Shownotes and Transcript
Intelligent Design may not be an idea you are familiar with but it has interested me since I was a child.
I find it impossible to accept that the world we live in and the complexity of human beings is all based on luck and chance. There has to be an intelligent designer.
Stephen C Meyer is one of the most renowned experts on this very topic and his recent appearance on The Joe Rogan Experience has made many people question the theory of a universe without God. At what point did intellectuals decide that scientific knowledge conflicts with traditional theistic beliefs? Is it even statistically possible for such complexity to just appear? What about the question of who is this intelligent designer?
Stephen Meyer will help you view the world around you with a brand new perspective.
Dr. Stephen C. Meyer received his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge in the philosophy of science. A former geophysicist and college professor, he now directs the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle. In 2004, Meyer ignited a firestorm of media and scientific controversy when a biology journal at the Smithsonian Institution published his peer-reviewed scientific article advancing intelligent design. Meyer has been featured on national television and radio programs, including The Joe Rogan Experience, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CBS's Sunday Morning, NBC's Nightly News, ABC's World News, Good Morning America, Nightline, FOX News Live, and the Tavis Smiley show on PBS. He has also been featured in two New York Times front-page stories and has garnered attention in other top-national media. Dr. Meyer is author of the New York Times bestseller Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design and Signature in the Cell, a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year. He is also a co-author of Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism and Theistic Evolution: A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique.
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Interview recorded 13.12.23
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Transcript(Hearts of Oak)
Dr. Stephen Meyer. It's wonderful to have you with us. Thank you so much for your time today.
(Stephen C Meyer)
Thanks for inviting me, Peter.
No, it's great to have you.
And people can find you on Twitter @StephenCMayer. It's on the screen there.
And also discovery.org, the Discovery Institute.
And you obviously received your PhD in philosophy of sciences from England, from University of Cambridge, your a former geophysicist, college professor, and you now are the director of Discovery Institute, author of many books.
The latest is Return of the God Hypothesis, Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind Behind the Universe, and the links for those books will be in the description. But, Dr. Meyer, if I can maybe, I think I remember as a child, church loyalty, being at church and getting a stamp for attending.
I remember asking for a book on creationism then, and we may touch on different creationism, intelligent design.
I mean, it was 10 or 11. And I remember being fascinated by this whole topic of how God can be seen in the world around us.
Maybe I can ask you about your journey. What has been your journey to being one of the, I guess, main proponents on intelligent design?
Well, I've always been interested in questions at the intersection between science and philosophy or science and
larger worldview questions or science and religion the questions that are addressed about, you know, how do we get here and what is, is there a particular significance to human life, what is the meaning of life, in the early part of my scientific career I was working as a geophysicist as you mentioned the introduction and in the city where I was working, a conference came to town that was investigating that intersection of science and philosophy, science and belief, and it was addressing three big questions, and they were the origin of the universe, the origin of life, and the origin and nature of human consciousness.
And the conference was unique in that it had invited leading scientists and philosophers representing both theism, broadly speaking, belief in God, and scientists and philosophers who rejected theism and who affirmed the more common view among leading scientists at that time, which was materialism or sometimes called naturalism.
We have the New Atheist Movement with their scientific atheists and people of more of that persuasion.
So it was, let's look at the origin of the universe from the standpoint.
What do the data say, what do you theists say about it, what do you non-theist materialists say about it, and it was a fascinating conference and I was particularly taken by the panels on the origin of the universe and the origin of life because surprisingly to me it seemed that the theists had the intellectual initiative that the the evidence in those about the origin of the universe, and then about the complexity of the cell and therefore the challenges it posed to standard chemical evolutionary theories of the origin of life that in both these two areas, both these two subjects, it seemed that there were powerful, theistic friendly arguments being developed, in one case about the, what you might call, a reviving of the ancient cosmological argument because of the evidence that scientists had discovered about the universe having a beginning.
