Michael Shermer: Why Darwin Matters

this program is a presentation of uctv for educational and non-commercial use only all right good evening again and welcome to the culminating event of the biological sciences undergraduate symposium which is the public lecture presented by dr. Michael Shermer why Darwin matters evolution intelligent design and the battle for science and religion as you know UC San Diego is celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of two brilliant minds Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin and this year 2009 also marks the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species one of the most important and as it turned out controversial scientific publication in the history of science and dr. Sherman will talk more about this in a little bit dr. Michael Shermer is a writer and historian of science a founder of the skeptic Society and editor-in-chief of skeptic magazine he received his BA in Psychology from Pepperdine University his master's in Experimental Psychology from Cal State Fullerton and his PhD in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University he's a monthly columnist for Scientific American hosted a skeptic science lecture series at Cal Tech and author of over nine books he's appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report 20/20 Larry King Live and Oprah as you can see I really don't think there is anyone who I could better look to as a model for science communication than dr. Shermer and who we could have the privilege of partnering with in this pro science pro evolution movement that said without further ado I had the honor of welcoming dr. Michael Shermer good evening how we doing Wow good crowd this is the first island Darwin stopped at in September 1835 the island of Sun cristobol and he first slept on that beach right there he spent the night there so we did and then he hiked up into these highlands here oh by the way if you're in the back of the room and you can't see the laser pointer it's right there good anything for a cheap laugh anyway so [Music] Darwin correctly deduced that that island actually wasn't an island it's it's a Serra Bruno it's a volcanic was a volcanic island that eventually corrupt connected with ex9 crystal the lava flows from here going down and from there going up then eventually connected and he figured that out when he got there so he was a great man and actually since we have the opportunity here to the greatest Galapagos scientists to ever a study in the Galapagos Islands are Peter and Rosemary a grant who were featured in the best-selling book the beak of the Finch and they're right here in the front row Peter and rosemary stand up and say hi to everybody all right they're gonna be bashful they're speaking tomorrow at the symposium so featuring income so tonight I want to give you just a brief introduction of what I do for a living and then how this connects to the whole evolution creation debate so I publish skeptic magazine we're a quarterly publication of the skeptic Society we investigate claims the paranormal pseudoscience fringe groups and cults and claims of all kinds between good science junk science bad science voodoo science pathological science non science and plain old nonsense thank you and unless you've been abducted by aliens and been on Mars with the last few decades you know there's a lot of it out there nonsense that is bunk some people call us debunkers but let's face it there's a lot of bunk out there we're sort of the Ralph Nader's of bad ideas consumer advocates for good ideas and so in science we're always looking for natural explanations for natural phenomenon before we say something like that aliens traversed vast distances of interstellar space and landed in Farmer Bob's field and pucker Brush Kansas and made a crop circle that says skeptic calm as a way of promoting our webpage maybe there's a better explanation maybe somebody with Photoshop made that fake photo another way that says before we say something is out of this world first make sure that it's not in this world again this is a painting of Roswell not a photograph and we have to look for these kinds of natural explanations like again what's more likely that aliens traverse the Vestas vendor stellar space and landed in Sacramento California to help the Governator in his bid for the governorship or that the world weekly news just make stuff up well we have no experience or evidence at all of aliens landing anywhere we have lots of experience of tabloid magazines making things up so the likely or explanation this is Humes question what's more likely when you're analyzing a miracle or an extraordinary claim what's more likely this explanation of that explanation and that's one of the things that we try to do here another way to say this in cartoon version my favorite cartoon from Sidney Harris here for those of you in the back there's a couple of mathematicians at the chalkboard he writes in here then a miracle occurs and he says I think you need to be more explicit here in step two now it's not that miracles aren't allowed in science because there isn't anybody allowing or disallowing things in science there's it's not as our regime like that it's that there's nothing to do with the concept of a miracle by definition something that supernatural is not part of the natural world and therefore we can't study it there's nothing to do with it there's no experiments to run and so on and that really is the basis of intelligent design theory I'm gonna summarize all of their arguments that I'll go through in detail tonight for you but they all go like this X looks designed I can't think of how X was designed naturally therefore X was designed supernaturally that is what we call the God of the gaps argument wherever there's a gap that's where the intelligent designer or God or it or whoever must have stepped in to do the deed well the fact that you can't explain it it doesn't mean it's inexplicable I mean in a way this is the argument from personal incredulity because I can't figure it out therefore and this is like the people that think the pyramids were built by the aliens or the lost continent of Atlantis the Atlanteans you know because they can't believe the Egyptians could have done this I can't figure out how they did it I mean they couldn't have done the dirt ramp thing or whatever well you know we call these by the way would call these people the pyrimidines I mean maybe you ought to just think a little harder about it before you give up and and so that's sort of an object lesson there the the fact that that we can't currently explain it doesn't mean we have to then therefore turn to net supernatural explanations in any case even if you do that doesn't get us anywhere it's like when cosmologists talk about dark energy and dark matter to explain the structure of galaxies and how they rotate