Michael Behe: A Mousetrap for Darwin

okay welcome my name is john west i'm the associate director of the center for science and culture at discovery institute which i co-founded with steve meyer philosopher of science back in 1996 the very same year that dr michael b he published his landmark book darwin's black box thank you for joining our webinar today to celebrate dr b he's newest and latest book just out last week dr b he is of course a biochemist he is a professor of biological sciences at lehigh university he's a senior fellow at the center for science and culture at discovery institute a best-selling author and an all-around great guy and his new book is calling is called let's go uh if i can yep there his new book is called a mousetrap for darwin michael j b he answers his critics the book is now available on amazon.com and paperback hardcover and kindle versions i hope you've ordered your copy already or will soon do so this book has a special place in my heart because i actually encourage mike to think about putting it together because i was dumbfounded frankly by what i will call the fake criticisms of michael behe's work like fake news fake criticisms are criticisms that aren't actually real they may seem real but they aren't probably the top fake criticism of michael behe is that he has not engaged with his critics or with their criticisms of his ideas which is so far from the truth it's like an alternate reality i've read most of bihi's critics and i've read his responses to them very careful methodical winsome and devastating responses usually mike responds have been so spot on that his critics are reduced to pretending that the responses don't exist i think that's telling if you are a serious critic of someone you do the hard work of actually responding to their arguments if you're a fake critic you come up with fake criticisms like falsely claiming that your opponent won't engage with his critics even though he has so i thought it would be great to call the bluff of these fake critics i thought let's collect be he's extensive responses to critics surely we'd have enough for a 300 page book i was wrong when mike collected all of his responses we found we had a 750 page book so we decided we had to be selective and reduce some of the material and we were able to reduce it to a really sparse 556 pages which includes new introductions throughout the book as well as some other unpublished material just sort of to give you an overview his book has eight sections really the first section first two sections deal with debates over bihi's first book darwin's black box the next four sections deal with debates inspired by his second book the edge of evolution another section deals with debates arising from his book darwin devolves and then the final section explores the need for genuine discussion on the merits of intelligent design as be he writes intelligent design is one topic badly in need of adult discussion i think he's right so this is a substantial book if anyone tells you that dr b he hasn't responded to his critics or that he's been refuted tell them to read this book and engage with its arguments otherwise they should just zip it in my view if they haven't been willing to engage in arguments you know the arguments with bihi's responses then i don't think they're real or serious critics i really do hope you get this book because i suspect you'll discover a lot of things you didn't know b he has written and you definitely will see how his ideas have survived the critics and stood the test of time but don't just take my word for it here are the words of two scientists who have already read the book a mousetrap for darwin provides perhaps the most comprehensive and incisive critique of neo-darwinism currently in print that's biologist michael denton and of course mike denton knows something about this because his book in the 1980s evolution of theory and crisis helped really start the ball rolling in many ways and in fact helped inspire mike behe's work and so mike denton says this is the single best place now to get the comprehensive critique of neo-darwinism and then we have world-renowned chemist marcus eberlin a member of the brazil's national academy of sciences one of the top people in the field of mass spectrometry he said this over the years i followed michael behe's work in building an arsenal of arguments for intelligent design and i have followed the desperate attempts of mainstream evolutionists to discredit that work a few of the critiques are superficially persuasive but they hold up best if you don't think too hard about the biochemical details of their evolutionary scenarios if you fear to doubt darwinism read further at your own peril i love that and i think it's actually true which is another reason i love it so with that let me stop sharing that and let's get started we're going to as far as format we're going to begin with some of my questions for mike beehee and then after that we will turn to your questions in the audience feel free to start submitting your questions right away using the question tab uh sort of below your screen if you want to tell us what city or country you're participating from if you want to be anonymous turn on the anonymous function otherwise i might use your first name when when talking about your question and so with that we are going to get started so mike thank you first of all for joining us from uh pennsylvania this morning and this morning my time afternoon i guess your your time um first of all i decided to ask what do you hope this new book accomplishes well uh you've covered some of it in your introduction and and that is that uh when you have a discussion i put forward an argument and then other people put forth their their counter arguments and the idea goes then well i consider those and and i either say they're good counter arguments or not and i reply and i've replied a lot but uh over the years i've noticed that not many critics have realized that i responded and they ignore the responses why the criticism doesn't apply and they bring the same thing up over and