Molecular Machines and the Death of Darwinism

tonight we're gonna be hearing from a six pack of rabid scientists and I'm including myself in that number all of us share a common love for science and for finding out how the world around us works but our backgrounds are very diverse from the most philosophical to the most empirical from the most mathematical to the most biological we'll be here tonight to talk about intelligent design molecular machines and to answer all but the stupid questions that you have tonight and as Craig mentioned my name is Jed macaws CO and it is my privilege to be able to introduce to you the other five members of the six-pack two of us have been asked to give in-depth talks tonight and I'll be introducing those two first the other four of us will be around after the break to answer questions so first I would like to introduce to you dr. Fritz Shafer dr. Fritz Shafer like me attended MIT then went on to Berkeley our sorry Stanford first hmm I'm thinking of myself here where he got his PhD in a mere two and a half years he was immediately hired by Berkeley which is very unusual for somebody finishing their PhD and he spent time there from 1987 sorry from 1967 to 1987 roughly in 1987 he went to the University of Georgia where he is now the grand Purdue professor of chemistry and the director of the Center for computational quantum chemistry he's the author of over thousand peer-reviewed articles jaws drop oh man I know how you do that and was the sixth most cited chemist in a pool of over six hundred thousand that's better than the people on the apprentice just so you know so that's that's very good and my favorite fact about dr. Schaefer is that he was a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize which is kind of the scientific equivalent of being nominated for the presidential candidate so you can kind of imagine what kind of a guy this is and he's gonna be here tonight sharing about his love for science and his desire to see more people with a theistic mind with a CA theistic worldview in the sciences so let's welcome up dr. Fritz Shaffer I was born on the same day same year close I you're a young guy four or five days younger than I am I think so so thanks to Jed for all the hard work and for Lyn Puli is Lyn here is she willing to identify herself maybe she's so exhausted she's gone home anyway thanks to Jed and to Lyn for arranging this wonderful meeting my hat goes off to Phil Johnson I wanted to check this was Phil for sure but I am the person in this auditorium I think who is known feel longer than anyone else including his wife Kathy I met Phil in 1977 when we were both faculty members at Berkeley shortly after Phil had become a Christian and and our friendship has endured and and flourished over the years and I'm very very proud to consider him one of my closest friends here's my title for tonight and as Jed is indicated my goal is at least in part to appeal to the young people here with the the thought of a certain sort of missionary work namely being a missionary to a secular University as a science faculty member so we're going to talk about that a little bit let this is also the title of of a book that I've just written this year and and I think Phil will appreciate my saying that this book began in a in an irregular way I was teaching freshman chemistry at Berkeley for the first time I think was the spring of 1983 I hadn't done this before even though I've been a faculty member at Berkeley for 14 years and the freshman class is 680 students actually that's how many we put in the auditorium on the first day we know that a hundred and some will disappear so they have to sit in the aisles and things like that for the first first class and I had never taught a class of 700 students before so I was a little concerned beforehand and but I had the the lecture very carefully organized indeed choreographed now the wonderful thing I'm telling Jed something he already knows but nobody else knows this here I think maybe Phil does the physical sciences lecture hall at the University of California at Berkeley has a stage divided in three parts remember this Jed and it's it's awesome because one-third is exposed to the audience and the other two-thirds are beyond the curtain the veil as it were and the things so great about this is you can be preparing your demonstrations for well at least one hour in advance and usually two hours in advance and then at the magic moment the stage somebody presses a button the stage twirls around and there you are in front of some vast number of students all ready to go to knock their socks off and this the thing that was particularly nice about my first semester teaching freshman chemistry was that there was nobody in the auditory in the very next hour so I could be talking of the students and my assistant Lonnie Martin a bachelor's Lonnie is still there - boy that guy just keeps on going Lonnie could be working behind the the the stage and getting something really neat set up and then at just the right time I'd holler - Lonnie he pressed the button and he twirl around and when you do that the first time you know the students have never seen it's a pretty awesome experience you know you see the professor sort of disappearing into the into the into the black hole behind the and then you see somebody else coming up so I had myself perfectly ready to speak for 45 minutes on the concept of the mole for those of you who are into that the kind of thing very advanced concept in freshman chemistry and the idea was when I'm done with my 45 minutes I'm gonna call the Lonnie he's gonna press the button he's gonna come around and he's going to display something totally awesome he's going to have a dozen different samples of common chemical substances 10 moles of each obviously water mercury wasn't so expensive back then maybe some lead ethyl alcohol of course that reagent of most interest to the Berkeley students and and so Lonnie was gonna come around I poppin experience for these kids I was gonna explain I was gonna get back on his part of the stage and asked that incredible question what do all these compounds have in common and they all look quite different in the instruct or tsa's they all have exactly the same number of molecules and illumination was going to come over the students and the rest of the semester was going to be a huge success well I finished in 40 minutes instead of 45 my prepared remarks and I really didn't have anything else to say so I called to Lonnie in the hopes that he would have the moles ready and we could spend some time describing the moles and nothing happened nothing happened Lonnie's a really nice guy I was surprised when nothing happened yet knows Lonnie's a good guy so I hollowed out a little bit louder Lonnie bring on the moles students still don't know what's gonna happen so I haven't haven't spoiled I mean they know there's somebody named Lonnie somewhere around there that's gonna do something but that's about it no response well then I started walking around to the to the scientists and Lonnie what's going on back there and he said prof you said 45 minutes the moles are gonna be ready in five minutes just like you ordered and I said well what am I supposed to do and he said well shuck and jive prof so I talked and that this was not choreographed I told the students well let me let me share with you something happened to me in church yesterday morning 680 students were very quiet I said I was I was in church and I was in Bible study and they became even more quiet that really did and I'm you know I'm looking at these kids in there thinking oh we've heard they're all these nuts at Berkeley and you know here he is and and I said I had shared with the with the Bible class that I was gonna be speaking for 680 students never had a class of more than 