and clusters of galaxies and things like that but they don't mean that as an answer that's not like that's the answer we're done we can go golfing now we have the answer dark energy it's just a linguistic placeholder that says well we're not sure what this stuff is but we're gonna just call it that for now and put it in our equations mathematically and now we're gonna go search for this stuff it's the start the gap is where science begins for the intelligent design creationists that is the answer the gap is that's the answer it's done we're through and that's why it isn't science there's nothing to do with that ultimately so I go so far as to say there's no such thing as the paranormal or the supernatural there's just the normal the natural and all the stuff we can't explain yet and it's okay to say I don't know in science that's all right in fact it's a great thing I don't know good let's go find out so this god of the gaps problem is an interesting one in Newton's own time there was a problem that we might loosely call the problem with a plane why all the planets are in a plane the plane of the ecliptic they're all in this sort of flat disk going around in the same direction at least a Newton's time the planets roll they're you know they're on that flat plane except for Pluto which is no longer a planet so that's there's no longer and and so Newton couldn't figure out how using his theory of gravity how to explain why that would be and the Comets and so on so he wrote and his greatest work that principia mathematica Principia this most beautiful system of the Sun planets and comets could only proceed from the council and Dominion of an intelligent and powerful being now I'm I'm curious why don't intelligent design creationists quote this this is one of the greatest scientists in history from his greatest work he was a deeply religious man who wrote more on religion and theology and biblical interpretation that he ever wrote on science why don't they quote that and the answer is because we have a pretty good explanation now for why planets form around stars and in big discs and how interstellar clouds of gas condense upon atoms condensed upon each other from the force of gravity and as they do so they begin to spin as they begin to spin they begin to flatten into discs because the little asymmetries in the disk that become the stars and planets and so forth so we have an idea about this the gap is you know been filled you don't need that anymore so why is it that evolution still stands on these lines of skepticism for some people Darwin wondered this himself he wrote in the second edition of the Origin of Species I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feeling of anyone in a satisfactory as showing how transient such impressions are to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man namely the law of attraction of gravity was also attacked by Leibniz as subversive of natural and inferentially of revealed religion a celebrated author and divine has written to me that he has gradually learned to see that it is just as noble a conception of the deity to believe that he created a few original forms capable of self development into other and needful forms as to believe he required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the actions of his laws now that's 1860 so we're talking 100 and the second edition 18 49 years ago and yet people are still struggling with this so that's what my book is about by the way I should note that this is my first book with full frontal nudity on the cover there so you can get away with it if it's a different species because you know they're not really related to us and that's that's the problem people have of thinking of thinking of us is you know one of those guys and so this is the creationism of old leoric I thought I'd throw into this lecture so I worked on this this afternoon from my recent trip to the new creationism Museum in Kentucky you know there's an old one here in Santee just inland from where we are here but believe me this this thing here is a chicken farm compared to this Museum in Kentucky this thing is a thirty million dollar production I mean they have animatronic models of Adam and Eve for example sort of a Brooke Shields looking Blue Lagoon character with a this is before the fall and then you know the snake tempted her to taste of the fruit and then she tempted him they had a little roll in there a little roll in the hay there and sin was born and so we had to have a flood and so here's a the model of Noah's Ark the animals going to buy - except for that other passage that said it was seven by seven but didn't never mind that and the Ark isn't completely encase so it can you know flop around in the huge oceans and so here it is on the on the waters these are if you can see that these are little people left on the last rocks sticking out crying for help like we went on I call them the last of the left-behind errs and here's the Ark on another diorama these are dioramas you know like the but but the size of a small room and so the waters are now receding where did all that water come from in the first place there's not enough water to cover up all the continents so to get that calculation you have to have a canopy of water above the sky and water below and so after the canopy of the sky water comes down and it has to go somewhere so the cracks in the earth open up in the water floods in this is on merit Mount Ararat from which all those species radiated out and diverged in an amazing feat of punctuated evolution in the last few thousand years and yes they're on the ark are baby dinosaurs because it turns out that dinosaurs were all vegetarians before the fall and that whole thing was snake the snake and even all that and of course I'm pointed I was just being myself there at the Museum and I got a tour from one of the directors and I said but look at the teeth and the claws on the this velociraptor oh well the teeth were used to crack open coconuts okay but then because of the sin thing dinosaurs became meat-eaters and they killed the little baby dinosaurs and and all that so what is this really all about well as you wind your way through this museum they get to the climax of the little tour there in which it's it's all about sin original sin because it turns out and I thought it's appropriate for a large undergraduate university like this only one in three teens will continue to participate in church life once they're living on their own so once you go off to college that's where the downfall begins because they're in college you learn about science and there you learn that there's no heaven no hell just science inside the crusade against religion Bible verses science dying on your own terms this is a bad thing there's Terry Schiavo anyway that this this is a wall do you know the size of you know like this screen well there