The Scientists Beginning To Doubt The Theory Of Evolution | Unlocking The Mystery Of Life | Parable

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] in 1993 Professor Philip Johnson of the University of California at Berkeley invited a group of scientists and philosophers to a small Beach town on the Central Coast of California they came from major academic centers including Cambridge Munich and the University of Chicago to question an idea that had dominated science for 150 years I think Pajaro Dunes represented a turning point for many of us individually we all had questions about evolutionary theory but when we came together each person brought something of their own to the table and suddenly we all had a glimpse of a new way of looking at life and none of us had individually seen before I would have to say that this was an intense period of time in my life it just seemed that there was something here much more intellectually satisfying than the view that I had held up until this time looking back on it now I think that gave me the motivation to actually look at the evidence and just see where I thought it pointed [Music] I realized that this was bigger than any one person or discipline and this was the beginning of a community of scientists who are now willing to face the fundamental mystery of life's origin foreign [Music] foreign why anybody talks about anything else because this is the most interesting topic there is where do we come from how did we get here what brought us into existence what is our relationship to reality as a whole [Music] you look at the incredible diversity and complexity of life and inevitably the question arises what brought all this into existence was it simply chance in necessity undirected Natural Forces or is there something else going on is there a purpose a plan a design a design due to an intelligent cause I think that is the fundamental question the scientists who came to paharo Dunes set out to re-examine the mystery of life's origin for each had significant doubts about widely held evolutionary ideas among them biochemist Michael behe questioned how natural processes could have assembled the intricate structures found within living cells Dean Kenyon was an evolutionary biologist who no longer thought that chemistry alone could account for the origin of life on Earth and Stephen Meyer Paul Nelson and William demsky were seeking a new approach one that could explain the origin of the genetic information encoded in living organisms these scientists and philosophers began to formulate an alternative to the central theory of Modern Biology a theory born in the mind of a British naturalist his name was Charles Darwin in 1831 Darwin then 22 years old set sail on a five-year survey Expedition for the British Empire [Music] he journeyed from England on the HMS Beagle traveling around the southern tip of South America then North toward a chain of volcanic islands in the Pacific called the Galapagos [Music] on this desolate archipelago 600 miles off the western coast of Ecuador Charles Darwin encountered an extraordinary array of birds reptiles and mammals the likes of which she had never seen before [Music] for more than a month Darwin studied plant and animal life took extensive notes and collected specimens then he left never to return 25 years passed as he developed a theory about how the diverse forms of life on Earth had originated in 1859 Darwin published a book titled On the Origin of Species its impact on science and ultimately all of Western culture was dramatic Darwin argued that all life was the product of purely undirected Natural Forces time chance and a process he called natural selection for 2500 years before Darwin most prominent scientists and philosophers people such as Plato or Newton or Kepler viewed the world as the product of some kind of design or plan but a fundamental shift occurs with Darwin's idea of natural selection and a real change in scientific philosophy is set in motion Darwin was not the first scientist to propose a theory of evolution but he was the first to offer a plausible naturalistic mechanism that could produce biological change over long periods of time to understand how natural selection Works consider the finch population's Darwin encountered on the Galapagos Islands thirteen species of finches inhabit the Galapagos Islands and they vary subtly in terms of their body size and shape of the beak Darwin returned to England with nine different species of these birds [Music] according to contemporary darwinian Theory differences in the sizes and shapes of the bird's beaks are the direct result of natural selection [Music] one example often cited involves species of seed eating finches [Music] following seasons of heavy rain small soft seeds are plentiful throughout the islands birds with short beaks can easily gather food however during periods of drought the only seeds available are encased in hard tough shells that remain on the ground from the previous year in these circumstances only birds with longer sharper beaks can crack the shells and eat the seeds those birds with the longer beak survive because they can reach the food source whereas other birds cannot that long beak then infers what biologists Now call a functional advantage the finches with smaller beaks unfortunately die out from starvation because they cannot reach that food source if the drought conditions continue the environment causes a change in the features of the finch population as a whole over time the long beaks are passed on to succeeding Generations because those beaks enable the birds to survive natural selection was a powerful idea physical variations that proved advantageous would be inherited by succeeding Generations through this process populations would be altered and over time fundamentally different organisms would arise without any form of intelligent guidance Darwin wanted to explain everything in the history of life in terms of undesigned unintelligent natural processes and when he looked for an explanation what he found was that a process he could observe in domestic populations also operates in the wild now Darwin himself was very familiar with domestic breeding he himself studied pigeon breeding and he knew that for centuries human breeders had been able to make dramatic changes in populations by selecting