[bright gentle music] >> Oh, well, welcome, glad to see so many faces
out there this evening, and of course the topic this
evening is Did God Need Darwin? And you don't have to read too
long in The Origin of Species to realize that Darwin did not need God but many Christians today
wrestle with this relationship. Just how should evolutionary theory and the biblical narrative
relate to each other? The answers to this question vary widely even among Christians, from
those who totally accept a fully naturalistic evolutionary model and dismiss the bible's
input on origins questions to those who do the opposite, who fully accept a
literal biblical narrative and dismiss any input from
science on the matter. Now, Biola offers courses and our MA in Science and Religion program, just to put a little plug in here, that covers this whole range
of views in considerable depth but this evening we're
focused on one model called theistic evolution
or evolutionary creation and in particular we're
focused on two questions, what caused new forms of
life to arise on Earth and how did the first people arise? Why are we focusing on this
theistic evolution model? 'Cause over the past several years, theistic evolutionists have loudly and publicly asserted their view as the only intellectually
credible position that thinking Christians can hold. Moreover, they dismiss anyone
who questions that claim as being out of touch with the
latest scientific research, but is the scientific evidence
regarding macroevolution and human origins so solid
that it cannot be questioned or have naturalistic assumptions
about how the world works limited modern science so
that science is blinded to other viable options,
and what are the theological and philosophical concerns
that arise if one accepts an evolutionary explanation
for human origins? Answering these questions is
the motivation behind this book and of the event this evening. How viable is theistic
evolution scientifically, philosophically and theologically? And we're very privileged
to have with us tonight four of the key contributors to this book and they're going to present, along with their lectures, their concerns, the opportunity for you to ask questions and to clarify things,
so I'd like to welcome the speakers again for
coming this evening. Give them a round of applause if we can. [audience applauding] Talk about an all-star team. If I was playing fantasy
football or something, this would be incredible, but I would like to open in prayer. That's something we do at
Biola, so if we can pray, then I will introduce
Steve, so let's pray. Father, just thank you for
this chance to be here, opportunity to seek truth, to seek wisdom. We just ask you to bless
us in that endeavor. We know it's not easy and
we know that, very often, truth is not something
that's popular so we ask that you'd give us that
special discernative wisdom as we seek to see your
hand in the world around us and how you've worked there
and to understand the word that you've spoken to us as well, so bless the speakers and bless
this hall this evening now. In Jesus' name, amen, amen. So I get the privilege
of being the MC here and to introduce Steve Meyer. Just to give you a little
bit of his biography, Stephen Meyer received his PhD
in the philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge, that's how you say it, Cambridge, Cambridge, yeah, depends on your dialect. A former geologist and college professor, he now directs the
Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. He's authored most recently
the New York Times bestseller, Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive
Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, as well as Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence
for Intelligent Design. That book was named a book of the year by the Times of London
Literary Supplement in 2009. I first met Steve about 25 years
ago here on Biola's campus. I'd just joined the faculty
here in August of 1993. Steve was giving a presentation
on intelligent design to the fall faculty workshop and after I heard him speak
and present for two days, I noticed that his wife was sitting in the back of the auditorium and I walked up to her and I said I don't know if you know this or not, but you're married to one of the 10 most important
evangelical Christians that's alive in the world today. I don't know if she ever told Steve that or this crazy guy who said that to her, but I think that's been
borne out in Steve's work for the past 25 years and
it's a great privilege to have him speak to us this
evening, thank you, Steve. [audience cheers and applauds] >> But I only have one doctorate. [laughs] [audience laughs] It's really nice to be
here and it's really nice to talk about this book. JP and Wayne and a British friend, Peter Luce, were the kinda
prime movers behind this, had the inspiration for this, and we conceived of it
originally as a reference work for theologians and pastors
and biblical scholars because we knew that many of
those folks felt under pressure from the well-funded
theistic evolutionary groups like the BioLogos Institute
in the United States, the Faraday Institute, the Center for Theology
and Natural Sciences, many, many groups who had the same message which is that if you're gonna
be a scientifically informed, in fact, reasonable person of faith, you need to embrace an
evolutionary perspective and so there's been a kind of perspective, a sense that you have a kind
of intellectual obligation if you're going to be a
well-informed Christian or other person of faith, maybe Jewish, maybe theist of some other stripe, you've gotta accept
the Darwinian evolution if your viewpoint is
to have any credibility and the force in my
talk tonight is to show that that's not true,
that many people assume they must adopt a kind