you go it's a better I'd fit gay marriages you know boy we're really going downhill now so this is the the logic that the Bible clearly says the earth is you know created well here I'll give you the slide for it there it is in 4004 BC about the same time the Babylonians invented beer by the way that's on that secular timescale I was told after I made that little joke there's two timescales there's the secular timescale and then there's the biblical timescale and the Bible clearly states 4004 BC well no actually it doesn't however you have to do some interpreting which they do but nevertheless they that's what they conclude and so everything was perfect and then everything fell apart so but Minh City R Li says what they think it clearly says once you concede that that point is wrong if you do if you say well geologists say it's you know like 4.6 billion years old that's wrong and it didn't happen in that particular order so Genesis is wrong once you concede that point then the rest of the Bible is wrong all the moral values are wrong and therefore there are no objective moral values at all and that leads to sex drugs and rock and roll and the decline of America going into hell in a handbasket with all those secular liberals out there corrupting our children in public schools that's that's why they're worried about evolution thank you guys it's almost like I believed it no really that's what they believe that's I mean why pick on why pick on Darwin in evolution when you saw in in Texas this week that they voted the legislation voted to include language in which students would have to be taught the strengths and weaknesses of scientific theories really like the weaknesses of the germ theory of disease that that weakness well no the weakness of plate tectonics no the weaknesses of you know gravity no evolution yeah that's the one so why that and that's because it touches directly on us and so of course this gets lampooned in editorial cartoons where the creationist in the middle there on the iconic linear progress graph here's Kansas Board of Education as the clown and the evolutionary sequence Kansas goes through a cycle of these rewriting the science standards for their students here's how you're now leaving Kansas intelligent design that's a W on that cowboy boot this is over about the Dover trial creationism in the disguise the lambswool of intelligent design being run by the monkey of the religious right holding the Bible off to the school board meeting warn the neighbors the carnivals back in town the case of Dover Pennsylvania recall that that's where the students were required to be read a single paragraph at the start of the lecture on evolution that essentially said you know there's other ideas out there like intelligent design and here's a interesting book pandas of people if you want to read it that it's at the library you know that sort of thing so that's what triggered a lawsuit that led to the Dover trial in which the judge Johnny Jones ruled against the the required teaching of that paragraph and that was a huge bug because he was a Bush appointee judge and he's a religious man and and he called intelligent design a breath-taking inanity which is one of the great lines of all time now here's another way of this teach both theories teach the controversy teach both theories chemistry and alchemy neurology and phrenology magic and physics and astrology and astronomy now I'll be teaching about intelligent design creationism tonight it's not that there's no place for us to discuss it of course this is America we have open discussion you know the bright light of sunshine is the best disinfectant for toxic ideas right so that that's fine but not in a science classroom if it's not science because if you let that in and what about all the other creation stories that want to be taught and pretty soon you're no longer teaching the science class you're teaching a comparative world religions comparative mythology fine teach the creation/evolution stuff and intelligent design in those classes or civics classes or current events classes or something like that that's the problem is that there's no science to teach I'm opting for creationism I mean what's ever Ellucian ever done for us we're not exactly accountants or lawyers are we always the monkeys this from the cartoon BC if man evolved from the ape how come they're still Apes around some of them were given choices the the artists author of BC is a sort of a young earth creationist I've been told and but but he's reflecting here one of the standard myths about evolutionary theory that you know if we came from apes then how come they're still Apes around and the answer is because we didn't come from apes Apes and humans have a common ancestor it's a branching tree not a linear ladder but the fact is we share 98% of our genes with our chimp cousins and and yet the myth is so strong that there are just it's just pervasive in our culture even in just skeletal displays like in an actual Museum it's presented in that left-to-right format as if we came from the gorillas which came for the chip so I guess that's a Narang which came from the chimp or maybe that's a it's a Gibbon on the far left chimp Arang gorillas us as if that's how it went and that isn't how it went and that's very deceptive and that's one of the myths people have and it very it confuses them the evolution of the band it's used for marketing I think this is a software company another software company social commentary that's homo European Union is on the right there this is back when the debate about that was still going on social commentary again social commentary the Segway more social commentary stolen by a game pinball game company the myth is religious commentary what is the Quran teach reverse evolution it's usually the iconography is almost always left to right which is interesting why we do that that goes from old to new this Way's just a convention in Western culture but occasionally you see it that way or and it's even jarring to the eye as if we're going backwards in time and of course that was the theme of the Planet of the Apes which turned out once he got there that in fact it was our own evolution that went backwards as it were but in fact the real story begins with Darwin's own first earliest writings on this in the eighteen late 1830s after he returned from the voyage of the Beagle in 1836 open a notebook and sketched I think that it's more like a tree a branching tree rather than a linear ladder of progress and so in the Origin of Species in the first edition there's a fold out comes out about that big that looks like that it's a richly branching tree and that's how Ernst Haeckel initially illustrated it in his popularized version of the theory for Darwin and the continent on the continent and that's a more accurate picture than his later one in which he put us at the