only certain individuals to breed Darwin really suggested that this same process operates in the wild for Charles Darwin natural selection explained the appearance of design without a designer there was no longer any need to invoke an intelligent cause for the complexity of life in effect natural selection became a kind of designer substitute today Darwinism is generally assumed throughout science and the academic world yet despite its wide acceptance a growing number of scientists and Scholars including those who met at bahara Dunes now challenge key aspects of darwinian theory when we came together at Pajaro Dunes we certainly didn't agree on everything but we did share a real dissatisfaction with the mechanism of natural selection and the role that it was playing in biological explanation natural selection is a real process and it works well for explaining certain limited kinds of variation small scale change we have lots of examples of that in fact where it doesn't work well is explaining what Darwin thought it could namely the real complexity of life we have Finch beak and then you've got the finch itself a minor change in the structure of the beak versus the origin of the organism itself these are different scales of phenomena these are different kinds of problems and the important problem for biology is to understand where natural selection works and where it doesn't and why there's a difference evidence is very powerful and all of us have the sense that if we let that evidence speak for itself that it would lead us in a very different direction away from natural selection and towards a different conclusion about the origin and nature of life on Earth [Music] natural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight success variations she could never take a great and sudden leap but must have balanced by scholten Shaw their slow steps foreign it's really interesting to notice that the more we know about life and the more we know about biology the more problems Darwinism has and the more design becomes apparent since 1988 Dr Michael B has investigated complex biological systems that seem to defy explanation by natural selection for the longest time I believe that darwinian Evolution explains what we saw in biology not because I saw how it could actually explain it but because I was told that it did explain it in in schools I was taught darwinian biology and through college and graduate school I was in an atmosphere which just assumed that darwinian Evolution explained biology and again I didn't have any reason to doubt it it wasn't until about you know 10 years or more ago that I read a book called evolution of theory and crisis by a geneticist by the name of Michael Denton an Australian and he put forward a lot of scientific arguments against darwinian theory that I had never heard before and and the arguments seemed pretty convincing and at that point I I started to get a bit angry because I thought I was being led down the Primrose path here were a number of very good arguments and I had gone through a doctoral program and biochemistry he became a faculty member and I had never even heard of these things and so from that point on I became very interested in in the question of evolution and and since have decided the darwinian processes are not the whole explanation for life Michael be he's skepticism derived in large measure from what Modern Biology has revealed about life's most fundamental unit the cell in the 19th century when Darwin was alive scientists thought that the basis of Life the cell was some simple glob of protoplasm like a little piece of jello or something that was not hard to explain at all this perception didn't really change too much until the early 1950s but in the last half century our knowledge of the cell has just exploded [Music] today powerful Technologies reveal elaborate microscopic worlds worlds so small that a thimble full of cultured liquid can contain more than 4 billion single-celled bacteria each packed with circuits assembly instructions and miniature machines the complexity of which Charles Darwin could never have imagined at the very basis of life where molecules and cells run the show we've discovered machines literally molecular machines there are little molecular trucks that carry supplies from one end of the cell to the other there are machines which capture the energy from sunlight and turn it into usable energy there are as many molecular machines in the human body as there are functions that the body has to do so if you think about hearing seeing smelling tasting healing blood clotting respiratory action the immune response all of those require a host of machines when we look at these machines we ask ourselves where do they come from and the standard answer darwinian evolution is very inadequate in my view in speaking on the topic of scientific naturalism and evolution during the early 1990s at a series of academic conferences bihi first shared his doubts about the ability of natural selection to construct complex molecular machines one machine particularly attracted his attention I remember the first time I looked in a biochemistry textbook and I saw a drawing of something called a bacterial flagellum with all of its parts in all of its Glory it's had a propeller and hook region and the the drive shaft and the motor and so on I looked at that and I said that's an outboard motor that that's designed you know that's no chance assemblage of parts bihi's reaction was not surprising for the molecular Motors that drive bacteria through liquid each depend upon a system of intricately arranged mechanical parts these parts come into focus when portions of a cell are magnified 50 000 times biochemists have used electron micrographs like this one to identify the parts and three-dimensional structure of the flagellar motor thank you in the process they have revealed a Marvel of engineering on a miniaturized scale Howard Berg at Harvard has labeled it the most efficient machine in the universe these machines some of them are running at 100 000 RPMs and are hardwired into a signal transduction or sensory mechanism so that it's getting feedback from the environment and even though they're spinning that fast they can stop on a dime it only takes a quarter turn for them to stop and ship directions and start spinning 100 000 RPM