here in red that's mediated by a layer of cells called the retinal pigmented epithelium which is between the blood vessels and light sensing cells now if these are removed the light sensing cells die and we would be blind but if these are put in front of the retina between the light sensing cells in the light we'd also be blind because blood is opaque white it doesn't emit white the nerve cells as it turns out a relatively transparent so by having the nerve cells here the light gets through to the proto sensing cells which has been nourished essentially by this blood and these retinal epithelial cells retinal epithelial cells so it turns out that Dawkins and Miller and actually many other evolutionary biologists look at the retina and without even checking the evidence which is in medical school textbooks anatomy textbooks has been for decades they just assume that they know more and that they know how an eye should be designed and obviously this is evidence for evolution that to me is bewildering to make statements like that without even checking the evidence finally moving on to antibiotic resistance in cancer advocates of a new discipline become popular in the last few decades called Darwinian medicine claim that nothing in medicine especially antibiotic resistance in cancer makes sense except in the light of evolution and they actually actively try to force medical examining examining boards medical schools licensing associations to require courses and evolution of medical students they don't persuade physicians that is needed because physicians usually know better so they go to the administrators and try to convince them to for students to study evolution but actually Darwinian medicine has contributed nothing to overcoming medical problems all it does is it provides materialistic stories about why we get sick physicians don't need that they need to know how to cure disease not to be able to explain how it happened materialistically so Darwinian medicine has actually done us no good now some people claim that antibiotic resistance and cancer provide evidence for evolution in antibiotic resistance a few cells emerge in a population that resists an antibiotic so the antibiotic kills off the other cells and the resistant cells are left and they multiply and take over so this is a form in a sense of microevolution somewhat like the peppered moth where a certain variety becomes predominant in a population where before it was a very small percentage that's microevolution that's all antibiotic resistance shows us and I get a kick out of people saying that cancer provides good evidence for evolutionary theory because for me it's like saying I have a theory for the origin of modern civilization and my best evidence is the Night of the Living Dead cancer kills it doesn't help us evil so my last chapter is called zombie apocalypse in 1995 philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote that Darwin's idea Darwin's dangerous idea is like a universal acid it eats through just about every traditional concept and he's right it eats through religion non-believers in the last few decades have increased threefold in America and many of them explicitly attribute their non belief to being convinced that science proves God is not there through Darwinian evolution I mean those are anecdotal stories but they're common in many major denominations have now endorsed something called the clergy letter project which is a project started by an evolutionary biologist to enlist clergy in support of Darwinian evolution and unfortunately many liberal Christians in America have fallen for education the emphasis is no longer on teaching children critical thinking but indoctrinating them into materialism and the actually the technical literature of education and philosophy and psychology is full of articles by people proposing various methods to do this even to preschool children Darwinism has corrupted science itself where the highest value in science should be the search for truth and for some people still is the quest for survival has become stronger so scientists publish publish publish even before they have the evidence to support their results and the number of retractions since 2000 has skyrocketed retractions because of poor science the other clue to how science has been corrupted is the hysterical reaction of the scientific establishment to intelligent design not to debate the evidence for and against it but to call it things like terrorism the end of civilization the end document all of these are actual quotations from mainstream scientists intelligent design is is treated like a leper we were treated like lepers and to me this is a sign that science has lost its soul sorry too fast there but I conclude that there's actually room for hope a lot of room for hope first of all there's a growing awareness among scientists that evolutionary theory is broken in November 2016 many prominent evolutionary biologists gathered at the Royal Society in London to produce a new theory to replace neo-darwinian evolution which they knew was not working they failed but they tried the one thing they would not allow at the meeting was intelligent design even though ironically large proportions of people in the audience were ID advocates who are not allowed to speak there is increased support for intelligent design in funding financially so much so that new scientific research projects are now being started up at major universities around the world this is a very good sign for a new science like intelligent design finally coming up soon on May 5th and May 6th Mike NZ University in South Paulo Brazil in collaboration with the Discovery Institute will inaugurate a new intelligent design research centre there very important event many people expected to attend the inaugural celebration these to me are signs that the times are changing and that zombie science will fade into the background before too long thank you [Music] you you

Channel: Discovery Science

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Keywords: science, philosophy, biology, evolution, Darwinism, neo-Darwinism, human origins, science and faith, intelligent design, Discovery Institute, Charles Darwin, biologic institute, icons of evolution, darwin's doubt, Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Douglas, Axe, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet, Zombie Science

Id: I2UHLPVHjug

Length: 53min 10sec (3190 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 01 2017