pinnacle of mammalian and primate evolution with you know there we are right at the top and again that's so deceptive because it's it kind of implies that were that evolution is moving toward us in some teleological inevitable goal-directed ways just not not how it works in fact we're just you know one tiny twig here and that's just of the animals from a modern version and that is one of the ways we know that evolution happened was the rich fossil record we have and I call this the fossil fallacy or the fact that one one fact is not a science meg this comes from my initial first debate I did with Duane Gish one of the young earth creationists in which he was talking I knew his his slides would include something about whales you know from cows to whales an utter failure haha and just show me one transitional fossil sure Murray says this whoever each debate show me one transitional that particular week the discovery of ambulocetus Natanz a beautiful transitional fossil and whale evolution was published in science so I threw it up there and and this guy is so clever it's like you know here you have a fossil and here you have a fossil and there's a you know a gap you know just show me one transitional fossil so I go there and you'll er see this Nate ons and Eve without missing a beat he goes now there's two gaps in the fossil record the more data you have the worse your theory is right in fact we've got quite a few fossils on the sequence of whales now to fill in many of those gaps and and the same thing with one of the create creationists or intelligent design creationists more popular subjects is the so-called Cambrian explosion in Darwin's time is the sudden appearance and trilobite s-- and other fossils was indeed a mystery and intelligent designers continue to cite this outdated example and claim that the Cambrian explosion is one of the creation events in the bible the problem is that when a geologists call something an explosion they mean it rather differently than we mean it in common use they're talking millions and millions of years but even with that they're still abundant Precambrian fossils but they're microscopic and were missed until the 1940s these Bluegreen bacteria the santé bacteria came from rocks three-and-a-half billion years old and and are very similar to modern cyanobacteria from 3.5 billion years to about 700 million years ago there was no more form of life more complex than a single cell and the only mega scopic fossils are the dome-like cyanobacterial mats stromatolites so for 90% of life's history this was the planet of the scum around 700 million years ago we see the next logical step the multicellular but not skeletonized soft body animals known as the ediacara fauna and then at the beginning of the Cambrian we see the next logical step the little shelley small organisms which are skeletonized but nowhere near as big as trilobite and then of course finally we get to the Burgess Shale in Canada of the hard body and animals so the Cambrian explosion just the Cambrian Park took twenty over 20 million years and much longer than that if we go all the way back to the earliest fossils we can find you have to remember that most animals that die they just leave no trace at all all right so it's amazing we have any fossils and yet we still have an embarrassment of fossil riches one of my favorite slides of the very young Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard just going through the stacks and stacks of fossils just from his own area but let's just take one of one area our own favorite species again a richly branching Bush not that ladder of progress and we have quite a few fossils and even this is a little outdated I have to throw new slides in every six months or so with new finds but you know back to the last common ancestor between ourselves and the last common ancestor with modern Apes about six to seven million years ago and then the Australopithecus africanus at 3 to 4 million years ago Kenyon throw piss at 3 and a half million years Lucy at 3.2 Australopithecus afarensis Homo habilis at 1.9 million years ago Homo George Ducas 1.8 million years ago erectus 1.5 Neanderthal point-five and then the sort of earliest Out of Africa probably bottleneck population from which all of us come at about 160,000 years ago and which we and the an turtles live simultaneously for many tens of thousands of years and then they mysteriously went extinct and then the culmination of all evolution there it is so the question on the table in is life naturally designed or intelligently designed that's that's that's the question and part of the problem is the word design did it they kind of hijacked the word it's a good word intelligent design I have to hand it to my debate opponents they they really marketed that one cleverly it's better than the word creationism everybody gets designed wings are designed for flight eyes are designed for seeing yeah that makes sense design I get it it's one of the reasons they did so well but what it's really asking is is supernatural top-down design versus natural bottom-up design I mean Darwin's book was in many ways just a a rebuttal of or a refutation of William Paley's 1802 book natural theology and in that he talked about design from the top down and Darwin essentially said yes there's design but the design actually has a mechanism to explain it from the bottom up there's an interesting pedigree there by the way Adam Smith originally used the phrase in the the invisible hand before the Wealth of Nations when he talked about wrote a little essay about planets going Jupiter as if and they're held there as if by an invisible hand then he applied that idea to the economy and said it's like an invisible hand and I think in because Darwin studied Adam Smith when he was an undergraduate I think natural selection is in a way a metaphor like the invisible hand and it's equally deceptive and misleading because there's no hand in the economy at least there shouldn't be because we see what happens trying to control things too much and and really the origin species opens with the first chapter is about artificial selection breeders breeding pigeons intelligently designing the selection process to get certain characteristics that they want and then he transitions from metaphor to saying this is what nature is like but in fact it isn't like that there's nobody selecting anything in nature there's no intelligent breeders and so this is the problem we have again in trying to get people to accept evolution they they they met in selection they think selection right like a breeder no no one intelligent designer up there so that's part of the problem we struggle with language metaphor misunderstandings misuses of words and that we're still facing in any case we know design is natural not supernatural in lots of areas of nature I gave the example of the planets and Newton's