over and over again so i just thought that bringing these all these critiques or all these responses together in one book would give everybody a convenient a place to go when they hear a criticism of id and and see if it's been uh addressed before yeah some of your critics it reminds me of the old film uh groundhog day they just just keep recycling the same old things as if there had been no responses and they just don't i mean i think it's because it's too difficult for them to deal with the actual response yeah the the worst part of if i might add here the worst part was my the the review in the journal science last year of my newest book darwin devals where the authors just repeated old criticisms and you said i had not responded to things that i had discussed extensively on the on the internet and other places so yeah this this is a needed book i think so in your view maybe apart from the claim that you haven't responded what's the least serious or most frivolous or not you know serious criticism your work has received over the years well uh in in my view the least serious criticism is the response that that we're not allowed to consider design that science isn't allowed to invoke design because some rule forbids us from doing so uh and that in my view is that's ridiculous because you've got the evidence right here and uh our reasoning processes the same ones that we use to conclude design anywhere else uh points strongly to design so reality can't be circumscribed by rules made up by people we have to just follow the evidence where it leads yeah i think that's actually really good that what you just said that they try to rule out discussion from the start um and that is a pretty frivolous criticism um now what about let's turn the tables on the other side what's the most serious criticism you think your work has received over the years well uh depends on how you mean that uh in my uh in my um completely unbiased view no criticism has actually worked against intelligent design sorry you know i'd i'd like to point to something just to show how open-minded i am but i haven't come across any criticism that has made me reconsider anything but one criticism i think has done damage to the discussion and that is when people try to uh to redefine terms that i use in my books particularly irreducible complexity that was uh i i defined it of course as a system that needs a lot of parts and if you take one part away the system doesn't work and uh in particular a man named kenneth miller who's a professor of biology at brown university said no no i he's going to say that irreducible complexity means if you take a piece out of a system you aren't you can't use that piece for any other role you can't use it in any other system and you know that's and that's of course a straw man and it's just set up so that you can push it down and of course i responded to it but it was a response was ignored and it's gotten a lot of traction for some reason a number of folks in the media ran with that and i i remember a big story in the wall street journal showing how intelligent design critics have been refuted because you can use pieces of systems for other uh purposes so uh it's not a it's not an intellectually strong criticism but it is a uh it is a rhetorically strong one and it it's gotten it's gotten uh it has derailed the discussion in many instances yeah i think that's a good point um now i grew up in a household where my sisters just loved star trek so we got it every day i admit i didn't love it quite as much partly because it was every day like in reruns we were watching various parts of it but i know in your book you make a couple of references to star trek so i thought i'd use those as a springboard for a couple of questions um first you write that quite literally life is like the borg in star trek how so well uh the borg is from uh the second iteration of the tv star trek show and they are supposed to be some sort of half human half machine hybrid and famously they are supposed to run on what is called nanotechnology these tiny little machines that are inside their bodies and there's one episode where captain picard is is going to be absorbed into the board and you can see under a microscope these little metallic clunky evil looking machines next to red blood cells in in his uh in his blood and he's being absorbed by nanotechnology well it turns out that science has discovered that we do have nanotechnology inside us we are run by nano machines that uh if you look inside the cell which of course darwin didn't have any much of an idea about it seemed like a piece of jelly back in those times if you look inside the cell there are literally machines made out of molecules of course the flagellum uh that we talked about but also the cilium and kinesin motors and and all sorts of things nothing in the cell happens by chance so just like in the show we are run by nanotechnology so we are the board okay that's great um you also um [Music] point out you say in another part of the book nobody on earth is the reincarnation of mr spock either singly or collectively what do you mean well um mr spock in star trek is supposed to be a very cool logical you know uh person uh almost a machine like computer-like and he only pays attention to the data and doesn't let his any emotions get in his way of of coming to a conclusion of course every third or fourth episode he breaks down and cries but you know that's just that's bad writing but that's supposed to be his uh his persona and many people think of scientists uh in general as akin to that image of mr spock go they would you know they just look at the data and come straight to their conclusions by by logic and and facts and uh and that's simply not the case scientists are people too and they've got their own preferences their own world views the their own way that they want things to be and so since design and evolution and these these are big ideas about uh about life and about fundamental ways in which we view ourselves and the world and so nobody is going to be completely objective everybody's going to have