of evolutionary framework in the way they read Scripture because science has declared it so and many think that they must also adopt an evolutionary understanding
of biological origins despite, as Dr. Grudem
will show later tonight, there is a substantial
cost to the coherence of some basic Christian doctrines by accepting this way of reading Scripture and understanding Christian doctrine. My talk is really about
the science tonight and whether or not we are under or people of faith are under
that kind of an obligation, what philosophers would call
an epistemic obligation. Does reason dictate, does science dictate that we must reformulate
these basic doctrines? I won't talk too much about the effect of these scientific ideas on doctrine, but I do wanna address this
epistemological question. Is evolutionary theory so well established that it makes it compulsory
to read Scripture in a completely different way, to adopt what you might call an
evolutionary hermeneutic framework? Now, it might be helpful
to start by talking about, just defining some terms, and in the book, in the first chapter of the book, it was part of my role in the project to write a scientific and
philosophical introduction to the book and one of the
things I started by doing was simply to just define
the term theistic evolution and suddenly realized I forgot one of the things I wanted to
say in the introduction and that is that, it's
really fun to talk about this because we didn't expect this
book to be selling so well. We thought it was gonna be a reference, you know, it's a reference work,
it's a door-stopper, right? It's a big behemoth of a
dictionary phone book-sized book but within 13 days it had
sold out the first print run. It's into the third printing
already and it's back-ordered in the United Kingdom and
here in the United States and it's very hard to
get a hold of right now, and I think one of the things we found when we did an initial
presentation on this at the Evangelical Theological Society and Evangelical Philosophical
Society meetings in Rhode Island back in
November was that somehow, despite its girth and its
somewhat intimidating appearance, it struck a nerve in a lot of people because a lot of people have
felt this kind of intimidation. Well, you must rethink, you
must rework, you must reread, you must reinterpret
basic Christian doctrines and your basic understanding of Scripture. The prima facie most
natural reading of Scripture has to be reinterpreted in light of what science has told
us is definitely the case. My talk is about whether
or not that's true. Now, helpful place to start
is with some definitions. What is theistic evolution? Well, really, the tricky part
of this is the evolution part because the term evolution can
mean many different things. It can mean very innocuous
things like change over time. Pretty much no one
disputes that life today on the planet is different
than it was a long time ago as recorded by the fossil record. We don't have trilobites and triceratopses running around today as much as some of us
might wish to see them. [audience laughs] I was one of those
dinosaur-crazy little boys and so I would very much
like to see a triceratops in my backyard, but alas, so change over time is not really disputed and there's a couple
senses of change over time. You could also think the change over time, you could talk about how
life is different now than it was a long time ago. You might also be referring
to the small-scale variation that we observe in things
like the peppered moths that turned dark to light and dark again or was it light to dark and dark again? Anyway, you get the idea, in
response to different levels of industrial pollution, okay? That kinda microevolutionary variation where you get a change in the frequency of expression of different
traits but no new traits is commonly observed
and it really is also, I don't think, extremely
consequential one way or another. How you get insects in the first place, however, different question, and a lot of scientists today saying what evolutionary biologists now saying that natural selection and random mutation explains the survival but not
the arrival of the fittest, explains the small-scale variation but not the major innovations, the major origin events of
major new forms of life. In any case, change over time in both these senses is
pretty much uncontested. Second meaning of evolution is the idea of universal common descent or sometimes also said
universal common ancestry, the idea that the history
of life is best represented as Darwin himself represented
it in The Origin of Species as a great branching
tree where the branches at the top of the tree
represent the major forms of life we see all around us today and the side branches, they
represent forms of life that went extinct a while back and then the root or trunk
of the tree would represent that first one-celled organism
at the very base of the tree very far back in biological history from which all other
forms of life are thought to have evolved or morphed and changed from that one simple form, so this is essentially a theory of biological history and it implies that there's been
continuous biological change occurring very gradually
to produce all the forms of life we see today from that one or very few simple ancestral forms. Now, a third meaning of
evolution, now, on that score, you might be a theistic
evolutionist of that sort as well. You could be a theistic
evolutionist relating to evolution number one, you could say that I think God causes change over time. It's not too contentious. You could also say I
think God causes this kind of continuous change over time and that's certainly
a logical possibility. I'm personally skeptical