200 pretty concerned about it and thinking I would get some some sympathy possibly even prayer know the leader of the Bible study and I'm telling all this through the fresh man trying to do what Lani told me to do I'm just this is just all coming out spontaneously and I said the leader of the Bible study told a story about how his uh his freshman chemistry instructor beat his wife kicked the dog and every other bad thing you could do so not exactly a jump start and then he proceeded to ask the rhetorical question which was very new at the time this is 1983 the rhetorical question being what is the difference between a dead dog lying in the middle of the road and a dead chemistry professor lying in the middle of the road and these students I mean now they just started or or just you know they didn't know what the answer was but just the concept of a dead dog lying in the middle of the road was was a tremendous thing and that took a couple minutes which is good because I was running out of things to say and when they settled down a little bit I explained that the Bible teacher had said difference between a dead dog lying in the middle of the road and a dead chemistry professor lying in the middle of the road is that there are skid marks in front of the dead dog and by the time they stopped laughing Lonnie was around with the molds they were they were their bean I was looking out at these students saying you know I'm not sure I'm gonna like this class so much I'm trying to imagine in my own mind what they're thinking and it came clear to me they're thinking you know if this guy will run down on the last week of classes you know it probably doesn't have anybody else that can make up a final exam it'd have to pass us all and we could just skip you know the hardest part of the semester well we we did have the moles it went down well and class was over and about a hundred students came down to the front and fifty of them wanted to know the answer to the canonical question which hole do we punch in this registration card in order to get in freshman chemistry and I was able to answer that question fairly well and then those fifty went off there's 50 left and I'm wondering myself what are these 50 people doing one young man comes right up in my face you know Berkeley students can be pretty obnoxious and they're very polite at the University of Georgia let me just say that but but as I was telling somebody here today I've taught more than 10,000 freshman chemistry students at the University of Georgia and not one football player this kid comes right up in my face and he says prof there's something I need to tell you that's well all right he says the most inspiring person in my life the person who is most inspired me all my life was my high school chemistry teacher last year and I said we don't get a lot of stories like that I said you have really made my day you know this is this is just a great thing and I said well that was the good news you ready for the bad news and I said well that news was so good I can probably take the bad news he said the bad news is that this guy that I idolized told me it was impossible to be a scientist and a Christian and I wasn't quite sure where you were going with your comments here but it seems like you think otherwise and I said I did and he was not very happy but he he wandered off now there 25 left okay a young lady comes up and thankfully doesn't get as close as that guy was I have been married for 37 and a half years and there's several people here who know my wife so no racy stories are gonna be told here tonight this young lady comes up and says prof we could use you well if you're at Berkeley and somebody says something like that to you you need to hang on to your wallet or be very cautious and I said hmm okay and you know she seemed friendly and what what do you have in mind who's the we and what sort of use are you planning to put to me she said well I I'm one of the leaders of a group called InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and we want you to come and explain to our group the answer to that young man's question is it possible to be a scientist and a Christian and I said what do I have to do well you just show up get ready to talk for about 40 minutes I'll take care of the auditorium I'll get the crowd somehow and you do it and that's how this began this book began some 21 years ago and I actually never really thought the book was gonna make it until last May 23rd I was I was told that I needed to report to the hospital in about 30 minutes for quintuple bypass surgery and before they took me under I had a little chat with my son because the book was about 80% done and I said Ted my sons had just graduated from Vanderbilt University very able young man said Ted if I come out on the other side of the dark river be sure to get this book published he looked at me with a very pained look and I don't know if he was really worried I was gonna be on the other side of the dark river I just didn't like the idea of writing the last twenty percent of the book but in the goodness of God I came through it and and I got out of the hospital about six days and hopefully now phil has had an experience like this so he knows what I'm talking about basically nobody expected to me do anything for months classes were over you know I was it was summertime nobody was expecting anything and I decided that you know really wasn't confident how many more days I had to go on this planet so in two weeks I finished the book and and then I'd been thinking about if I ever did finish this book what would I do with it and I thought well I do this standard stuff that everybody does I'd ask Phil Johnson my friend Chuck Colson where I should publish it and all that well I'm no longer sure I'm gonna be around when the proofs roll in on this book so I took it over to my friend George Smith at the University of Georgia printing and he printed the book in one month and so then we have we have a book that wouldn't have existed otherwise put doubt in rather short order now we are always looking for PhD students I see people on that side and on that side that are candidates chemistry majors I can tell there are several of them out there yeah I have never I've had 73 successful PhD students not a one from Biola so I hope this will this will break the curse and you can see they've built a wonderful building for us there it's a great place to do scientific research and I hope that some from Biola will come and join us now the one and only purpose of my talk tonight is to yes the question that young man raised 21 years ago is it possible to be a scientist and a Christian and of course other people are more aggressive they just come out and say things like well we all know the science has disproved God Richard Dawkins certainly one who would fall in that category I do want to try to put this discussion in a little bit broader context before I start and pointing out that science has had its challenges struggles fights with other intellectual disciplines as well perhaps some of you are familiar with this book called literature by Gallagher and in London and they talk about trouble between science and literature they say because in recent history literature has often found itself in opposition to science i'ma say it's it's it's it's a problem and they are not vague about this they give an example they they give as example Keats famous English Romantic poet and he he didn't like science he didn't like science he thought he thought that the Newtonian worldview is what we had this was still the age of classical mechanics what would be a world in which myth and poetic vision had vanished and would make the universe a cold and uninviting place and in his his poem la mia famous poem he talks about this and here let me say give you just a little bit