in the other direction and just like outboard motors on motor boats it has a large number of Parts which are necessary for the motor to work the bacterial flagellum two gears forward reverse water cooled proton motive force it has a stator it has a rotor it has a U-joint it has a driveshaft it has a propeller and they function as these parts of machines it's you know it's not convenient that we give them these names that's truly their function since its Discovery scientists have tried to understand how a rotary motor could have Arisen through natural selection as yet they have failed to offer any detailed darwinian explanation [Music] to see why we must understand a feature of molecular machines known as irreducible complexity irreducible complexity was coined by Mike bihe in describing these molecular machines basically what it says is that you have multi-component parts to Any Given organelle or system in a Cell all of which are necessary for function that is if you remove one part you lose function of that system the idea of irreducible complexity can be illustrated by a familiar non-biological machine a mouse trap [Music] the Trap is composed of five basic pieces a catch to hold the bait a strong spring a thin bent Rod called The Hammer a holding bar to secure the hammer in place and a platform upon which the entire system is mounted if any one of these parts is missing or defective the mechanism will not work all components of this irreducibly complex system must be present simultaneously for the machine to perform its function catching mice irreducible complexity also applies to biological machines including the bacterial flagellar motor all told there are about 40 different protein Parts which are necessary for this machine to work and if any of those parts are missing then either you get a flagellum that doesn't work because it's missing the hook or it's missing the drive shaft or whatever or it doesn't even get built within the cell in evolutionary terms you have to be able to explain how you can build this system gradually when there's no function until you have all those parts in place the irreducible complexity of molecular machines poses a severe challenge to the power of natural selection according to Darwin's theory even very complex biological structures like an eye an ear or a heart can be built gradually over time in small incremental steps yet as Darwin made clear natural selection can only succeed if these random genetic changes provide some advantage to the evolving organism in its struggle for survival as I have attempted to show it is not necessary to suppose that the modifications are all simultaneous if they were extremely slight and gradual natural selection is scrutinizing the slightest variations rejecting those that are bad preserving and adding up all that are good but could Darwin's small favorable variations have produced a bacterial flagellum some scientists doubt the possibility could something new like a bacteria flagellar motor and all the components that go with it how could it develop out of a population of bacteria that don't have that system when each change according to Darwin's theory has to provide some kind of advantage imagine such a scenario early in the Earth's history an evolving bacterium somehow develops a tail and perhaps even the pieces necessary to attach it to the cell wall yet without a complete motor assembly this Innovation would provide no advantage to the cell instead the tail would lie immobile and useless invisible to Natural Selection which by definition can only favor changes that Aid survival the logic of natural selection is very demanding unless the flagellum mechanism is completely assembled and actually works natural selection simply cannot preserve it it cannot be passed On to the Next Generation the important thing to realize about natural selection is it selects only four a functional advantage in most cases natural selection actually eliminates things things that have no function or that have a function that harms the organism so if you had a bacterium with a tail that didn't function as a flagellum chances are natural selection would eliminate it the only way you can select for a flagellum is if you have a flagellum that works and that means you have to have all the pieces of the motor in place to begin with so natural selection can't get you the bacterial flagellum it can only work after the flagellum is there and operating foreign [Music] 1996 Michael behe published a book titled Darwin's Black Box in it he argued that natural selection Darwin's designer substitute could not explain the origin of the bacterial flagellum or any other irreducibly complex biological system instead bihi concluded that the integrated complexity of these systems pointed to intelligent design Darwin's Black Box created immediate controversy over 75 Publications including some of the world's leading newspapers and scientific journals reviewed the book some scientists praise be his work While others dismissed it as unscientific and religiously motivated be his critics also insisted that he had underestimated the power of natural selection they argued that the flagellar motor could have been constructed from parts used to build simpler molecular machines like this needle-nose cellular to pump if the components of the pump already existed they could have been preserved by natural selection even before the bacterial motor arose this theory is called co-option it's essentially saying that Evolution or national selection at some point was able to borrow components of one molecular machine and build a new machine with some of these components Scott Minnick has studied the flagellar motor for nearly 20 years his research has led him to challenge the co-option argument with a bacterial flagellum you're talking about a machine that's got 40 structural parts yes we find 10 of them are involved in another molecular machine but the other 30 are unique so where are you going to borrow them from eventually you're going to have to account for the function of every single part is originally having some other purpose so you can only follow that argument so far until you run into the problem of your borrowing parts from nothing but even if you can see that you have all the parts necessary to build one of these machines that's only part of