And in the other case, what we now call the theory of intelligent design, that there was evidence of design in the cell, in particular, in the digital code that is stored in the DNA molecule, the information and information processing system of the cell.
And was it that time? And still to this day is something that undirected theories of chemical evolution have not been able to explain.
And instead, what we know from our experience is that information is a mind product, which is a point that some of these scientists made at this panel, that when we see digital code or alphabetic text or computer code, and many people have likened the information and DNA to a computer code, we always find a mind behind that.
So this was the first time I was exposed to that way of thinking.
I got fascinated with that.
A year later, after the conference, I ended up meeting one of the scientists on the Origin of Life panel, a man named Charles Thackston, who had just written a book with two other co-authors called The Mystery of Life's Origin.
He was detailing in that book, he and his colleagues were detailing sort of chapter and verse the problems with trying to explain the origin of the first cell from simpler chemicals in some alleged or presupposed prebiotic soup.
And the three authors showed that this was implausible in the extreme, given what we know scientifically about how chemistry works versus how cells work.
And over the ensuing year, he kind of mentored me and I got fascinated with the subject and ended up getting a fellowship.
A Rotary Fellowship to study at Cambridge for a year and then ended up extending on.
I did my master's thesis and then my PhD thesis both on origin of life biology within the History and Philosophy of Science Department at Cambridge.
And while I was there, I started to meet other scientists and scholars who were having doubts about standard Darwinian and chemical evolutionary theories of life's origin.
And by the early 90s, a number of us had met each other and connected and had some private conferences.
And out of that was born a formal program investigating the evidence for intelligent design in biology, in physics, in cosmology, and in 96, we started a program at Discovery Institute.
You were very kind to me to call me the director of the whole institute.
I direct a program within the institute called the Center for Science and Culture, which is the institutional home.
A network of scientists who are investigating whether or not there is, empirical scientific evidence for a designing mind behind life in the cosmos and and the program just continues to grow, the network especially continues to grow, we've got fantastic scientists from all around the world now who are sympathetic to that position and I would mention too that it's a position that's kind of reviving an ancient view going back to certainly the time of the scientific revolution.
In particular, we've discovered back to the scientific revolution in Cambridge where I had been fortunate enough to study.
There's a, in the college that I was part of, St. Catherine's, there was back in the 17th century, one of the founders of modern botany, who was also one of the first authors of what's called British National Theology. His name was John Ray.
Ray was the tutor of Isaac Barrow, a mathematician who in turn tutored Newton and so this whole tradition of seeing the fingerprints of a creator in the natural world is something that was launched in Britain, particularly in Cambridge there were other figures like Robert Boyle who were in other places but the Cambridge tradition of natural theology was very strong from that time period in the 17th century, late 17th century, right up to figures like James Clerk Maxwell, the great physicist in the late 19th century who was critical, sceptical of Darwinism and articulated the idea of design.
And I think that's now being revived within contemporary science.
There's a growing minority of scientists who see evidence of design in nature.
Now, the understanding of intelligent designer, that's a new thinking, but through the millennia, that's been the norm.
Individuals have viewed the world through the lens that there is a God, and that has helped them understand and see the world.
But there must have been a point, I guess, when intellectuals decided that scientific knowledge conflicts with that that traditional belief, that traditional theistic belief.
Yeah, that's a great way of framing the discussion, Peter.
There's a historian of science in Britain named Steve Fuller, who's at Warwick.
And he's argued that the idea of intelligent design has been the framework out of which science has been done since the period of the scientific revolution at least and that the the post Darwinian deviation from that, denying that there's actual design and only instead as the Darwinian biologists say the appearance or illusion of design, you may remember from Richard Dawkins's famous book the blind watchmaker, page one he says biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
And of course, for Dawkins and his followers, and for Darwinians from the late 19th century forward, the appearance of design is an illusion.