uh some views that they bring to the table no that's right we're not we're not just like spock although as you point out spock does i guess from his half part human parentage i guess that's his mom his mom now i find it really fascinating just how much you've gotten inside the heads of darwinist the very scientists who say you know they find evidence for darwinism is so overwhelming that there isn't any evidence of design in biology seem obsessed with trying to disprove some of the things that you've pointed out so you write in in this new book emphasizing in one's paper how the results falsify irreducible complexity or easily explain some astounding molecular system virtually guarantees that it will be accepted by nature science or some other top-tier journal usually accompanied by a story in the new york times my question is what do you think this shows about the real state of darwinism on the one hand we have these top scientists saying there is no scientific debate over darwin or design it's not a scientific question it's tantamount to believing the flat earth on the other hand these same scientists seem to spend a whole lot of time trying to refute something they say isn't worth refuting it's like you've taken over their brains you've set the terms of debate for them so what do you think these efforts to refute you really show about the state over darwin in design well it it shows that darwinism is much more fragile than people admit and scientists admit then then the media admit and so on uh not only my stuff but uh about five six years ago uh two letters uh were sent by different groups of scientists and published in the journal nature the leading science journal in the world under the title does evolution need a rethink and one group of scientists said no no darwinism is great the other group says yeah you know there's lots of problems that can't answer we would better start thinking about other things so uh in my view uh darwinism is sustained mostly by sociology it's kind of what people learned in school uh everybody agrees it's true and somebody who says wait no look at these tough questions it's not true threatens to kind of break the consensus and and um expose it to very hard questions and since a consensus is pretty much the only thing supporting darwinism it doesn't have any any evidence that it can uh make the the uh fantastic structures of life then people consciously or unconsciously really try hard to stop any criticisms of it from uh from getting out there um i think that's right so um as we're winding down our discussion there's one question that i couldn't let this opportunity go by with ask asking you about the scintillating topic of the type 3 secretory system and the bacterial flagellum i am still amazed when i come across new comments online especially in the comments section of some of our youtube videos that assert something like beehee has been refuted because we all know the so-called irreducibly complex flagellum evolved from the simpler structure known as the type 3 secretion system now you've already alluded to this type of argument earlier in our conversation and i know you've patiently refuted this objection about the type 3 secretion system time and again but it's almost like a zombie that just keeps coming back so i thought i'd give you a chance to address it here did the bacterial flagellum evolve through darwinian means from a simpler structure known as the type three secretion system or do we think you have good evidence to think that yeah no we we do not have any evidence to support that uh as a matter of fact when i wrote about the bacterial flagellum in darwin's black fox box the ability of it to build itself by pumping proteins out through a hollow tube to the outside to make the long flagellum wasn't known and then later it was discovered that it was more complex than anybody knew because it could do that besides being a rotary motor it could also be a protein pump uh and i i thought it was you know a wonderful show of hutzpah for darwinists to say well now it's more complex and and so you know it's we can explain it now uh in fact the type 3 secretory system which uses a uses a handful of parts that are similar to ones in the flagellum is a sophisticated machine in its own right and no darwinist has explained how that could occur and no one has explained how it could go from a type three secretory system uh to a flagellum all they've said is that here's this one machine and here's this other machine and and uh they imagined that they could uh come together uh but um additionally that scenario requires that the type three secretory system somehow come first and then give rise to something uh even more complex and it turns out that work in the past few decades has shown that it seems like the flagellum came first that the flagellum showed up in life well before the type 3 secretory system and that perhaps the type 3 is a degradatory product of the flagellum and while that's fits in just fine with a theory of purposeful intelligent design where a complex machine is made where which can uh break down to give other useful parts it's very difficult to square with a darwinian explanation so uh yeah no i've i've written about this a lot and you'll you can find this in the uh in the new book as well and and no and just like a zombie it keeps coming back but but it's it's uh not living okay great um final question for me before i begin to get to all the questions we have actually dozens of questions have been submitted so i want to get to those but my final question is at the very end of this new book you write the great thing about science is not that it's never wrong but that it's relentless i wonder if you could just comment on that or discuss what you mean by that yeah it's you know scientists are fallible and they make mistakes but if you keep plugging away then you'll stumble over uh you can stumble over truth or reality uh eventually whether you welcome it uh or not so uh in the past we've had theories like the ether where people thought that outer space was filled with some mysterious gas