the problem maybe even more complex I think more complex is the assembly instructions that is never addressed by opponents of the irreducible complexity argument studies of the bacterial motor have indeed revealed an even deeper level of complexity for its construction not only requires specific Parts but also a precise sequence of assembly you've got to make things at the right time you've got to make the right number of components you've got to assemble them in a sequential manner you've got to be able to tell if you've assembled it properly so that you don't waste energy building a structure that's not going to be functional building a molecular machine has been compared to the construction of a house where workers follow a detailed blueprint and plan for assembly the foundation of a house is poured before the walls are erected plumbing and electrical fixtures are installed prior to enclosing the walls of the structure Windows must be hung before siding is applied and shingles are attached only after plywood sheets are nailed to the rafters so it is with the construction of a flagellar motor [Music] you build this structure from the inside out you're counting the number of components in a ring structure of a stator and once that's assembled there's feedback that says okay no more of that component now A Rod is added that ring is at another Rod is added the U-joints had it once U-joints at a certain size and a certain degree of Bend about a quarter turn that's shut off and then you start adding components for the propeller these are all made in a precise sequence just like you would build a building pull the motor correctly requires a complex system of machines that coordinate the timing of the assembly instructions but how could natural selection construct such a system co-option argument doesn't explain this you see in order to construct that flagellar mechanism or tens of thousands of other such mechanisms in the cell you require other machines to regulate the Assembly of these structures and those machines themselves require machines for their assembly if even one of these pieces is missing or put in the wrong place your motor isn't going to work so this apparatus to assemble the flagellar motor is itself irreducibly complex in fact what we have here is irreducible complexity all the way down we know a lot about the bacterial flagellum we still have a lot to learn but we know a lot about it and there's no explanation for how this complex molecular machine was ever produced by a darwinian mechanism [Music] 150 years ago scientists did not know about irreducibly complex molecular machines yet Charles Darwin anticipated the difficulty that systems such as these could pose to his theory [Music] Jay said that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications my theory would absolutely break down [Music] there are really two big questions in biology how do you get new living forms with new structures like wings and eyes from life that already exists and secondly how did life originate on Earth in the first place now of course we know that Darwin spent most of his life formulating an answer to the first of these two questions [Music] [Applause] [Music] Charles Darwin compared the history of life on Earth to a great branching tree [Music] the base of the tree represented the very first living cell and the branches were new and more complex life forms that had evolved over time from the first primitive organism Darwin was trying to explain how the branches on the Tree of Life originated he was trying to show how natural selection could have modified existing organisms to produce the great diversity of plant and animal life that fills the Earth today but when it came to the base of the tree which represented the origin of the first life the first living cell Darwin had very little to say in fact in the Origin of Species he didn't even address the question of how life might have originated from non-living matter the only glimpses we have of Darwin's opinions on the subject appear in a letter he wrote to a colleague named Joseph Hooker [Music] regarding the first production of a living organism if and oh what a big if we could conceive in some warm Little Pond with all sorts of ammonia and phosphoric salts light heat and electricity present that a protein compound walls chemically formed ready to undergo still more complex changes at the present such matter would be instantly devoured but this may not have been the case before living creatures were formed during the final years of his life Darwin did little to develop his idea that A Primitive cell might have emerged from simple chemicals in the primordial Waters of the early Earth but later in the 1920s and 30s a Russian scientist named Alexander o'parin formulated a detailed theory about how this could have happened it was called chemical evolution o'parin thought that he could explain the origin of the first life using darwinian principles he envisioned simple chemicals combining and recombining to form larger molecules and then these larger molecules organizing themselves with the help of chance variations and natural selection into the first primitive living cell over the next three decades many scientists work to develop and refine these ideas as they pondered the questions both oparan and Darwin had raised how could life have evolved from simple chemicals one man thought he knew the problem of biological Origins is for a very long time I would say has been a real deep interest to me just because of the scale of the problem the importance of it where did we come from uh what are why are we here and all that kind of uh question uh probed from the point of view of Natural Science during the late 1960s and throughout the 70s and early 80s Dean Kenyon was one of the leading chemical evolutionary theorists in the world and like others in this field he was trying to explain how life on Earth began through a purely natural process [Music] in 69 Kenyon co-authored an important book on the origin of life Gary's Diamond myself thought that if we were to pull together um in all of the lines of empirical evidence that had accumulated by the mid to late 60s and one continuous argument we were very enthusiastic about the possibilities for explaining the origin of the main life-building elements despite his optimism Kenyon