about universal common descent but some people who hold to the theory of intelligent design are not. That's not what the theory
of intelligent design, for example, is mainly about, but I see a lot of discontinuity
in the fossil record, especially at the level of
the higher taxonomic groups, and I see discontinuity in the patterns that we're now discerning
in the genomic data so genes used to be thought to be the knockout down drag-out argument for common descent, lot
of reasons to doubt that. We could talk about that in the Q&A. The book, our book, Theistic Evolution, does critique this sense of evolution and therefore this form
of theistic evolution. We think there are reasons to doubt it, some good scientific reasons,
and we lay some of those out but it's the third meaning of evolution that is really the most
scientifically contentious and philosophically and
theologically consequential and it concerns the cause of
the alleged change over time. Assuming there was
continuous change over time, again, I doubt that,
but assuming there was, what would've caused that? According to Darwin, the
answer is an unguided, undirected mechanism
known as natural selection acting on random variations. An updated form of Darwinism
called modern neo-Darwinism would say a particular kind
of variations were involved called mutations which are
essentially random changes in the sequence of chemical
characters in the DNA or copying errors as the
DNA is being replicated so the third meaning of evolution concerns the cause or mechanism of change whereas the second meaning
concerned a historical pattern. Often evolutionary biologists
will say the third meaning of evolution concerns the process, the physical process or
the biological process. Now, according to
contemporary neo-Darwinism, this mechanism of natural selection acting on random mutation
produces all the new forms of life that we see in the history of life as represented on that
great big branching tree. All new innovations in the
history of life are produced by this mutation selection mechanism and some other maybe less important but complementary also
materialistic undirected processes and this evolutionary
mechanism or mechanisms also, they say, accounts for the appearance but not the reality of
design in living organisms. Richard Dawkins, the famed
neo-Darwinian spokesman, says that biology is the study of complicated things
that give the appearance of having been designed for purpose. Counter-intuitive,
perhaps, but the idea is that an undirected, unguided process can produce all the new forms of life and all their different
complex features including ones that look as though they
were designed for appearance, so though living systems look designed, they're not really designed
because an unguided, undirected process produced
them, the final outcome. Now, this is where things
get really interesting if you're a theist
because if you wanna say that God is guiding that unguided process, that's kind of logically
problematic, right? Not even God can guide
an unguided process. On the other hand, if you say that God isn't guiding
the unguided process, that becomes theologically problematic because it really begs the
question as to what God is doing in this theistic evolutionary synthesis. Does the theism part actually
have any cognitive content? Is God doing anything? Is it scientifically
relevant at all to talk about theistic evolution if
God isn't guiding the process? And besides which, if
God's guiding the process, that would be a form of intelligent design and the leading spokespersons
for theistic evolution have repudiated the theory
of intelligent design, so we've been asking them to
clarify exactly what they mean by theistic evolution, in other words, if you're a theistic evolutionist, what do you mean by evolution? Do you mean a guided or unguided process? Do you mean what the Darwinists mean or do you mean, well, something else? Please explain. In any case, this all comes
at a very interesting time. This great push to get
the Christian Church in particular to accept
theistic evolution comes at a kind of ironic time
because major figures in evolutionary biology are
now expressing profound doubts precisely about the creative power of the mutation natural
selection mechanism, the alleged cause of the
major biological change over the history of life, and that's what I really wanna
focus on too in this talk, is what is causing
those major innovations? What's causing the new form, the new biological forms to arise? That's the central question of biology, evolutionary biology, this
is the central question that Darwin himself addressed. Now, a number of us here in
the room, and by the way, we have not only the four speakers tonight but we had a late addition of Doug Axe who is also a contributor to the book and about whose work I'll be discussing in my talk so it's a little bit awkward. We should have Doug up here talking about his own groundbreaking work but he'll join us for the Q&A afterwords. Anyway, Doug, Ann Gauger and I and about two dozen other proponents of intelligent design attended
the Royal Society conference that was held in November of 2016. The conference was called by
leading evolutionary theorists who were essentially wanting to, A, evaluate the standard textbook
theory of neo-Darwinism, the modern form of Darwin's
theory, but also to say it's time to move beyond
this theory and we need to start exploring new
mechanisms, new processes, new something that can
explain major innovation in the history of life
because many of them have acknowledged in their
own scientific writings that the mutation natural
selection mechanism lacks creative power. It explains the small-scale
variations very well. It doesn't explain where major
new forms of life come from. It explains the minor