time nobody frets about solar systems anymore or any of these examples of natural design in the organic world it's only when it when it when it gets to more complex designs that the problem comes in so we take like the whales flipper is intelligently designed or naturally designed well it does look like an intelligently designed flipper until you strip the flesh off and see that in fact it has a history wit and the history you can trace in the skeleton why would a designer presumably intelligent engineer of some kind and architect of life you used the same structure for so many different animals this the whole tetrapod for limb that appears over and over again is good enough to get the job done but it's not an amazing design a remarkable design and intelligent design it looks like it has a history to it and that's why we see in these convergence of evidence from different lines of inquiry the hummingbird and the way look a get more dramatic than that these by the way are not to scale and the hind limb why would an intelligent designer put a hind limb in a whale it's not even articulated to the bow there's no connect it's just floating and flesh does nothing there you can see it there held on by wires or vestigial structures like in the Cretaceous take snake packing rack is problematic as' of over 60 million years ago had hind legs and snakes no longer have those or the vestigial legs and snakes and whales so the problem is we can explain vestigial structures from evolutionary theory based on history how does the intelligent design theory explain it things like wings on flightless birds the human tailbone wisdom teeth male nipples the human appendix I did want to have one personal picture in this slideshow come on that's my appendix there they often say well you know evolutions not a science because it's not testable Oh baloney you show me some mammal fossils in the same bedding planes as trilobites in the Cambrian and then we'd have a real problem that would be a big setback that would be a bit of contradictory evidence for the theory of evolution and yet that never happens this was JBS Haldane famous remark about you know fossil rabbits in the camry ok so something like that a radical discontinuity in the fossil sequence as we understand it and it gets worse than that for the creationist that is modern organism should show a variety of structures from simple to complex reflecting evolutionary history eyes have evolved numerous times of various complexities and likewise biological structure should show signs of natural design not intelligent design the eye in fact is built upside down and backwards your rods and cones are at the back of your retina they'll sort of layer in the back where there's rods and cones facing that direction in which there's bipolar cells and ganglion cells on top of those and then all the goop and blood vessels and stuff and then the stuff in your eyeball and then 'men the reason for that is because they weren't plucked in their you know by mr. potato designer they evolved out from a neural tissue from embryological neuro tissue coming out from the inside out not outside in so they show a history in fact that's how we know this convergence of evidence is a powerful idea again back to that fossil fallacy show me one transitional fossil well evolution is not proof through one bit of data it's proof through you know tens of thousands of pieces of data to converge just like take the different dating techniques you know a creationist always think they can get you you know I read this paper or you know carbon-14 dating is inaccurate yeah well let me see the paper first and what were they dating and what would the error bars and you know there's been hundreds of thousands of artifacts carbon-14 dated you know yes there are error bars the process gets better and so on but it isn't just fourteen-day we have all these other dating techniques so if it was true that we found that say the age of the earth was 4.6 billion in the age of the Sun was you know four thousand years yeah okay that would be a problem for us but that never happens never happens that they're always fairly consistent yes there's little variations from measurement error but never these big discontinuities in the data that you would expect if the creationists are intelligent design people were true so evolutionary theory is true we know because provisionally truth's multi it explains how design happened naturally from the bottom up it's convergent independent lines of inquiry jump to the same conclusion predicts new findings that have been confirmed empirically so life was designed from the bottom up not the top down natural design not intelligent design evolution not creation now that's or that sort of the end of the short version of this first for kids then begin to looking at that's my alien sound effects sorry now I want to talk about some of the background to why I think people believe this what their arguments are their best case arguments but first let's just take let's just take seriously their idea that the intelligent designer need not be a God it could be anything it could be a space alien alright let's take that hypothesis seriously seriously which I did with tongue firmly in cheek in which I called an essay in Scientific American schirmer's last law because the first shall be last and the last shall be first or some biblical thing like that and that is any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God all right so let's say we go in search of this intelligent designer let's say it turns out we we really can't explain the first cells on earth and we find evidence let's say there's a pod on the moon or something hey there's an idea for a science fiction film we find something on the moon or out in the desert blythe or something and and it turns out that the aliens from the planet Vega because I'm pretty sure I saw that in Star Trek somewhere came here and they seeded the earth with the first complex cells and then and then evolution took over or something like that let's say that turned out to be the case well that would end the discussion on how life on Earth started but it wouldn't solve the problem of how life began period because where did the bagans come from that's what a scientist would want to know well that's really interesting and now we got to get more funding from NASA so we can send a spacecraft to Vega to check out the aliens but but where did they come from and let's say turns out oh well they were seated there from these in Drammen and Galaxy aliens okay that's interesting but where did those guys come from and it's you see where I'm going with this at some point you have to have a bottom-up natural process to explain how life begin unless you want to go all the way back and step outside of space and time and assume some supernatural entity which is what theologians end up doing