faced a significant problem to explain how life began he first had to account for the origin of the essential building blocks of every cell that has existed on Earth large complex molecules called proteins proteins have a wide range of function in the cell everything from structural requirements in terms of scaffolding of the cell the cytoskeleton to enzymes where they're actually processing molecules to harvest energy or to build components of the cell proteins do pretty much all of the jobs inside of the cell except for storing genetic information that's left to the DNA the RNA but all the day-to-day jobs cleaning up the cell making energy it's all proteins Kenya knew that proteins would have been as important to the first life as they are to living cells today he also recognized the complexity of their Construction by the 1960s scientists had determined that even simple cells are made of thousands of different types of proteins and the function of these molecules derives from their highly complex three-dimensional shapes the irregular shapes of some proteins allow them to catalyze or trigger chemical reactions because of the hand and glove fit that they have with other molecules in the cell while other protein molecules form interlocking structural components individual parts of a bacterial motor like this ring structure are each made of either a single protein molecule or an assembly of proteins fitted together into a specific shape these proteins are in turn made of smaller chemical units called amino acids that are linked together in long chains there is a very great degree of intricacy of architecture down in the cell units in these protein forming amino acids in nature 20 different types of amino acids are used to construct protein chains biologists have compared them to the 26 letters of the English alphabet alphabetic letters can be arranged in a huge number of possible combinations and it's the sequential arrangement of the letters that determines whether you have meaningful words and sentences if the letters are arranged correctly you'll get meaningful text but if they're not arranged correctly you'll get gibberish and the same principle applies for amino acids and proteins there are at least thirty thousand distinct types of proteins each made of a different combination of the same 20 amino acids they are arranged like letters to form chains often hundreds of units long if the amino acids are sequenced correctly then the chain will fold into a functioning protein [Music] proteins are arranged with their amino acids in such a way that the amino acids collapse on each other into an architecture that is pre-programmed by the order of the amino acids it folds into a certain structure and that structure can do a certain function so all proteins in the cell have a certain three-dimensional pattern that's based on the arrangement of amino acids in the chain this Arrangement is critical for if the amino acids are incorrectly sequenced a useless chain forms and instead of folding into a protein it will be destroyed in the cell proteins like written languages or computer codes have a high degree of specificity the function of the hole depends upon the precise arrangement of the individual parts but what produces the precise sequencing of amino acids that gives rise to the specific shapes and functions of proteins during the 1950s and 60s discoveries about protein structure forced biologists to confront this mystery Dean Kenyon believed he could solve it in his book biochemical predestination Kenyan and his co-author Gary Steinman proposed an intriguing Theory Kenyon wrote life might have been biochemically predestined by the properties of attraction that exists between its chemical Parts particularly between amino acids in proteins it's at the time that biochemical predestination came out I and my co-author were totally convinced that we had the scientific explanation for Origins Kenyon proposed that the chemical properties of the amino acids caused them to be attracted to each other forming the long chains that became the first proteins the most important components in the living cell and this meant that life was effectively inevitable predestined by nothing more than chemistry many scientists embraced kenyan's ideas and over the next 20 years biochemical predestination became a best-selling text on the theory of chemical evolution yet five years after the book's publication Kenyon quietly began to doubt the plausibility of his own Theory it was during that whole period of time that my doubts about certain aspects of The evolutionary account became apparent when coming into contact with a powerful counter-argument given to me by one of my students and I could not refute that counter argument Kenyon was challenged to explain how the first proteins could have been assembled without the help of genetic instructions in living cells today chains of amino acids are not formed directly by forces of attraction between their parts the scenario Kenyan envisioned on the early Earth instead another large molecule within the cell stores instructions for sequencing the amino acids in proteins it is called DNA initially Kenyon believed the proteins could have formed directly from amino acids without any DNA assembly instructions and and that's why so many scientists were excited about his theory but the more he and others learned about the properties of amino acids and proteins the more he began to doubt that proteins could self-assemble without DNA [Music] in DNA Kenyan encountered a molecule with a property he could not explain through natural processes for lock securely within its double helix structure is a wealth of information in the form of precisely sequenced chemicals that scientists represent with the letters A C T and G in a written language information is communicated by a precise arrangement of letters in the same way the instructions necessary to assemble amino acids into proteins are conveyed by the sequences of chemicals arranged along the spine of the DNA this chemical code has been called the language of life and it is the most densely packed and elaborately detailed assembly of information in the known universe like other scientists working on the origin of Life Kenyon realized he had two choices either he had to explain where these genetic assembly instructions came