changes in the shape and size of the finch beaks but doesn't explain where birds come from in the first place. Now, the first talk at this
conference was really striking. It was by a leading Austrian
evolutionary biologist named Gerd Muller. His talk was about the
explanatory deficits of the modern synthesis. The modern synthesis is
just a technical term for neo-Darwinism and
Muller listed a number of deficits but I wanna focus on three. They were the first three outta the chute. He said that modern
neo-Darwinism with its reliance on the mutation selection
mechanism does not explain the origin of phenotypic complexity, that is the large-scale features of animal bodies and anatomy. Secondly he said it
doesn't explain the origin of anatomical novelty, new
organs, new structures, new body plans as they arise
in the history of life, and thirdly he said it doesn't
explain non-gradual modes of transition, what he's talking
about is abrupt appearance in the fossil record including an event that I have written about extensively, the Cambrian explosion which is the origin of the first animal life. In our new book on theistic evolution, there's a new player in
our cast of characters. His name is Gunter Bechly. He's recently publicly
declared his sympathies for the theory of intelligent design. He's been rewarded with,
he's erased from Wikipedia. He's also been asked to leave the museum where he was long curator, but he nevertheless is
a really high-powered European paleontologist, leading science as an
insect paleontologist, and he and I co-authored
an article in the book about not only the abrupt appearance of the first animal groups but
also the abrupt appearance, 17 other such events
in the history of life. The first mammals, the
first flowering plants, the first reptiles, the first birds, there are all these different
radiations or evolutions and this is a major puzzle
for evolutionary theory. The picture of the history
of life in the fossil record doesn't look like that
gradually branching tree at all. It looks like a series
of abrupt appearances. In any case, the main thing
I'd like to focus on tonight is this question of the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism because we have this kind of
irony in that major figures in evolutionary biology are saying things like neo-Darwinism has no
theory of the generative. It doesn't have a
mechanism that's creative. This is an earlier book by Gerd Muller with a co-author, Stuart Newman, published by a little-known science press, MIT, anyone heard of that? Yeah, [audience laughs] called On the Origin of Organismal Form and Muller and Newman argue that while the mutation
selection mechanism is still orthodoxy in all the textbooks, that people in the know
within evolutionary biology are aware that it offers
very little by way of creative power and
yet at the same time, we have leading spokesmen
and women, spokespersons, for the evolutionary creationist view or the theistic evolutionist view saying that this very mechanism is
the means by which God created. The gradual process of
evolution was crafted and governed by God to
create the diversity of all life on earth,
this is Deborah Haarsma, now president of the BioLogos Foundation. She goes on to say in the same article that evolutionary creationists
accept that natural selection and other evolutionary mechanisms acting over long periods of
time eventually result in major changes in body structure. Some people call this macroevolution, so the mutation selection mechanism and other related mechanisms are thought to be the means by which God created, and yet at the same time we have people like Muller and Newman
saying neo-Darwinism with its reliance on those same mechanisms lacks a theory of the generative. It doesn't have a mechanism
that's genuinely creative. So we have this kind of irony that just as leading
evolutionary biologists are explicitly acknowledging a crisis in the explanatory power of neo-Darwinism and its mutation selection mechanism, Christians in the sciences
and other faith groups are pushing to get the Christian Church and outside the Christian
Church, maybe Jewish groups, others, to accept evolutionary mechanisms as the means by which God created, but if the mechanism isn't creative, why attribute God's creativity to it? See the puzzle? Now, what I'd like to show
in the time we have left, this is just a quote from
one of the organizers of that conference at the Royal Society, says there are hundreds of
evolutionary scientists, aren't creationists, who contend that natural selection
is politics, not science, by which Suzan Mazur really meant that it lacks this power
we were talking about. Now, I've got a heading, Four Challenges to the Creative
Power of Natural Selection. Don't think we'll get through all four but we'll talk about a few of them. I want to understand a
little of the science about why the sciences are
disputing the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism and therefore why we might be skeptical about claims from
Christians in the sciences that other people of
faith are under a kind of intellectual obligation
to accept this mechanism as the means of God's creativity. Okay, I think the very first problem that natural selection
and random mutation face is the problem of the origin
of genetic information. In an event like the Cambrian explosion where you have a lot of new forms of animal life arising very abruptly, there is now, we
understand, a deeper problem than just the missing ancestral
fossils on the lower strata and that problem is what mechanism or process could have
built all that new form so apparently quickly
in the history of life? I used to ask my students a question, if you wanna give your
computer a new function, what do you give it? Feel like Ben Stein up here, anyone? [audience laughs] >> Code.