of this poem that the word he uses for science is philosophy so whenever he uses the word philosophy he means science maybe I'll destroy the meter and just say science that way nobody will miss it Keats do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold science there was an awful rainbow once in heaven we knew her Woolf her texture she is given in the doll catalog of common things science will clip an angel's wings conquer all mysteries by rule and line empty the Haunted air and no mine unweave a rainbow so there has been a problem between literature and and science and let me point out no we don't have very many literature people at this conference we got a lot of philosophers I mean these the woods are full of these guys I'll tell you and you know I they they are not my favorites among the people at the conference they just have to be honest about it you know these these guys give us scientists a really hard time and this is all who are philosophers will understand this I'm going to quote my former colleague Paul fire abend fact a philosophy professor at at Berkeley wouldn't have him down at the bottom here I think he died about 10 he was an unusual character in it yeah and these philosophers are nodding he was a strange character we don't need to go into that that's longer than the dead dog story but is there a conflict between science and philosophy fire abend said absolutely in the end the the phrasing of it is remarkable he says the rise of modern science coincides with the suppression of non-western tribes by Western invaders the tribes are not only physically suppressed but also lose their intellectual independence are forced to adopt the bloodthirsty religion of of brotherly love Christianity yeah he doesn't mince words it said today this development is gradually reversed but science still reigns supreme he does not consider this to be a good thing thus while an American can now choose the religion he likes he is still not permitted to demand his children learn magic rather than science at school and yet science has no greater authority than any other form of life is there a conflict between science and philosophy Paul fire Robin certainly thought so the young man who addressed me so aggressively that that morning at Berkeley could just as well have been CS Lewis some my goodness fifty fifty-five years earlier Louis writes in the autobiography of his early life surprised by joy an interesting book talks about why he was an atheist for a long period of time before about age 29 or 30 Lewis says you'll understand that my atheism was inevitably based on what I believed to be the findings of the sciences and those findings not being a scientist I had to take on trust in fact on Authority in other words somebody told me science had disprove God and since I never took a science course in my entire life I believed that person and thought that I ought to be an atheist I've got way too much material here and but I don't want a short give short shrift to to my atheist colleagues so let's let's take a juicy one here okay this is many of you will probably know that Chandrasekar was one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century born in India but spent most of his his life as a professor at the University of Chicago editor of the Astrophysical Journal much correspondence of a non controversial time type between myself and Chandrasekar and his biography has been written by his close friend Wally and and I recommend it to everyone this is about 10 years old now she understand has been been dead for about five years and the most interest everybody who's read this book agrees the most interesting part of it is at the end where there is an actual interview between the author and the subject and it starts out this way with Chandrasekar he says in fact I consider myself an atheist but I have a feeling of disappointment because the hope for contentment and a peaceful outlook on life as a result of pursuing a goal has remained largely unfulfilled and and having been to India six times in China five times I'll tell you that these are the goals the great goals of the east contentment and a peaceful outlook so he have them and his biographer is pretty shocked even though he knows Chandrasekar well he says what I don't understand you mean single-minded pursuit of science understanding parts of nature and comprehending nature with such enormous success still leaves you with the feeling of discontentment Chandrasekar is holding firm I really don't have a sense of fulfillment all I have done seems not to be very much and then the biographer wants to lighten this up yeah this is getting way too heavy for the last couple pages of the book and he says don't you think everybody has the same problem but Chandrasekar is giving no ground he says that maybe but the fact that other people experience it doesn't change the fact that one is experiencing it it doesn't become less personal on that account and his last statement is something for every person who wants to be a scientist to think about no matter what their worldview is this is under state cars final statement what is true from my own personal case is I simply don't have that sense of harmony which I had hoped for when I was young and I have persevered in science for over fifty years the amount of time I have devoted to other things is minuscule do you think science is a way to find a completely fulfilling life I advise you to reach under state cars books so this is the question we want to to ask this is the question I was asked 21 years ago and the main question I've been trying to answer ever since the answer to this question is yes and just to show you I'm not making this up let me quote CP snow very famous extended essay he wrote 1958 I think is the date for this the two cultures CP snow kind of an interesting guy he was a cambridge faculty member not entirely successful he was a spectroscopy which is indeed a noble calling but it wasn't a great spectroscopy but it was good or he wouldn't been on the faculty Cambridge and he never made professor and when he turned about 40 years old he decided he needed to do something new so he write it I started to write novels these were not filthy Danielle Steel type novels these are good novels that some of these are still in print get a hold of his novel called the Masters it sounds like a science fiction or something it's a it's a story of intrigue there's a murder in it about life and in the college system the masters are the bosses of the colleges at Cambridge anyway he says in this it gets near the end of his career he's been writing novels he's much more famous for that he's been a moderately successful scientist he gets and he wants to bring some unity to his life so he writes this essay relating the world of science to the world of arts and humanities and he writes as such she says so statistically I suppose slightly more scientists are in religious terms unbelievers compared with the rest of the intellectual world but there are plenty more religious and that seems to be so especially among the young and Richard Fineman an atheist to his dying day refused to go to his father's funeral because a rabbi presided and that was offensive to him but nine years before he got the Nobel Prize he made this statement many scientists do believe in both science and God the God of Revelation he's about what kind of a God he's talking about in a perfectly consistent way so it certainly is possible one could go beyond that and cite Alan Lightman who I think has written the definitive work on this on this topic origins lives and worlds of modern cosmologists and I'll just jump to the he took the Dan Rather approach to to this this question he bought a tape recorder traveled all around the world talked to famous physicist and asked them what they thought about