from or he had to explain how proteins could have Arisen directly from amino acids without DNA in the primordial oceans and in the end he realized he could do neither foreign problem how you could get together in one tiny sub microscopic volume of the Primitive ocean all of the hundreds of different molecular components you would need in order for a self-replicating cycle to be established and so my doubts about what amino acids could order themselves into a meaningful biological sequences on their own without pre-existing genetic material being present just reached I guess for me the intellectual Breaking Point sometime near the the end of the decade of the 70s as Kenyan re-evaluated his theory new biochemical discoveries further weakened his conviction that amino acids could have organized themselves into proteins the more I conducted my own studies including a period of time at NASA Ames Research Center the more it became apparent that there were multiple difficulties with the chemical Evolution account and further experimental work showed that amino acids do not have the ability to order themselves into antibiologically meaningful sequences faced with mounting difficulties in his own Theory and a growing body of scientific data about the importance of DNA Canyon was forced to confront the absolute necessity of genetic information the more I thought about the alternative that was being presented in the criticism and the enormous problem that all of us who worked on this field had neglected to address the problem of the origin of genetic information itself then I really had to re-assess my whole position regarding regarding Origins Bourdain Canyon a new question became the focus of his search for life's origin what was the source of the biological information in DNA if one could get at the origin of the messages the encoded messages within the living Machinery then you would really be on to something far more intellectually satisfying than this chemical Evolution Theory [Music] yet Kenyon realized that he faced a narrowing set of options by the 1970s most researchers had rejected the idea that the information necessary to build a first cell originated by chance alone [Music] to understand why consider the difficulty of generating just two lines of Shakespeare's play Hamlet by dropping Scrabble letters onto a tabletop then considered that the specific genetic instructions required to build the proteins in even the simplest one celled organism would fill hundreds of pages of printed text of course a serious origin of Life biologists did not believe that life had Arisen by chance alone instead they envisioned natural selection acting on random variations among chemicals to produce the first life but there was a problem with this proposal by definition natural selection could not have functioned before the existence of the first living cell for it can only act upon organisms capable of replicating themselves cells equipped with DNA that pass on their genetic changes to Future Generations without DNA there is no self-replication but without self-replication there is no natural selection so you can't use natural selection to explain the origin of DNA without assuming the existence of the very thing you're trying to explain [Music] chance natural selection and his own theory of self-organization had all failed to explain the origin of genetic information now Kenyon saw only one alternative we have not the slightest chance of a chemical evolutionary origin for even the simplest of cells so the concept of the intelligent design of life was immensely attractive to me and made a great deal of sense as it very closely matched the multiple discoveries in molecular biology in the years since kenyon's rejection of chemical Evolution science has revealed the details of an entire system of information processing that bears the Hallmarks of intelligent design foreign with computer animation we can enter the cell to view this remarkable system at work [Music] after entering the heart of the cell we see that tightly wound strands of DNA storehouses for the instructions necessary to build every protein in an organism foreign a process known as transcription a molecular machine first unwinds a section of the DNA Helix to expose the genetic instructions needed to assemble a specific protein molecule [Music] another machine then copies these instructions to form a molecule known as messenger RNA [Music] when transcription is complete the Slender RNA strand carries the genetic information through the nuclear pore complex the gatekeeper for traffic in and out of the cell nucleus [Music] the messenger RNA strand is directed to a two-part molecular Factory called a ribosome after attaching itself securely the process of translation begins [Music] inside the ribosome a molecular assembly line builds a specifically sequenced chain of amino acids these amino acids are transported from other parts of the cell and then linked into chains often hundreds of units long their sequential Arrangement determines the type of protein manufactured foreign [Music] is finished it is moved from the ribosome to a barrel-shaped machine that helps fold it into the precise shape critical to its function [Music] foreign is folded into a protein it is then released and shepherded by another molecular machine to the exact location where it is needed this is absolutely mind-boggling to perceive at this scale of size such a finely tuned apparatus a device that's that bears the marks of intelligent design and manufacture and we have the details of a immensely complex molecular realm of genetic information processing and it's exactly this new realm of molecular genetics where we see the most compelling evidence of design on the Earth [Music] [Music] [Music] when I look at molecular machines or the incredibly complex process by which cells divide I want to ask is it possible that these things had an intelligence behind them that there was a plan or a purpose to this structure science ought to be a search for the truth about the world now we shouldn't prejudge what might be true we shouldn't say I don't like that explanation so I'm going to put it to one side rather than when we come to a puzzle in nature we ought to bring to that puzzle every possible cause that might explain it one of the problems I have with evolutionary