And it was thought to be an illusion because Darwin had formulated an undirected, or had identified an undirected, unguided process, which he called natural selection that could mimic the powers of a designing intelligence, or so he argued, without itself being designed or guided in any way.
And that's kind of where we've engaged the argument. Is that appearance of design that nearly all biologists recognize merely an appearance, or is it the product of an actual guiding intelligence?
And that's why we call our theory intelligent design. We're not challenging the idea that there has been change over time, one of the other meanings of evolution we're not challenging even the idea of universal common descent though some of us myself included are quite sceptical of that, the main thing we're challenging with the theory of intelligent design is that is that the appearance of design is essentially an illusion because an unguided undirected mechanism has the capability of generating that appearance without itself being guided or directed in any way and that's, to us the key issue.
Is the design real or merely apparent?
You may remember that Francis Crick also once said that biologists must constantly keep in mind, that what they see was not designed, but instead evolved.
So there's this, the recurrence of that strong intuition among people who have studied biological systems.
And I would say, going back all the way to Aristotle, you know, this has been, the Western tradition in biology has been suffused with this recognition.
That organisms look designed, they look like they're designed for purpose, they exhibit purpose of behaviour.
And now in the age following Watson and Crick, following the molecular biological revolution of the late 50s and 1960s and 70s, we have extraordinarily strong appearances of design.
We've got digital code. We have a replication system.
We have a translation system as part of this whole information processing system.
Scientists can't help but use teleological wording to describe what's going on. We see the purpose of nature, of all of the biological systems and subsystems.
And so what we've argued is that, at least at the point of the origin of life, there is no unguided, undirected, or there is no theory that invokes, that has identified an unguided, undirected mechanism that can explain away that appearance of design.
Many people don't realize that Darwin did not attempt to explain the origin of the first life. He presupposed the existence of one or a few very simple forms.
And so he started it effectively with assuming a simple cell and then said, well, what would have come from that?
We now know, however, that the simple cell was not simple at all and displays this many very striking appearances of design that have not been explained by undirected chemical evolutionary processes.
Dawkins himself has said that the machine code of the genes is strikingly computer-like.
And so you have this striking appearance of design at the very foundation of life that has not in any way been explained by undirected processes.
Well, I want to pick up on a number of that, the new discoveries, how things have changed, the complexity.
But I can go back, you're challenging, I guess, hundreds of years of new thinking that the complexity of the universe simply points to luck and chance.
And I guess there's a statistical side of that, whether that's even possible.
We look around and we see things just working perfectly.
And I wonder whether it's even possible for a chance element to make all those things come together and make the world as it is.
Well, in my book, Signature in the Cell, which was the first of the three books that I've written on these big topics, I look at the argument for the chance origin of life and even more fundamentally, the chance origin of, say, DNA and the protein products that the DNA codes for.
And one of the first things to take note of in addressing the chance hypothesis is that no serious origin of life researcher, no origin of life biochemist or biologist today reposes much hope in the chance hypothesis, it's it's really been set aside and the reason for that, I explained the reason for that in in signature in the cell and then do some calculations to kind of back up the thinking that most origin of life biologists have adopted and that is that the cell is simply far too complicated to have arisen by chance.
And you can, and the large biomacromolecules, DNA and proteins, are molecules that depend on a property known as sequence specificity, or sometimes called specified complexity.
That is to say, they contain informational instructions in essentially a digital or typographic form.
So you have in the DNA you have the four character chemical subunits that biologists actually represent with the letters A, T, G, and C.
And if you want to build a protein, you have to arrange the A's, C's, G's, and T's or the evolutionary process or somehow the A's, C's, G's, and T's must have been sequenced in the proper way so that when that genetic message is sent to the ribosome, which is the the translation apparatus in the cell, then what comes out of that is a properly sequenced protein molecules.
Proteins also are made of subunits called amino acids.
There are 20 or so, maybe as many as 22 now, protein-forming amino acids.