but my point of this little exercise thought experiment is that what experiment would we ever run to tell the difference between a really smart alien that could construct life-forms which we're practically able to do I mean the other human genome guy that Francis Collins but J craig Venter is you know this close to announcing the discovery the creation of a new life-form in the laboratory self-replicating molecules the whole thing well if we're practically able to do this think of what an alien could do that was only say 500 years ahead of us in terms of biotechnology and genetic engineering or 5,000 years ahead of us or 50,000 years ahead of us you know if we encounter aliens right they're not going to be like 10 years ahead of us like they think of Roswell you know the Roswell aliens the aliens came and crashed at Roswell and gave us transistor technology that's what they think it's like just slightly ahead of vacuum tubes Wow they managed to traverse the vast incitive interstellar space on slightly better than vacuum tube technology and of course you know they're not gonna be bipedal primate s'right with gnarly stuff on their forehead speaking English with an Indian accent these are largely driven by you know Wardrobe Hollywood wardrobe restrictions so whatever gonna be like there could be so so far advanced from us they really would be indistinguishable from God so even the search for the intelligent designer by looking for clues I came as a fruitless exercise that that could never result in anything but finding an alien so in other words this gets back to the old human question of of explaining causality and simply asking well then who designed God or the designer so if the world is complex and looks intricately designed and therefore the best inference is that there must be an intelligent designer by the same logic we should infer that an intelligent designer must itself have been a designed by a superior intelligent designer and by the same course of reasoning any designer who can create a superior intelligent designer must itself be a super superior intelligent designer itself been created by a super-duper superior intelligent designer ad infinitum so this is what demske says intelligent design is a strictly scientific theory devoid of religious commitments whereas the Creator underlying scientific creationism conforms to a strict literalist interpretation of the Bible the designer underlying intelligent design need not even be a deity well I just showed that that that's not going to get them anywhere and in any case they don't actually believe that right you just sit and have beer and pizza with them which I have done and a couple of beers boy they really tell you what they think and and they they're all they believe in the God of Abraham they do their right so in fact demske himself said thus in its relation to Christianity intelligent design should be viewed as a ground clearing operation that gets rid of the intellectual rubbish that for generations has kept Christianity from receiving serious consideration right so they're embarrassed by the Dwain Gish's the young earth creationists the silly museums when the ark and all that they want to take they want to place at the table with the big boys and the serious scientists and they're not going to get that unless they can appear to be doing real science thank Philip Johnson they're sort of grandfather of this whole movement this from an interview in church and state magazine Johnson calls his movement the wedge the objective he said is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic thus shifting the debate from creationism versus evolution of the existence of God versus the non-existence of God from there people are introduced to the truth of the Bible and then the question of sin and finally introduced to Jesus so this is their mo this is what they want this is they can't all that in public schools obviously so enter there are three big arguments so I'll give you the three these are all in my book in the detailed arguments that give citations of all their papers and books and then all the refutation is by scientists over the years so the first argument irreducible complexity this is comes from Michael be a biochemist at Lehigh University and irreducibly complex structure cannot arise by a gradual process of incremental complexity all its parts need to be together to work so it must have been the result of an intelligent designer and he's the one who introduced the mousetrap it has to have those parts to it you have to have those five parts to make the mousetrap work oh yeah well here's a mousetrap with four parts three parts two parts even one part this is from John MacDonald's illustrations just because ideas can't figure out how it happened doesn't mean it can't happen we're back to the pyrimidines and just because they can't figure out how the pyramids were built I mean it's just a pile of rocks guys I mean really anyway that's a different frustration their second argument the design inference all right so my favorite example to face on Mars the the Apollo just got very excited about this when the Viking spacecraft photographed that and there's been you know dozens of books published about the Martian monumental architecture designed for us to see the face anyway so the kind folks at JPL when they sent the 2,000 spacecraft there they took up-close photograph just to get those guys off their back and sure enough it's just a mountain range eroded but if you squint you can see the face pop back out again there's the eyes there's the nose there's a mouth and by squinting you're reducing the granularity of the data back to a coarse grain like the first one and then your facial recognition module kicks in and you see faces right everybody sees faces so we know that's an artifact of nature yet nobody would look at Mount Rushmore and go oh wow look at the incredible coincidence okay that's their argument that's a reasonable argument I mean there's an inference of design that we intuitively make and we'd be right about that and they their other favorite example is you know Carl Sagan's contact and Jodie Foster with earphones and the prime numbers come beeping in from the aliens clearly there's no neutron star rotating black hole anything like that's it's gonna pump out prime numbers that's an intelligent signal in the noise okay that's the argument so demske zone little graph here that you start there on the left with whatever it is you want to explain it is it highly probable if no you go down to the next one if yes highly probable it's probably due to law if it's the intermediate probability you then ask if it's possible by chance and if yes then it's chance but if it's a specified if it's a very low probability event it's very specified then we would infer that if it's not specified then this chance if it is specified then you infer design