ultimate questions what is life is there meaning in the universe does a God exist is there life after death you know these these questions that philosophers no longer asked well that on so that night I guess there aren't as many of them here as I thought that should have should have gotten their blood going okay and Jed is telling me watch out for the clock you told too many stories anyway I'll just take the bottom line of this indeed contrary to popular myth scientists appear to have the same range of attitudes about religious matters as does the general public you're all that time getting me introduced is your time Jed not mine that is that is your time okay yeah all right well we're gonna skip many things that's sad but we're not gonna skip this this is this is too good to skip Eugene Wigner Nobel Prize in Physics in the early years just died a couple of years ago a labeled himself of course it was one of these great Jewish intellectuals that came from Budapest and and you know Johnny von Neumann as well Michael Polanyi Edward Teller an amazing group of people once he got to the US he kind of morphed into into Protestantism used to like to talk about the remarkable effectiveness of mathematics and stated that the miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift we neither understand nor deserve so I'm gonna ask this question three times I'm not gonna do too much else why might a scientist become a Christian and my first answer to this question would be the intelligibility of the universe it certainly points to a sovereign creator god this comes to us from mathematical physics the laws of nature look just as if they have been selected as the most simple and elegant principles of intelligible change by a wise creator belief in the intelligibility of nature strongly suggests the existence of a cosmic mind who can construct nature in accordance with rational laws and I have much more on that topic but I'm not going to do it I'm going to keep going you know the the best evidence is empirical is it possible to be assigned a scientist and Christian it must be because virtually all of the great ones in the history of the physical sciences we're Christians and many are today and one of the wonderful things about writing this book is I have had so many people write to me who are well-known scientists to say hey get me in there - yeah get me in there - I love Jesus - I'm it that's really heartening to see that to see that that happened case Decker is here at the meeting and he is is one such well we're skipping many things here it's sad to see it go by but dead is giving me is giving me the very evil eye very evil I'm not even looking at him now you can see that I'm not gonna look until I get to something I like here I'm gonna ask this question three times why - scientists become a Christian but I have to get to the second one y'all are missing such good stuff here I mean this is this is really sad to see this stuff go by the wayside Jed you know this is all your fault they could be okay here we go they could be they could be just taking this all in if it weren't for you so number two and this I think that okay this is my one you know I'm not a I'm not really a member of the ID fraternity because I don't have a research program that's looking into questions like might be he and Bill Dempsey are but I'm a big cheerleader for these guys okay so if there's anything I have learned from these two guys it is is this why might a scientist become a Christian biology the extraordinary complexity and high information content of even the simplest living thing the simplest self-replicating biochemical system points to a sovereign creator god I think that's what ID is is is is all about yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna try to sneak in a couple extra minutes here but that I'm really I'm about to finish yet be patient be patient I do want to ask them you know we want to spend a little bit of time asking the why question it is empirically demonstrable that science grew up in a Christian culture let's ask why I think it's important not just to state that as a fact but to ask why why did why did that happen why did sustained scientific development appear first in a Christian environment first if Christianity is true the universe is not an illusion but real the product of a God whose character is immutable this position is at variance with pantheistic notions that place inherent distrust in sensory experience in a mercurial world reason number two if Christianity is true being divinely created the universe is of inherent Worth and is thus worthy of study this conclusion supplants any zeitgeist any spirit of the times which would view science as a mere intellectual pastime third if Christian B is true nature itself is not divine and thus humanity may be free to probe it without fear this was an important realization in early eras dominated by superstitions about the natural environment worship and ultimate reverence is reserved for the Creator not the creation nor humans as creatures therein forth and I've got five points on this and then I'm really almost done if Christianity is true then mankind formed in the image of God we've heard a good bit of what that means today can discover or in the universe by rational interpolation that is the codes of nature can be unveiled and read without such faith science might have never developed because it might have appeared impossible in principle fifth and last if Christianity is true the form of nature is not inherent within nature instead the universe reflects the divine command imposed from outside nature thus the details of the world must be uncovered by observation rather than by mere rational musing because God is free to create according to his own purposes in this way science was liberated from Aristotelian rationalism whereby the creator was subjected to the dictates of reason constructed by humans such Gnosticism which transformed speculation into dogma undermine the open endedness of science to be sure Christianity holds that God is a perfectly rational being who cannot act inconsistent with his character but this principle only places partial constraints on God's creative activity which science must be free to discover in all its diversity now I am just about to finish it ok get there I really am about to finish and this one will that my last I've asked this question twice before why might as scientists become a Christian the first answer was the intelligibility of the universe in terms of mathematical physics the second was the astonishingly high information content and Eavis even the simplest self-replicating biochemical system and the last one is going to be the thing that Hugh Ross talked about this morning and I know some of you weren't here so this is the 32nd review of what Hugh had to say why might a scientist become a Christian the extraordinary fine-tuning of the universe points to a sovereign Creator God and I might even use yes I'm even gonna use one of the quotations that you used this morning he quoted Paul Davies a little bit differently than this Davies has written a lot on this subject the present arrangement of matter indicates a very special choice of initial conditions Stephen Hawking in fact if one considers the possible constants and laws that could have emerged the odds against the universe that has produced life like ours are immense and fred hoyle again we heard this this morning a common sense interpretation of the facts suggest that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics as well as with chemistry and biology and there are no blind forces worth talking about in nature thank you very much for your attention so dr. Schaefer has told us about how going into science makes sense for Christians in fact it makes maybe even more sense when you believe