like substance and but as as science kept plugging along that was shown not to be the case and so uh the as science thought it had an idea to uh help explain where life comes from darwin's theory of evolution but uh darwin didn't know about many things that we know about today didn't know about the genetic code and molecular machines and and so on and as science continued to plug away its its own uh its own results uh are leading it into a uh a clearer view of of what life is and how life uh must have come about so as long as you keep trying and you're gonna make some progress okay great well now we have like i said dozens of questions and we have several hundred people on on our webinar and they're from all over the united states from the czech republic from scotland from turkey so we have people from all over so i apologize beforehand if i don't get to your question i'm trying to pick those that would be the most interesting to people and also um you know that aren't duplicative uh let's see there are a few questions relating just to this book one person actually asked after you know completing a book that was so substantial like darwin devolves how do you have the time and where do you get all the energy to produce a new book well uh yeah um well it turns out that uh most of these things were written already and and in scattered uh publications and so all i had to do was search my hard drive and uh bring some of them together and then write introductions and a couple of new pieces because uh they cause newer criticisms uh required them uh so it wasn't nearly as hard as writing uh uh the other three books additionally i had lots and lots of help from the discovery institute in particular uh jonathan witt who uh put things together edited things for clarity and and so on so uh this this was comparatively easy okay a couple more questions just about the book itself then we'll get into other more specific ones uh someone asked would you recommend a newbie to read darwin's black box first before reading this new book yeah sure uh you have to know what the basic argument is and darwin's black box puts it most clearly because it talks about what the foundation of life is like talks about how we perceive design uh yeah so that would be the best uh book to read first and then one other question again about the book itself uh someone asking about what level of technical knowledge should you have to be able to read this new book well uh it's uh all of my all of my writings are for a broad general public that has you know uh not not necessarily any technical expertise high school level biology something like that so uh everybody uh could read it a couple articles are more technical than others but they all uh can be understood uh by the general public yeah i just like to accentuate that mike is one of i think the preeminent scientists of our times who can actually communicate in a way that even those of us who uh you know may not have a specialty in biochemistry certainly can understand and so i encourage you if you're interested in these topics get the book you don't have to be a scientist in order to understand except a lot of them do go into quite a amount of detail of you know unpacking the the arguments you know pro and con so let's get to some of the questions about sort of content and specific objections and things like that uh richard from inverness scotland asked what particular untruth that is used to support darwinism irritates you the most and would you and you'd like to dispel once and for all well i i i think it's uh the overlooking of all the molecular steps that are necessary to make observable changes you often see stories in the newspaper magazines where uh it says scientists show that uh this thing evolved from that thing and um uh you know the um [Music] and and they're speaking about organs or features and all of those things uh are underlain by many many molecular steps and to understand what evolution unaided evolution can do unguided evolution can do you have to look at each of those steps ask whether that's uh can be can be that pathway can be traversed by random steps and selection so i the thing that disturbs me most is that people have their focus you know understandably on larger features because that's what we can see but evolution must occur at the molecular level and and uh most popular uh magazines and uh newspapers and so on overlook that okay yeah um wes from california says can you comment on what seems to be a growing trend among scientists who profess a belief in darwinism but admit that based on new genomic and epigenetic findings that that human dna could have been seeded by intelligent civilizations from other worlds basically a prometheus argument is that is this argument now shifting to two sides of intelligent design well i i have to admit i i haven't heard that one before that specifically human dna was put on the earth a long time ago some folks may recall that francis crick a you know the co-discoverer the structure of dna with james watson proposed that life on earth might have been seeded by space aliens but he was thinking of tiny single celled organisms that might grow up and evolve into into uh all of life on earth i haven't heard anybody talking about specifically human dna though but it's true that the more we see and this is the relentlessness of science again the more we discover the more and more controls that are seen on dna the more regulation the more uh sophistication and so even folks who aren't uh willing to entertain the idea of design by uh by something outside the cosmos outside the universe uh are you know drawn to proposing uh designed by some other uh entity such as you know space aliens but i don't think most people will uh will uh find that idea persuasive okay um another person actually has a list of questions which are all good questions but i can't get to all of them so i'll choose one of them could you describe what the adaptive mechanisms or or i think i mean how the adaptive mechanisms of any organisms have a limit so i guess the are there limits to the adaptive