okay so here's a whole book about this it goes on in our very very detail the problems with the explanatory filter are this it assumes probabilities that cannot be determined in practice how would you apply that to say DNA what's the algorithm you're going to use to say that below that level we'll say it's law and chance above that level we'll say it's design to to eliminate all necessity and chance explanations assume that we know all the configurations of them for whatever natural thing you want to talk about wings or eyes or whatever we don't intelligent design is not simply the elimination of necessity and chance in any case so remember the law of the excluded middle you can't just debunk the other guy's idea you can say well theory a is wrong therefore my my theory is right you actually have to have positive evidence in favor of your theory not just that law and chance doesn't explain that and for by the logic of the explanatory filter we should apply it to the designs designer and here we go back to that argument again a necessity and chance rejected for the designs designer the conclusion is that the designs designer was designed and finally the ultimate answer to the design inference is to provide a cogent theory of natural designer we have that we know languages are designed from the bottom up not the top down I mean no one design English to sound the way it does today 500 years ago where you know by where I live they use the word like every three words markets and economies are designed from the bottom up not the top down the universe itself is so organized water is a self-organized emergent property of hydrogen oxygen consciousness is a self-organized emergent property of billions of neurons firing and patterns complex life itself is a self-organized emergent property of simpler life prokaryote cells evolved into eukaryote cells at least if you accept Margolis is theory of symbiogenesis which I do and I think there's a workable model there of a nice gradual Darwinian sequence and complexity and finally I think their best argument to fine-tune in throat pick principle that is you can find plenty of you know world-class scientists or not at all creationists may even be atheist oh my gosh like Sir Martin Rees in his book just six numbers where he talks about the amazing sort of fine tunas of the universe like Omega 1 the amount of matter in the universe such that if Omega was greater than one would have collapsed long ago and if a mega was less than 1 no galaxies would have form you have to have just the right amount of stuff to epsilon point zero zero seven that is how firmly atomic nuclei bind together such that if epsilon were pointy rows zero six or point zero zero eight matter could not exist as it does not just that there'd be some other life form you couldn't even get atoms to be structured and therefore no molecules three dimensions obviously have to have three dimensions not two or four and is the 10 to the 36 the ratio of the strength of gravity to that of electromagnetism such that if it had just a few less zeros the universe would be too young and too small for life to evolve life takes to get to intelligent life it takes the billions of years you have to have a universe that evolves along for for quite a while q1 over 100,000 the fabric of the universe such that if ki were smaller the universe would be featureless and if ki were larger the universe would be dominated by giant black holes so you have this delicate balance and the fabric of the universe so you can get stars and planets and therefore life than planets and then finally lambda point seven the cosmological constant or the anti-gravity force that is causing the universe to expand at an accelerating rate such as lambda were larger it would have prevented stars and galaxies from forming okay there's nothing particularly controversy about those these are not numbers claimed by creationists these are just standard all physicists know about these okay so what's our explanation what's our how do we respond to that well one the universe isn't so finely tuned is it only a few regions of the universe are hospitable to life and most of these are only for a brief history during the history of the universe so in fact due to the accelerating expansion as billions of years of go by life will have a harder and harder time surviving so this idea that somehow boy God made this universe just for us boy it's so hospitable no actually it isn't there's hardly any places you could live okay well they have a rebuttal to that yeah that's right that's a miracle earth that's it okay well that's why Kepler the new spacecraft is gonna be so important how many earth-like planets are there probably a lot but we'll see too well different physics different life I mean Sagan used to say we're carbon chauvinists you know we were so locked into the our own biochemistry that perhaps different universes or a different configuration of the laws and constants of our universe could produce a different kind of life you know we don't know that much we're not emissions right so carbon Chauvin it's hard for us to think of other kinds of life Stephen Weinberg tells me that in fact he's not particularly worried about it because he thinks there might be an underlying principle behind all the fine-tuned equations and relationship that will be forthcoming when the grand unified theory of physics is discovered not six mysterious numbers just one you know the one on the t-shirt the single equation that's it that's the only mystery we got to explain well okay you can still use that for a god argument yes it's true but but maybe there aren't a whole suite of these problems maybe that maybe there's just one my my favorite answer to it is the multiverse that is the multiverse in a way multiple bubble universes with different laws of nature in other words the next natural step from in our sort of history of cosmology this is sort of a history of science argument it begins with the earth is the universe with God just outside looking in this wasn't that long ago back when the Babylonians were drinking beer and that's you know that was their cosmology and that that is in fact this is the Babylonian cosmology which by the way the Hebrews adopted under the Babylonian captivity which is what Genesis 1 through 14 is it's Babylonian cosmology we can see that you can see the the canopy there's the water that opens up in these little holes and the flood in the left to the Earth centered solar system as the entire universe to the sun-centered solar system as the entire universe this is the Ptolemaic system the Copernican system and this is Tycho Brahe haze modified version that's kind of interesting actually you got all that but it was wrong so the Milky Way is the entire known universe in 1903 this picture is from Alfred Russel Wallace book Alfred Russel Wallace co-discoverer of