in somebody who is orchestrated all of these kinds of things that we would observe both in biology cosmology and all the things in between and so it's fitting now that we hear from a man who really came into this field of molecular biology without so much emphasis on intelligent design it wasn't until he read a book by a man named Michael Denton evolution a theory in crisis that he found out that he had as in his words had been led down a primrose path and it started him on a journey to looking into the design of the kind of molecular machines that he had been learning about and had been studying and of course the man I'm talking about is Michael Behe Michael Behe graduated from Drexel University in 1974 he then went on to earn his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 he had the opportunity then to study nucleic acid structure at the NIH and that was what he went on to build his scientific career on he was a professor at Queen's University in New York and then in 1986 he was asked to be a professor at Lehigh 1985 a professor at Lehigh University where he is currently professor of biochemistry and as we all know in 1996 his book Darwin on trial of Darwin's black box the biochemical challenge to evolution came out and made a huge impact in all of our lives - specially since this is me this is my field of molecular machines getting to see that those chapters chapter after chapter explaining those machines and the concept of irreducible complexity that book has been reviewed in over a hundred periodicals include the New York Times in the premiere magazine nature and the most interesting factor the fact I like most about dr. B he is that he has sired nine children which if you think about it increases his be heinous in the world by a factor of ten if you count his his heroic wife's less so let's all welcome up dr. beter who put that microphone up there well thanks very much Jed it's a pleasure to be here and especially I always enjoy traveling out to California you know whenever I get the opportunity and I was here at the at the conference today and was on a break and I was just walking around the campus noticing all the beautiful flowers and plants and the warm wind was blowing and it was smelled so fragrant that I decided I'd call home and and taught my wife with worth all the fun I was having and and I come and and my daughter Rose picked up and said hi dad and I said hi rose is mom there she says sure and I heard in the background ah ah and slam and and crash and boom and so my wife came to the to the phone and I I said dear I'm having a wonderful time here ha ha ha and so she said I could stay here all right anyway this is a picture that I got on the Internet of an engine room in a ship and I thought it would be a good one to keep in mind as I go into my talk and I've entitled that molecular machines evidence of design and and much like what you see in this picture I think we can we can envision the cell in the same way my talk is going to have hopefully two components the first component this came twice but the first component is the question how deeply does design extend into the cell we've seen a lot of the machines that Jed put up for us we've we've talked about design in the cosmos with you Ross this morning and design at the origin of life that foz Rana has has spoken about at the conference and we've seen pictures of the bacterial flagellum and other things so we know that there's a lot of design but how deeply does it go into the cell and that's what I hope to address in the first half of the talk and if there's time if there isn't I will stop after that but if there's time I'm going to look back at an argument I've made about design on one particular system called the blood coagulation cascade and show you some recent comments that some Darwinian scientists have made about it to show you that that Darwinists still do not have a grip on the problems of irreducible complexity and design that we've pointed out in these past years okay so first I'm going to kind of do a Cook's Tour of the design argument and the design argument so that I can answer the question how deeply does design go extend into the cell it starts out like this with Charles Darwin's statement that if it could be demonstrated than any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications that his theory would break down so we can ask ourselves what sort of an organ or what sort of a system would fit that bill and I've argued in Darwin's black box that one that meets Darwin's criterion is one which is irreducibly complex and I won't bother giving a definition but just the example that I've used many times probably most people here have seen it an example from our everyday world of a mousetrap and the point of the mousetrap example is that a mousetrap consists of a number of different components there's the wooden platform and and the holding bar in the and the spring with extended ends and the hammer and and so on and the mousetrap needs all of these parts to function if you take one of them way you don't have a mousetrap that works half as well as it used to or 1/4 as well as it used to it's broken it doesn't work at all so this is this is it represents the concept of irreducible complexity and it turns out that things like this are big challenges to Darwinian theory because Darwin's because natural selection needs a system to be functioning before it can select it and yet with irreducibly complex systems the function really doesn't appear until the system is essentially intact and I go on to argue that not only are things like this problems for Darwinian theory but that they are also evidence for design they are pointers to design and many many critics have said that design is a religious argument and not a scientific argument but I like to show the following example to try and show you why that's not the case whoops did I Oh something got a little out of whack oh I'm sorry no it didn't I got a little out of whack ok and the question then is are there any things like mouse traps in the cell which exhibit irreducible complex and and I argued yes and here's a drawing of the flagellum which many of you have seen before and the flagellum is sent as a rotary motor essentially it's an outboard motor that cells used to swim the the motor turns the propeller around and around and around which pushes on the solution in which the bacterium finds itself and pushes the bacterium forward there's a number of different parts that it contains a hook region a drive shaft the motor itself the stator region bushing proteins and in the absence of any of those components the apparatus does not work so the question is is the conclusion of design and a scientific one or a religious conclusion and I'd like to use this little far side cartoon to show why I think it's a scientific one and in this cartoon we've got a troop of jungle explorers and the lead Explorer has been strung up and skewered and this guy turns to this guy and says that's why I never walk in front words to live by let me tell you now everybody here looks at this cartoon and you immediately realize that this was designed this was not an accident in fact the humor of the cartoon depends on you recognizing the design but how do you know that is it is it a religious conclusion no of course it isn't a religious conclusion you know it's designed because you see a number of different parts interacting with each other to perform a function that none of the parts by itself could could perform essentially you see what I mean by the phrase irreducible complexity okay so if you think there is design in the cell as I do and you want to move beyond that one question you can ask is is how deeply does design extend into the CEL is the flagellum designed and and that's pretty much it or the flagellum and the centrosome