mechanisms of organisms uh sure yeah uh well as i as i write in darwin devolves the book that was published in 2019 organisms can adapt to environments and they seem to be able to adapt by a darwinian mechanism that is a mutation comes along that helps them in a certain environment and they they and their progeny increase and they take over the population uh the problem is that most of those uh mutations uh the ones that help are degradatory degradative they break genes that is they essentially sacrifice a gene that's holding them back in a particular environment and while that does fit them more closely to a niche it makes them more evolutionarily fragile because now they can't they don't have as much genetic information to spend if the environment changes again so they can adapt to more and more specialized niches but then they're going to get stuck so there will be a limit and and again in in the book i argue that the limit is at the level of uh somewhat below family that is that you can might be able to get new species with darwin's mechanism maybe even new genera but nothing at the family level okay um i have a question actually from someone here in washington state dean from spokane washington that actually follows off of what you were just talking about he says in your book darwin's devolves darwin devolves you say that the most adapted mutations are really the breaking of genes a darwinist would counter that there are millions and millions of mutations underlying the evolutionary tree of life so have you examined all those adaptations and included them in your claims of broken genes i have my own retort to that but i'd like to hear yours well um we we look at examples the best examples that uh current science knows about it it turns out that the ability of science to determine what mutations are helping a species has only been available in the last 10 to 20 years you have to remember that mutations are changes in at the molecular level of life there are changes in dna that cause changes in proteins which are the molecular machinery that that builds organisms and and helps them grow and live and so on um but the ability to look at that level at the dna level of life insufficient uh with sufficient uh resolution to determine what was helping and what wasn't is as a very very recent ability and in the places where it's been tracked down the genes or the mutations which helped species adapt most strongly were as i wrote in the book seem to be degradative ones particularly in the polar bear the top top dozen or more genes that allowed it to survive in the in the arctic uh were the result of breaking or degrading genes the differences in breeds of dogs great danes versus chihuahuas versus french poodles and so on they've been tracked down at the genetic level too and they are mostly broken genes as well so there is no reason to think that this is uh this would be different for for some uh for some unguided process in the past this is what we see it doing so uh it's this is the best explanation uh that we have okay we have another question from someone who says they've just listened to your interaction with biologist josh swamidas on the show unbelievable i'd like to hear more about his observation that god's methods of design etc might be vastly different from how we would design machines sure uh for folks who don't know uh josh suamados is a biologist at the univer washington university in st louis and he's a christian and he is a design uh opponent and uh yeah yes uh recently he and i were on a podcast together and he said i raised an objection that i've heard before is that well you know god is completely different and you know the way we uh that the way that we finite humans design things is not uh the way that god does he he has you know his own ways which are unfathomable to us and that's fine you know i don't disagree with any of that but it doesn't matter because design is perceived in the designed object or system itself it's not it does not require you know the methods or the ways in which the designer worked for example um suppose you were out hiking and you turned a corner and you saw mount rushmore and you had never heard of it before uh when you looked at it you would not know when it was made you would not know who made it you would not know how it was made and so on but you would know immediately without any doubt that that sculpture was designed it was not an accident it was not the result of weathering a strange weathering event so if god made mount rushmore he could use methods and whatever uh that are unfathomable to us but we perceive the design in the final system so uh so that objection i think uh doesn't matter and that's one of the uh strong points of uh design is that you do not know you do not need to know the history of the uh object uh you only need to see how it is now you know how its parts uh are fit to each other right now okay um someone asks what's your favorite star trek episode uh let's see what what one uh it's the one where uh where um where captain kirk and spock and dr mccoy go back in time i've forgotten the name of it they go through the suit is it like tomorrow is the edge of forever or something or tomorrow yeah that's right and they uh they land in the 1920s and uh there's a woman peace activist and uh she falls in love with captain kirk of course then but she gets killed at the end and uh yes there's something at the edge of forever okay yeah that yeah that's that's certainly up there okay great now we know um do you have a favorite error this is another question favorite error from the kits to miller versus dover judgment a favorite error from the error okay yeah my favorite one is is um when the judge john jones quoted the opposing lawyer as saying that the science investigating uh the immune system was not good enough for me and the judge put those words in my mouth that is he misattributed a quote uh an obnoxious quote from the lawyer uh to me uh i was on the stand and uh uh the uh opposing lawyers had cooked up a stunt where they would take a bunch of books and put them in front of me