theory is it artificially rules out a kind of cause even before the evidence has a chance to speak and the cause that's ruled out is intelligence since the late 19th century since the time of Darwin in fact in part because of Darwin's writing and the Origin of Species scientists came to con accept a convention a definition of science that excluded the possibility of design as a scientific explanation and that convention has a name it's called methodological naturalism and it just means that if you're going to be scientific you must limit yourself to explanations that invoke only natural causes you can't invoke intelligence as a Cause and yet curiously we make inferences to intelligence all the time it's part of our ordinary reasoning to recognize the effects of intelligence consider for example these hieroglyphic messages carved upon the ruins of Egyptian monuments no one would attribute the shapes and Arrangements of these symbols to natural causes like sandstorms or erosion instead we recognize them as the work of ancient scribes intelligent human agents similar reasoning leads us to conclude that the mysterious Stone figures on the shores of Easter Island were not formed by the actions of wind and water over great periods of time nor do we presume that plants could grow into these familiar shapes without some manner of intelligent guidance of course we make these inferences all the time and we know they're correct but the question is on what basis do we make these inferences what are the features that enable us to recognize intelligence recently in a book titled the design inference mathematician William demsky has made an important breakthrough in understanding design reasoning demsky has identified the specific features of artifacts that cause us to recognize prior intelligent activity I came to this by trying to look at how do we reason about design what what are The Logical moves that we have to go through in order to come to a conclusion of design so what I'm trying to do is to establish reliable empirical scientifically rigorous criteria for deciding whether something is in fact designed so I was looking at the logic of it and what I found was you need improbability and you need specification the right sort of pattern these objective patterns according to demsky human beings correctly detect the activity of intelligence whenever they observe a highly improbable object or event that also matches a recognizable pattern just such a pattern is found in the Black Hills of South Dakota if you travel through the West you'll see lots of different shapes on mountainsides most of which mean nothing at all they're just rocks strewn in various patterns but what you don't see are the faces of Lincoln Jefferson Teddy Roosevelt and George Washington on mountainsides the only place you see that is in South Dakota and the reason it's there is because a sculptor an eccentric sculptor decided that he wanted to honor these Presidents by spending the larger part of his life chiseling their faces in the side of that mountain that pattern is improbable a random Hillside is awesome improbable but a random Hillside doesn't specify anything we do know though that there were four guys who were presidents of the United States who had particular patterns with their faces and those patterns on the Mountainside in South Dakota match faces elsewhere if I look up and see the faces I immediately recognize that they match the faces of the four presidents that are known from money or portraits at the National Gallery or paintings and books and and so I realized when I look at Mount Rushmore we have not only a highly improbable configuration of rock but one which matches an independently given pattern that reliably indicates intelligence so we have a small probability specification its design [Music] on a seashore issue another improbable pattern etched into the Earth illustrates how we detect design one would infer that this message was written by the movement of the times instead because of the characteristics of this pattern we identify the words as the products of intelligence that improbable Arrangement also conforms to an independently given pattern namely the shapes of the letters that we recognize from English alphabet and the words that we know from English vocabulary and so it's the improbability of the arrangement plus the fact that it conforms to an independently given pattern that triggers the awareness of design this illustration suggests that William Dempsey's criteria for design detection small probability and specification are essentially equivalent to information the type of information present not only in pictures written texts and numeric sequences but also encoded in software and radio signals the ability to detect information in electromagnetic Transmissions has made possible a unique search for intelligence for more than three decades astronomers involved in seti the search for extraterrestrial intelligence have monitored radio signals from outer space in an attempt to find information-rich patterns typically radio telescopes receive either random noise or simple repetitive signals produced Naturally by stars galaxies and other celestial objects but astronomers recognize that if they ever identified an information bearing signal it would confirm the existence of intelligent life beyond the Earth some have speculated that an extraterrestrial civilization might have attempted to communicate by transmitting messages in the universal language of mathematics perhaps through a recognizable pattern like a series of prime numbers you're not going to get that by chance so you need complexity or improbability lots of prime numbers and you also need a pattern and it has to be the right sort of pattern it's not a pattern that you're imposing it's a pattern that's that's there objectively to date seti research has failed to detect any pattern or information that would indicate intelligence in a distant Galaxy but in Another Universe much closer to home scientists have discovered a wealth of information within the nucleus of the living cell DNA has a structure that is ideal for carrying information in the A's T season G's the basis of the double helix of DNA is the potential for storing a tremendous amount of information there is in fact no entity in the known universe that stores and processes