as Jonathan wells talked about this afternoon and that's it or is there more well I contend that the the cell is pretty much like this engine room and and the flagellum might be this component over here so we have to ask ourselves what else in the cell is designed and how would we go about determining that and I think one good way to do it or one question to ask is this first of all let's ask ourselves how does this get built how do these components get put in the right order in the right position well in the case of a complex system in in the in our regular macroscopic world an intelligent agent brings the components over and it fits them together screws them together bolts them together and so on but a cell in a Cell there is no active agent doing such a thing so we can ask the question how do the components of something like the flagellum get together where do you put them together and there are a number of different protein parts a number of different components that make this thing up how do they manage to get together well you have to realize that something like this and even the movie that Jed macaws go just showed you really doesn't do full justice to the complexity of the proteins that it pictures they are pictured as little kind of ovals or circles or squares or something like that but here's an x-ray crystallographic representation of two macromolecules which are binding each other we can think of this as two proteins binding to each other but actually one is a protein and one something called a tRNA but for our purposes we'll say this is this is two proteins and you'll notice that they are very they're their shape is very is very convoluted and that one is complementary to the other and more than that but why do they stick together anyway you know the the back of my hand might be complementary in shape to the surface of the top of my other hand but you know they don't really necessarily stick together why would these two things stick together well they stick together because they have complementary surfaces not only complementary in shape but complementary and chemical properties as well so that one region that has a negative charge in one molecule will when it mines be opposite a region that has a positive charge on the other molecule two regions which are oily will oppose each other when the two bind and and other and other complementary parts will stick together so not only do the surfaces have to be complementary in shape they've also got to be complementary in in physical properties so we can ask ourselves well one thing we can point out is that notice when two molecules get together there is more than one interaction which is necessary to hold them in a stable complex there are maybe half a dozen interactions here so in order for two molecules to bind each other you need multiple interactions and remember an irreducibly complex system needs multiple parts to interact in order to fulfill the function so we can consider not just molecular machines not just complicated things like the flagellum but even the binding of two proteins to each other the preliminary step before any function can take place simply the binding of two surfaces to each other as an irreducibly complex system well okay let's ask ourselves how many proteins have to do this we you know we see big molecular machines like the flagellum but is that common in the cell well in recent years investigators have discussed how common molecular machines are in the cell and in particular some work has been done in the in yeast looking at all essentially all the proteins in the cell and asking the question to the proteins generally act as individual molecules or as complexes that have to bind each other before they work and the conclusion that the researchers have been reaching is that most cellular processes are carried out by multi protein complexes and they go on to point out that essentially half of the proteins in the cell close to half of the proteins in the cell work as complexes of six or more proteins and the majority are the about half of them work as as either individual molecules or complexes containing up to five proteins so we can ask ourselves or should we be surprised you know what does it take to form a complex if if we consider the primordial state to be individual proteins how likely is it to be able to form a new molecular complex you know just simply asking how likely is it is it to bind several proteins together let alone worrying about the function after they bind and this slide just shows a little cartoon from that paper showing one complex that has been discovered and this is called something called the polyadenylation apparatus and the structure of it is not really well known but all of these proteins are known to interact with each other in in the function of the polyadenylation complex so let's ask the question how likely is it suppose you have two proteins and it would be good for them to get together bind together to form a new complex and if that happened then it would give the the cell an edge in its struggle to survive how likely is that to happen well I results from from immunology are pertinent to this question and I'm going to go through a couple a couple papers in in rapid succession here essentially a hundred million different protein surfaces have to be searched through in order to get in order to get a protein that binds a given protein with a fair amount of stickiness with a binding constant on the order of micro molar for those who know what such a thing is the the bottom line is that essentially you have to go through a hundred million different protein surfaces before you find one that forms a reasonably tight binding surface with a with a given protein and I'm going to skip through but there are a number of papers in the literature which come up with essentially the exact same numbers about one in ten to the seventh one in ten the eighth proteins have to be searched through before one gets a dissociation constant in the micromolar range now we can ask the question well okay suppose you've got your two proteins how long would you have to wait around before you would accidentally come across two surfaces on the proteins which would complement each other in sufficient detail that you get a reasonably tight binding complex now I've been doing some work along with a man named David Snoke who's a professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh and I won't go through this in detail suffice it to say if one takes as a model if one takes as a model a given protein and assumes that the gene for the protein duplicated and a seen and you assume that one needs several changes in the surface of the protein in order to develop a new functional property such as a binding site then perhaps this is a route that in which one might be able to develop a new binding site but you have to worry that if you've got a duplicated gene you might get unfavorable mutations in the in the sequence of the gene and if that happens this is supposed to represent the fact that the the unfavorable mutation would kill essentially kill a duplicated gene so that would be no longer available for for developing a new complementary surface for your protein and my table is not here but this is just a little equation looks complicated it's really not Jonathan well Jonathan well said this afternoon that when a biologist sees an equation he should hum it this you'd you'd have to have multiple parts to hum you'd need a soprano and and the base and and and so on we can dispense with this let's just point out that the the only considerations in in estimating how long it would take to develop this protein binding site are the number of organisms which is in that are available to develop to develop a new protein binding site the mutation rate the number of sites you