and the stack of papers from the literature and and say you know well you know look at all this scholarship that opposes you and of course none of it you know uh contained uh contained experiments or uh arguments to show how the immune system might uh arise by a darwinian process but that doesn't matter and the uh the attorney who is of course trying to make you look as bad as possible the the opposing attorney said to me so he says so you think these these papers and books they're not good enough for you they're they're not good enough and i said no they're wonderful i'm sure they're you know great papers they just don't address the questions that i asked meaning the mechanism of of evolution darwin's mechanism not common dissenter relatedness and in the uh in his his opinion the judge attributed me to me that quote that these papers and books were not good enough and that was also written into the god delusion if i'm not mistaken by richard dawkins uh he spent a little bit of time uh on my arguments and he says why look at what uh judge jones you know uh how uh bihi dismisses the the the work of scientists so yeah that that's the that that got my goat yeah that's that's the one okay someone else asks where oh and by the way uh someone actually uh gave us the actual title uh thank you for submitting city on the edge of forever that was for the star trek episode okay so someone else asked where does randomness fit into an intelligent design approach for example how do you fit humans who have evolved to being able to breathe and evolve as in quotes or adapted to being able to breathe at higher altitudes say in tibet uh into an id paradigm well uh if you if you were a designer one could imagine that you could make or design an organism so that if it found itself in different niches it could adapt to it by losing information or by getting rid of a a certain system so with humans uh yeah if they go to tibet or the andes mutations can come along that help them breathe more easily at the low oxygen pressures but they're uh they are degradatory mutations additionally you know if you have humans in environments that have malaria in it malarial parasites they can adapt too and sickle cell and and uh thalassemia and so on but again uh almost all of those are degradative mutations so uh yeah it's it's uh it fits in pretty well i think from uh an id point of view that you make a line of organisms that uh can change within limits uh can change and fill various uh niches in the world this person asked how has advocating id affected your professional career do negative professional consequences hurt the advance of intelligent design ah let's see well um they haven't hurt my career nearly as much as they have other folks i'm pretty lucky i have tenure before i got involved in the design discussion you know i'm no fool i and you know it's clearly true that people in professional biology don't like id one bit and some of them are activists and they will try to make your life unpleasant but lehigh has been very good to me you know they've written a statement where they say that oh these ideas are be his own we don't endorse them but they've let you know haven't tried to stop me from publishing or discussing or going out and giving talks that is different for other people i've known folks who have lost jobs uh grad students who have been kicked out of laboratories and so on for advocating intelligent design um so that does in fact put a poll over the discussion of intelligent design you can't discuss it if you're a in a vulnerable position that is if you're trying to get a job or an education in sciences particularly biology uh and so that inhibits the free discussion of it but in a sense it makes it you know dangerous and exciting too so uh perhaps that makes up for it okay um we have someone who writes uh you speak of us being like borgs insofar as we defend depend on cellular nano machines of course we are more than just a sum of ourselves humans for starters have spiritual souls but even apes or cats or bees or plants have a principle of being which aristotle would call souls one criticism of id i have come across is that it requires one to buy into a mechanical view of the universe my response to that is that there is more to us than the cellular nano machines but we are not less but have you any comments about the integration of the cells into a life form such as man or this i myself i'd say this complaint that an id view of nature led you to a mechanical view of nature that we're just machines okay i i yeah i've come across that too and i don't agree with it and i i don't think it really has much force as you say john and as the as the questioner says you know just because parts of us work just by simple mechanical means you know your fingers are you know levers and pulleys and so on uh that doesn't mean our minds are uh machines and it doesn't mean that the whole of us put together aren't uh much more than say the sum of our parts uh nonetheless you know portions of people you know clearly are machine like or our machines the heart is a pump and it can be replaced by a pump uh for a while and um the eye is a like a movie camera and so on and you can study these using the principles of science and uh you know again the conclusion of design depends only on your knowledge of the structure of a system it doesn't depend on knowledge of how it got there so even if living things you know uh are not machines in a in a non-living in the same way as non-living things are nonetheless from the way you can put things you see things put together you can easily conclude that the things that i've written about are are purposely designed good um so i'm just trying to okay ever since someone else has said ever since grade school i've intuitively been struck by how awesome rowing cilia are now that i've read your uh free kindle sample i see how the elegant mechanism works but my ah in light of the design has only radically uh increased is that awe that sense of awe bad good or neutral for science oh uh that's that's great uh well uh who was it socrates aristotle