more information more efficiently than the DNA molecule a full complement of human DNA has three billion individual characters analysis of the DNA molecules coding regions show that its chemical characters have a specific Arrangement that allows them to convey detailed instructions or information much like letters in a meaningful sentence or binary digits in a computer code Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a computer program only much more complex than any we've been able to devise and if you reflect on that even for a minute it's a highly suggestive observation because we know that Bill Gates does not employ wind and erosion or random number generators to generate a software instead he employs intelligent Engineers software engineers and so everything we know in our experience suggests that information Rich systems arise from intelligent design but what do we make of the fact that there is information in life in every living cell of every living organism that's the fundamental mystery where does that information come from the past 15 years philosopher and scientist Stephen Meyer has worked to answer this question Meyer has developed an argument to demonstrate that intelligent design provides the best explanation for the origin of information necessary to build the first living cell information that the DNA molecule holds it's part of our knowledge base that intelligent agents can produce information-rich systems so the argument is not based on what we don't know but it's based on what we do know about the cause and effect structure of the world we know at present there is no naturalistic explanation no natural cause that produces information not natural selection not self-organizational processes not pure chance but we do know of a cause which is capable of producing information and that is intelligence so when people infer design from the presence of information and DNA they're effectively making what's called in the historical Sciences an inference to the best explanation so when we find an information Rich system in the cell in the DNA molecule specifically we can infer that an intelligence played a role in the origin of that system even if we weren't there to observe the system coming into existence Meyer's work on the origin of genetic information is now part of a comprehensive scientific case for design that grew out of a meeting of scientists and philosophers on the Central Coast of California in 1993. their objective was to reassess an idea that had dominated biology for more than a century in the process they gave birth to a theory that has become known as intelligent design to me the great promise of design is it gives us a new tool and explanation that belongs in the toolkit of science intelligent causes a real they leave evidence of their existence and a healthy science is a science that seeks the truth and lets the evidence speak for itself the argument for intelligent design is based on observation of the facts now that's my definition of good science it's observation of the facts now when you observe the facts as Michael behe has done what do You observe You observe this incredible pattern of interrelated complexity and the way we conclude intelligent design for the bacterial flagellum is the same way we conclude intelligent design for an outboard motor when we see an outboard motor we see the way the parts interact and so on we know somebody made that the reasoning is the same for biological machines so the idea of intelligent design is a completely scientific one certainly it it might have religious implications but it does not depend on religious premises when I look at the evidence objectively without ruling out the possibility of design design just leaps up as the most likely explanation and that's why I believe that it's true I think design is back on the table you know we can't explain these systems by natural law and if we're searching for truth and they are in fact designed if we have to be design Engineers to understand them then I say what's the problem you know you go over the date of legion and the implications yeah they have profound metaphysical implications but so be it so it's a powerful idea that the universe is rational and comprehensible underwritten by a supreme intelligence that meant for this world to be understood is something that underwrites then the program of science because then you can go out and look at the world and the world will make sense if it's all just a chaotic assemblance there's no reason to expect any rationality out there but if it in fact is the product of a mind then you can go out in science becomes this enormous wonderful puzzle solving project in which you can expect to find rationality and beauty and comprehensibility right at the foundation of things 150 years ago Charles Darwin transformed science with his theory of natural selection [Music] today that theory faces a formidable challenge intelligent design has sparked both Discovery and intense debate over the origin of life on Earth and for a growing number of scientists it represents a paradigm an idea with the power to once again redefine the foundations of scientific thought during the 19th century scientists believed that there were two fundamental entities matter and energy but as we enter the 21st century there's a third fundamental entity that science has had to recognize and that is information and so as we encounter the biology of the information age the suspicion is growing that what we're seeing in the DNA molecule is actually an artifact of Mind an artifact of intelligence something that can only be explained by intelligent design foreign [Music]

Channel: Parable - Religious History Documentaries

Views: 410,842

Keywords: parable, parable channel, parable documentary, religious history, religious history documentary, bible documentary, bible documentary bbc, jesus documentary

Id: GgbwySSd0PM

Length: 65min 20sec (3920 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022

Reddit Comments

[u/de_bushdoctah]

Creation scientists made a video, evolution debunked lol.

No but seriously, evolution doesn’t tackle the origin of life. Instead of trying to dismantle that theory, these guys should’ve focused on abiogenesis.

[u/[deleted]]

Take away their PhDs and let them work as a janitor, fast food worker, or Reddit mod.