have to change and and and so on let's go to the bottom line mmm this is kind of messed up a little bit but this essentially is a plot of the time which is over here the time and generations versus the number of sites that you have to change versus the population size of the of the particular species and take my word for it that a conservative estimate if you have to change say six or so amino acid residue in one protein to make it able to bind a second protein with a reasonable dissociation constant you'd have to have on the order of 10 to the 20th organisms in order to develop a binding site within a hundred million generations so the point is that it takes a long time but more than that if you suppose you had to form a complex a new complex that had not two proteins but three and remember again in the cell the great majority of proteins are in complexes of three or more if that was the case then you would have to form you would have to you would have to change not six but twelve or so amino acids six on the surface of one protein six on another protein and if that were the case and it develops by the model that I have outlined very very briefly here it would take on the order of a lot more organisms to develop in a hundred million years you would need more organisms than have ever lived in the history of the world so the point is and here are some tentative include conclusions that's simply forming a new protein protein interaction would be very difficult to do and would be expect to be extremely rare in the history of life and we're not even talking about their function we're just talking about locating them next to each other for a mousetrap such as I pictured an intelligent agent might bring one component and put it next to another and screw it on for that to happen to by a blind process would require would require an exceedingly long time an exceedingly large number of organisms and the second point is that if you need two of these things - if you need to develop two surfaces a complex of three proteins and if the intermediates have no selective value you would not expect that ever to occur in the history of life so the point is that design extends if this is correct and this is recent work but if does if this is correct design extends very deeply into the cell it is not simply the the the poster molecular poster child molecular machines that are often associated with design talks it's essentially virtually everything in the cell okay how much time do I have Jen 15 oh wow okay cool all right well let me tell you about a lecture I once gave then well in every one huh I can't hear oh in cludes question so five minutes then five minutes okay skip the lecture okay let's briefly talk about recent comments on something called the blood coagulation cascade the here's a the table of contents of a recent issue of bio essays which published just a couple of months ago and it was a special issue dedicated to yes molecular machines and in the table of contents you can see you know a special issue on molecular machines the spliceosome the most complex molecular macro molecular machine in the cell and and maybe a dozen articles on various molecular machines including in that included in that was something called the blood coagulation system the blood clotting system you know when you go in the bathroom in the morning and and shave and Nick yourself and in the blood comes out and bleeds for a little bit slows down and and stops you know nobody thinks much about that but but in the past 40 years or so has shown that the blood coagulation system is an extremely complex molecular molecular system and this is what the authors of that article say and here's a little kind of a diagram of the blood clotting cascade where this is a component called fibrinogen which is the precursor of the clot material itself and when it's activated it turns into something called fibrin which is like which associate stick form like a fisherman's net which slows down and stops red blood cells from leaving from from from bleeding out but the fibrin has to be in the inactive form most of the time in the fibrinogen form because otherwise all your blood would clot and you kind of freeze and and that would be sad but so it actually has to be activated by something called thrombin but thrombin can't be active all the time or it would cleave fibrinogen turning into fibrin and you'd have the same problem so it's in an inactive form and it has to be activated by something else which is in an inactive form and that has to be activated by something else and so on and so forth and I had written about this blood coagulation system in Darwin's black box and said it was an irreducibly complex molecular machine and had to in required design and that's what I said but a man named Russell Doolittle disagreed with me and he wrote about it in something called the Boston review which is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 and that wasn't good for me because Russell Doolittle is a prominent scientist he's a professor of biochemistry at the University of California San Diego a member of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences who has worked on the blood clotting system for 40 years and so that's not the kind of person you want on the other side and he said this idea of irreducible complexity is wrong and not only is it wrong there is experimental evidence to show that it's wrong he wrote the following he said recently the gene for plasminogen and there was a typo here plasminogen was knocked out of mice and predictably those mice had thrombotic complications because fibrin clots could not be cleared away now plasminogen is like a chemical scissors that removes blood clots once their job has been has been accomplished not long after that the same workers knocked out the gene for fibrinogen in another line of mice again predictably these mites were ailing although in this case hemorrhage was the profit problem again fibrinogen is the precursor of a fiber and the clot material itself and what you think happened when these two lines of mice were crossed for all practical purposes the mice lacking both genes were normal contrary to claims about irreducible complexity the entire ensemble of proteins is not needed music and harmony can arise from a smaller orchestra so his point was this that if you knock out one protein from the blood clotting cascade the mice have trouble if you knock out another protein and a different line of mice they have a different sort of trouble but if you combine those two lines of mice into a strain that is missing both proteins there okay so the argument is perhaps the blood clotting cascade could develop slowly in steps of 2 instead of steps of dozens or so or something like that but we don't really have to worry about the rest of the argument though or how he would finish that argument because it turns out that he was wrong he misread the paper that he cited the mice are in are in big trouble this is the this is the paper that he was referring to loss of fibrinogen rescues mice from the pleiotropic effects of plasminogen deficiency and Russell Dolittle saw the phrase rescues mice and he thought that the mice were normal well turns out they're not and in the abstract of the paper the authors wrote mice deficient in plasma and fibrinogen our phenotypically indistinguishable from fibrinogen deficient mice now translated into English that means that mice missing both components have all the problems that mice missing only plasminogen have or fibrinogen have they can't clot they hemorrhage females die during pregnancy they are not happy campers they are not promising evolutionary intermediates and here's a little table of the symptoms of the of the mice if they lack plasminogen they have this suite of of symptoms if they lack fibrinogen they have