And to get the protein chain that is built from the DNA instructions to fold into a proper functional conformation or three-dimensional shape, those amino acids have to be arranged in very specific ways.
If they're not arranged properly, the long peptide chain, as it's called, will not fold into a stable protein.
And so in both cases, you have this property of sequence specificity that the function of the whole, the whole gene in the case of DNA or the whole protein in the case of the the amino acids, the function of the whole depends upon the precise sequencing of the constituent parts.
And that's the difficulty, getting those things to line up properly.
Turns out there's all kinds of difficulties in trying to form those subunits, those chemical parts, out of any kind of prebiotic chemical environment that we've been able to think of.
But the most fundamental problem is the sequencing. And so you can actually run, because there's, if you think of the protein chain, you have 1 in 20 roughly chances of getting the right amino acid at each site.
Sometimes it's more or less because in some cases you can have any one of, there is some variability allowed at each site, but you can run numbers on all this and get very precise numbers on the probability of generating even a single functional protein in the known history of the universe.
And it turns out that what are called the combinatorials or the probabilities associated with combinatorials, the probabilities are so small that they are small even in relation to the total number of possible events that might have occurred from the Big Bang till now.
In other words, here's an example I often use to use to illustrate, if you have a thief trying to crack a bike lock.
If the thief has enough time, even though the combination is hidden among all the possibilities, and then the probability of getting the combination in one trial is very small, if the thief has enough time and can try and try and try again, he may crack it by sheer chance.
But if the lock is, we have a standard four-dial bike lock, but if the thief encounters a 10-dial bike lock, and I've had one rendered by my graphic designer to get the point across, then in a human lifetime, there's not enough opportunities to sample that number of possible combinations.
If you've got 10 dials, you've got 10 to the 10 possibilities, or 10, that's 10 billion.
And if the thief spins the dial once every 10 seconds for 100 years and does nothing else in his entire life, he'll only sample 3% of those total combinations, which means it's much more likely that the thief will fail than it is that he will succeed by chance alone.
And that's the kind of, that's the, so the point is that there are, there are degrees of complexity or improbability that dwarf what we call probabilistic resources, the opportunities.
And that's the situation we have when we're talking about the origin of the first biomacromolecules by reference to chance alone.
Only it's not just that you would with those events, you know, all the events that have occurred from the beginning of the universe until now could only sample about one, I think I've calculated about one ten trillion trillionth of the total possibilities that correspond to a modest length protein.
So it's like the bike thief trying to sample that 10-dial lock, only much, much worse.
You know, it turns out that 14 billion years isn't enough time to have a reasonable chance to find informational biomolecules by chance alone.
I mean, is the whole scientific argument that removes God, is it just an attempt by science to play God, because whenever we are told that scientific principles break down and no longer exist at the very beginning, for instance, and it doesn't make sense, but we're told that that's just how it happened and you have to accept that.
And it seems to be people jumping over themselves with a desperation to try and remove the idea that there is an intelligent designer.
Well, I tend to think that the questions of motivation in these debates are kind of a wash.
I think as theists, we have to, I'm a theist, okay, I believe in God.
In my first two books, I argued for designing intelligence of some kind as being, of some unspecified kind as being the best explanation for the information, for example, in the cell or the information needed to build fundamentally new body plans in the history of life on earth.
So, but in my last book, I extend that argument, I bring in evidence from cosmology and physics and suggest that the best explanation for that, the ensemble of evidence that we have about biological and physical and cosmological origins is actually a designing intelligence that has attributes that, for example, Jews and Christians have always described to God, transcendence, as well as intelligence.
For example, no being within the cosmos, no space alien, and some scientists have proposed even Crick, Francis Crick in 1981 in a little book called Life Itself floated the idea that yes we do see evidence of design in life.
The origin of life is a very hard problem, we can't see how it could possibly have happened on Earth so maybe there was an intelligent life form from space who seeded life here.