i think socrates who said that uh philosophy begins in wonder you know and so the sense of awe is i think all similar to a sense of wonder you say look at those things all going together paddling along i think it's well it's i think it's very helpful for science than even though some folks can get sidetracked saying oh that's really not i mean it's neat but it was just put together accidentally nobody really intended it uh still further investigation as you say shows more and more and more uh elegance and sophistication and and drives you to deeper and deeper uh states of awe so eventually i think it it's uh does get uh people on the right track and we'll eventually get science on the right track that uh that we to appreciate the the design of life okay so um we had a question here about uh whether you thought endogenous retroviruses provided strong evidence for evolution and so i'd like you to reflect on that but also there was another question that i think i'd tie into it if someone asked well what do you think is the strongest evidence for for darwinism if you had to make it what's this the strongest argument so first the specific argument about endogenous retroviruses is there anything that that somehow supports a darwinian view and regardless of how you answer that what is the strongest evidence for darwinism that you think you know says something for it yeah okay well for endogenous retroviruses for and for any listeners who don't know what that is they're little pieces of dna in our genome that strongly look or strongly resemble the dna of of viruses some viruses and the idea is that they got into our genome and uh uh our is are also passed along uh through the generations simply by uh by uh being inherited and it turns out that some are similar to uh some that humans have are similar to other species and uh some that some mouse species have are similar to uh other other rodent species and so they have been argued to be strong markers for common descent and yeah that's fine maybe they are indeed the result of common descent although i've i've heard other arguments about that too but just for purposes of discussion say okay they're they point towards common descent but they don't say anything about darwinism versus design uh they don't even say that the viruses are arose by darwinian processes and the fact that they are in different uh species dna doesn't say anything about why the species are different or how they got their specialized uh specialized features you know if the if the retroviruses found in say giraffes were the same as those found in cattle you've still got the same problem trying to explain where how giraffes might have uh come about okay um what was that second question so and the second well i'm glad you asked so i could highlight the second question actually came from martin in the czech republic we're getting questions from all over the world what argument do you consider the strongest one for the support of darwinism okay the strongest one well uh let let me just say i don't think there aren't any but because if i have to pick one it's that you know some organisms have surprising features that we didn't expect and people say you know why would god or why would a designer put such things in creatures i'm sure everybody's heard of the blind spot in the eye and uh um [Music] the uh and darwinists would say well no uh self-respecting designer would have allowed that and someone back in um darwin's day um was asked what his uh a biologist was asked what his work showed about the intentions of the deity and he says that he has uh a uh an overly fond uh overly fond view of beetles because there's lots and lots of species of beetles in the world so uh it and and also of course um things like uh uh wasps lay um uh uh wasps uh oh i've gotten this wrong but but uh there are parasites and parasites seem icky to us so why would a designer make things like that and their you know species go out uh go extinct why would a designer make something and allow it to go extinct and there are easy and uh responses to those but nonetheless it seems to be the a very appealing argument or a very intuitive argument that seems to reach a lot of people so they don't know why some feature exists or why this relationship exists and they ascribe to a designer they say that well you know this designer would have made things differently i would have made things better they think to themselves i wouldn't allow this suffering to occur i wouldn't have allowed this uh this feature which seems non-optimum to occur and uh since darwinism says that it's pretty much just nature red and tooth and claw and you have to expect bad things to happen that seems to be a strong argument uh it's essentially an argument from evil or or related to it and i think that's the strongest one for darwinism okay so we're um now just in the last i'll try to fit in a couple more questions before we wrap up because we're almost out of time you seem to have a lot of readers or people interested in scotland so i'll take one more from there louise from scotland says is there any critic that you think did engage your work properly and who did acknowledge your responses um well that's a good one that that's that's why i like scotland so much they they ask penetrating questions uh let's see um i can't maybe john maybe you can help i i can't think of anybody where i've gone around and around with them uh ken miller i've gone around a couple times with uh but very unsatisfactorily i might say and uh i've i have gone around with a man named uh lawrence um uh what's his name on on sand walk uh oh uh larry moran larry moran yeah that's he's a retired biochemistry professor from the university of toronto and again uh i went back and forth with him a number of times but it was rather unsatisfactory because we simply couldn't agree on even what the terms should be so i i will have to say that no i i haven't really most people don't engage and the ones that do uh uh somehow we we fail to communicate i mean you did have the the extensive back and forth with richard lenski didn't you on