>> It's code, yes, thank you, code, a program,
information, instructions. All of these are the right answer and we've come to appreciate
that since the 1950s and '60s during a period in the history
of science that's now known as the molecular biological revolution. Watson and Crick are key figures in this. They elucidate the structure
of the DNA molecule in 1953. Four years later, Crick
on his own realizes that the famed double helix structure with the different chemical
sub-units along the inside known as bases or nucleotide bases is actually an
information-carrying molecule and that these chemical
bases are functioning just like alphabetic
characters in a written text or we could say the zeroes
and ones in software, that is to say it's not
the molecular structure of those bases or their atomic weight or their other attributes, per se, it's their arrangement in accord with an independent symbol convention that we now call the genetic code that allows them to convey information, information as it happens for
building the crucial proteins and protein machines
that keep cells alive. This idea of Crick's was known
as the sequence hypothesis. It's the sequential arrangement
of these chemical sub-units that allow them to convey instructions or information for building proteins. Now, I've got a little visual aid. Some of you have seen it before. I was taking some ribbing
before the talk started but these are snap-lock beads, ages two to four it said on the box, okay? [audience laughs] The DNA, in case this isn't familiar, provides instructions for
arranging the sub-units of the proteins called amino acids. If these sub-units are
arranged just right, then the forces between
them, they'll cause them to fold into a particular
three-dimensional structure or shape that will allow the protein to do an important job in the cell, and proteins do all the
important jobs in the cell. They're like the toolbox where their shape allows them to do different functions. In a toolbox you might have
a wrench, a hammer, pliers, and the different form
of those tools allow them to do different jobs and the
same thing is true in life. You have this information
directing the construction of these crucial protein
structures and machines that allow cells to stay alive. Now, I like to call this DNA enigma and the DNA enigma is not the
structure of the DNA molecule. Watson and Crick figured that out. It's not what the
information in the DNA does or where the information resides,
we now know that as well. The DNA enigma is something else. Where did the code come from? Where did that information come from? Now, the Darwinian answer
to that question is that the code is the
result of random changes in the sequence of chemical sub-units or chemical characters that
convey the information, but as we've realized that the code inside the DNA is like the code we use in computer software
or like a written text, that answer seems to be
less and less plausible. Imagine taking a functional
sequence on the bottom like time and tide wait for no man and then beginning to change it at random by what we might think of as mutations. It doesn't take very long
before the changes are going to accumulate and destroy
the original readability and meaning of that sentence, and that will happen long before you get to another sentence, right? It's very similar with computer code. You start introducing random
changes to zeroes and ones and you get bugs and glitches. You don't get a new operating system or algorithm or software program, right? And so a very problem attends
the Darwinian mechanism because though natural selection
is not a random process, it is preserving things that
correlate to survival value, the random mutations are
random, ineliminably random. Can't get rid of the random element in it, and so that mechanism is going to degrade functional information long before any new
information arises, okay? Now, there's a mathematical
reason to that. We can kind of think of randomly changing and then getting a new
sequence, so random changes tend to degrade specified or
functional information. Now, there's a reason for
this that's mathematical. In the English language, for every 12 letters that are
functional and meaningful, there are 100 trillion other ways to arrange those same characters so as you start changing things at random, you're much more likely,
overwhelmingly more likely to land in the non-functional abyss, to find a non-functional
combination than you are to find a new functional
combination, okay? Now, to make a kind of long story short, it turns out that the
very same thing is true in the DNA and protein case. If you think of the As, Cs,
Gs and Ts along the DNA spine there and you take a section of the DNA that's long enough to build
a new functional protein, the ratio of non-functional sequences to functional sequences is
even more prohibitively small than in the case of the English
language and my colleague, Doug Axe, has actually done
the definitive work on this in his 12-year-long research
project that he performed at Cambridge University in
the 1990s and early 2000s and I'm gonna skip a few