natural selection with darin wrote a book in 1903 that basically argued were alone we're alone he said because the universe is pretty small look it's only the radius is only 1,200 light-years it's it's pretty small there can't be that many planets and to get from bacteria to big brain takes a long time with a lot of little things that have to happen and the chances that happening somewhere else are so slim he concluded we're alone in the universe the entire universe in 1903 was twelve hundred light-years in radius that's pretty small in 1923 Hubble finally using the 100-inch telescope right up Mount Wilson above my house in Pasadena there found the first variable these are Cepheid variable stars that predictably expand and contract and so you can measure their light consistently and they become a standard candle so you can know exactly how far away they are and he had been working on new technologies with the hundred inch at Mount Wilson to finally identify them in another one of these little fuzzy patches that everybody thought were probably in the Milky Way galaxy these are so-called nebulae and he was the first to show that in fact these Cepheid variables were inside those patches but far away not within tens of thousands of light years within our universe but in some other universe they called these Island universes we call them galaxies that's just 1923 isn't that long ago - the steady state universe of the 1950s - the Big Bang beginning accelerating an expanding universe to today and just look at the kind of the sequence in it slides of of just how much grander our scope of perspective on the universe has become from the earth to the Earth Moon to our own little solar system to our solar system with a Kuiper belt so that going as its fans further out the Voyager spacecraft by the way the two of them hurtling along at 70,000 miles an hour won't get to the next star for about 70,000 years if they were going to the closest one and they're not that's a long time to sit there with your tray table down and your seat back back I mean this is why the aliens haven't come here it's mostly just empty space there's nothing out there for the longest time and and so our Oort cloud of comets way way up there the nearest stars again if the Voyager spacecraft we're going there - Alpha Centauri Proxima Centauri they're not that far away they're only a few light-years away but again at that speed it would still take 70,000 years to our local group of stars so now we're just talking about a few tens of light years - a few hundred light years of where we begin to see some little bit of structure in our galaxy until we can finally make out a few of the belts in the arms of our own little galaxy there - the galaxy itself which looks a lot like the Andromeda galaxy when we look at it it's similar to what the Milky Way galaxy probably looks like obviously we don't have any pictures of it because we're in it - just our local just the local smallest galaxies around here like this the larger than small Magellanic Clouds you can see from the southern hemisphere so we're talking about a few hundreds of thousands of light years to the Andromeda galaxy that Hubble first looked at it was just it's relatively close actually by standards but back in 23 that was a long ways away we're talking several million light-years away a local cluster of galaxies to the super cluster of galaxies to the entire known universe at about 13.7 billion years so when we talk about that it's really just time it's that's how long it took the light to get here so the next natural step then would be multiple bubble universes okay we don't have any evidence for the multiverse yet but here's the argument that different universes will have different laws of nature any universes that have laws of nature like ours that give rise to planets stars and planets and so on some stars will have will become black holes and when black holes collapse they collapse into a singularity an infinitely dense point well if Hawking is right that that that this is how the universe might have begun at a single point of singularity and exploded into a big bang out of the quantum foam fluctuation it's possible that when stars collapse into black holes that create other universes maybe and those universes then will give rise to give birth to universes that have laws of nature that give rise to stars and therefore they'll have more universes like that so that baby universes they'll be it's a Darwinian selection process and those universes that don't have laws of nature that give rise to matter won't have stars they won't get black holes they won't have baby universes they'll go extinct this is Lise Mullins idea his book is called the life of the cosmos it's a Darwinian explanation okay we don't have proof of it yet but you have to remember the other side has no proof either so if we're speculating anyway it's okay to at least try to ground it in something like science and so in conclusion science tells us that we are but one among hundreds of millions of species that evolved over the course of three and a half billion years on one tiny planet among many orbiting an ordinary star itself one of possibly billions of solar systems in an ordinary galaxy that contains hundreds of billions of stars itself located in a cluster of galaxies not so different for millions of other galaxies clusters themselves whirling away from one another in an accelerating and expanding cosmic bubble universe that very possibly is only one among a near infinite number of bubble universes to believe that this entire cosmological multiverse was designed and created for one tiny subgroup of a single species on one planet in a lone galaxy and that solitary bubble universe is anthropocentric ly absurd instead science elevates us all to a higher plane of humanity and humility that we are in this limited time and space together a momentary proscenium in the drama the cosmos and I'll just read the last paragraph from why Darwin matters so herein lies the spiritual side of science it's Scientology if you'll pardon awkward neologism but one that echoes the sensuality of discovery if religion and spirituality are supposed to generate aw and humility in the face of the Creator what could be more awesome and humbling than the deep space discovered by Hubble and the cosmologists and the deep time discovered by Darwin and the evolutionist Darwin matters because evolution matters evolution matters because science matters in science matters because it is the preeminent story of our age an epic saga about who we are where we came from and where we're going thank you [Applause] [Music] you you

Channel: University of California Television (UCTV)

Views: 89,218

Keywords: Darwin, Evolution, Intelligent, Design, Skeptic, Creationism

Id: kFxxrcoaIII

Length: 58min 38sec (3518 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2009