online um i mean i'm again i'm not saying that he had the better arguments because he didn't but at least he did make an attempt to engage sort of well uh i i wouldn't say that really i mean yeah lansky blensky was one of the co-authors of the review and science of darwin depaul's and of course he's a very eminent scientist himself and after that he posted uh four blog posts on his site going into much longer depth and i responded on evolution news but he never responded to my responses he never engaged my responses so that was right i was trying to put the best part you know i tried to be pollyanna's trying to think uh best of people final question from someone when kenneth miller's argument biologist kenneth miller's argument which you've already talked about in a bit still be supporting intelligent design theory when he says that one part is usable in different systems that's what we do after all we create tools that can be used for multiple purposes such as nuts and bolts that can hold together a television or a bookshelf for example sure yeah i mean that's that's fine you can think that a part can be used in different systems and that can be the result of purposeful design but i don't think ken miller in that was arguing for intelligent design additionally you have to in these particular cases uh of you know this part can be used over here or this can be co-opted for that you always have to remember that when we have a nut or a bolt we put it in and decide where it goes and how it connects other things and if we're going to use it in a different arrangement we uh we have to manipulate things different in the cell if you have a nut in a bolt they don't uh if you have two pieces that are originally not together and it would be helpful if they did stick together in a certain way they have to develop what are called binding sites that is surfaces that are geometrically and chemically uh complementary so that they can find each other and stick and if you need a half dozen parts then all half dozen have to develop these binding sites before you can have a system so even if parts of one system might if modified be used for another it doesn't affect the problem of irreducible complexity because you've still got to adjust everything to each other and while you're doing that if the system is irreducibly complex it will not be functioning as the final system does great i think great thought on which to end um i want to thank you for participating mike and for the hundreds of people who participated for the dozens and dozens and dozens of questions that we got sorry that i couldn't get to all of them one person asked whether uh how they could share this zoomcast with others and we have been recording it and so assuming that the recording turns out it should be posted i'd say within a week to to maybe a little bit more than a week for on our discovery science youtube channel so that would be the easiest way to share it um i'd also in addition to thanking mike i'd like to thank our behind the scenes producer for this event our educational outreach coordinator at the center for science and culture daniel reeves uh for doing the technical production oh good yeah daniel you can see him on that that's great um i'd like to just uh please buy behe's book it's a great christmas gift uh be prepared to uh you know really be entranced by it dr b he's a great writer he makes science come alive even for those of us who are not scientists by training um i know that mike's writing has impacted many and many of you some of you expressed that in your comments that you sent uh not questions but comments just a few weeks ago we actually had someone post something online that talked about how he cried after reading mike's book darwin's black box and then he hugged it so it wasn't crime i think he was crying out of tears of joy not out of not because you depressed to mike and he hugged the book i can't promise you that you will hug this new book although it's certainly large enough for you to get your hands around but feel free if you if you want to um before we go i'd like to alert you to an upcoming uh another webinar on friday december 4th with biologist dr richard gunasicara of biola university on the emerging field of nano medicine and how that might relate to intelligent design it's sponsored by the southern california chapter of our science and culture network uh and so you can go you can see discovery.org id slash events to get more information about uh registering for that or by for that event and then one final thing um this is sort of the season of giving as you may or may not know the center for science and culture uh at discovery institute is a non-profit organization so we do rely on donations i want to thank the many of you who joined today who are actually donors and contributors to us you made the publication and distribution of this new book possible among other things if you aren't a donor but you think that this debate over darwin and intelligent design is important i just hope you might consider a donation and there's an address discovery.org id slash events and so you could consider that that's all for now bye until next time thank you for spending part of your saturday with us and hope you have a great rest of your day

Channel: Discovery Science

Views: 24,055

Rating: 4.92237 out of 5

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, Evolution News & Views, Michael Behe, William Dembski, John West, Jay W. Richards, Darwin Day in America, Darwin's Black Box, Privileged Planet

Id: rBxSh0ZInng

Length: 64min 16sec (3856 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/nomenmeum]

Biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin's Black Box, Darwin Devolves, and other books, discusses his new book A Mousetrap for Darwin: Michael J. Behe Answers His Critics with John West, Associate Director of the Center for Science and Culture, and fields questions from an international audience.

[u/Web-Dude]

I guess you guys have a lot of extra time. Why are all of these videos over an hour long? No nice samples for us workaday folks?