slides so don't get dizzy. I'm gonna go right to his conclusion which is that the ratio of
the functional combinations of amino acids to all the
non-functional combinations is not one over 10 to the 12 which is the ratio we just
looked at in the English case but it's about one over
10 to the 77th power for a relatively short, 150
amino acid-length protein. Most proteins are much longer than that so the problem is typically much worse. Most proteins are on average
about 300 amino acids so the way to think of this
would be something like, I've got an illustration, a bike lock. Imagine you're a thief and
you wanna steal a nice bicycle out in front of Sutherland Hall and you encounter a bike
lock with four dials. How many possibilities
do you have to search? Well, as it turns out, not as many as even that 12-letter case
with the English language. You've got about 10,000 possibilities, but that's enough to defeat most of us if we have a limited amount of time. You spin the dials and
you're gonna, you know, you've gotta be really persistent, but I've done the math on
this and if you have 15 hours and you spin one dial per 10 seconds, in 15 hours you can get more than 5,000 at which your odds of success
are gonna be better than 50/50 and so in that case the chance hypothesis, the hypothesis that
the thief will succeed, is more likely to be true than false if the thief has 15 hours, [audience laughs] but what if the thief
encounters a lock like this with 10 dials? Well, now if the thief lives to be 100, does nothing his whole life but sample different combinations,
one every 10 seconds, takes no potty dates, has no dates, never goes to sleep at
night, never eats a meal, the thief is only gonna sample
about 3%, I've done the math, of the total number of combinations, the 10 to the 10th possibilities. Now, in that case, it's
overwhelmingly more likely that a random search will fail than it is that it will succeed and so the question in the life case is, and if that's the case, by the way, notice how this kind of
shifts to being a way of testing the chance hypothesis. If it's overwhelmingly more likely that a random search
will fail than succeed, it's overwhelmingly more likely that the chance hypothesis
is false than true 'cause if you're a betting
person, you say, well, he's gonna succeed and finally the thief is gonna succeed in
finding the combination, you're more likely to be wrong than right so your hypothesis is more
likely to be false than true. Okay, now let's go back
to what Dr. Axe found in his research, that the
search space when we're talking about genes and proteins
is vastly in excess, exponentially much larger than the case with the 10 dials on the lock and it's even vast in
relation to all the number of opportunities you would
have to search the space in the known history of life on Earth because there have only been
about 10 to the 40th organisms so 10 to the 40th over 10 to the 77 is one over 10 to the 37th. That is that being the
size of the search space that you can sample in 3.85 billion years, so if you could only sample
a tiny little smidgen of the search space,
you're more likely to fail in finding the part you want
than you are in succeeding and therefore the hypothesis
that that's how it happened is more likely to be false than true. Bottom line, the mutation
selection mechanism is not a plausible means of generating new biological information. Next subject. [audience murmurs] It's not, but the problem isn't just that the mutation selection mechanism can't generate a single new gene, it's that to build a
new form of animal life, we need what are called developmental gene regulatory networks which are integrated systems
of genes that interact to, in effect, regulate the
timing and expression of specific parts of the genome so that just as the
organism is developing, going through cell division, the right proteins are
generated or are expressed in order to service
those new types of cells. It's all beautifully
choreographed and when scientists, including the scientists who did this work who were at Caltech, when
they mapped this out, when they mapped out the
functional relationships between the different genes
and the gene products, the proteins that in turn bound
to other parts of the genome to turn some parts on and
leave other parts suppressed and then you gotta turn other parts on at just the right time, they found that it looked like an integrated circuit. It was a complex, functionally integrated information-processing system. So you don't just need one gene and one protein to make an animal. You need a developmental
gene regulatory network. Now, here's the rub. It turns out when the scientists, Eric Davidson who has recently passed away but a genius Caltech scientist,
mapped out these systems, he discovered something else about them and that is that you can't
change them very much at all without the organism ceasing to undergo the process of development. In other words,
development would shut down if you start changing the core elements of these gene regulatory networks but since we know that these
gene regulatory networks are necessary to build animal body plans, to get a new animal body plan to arise from an old animal body plan means we'd have to have a new