this suite of symptoms if they lack both they are rescued from the symptoms of plasminogen deficiency but only to suffer the symptoms of fibrinogen deficiency and if you think about it for just a second you see what the problem is or see why this should be so plasminogen job is to get rid of blood clots once their job is done and if you can't do that the blood clots hang around they clog up your circulatory system and you get problems with fight without fibrinogen though you can't form clots in the first place and you hemorrhage and you have got problems as always associated with a failure to form blood clots if you lack both it doesn't matter if you're missing plasminogen because you can't form clots in the first place to gunk up your circulatory system so you are rescued but you've still got major big problems now the the scientists who did this work that Russell Dolittle cited have gone on to knock out the components of other components of the blood clotting cascade including prothrombin and tissue factor and in each case the mice are in big trouble which is exactly the exactly the result you would expect if in fact the blood clotting cascade irreducibly complex as i had argued so what do we conclude from this the conclusion is not simply that Russell Doolittle misread a paper which anybody can do you know scientists are not known for the clarity of their prose and it takes a while to figure out what's what's going on oftentimes in a paper no the point is this Russell Doolittle knows more about the blood clotting cascade and its potential evolution than anybody else on earth and yet he does not know how Darwinian processes could have produced that system if he did he would have simply cited the work in his essay instead of pointing to a paper that talks about hemorrhaging mice and if Russell Dolittle does not know how Darwinian evolution could have produced this system then nobody knows nobody knows and I think that's an important thing to keep in mind considering professor Schaffer quotation from CS Lewis in which CS Lewis said he took it on scientific authority what science was able to explain you have to keep in mind especially in this controversial area of evolution and Darwinism and intelligent design that oftentimes the claims of what science can and cannot explain are grossly misleading I have a lot more to say including a recent paper which was actually more recent than the than the one I just talked about this was a paper that appeared in something called the Journal of thrombosis and hemostasis just about six months ago with this intriguing table title and I'd be happy to tell you about it but I think I'm out of time and and so I'll just leave with a statement that in fact if you read this paper you find there still is no explanation for the blood clotting cascade and with that I'd like to thank you very much for your attention thank you dr. Behe we're gonna have a little break but if there are just a few questions that you've asked your peers if it's okay I'll take two questions and then we're gonna have a break if you if you have to leave leave quietly if there's any questions to clear up what dr. B he said go ahead variety of other organisms that don't have the same cascade but they have sin parts of that cascade system at least I'm assuming they do have you looked at that as as a part of the evolutionary thought that might you be using objection to your your irreducible complex system back to me thank you yeah that's a good question but it turns out that the clotting system is is exclusive to vertebrates all vertebrates have a very similar clotting system in vertebrates don't have it and I'm sorry even with the fact that they have hemoglobin they have hemoglobin but hemoglobin is not a part of it the clotting cascade your Bloods not the same that's right what you should remember is that Russell Dolittle knows all about every vertebrate who's blood clotting system has been investigated and and he even with such knowledge and the similarity between all vertebrates is still unable to account for how their clotting cascade could have been put to pay the last question here before the Rick just a couple short questions one you mentioned binding between proteins and it seems to me that that's not a qualitative trade it's a quantitative trait and therefore it could happen gradually and it seems that there's a lot of experiments with random peptide libraries and things where they get binding experimentally under short condition you know short amounts of time with mutation selection and there's a lot of recent examples of enzyme switching substrates so that's one the second one is blood clotting it was mentioned briefly but it seems that lampreys and critters like that have the only part of the blood clotting cascade so how do you explain that if all the parts were supposed to be there and then with the bacterial flagellum how do you explain the fact that almost all the components have identified or probable homologies with systems that aren't in the flagellum with other systems okay good questions I'll see if I can remember them all I'll start with the last one first an important thing to remember is that sequence homology and for those who don't know what it is that's the similarity of two proteins in their amino acid sequence to each other proteins are polymers of amino acids and sometimes you know half of the residues are the same in one protein as with another protein sequence homology does not tell you how Darwinian processes could have put together complex molecular systems such as this again just as don't take my word for it Russell Doolittle knows all about the similarity in amino acid sequence between proteins in the blood clotting cascade and yet even with that knowledge he's completely unable to come up with a scheme for how such a thing might have originated I just agree on that point because okay published some papers that seem to be pretty good scenario to me but and there's I've also got one by a Davidson in the Journal of thrombosis and hemostasis 2003 I think it was about six months after the aired paper and they've got the their last conclusion is in this chapter we reviewed the biochemical evidence molecular cloning and sequence data indicating the structure the blood coagulation network and non-mammalian vertebrates and present an evolutionary scenario to account for the possible evolution what has been described as an irreducibly complex system that could not have arisen by gradual step by step Darwinian processes and that last bit is a quote from Darwin's black box so they basically say here's this book but we're refuting it well that's fine but I in my experience the scenarios that Darwinists have come up with have been extremely sketchy unpacked up by experiment and essentially I had a slide here essentially what are called just so stories so I'm not surprised that Darwinists can put together a story in which they declare themselves satisfied but I think the reason I bring up Russell Doolittle's example is to show that he envisioned a scenario he thought that if one were missing a couple components you could still have a reasonable blood clotting cascade and he was utterly wrong he was that was just one example where he misread a paper I mean he studied a lot of okay we're gonna take a break now and the two of these guys can fight it out up front we're gonna be back here at 8:47 right on time to the schedule so please return to your seats at 8:47 on that clock in the back thank you

Channel: Access Research Network

Views: 18,024

Rating: 4.1914892 out of 5

Keywords: Darwinism (Literature Subject), Molecular Machine, Fritz Schaefer, Michael Behe (Author), Creation–evolution Controversy (Literature Subject)

Id: Wd-vVqOAf-Y

Length: 78min 39sec (4719 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 29 2014