gene regulatory network which would mean we'd have to alter, transform or change that
initial gene regulatory network but that's exactly what our
laboratory work tells us does not and cannot happen
without animal death and if you have animal death, the evolutionary process ceases, so you've got a real problem. This problem has not been solved, it's not been addressed by
leading evolutionary biologists except in the case of Davidson to say that neo-Darwinism is a
catastrophic error in thinking because it cannot solve this problem. I put this problem to Dr. Haarsma in the Four Views book
in an imprint exchange and she passed on the
opportunity to try to answer it. It's simply not addressed by
proponents of either theistic or mainstream naturalistic
forms of evolution. One other problem, and this
one is a really delicious and it's caught the attention of a lot of very serious evolutionary biologists. It turns out that as important as DNA is for the production of proteins which need to service all different types of cells, the DNA alone cannot generate
a new animal body plan, a new animal architecture either. DNA makes proteins but
proteins have to be organized into biosynthetic pathways that characterize
different types of cells. Different types of cells
have to be organized to form specific kinds of tissues. Specific tissues have to be organized to form specific kinds of organs and organs and tissues
have to be organized again to form a high-level body plan, so the DNA is providing
the low-level instructions for, in a sense, the
lower-level components, but those components and those above it have to be organized again
with new sources of information that we now know are not solely
present on the DNA strand, in the DNA molecule, in the genome, so it'd be a little bit like
in a computer system today where you might have
information being used in a CAD/CAM system where
you take information and you use it to build
some mechanical parts so we can have assembly instructions for building an electrical component. Well, that's pretty
good to use information to build the electrical component, but you need more instructions
to place the component on the circuit board in the right place and the other components as well and then you need additional
assembly instructions to put those circuit
boards in the right place in relation to all the
other parts of the computer, so you need these higher-level
assembly instructions and we now know that those
instructions are not stored on the DNA molecule. Now, where they are is a
question of open research. In my book, Darwin's Doubt,
I identify four known sources of what are called epigenetic
or ontogenetic information, information beyond the genome, but here's the rub for
evolutionary theory. The neo-Darwinian mechanism
places the creative engine, assigns the creative engine
for the evolutionary process to the mutations, they're the variations, they're what change things, right? They're what could generate the novelty, but those mutations, in the best of cases, even if they could solve Doug
Axe's probability problem, even if they could
search those vast spaces to find those little needles in haystacks, would in the best case only
generate a new protein. That information on the DNA
strand at the lowest level on the biological
hierarchy will not arrange, by itself, the proteins into cell types, the cell types into tissues,
the tissues into organs, the organs and tissues into body plans, and so what that means is that what's called body
plan morphogenesis, the origin of new form,
cannot, in principle, be explained by the
neo-Darwinian mechanism because the neo-Darwinian
mechanism, best case, is only gonna give you new proteins. You can mutate until the
cows come home, indefinitely, infinitely over an
infinitely long time period, and you will not get this
higher-level structure which is necessary to
build a new body plan and it was for exactly that
reason that Muller and Newman in their book On the Origin
of Organismal Form said mutation and selection
is not an adequate theory of the generative, it can't
explain high-level form, the origin of body plans, and they list it in a
table of unsolved problems for contemporary evolutionary theory, the problem of the origin of form. When I saw that, I thought, stop press. That's the very question
that Darwin allegedly solved, and yet we have this
irony that we have people in the theistic world now trying to effectively baptize Darwin. Now, at this Royal Society conference, a number of the proponents of newer evolutionary
models were there, also, thank you very much, also
proposing new mechanisms to complement, supplement, replace the neo-Darwinism mechanism but we found, and I have
evaluated a number of these both in the new book with Ann
Gauger, we had a long article on the post neo-Darwinian
evolutionary models and mechanisms and in my book, Darwin's Doubt, that while many of these mechanisms and new theories had advantages that old-line neo-Darwinism does not, they cut, broke through ground in biology, they highlighted new processes
that are real processes. They did not solve the
fundamental information problem. An illustration I highlight at the bottom, Natural Genetic Engineering. It's the brainchild of a
brilliant molecular biologist or cell biologist at the
University of Chicago, Jim Shapiro, he has
shown that the mutations that often occur in living
systems are not random at all. They're under what he
calls algorithmic control and it looks as though the
organism has the capacity to, it has a kind of pre-programmed
adaptive capacity so that when environmental stresses of various kind affect the organism, the organism has the ability
to activate certain genes and suppress others and to adapt within limits to those stressors. All that is very cool biology. It is non-Darwinian, we agree, but Shapiro leaves one
question unanswered. Where does the programming come from? That pre-programming, and
that's what interests us in the intelligent design movement because we think that
information, in our experience, always arises from an intelligent source and none of these new
models have shown otherwise. In fact, one of the
organizers for the conference, Suzan Mazur, for the
Royal Society Conference, wrote afterwards that it was characterized by a lack of momentousness. Very trenchant critiques of
established neo-Darwinian theory but nothing new to replace
it that solves the problems that inspired the conference
in the first place. Now, you might be interested
just to know how this critique that we're offering of the
creative power of mutation and selection has been received
by mainstream scientists, mainstream evolutionary biologists. Some of the critique that we make in the book Theistic
Evolution echo some things that I argued in Darwin's Doubt. When my book came out in 2013, I had a number of
frivolous reviews initially but then I got a very
serious review in Science in September after a June release, and the scientist there, Charles Marshall, who reviewed it was critical,
respectful but critical, and I was thrilled more at the criticism than at the respect because he tried to, he did address the main
argument of the book head-on and he said that Meyer's
case depends upon the claim that the origin of new animal body plans requires vast amounts of
novel genetic information. He said in fact that's not
our present understanding. Our present understanding
of morphogenesis, of body plan building,
indicates that new phyla, new animal forms, were
not made by new genes but largely emerged through the rewiring of the gene regulatory networks
of already existing genes. Now, the term already existing genes oughta maybe make alarm bell go off. If you've got already
existing genes, and you do, notice he's talking about
those gene regulatory networks that I was talking about,
those integrated circuits of different genes acting to express some and not others at different times. What are genes, they're sections of DNA. What does DNA contain? Biological information,
and what we know goes on is that the gene regulatory networks act on other already existing
genes that have information for building the parts of animals, so you've got the regulatory system and then the information
for the parts list, so Marshall's acknowledging
both those sources of preexisting genetic information but he's not explaining
the origin of either one. Moreover, he talks about rewiring these developmental
gene regulatory networks which is the very thing
we know can't happen based on the experimental
research on them, and moreover, if you did rewire
a gene regulatory network, that would require multiple
coordinated changes in code which is a new source of information and also requires intelligent design, so in order to answer
the information argument that we've put forward in
the theistic evolution book and that I've put
forward in Darwin's Doubt and Doug and Gauger have
put forward in their work, Marshall has to invoke
three separate sources of unexplained biological
information, genetic information, and that, I submit, does not require a PhD in biology to refute. Basic logic reveals that to be
a question begging argument, so I would assert that if this is the best that the mainstream
evolutionary biologists can do to respond to our critique and to our positive case
for intelligent design which is not mainly the focus tonight, and I think for Charles
Marshall, is the best, he's a terrific scientist, then I think our critique is
on very solid grounds indeed and so for me, I'm very
puzzled at this big push to get theistic evolution
into the religious world at just the time when the
creative power of the mutation, natural selection, is being so roundly and profoundly critiqued by secular mainstream
evolutionary biologists, or in the case of people like Marshall, when they encounter our critique, we find that they're unable to answer it without begging the question, I think this is really problematic, so thank you very much and I hand it over to the philosophers and theologians, yeah. [audience applauds] [bright gentle music] >> Announcer: Biola
University prepares Christians to think biblically about everything, from science to business
to education and the arts. Learn more at biola.edu.