He was subsequently ridiculed a bit and said, I think he was embarrassed that he'd floated this and said he would not, he foreswore any further speculation on the origin of life problem. It was too difficult, he said.
But in any case, back to your question, I think the whole question is.
Oh, I was finishing a thought, and that is that the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe and what's called the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics and the initial conditions of the universe, the basic parameters of physics, which were said at the beginning, are exquisitely finely tuned against all odds.
And no space alien, no intelligence within the cosmos could be responsible for the evidence of design that we have from the very beginning of the universe because any alleged space alien would itself have had to evolve by some sort of naturalistic processes further down the timeline, once you have stable galaxies and planets and that sort of thing and so no being within the cosmos could be responsible for the conditions that made its future evolution possible nor could a space alien to be responsible for the origin of the universe itself.
So when you bring in the cosmological and the physical evidence, I think the only type of designing intelligence that can explain the whole range of evidence we have is one that is transcendent, that is beyond the cosmos, but also active in the creation, because we see evidence of information arising later, and information, as I've mentioned, is a mind product based on our uniform and repeated experience.
But as to the motivation issue, I kind of think it's a wash.
I think theists have to acknowledge that all people, including those of us who are theists, have a motivation, maybe a hope that there is a purposeful intelligence behind the cosmos.
I think there's a kind of growing angst in young people.
Harvard study recently showing that over 50% of young people have doubts about there being any purpose to their existence.
And this is contributing to the mental health crisis.
And so I think all of us would like, to be possible, for there to be life after death, for there to be an enduring purpose to our lives that does not extinguish when we die or when eventually there's a heat death of the universe.
I think theism, belief in God, gives people a sense of purpose in relation, the possibility of a relationship to our creator.
That's a positive thing. I think there's also a common human motivation to not want to be accountable to that creator and to have moral, complete moral freedom to decide what we want to do at any given time.
And so oftentimes theists or God-believers, religious people will say, well, you just like these materialistic theories of origins because you don't want to be accountable to a higher power.
That might be true, But it's equally true that the atheist will often say, well, but you guys just need a cosmic crutch.
You need comfort from the idea of a divine being, a loving creator, father, whatever, you know, the divine father figure.
And Freud famously critiqued or criticized religious belief in those terms.
So I think that those two kind of motivation, arguments about motivation are something of a wash and that what I've tried to do in Return of the God Hypothesis is set all of that aside, look at the evidence that we have, and then evaluate it using some standard methods of scientific reasoning and standard methods of evaluating hypotheses, such as a Bayesian analysis, for example, that come out of logic and philosophy.
And set the motivation questions aside. And my conclusion is that the evidence for
an intelligent designer of some unspecified kind is extremely strong from biology, and that when you bring in the cosmological and physical evidence, the evidence of fine-tuning and the evidence we have that the material cosmos itself had a beginning, I think materialism fails as an explanation, and you need to invoke an intelligence that is both transcendent and active in the creation to explain the whole range of evidence.
Well, let me pick you up on that change, because initially there is a change from someone who believes the evolutionary model, big bang, there is no external force.
That step from there to there is an external force, there is intelligent design feeding into the universe we have.
And then it's another step to take that to there is an intelligent designer, now there is a personal God. And that step certainly, I assume, is frowned upon in the scientific community.
Tell us about you making that step, because it would have been much safer to stay, I guess, in the ID side and not to make the step into who that individual is.
Tell us about kind of what prompted you to actually make the step into answering that who question.
Right. Well, I've been thinking about this question for 35, 36, I don't know, since the mid-80s when I was a very young scientist.
And it was at the conference that inspired it, because at the conference, there were people already thinking about the God question, especially the cosmologists.
At that conference, Alan Sandage announced his conversion from scientific agnosticism he was a scientific materialist to theism and indeed I think he became Christian, and he talked about how the evidence for the singularity at the beginning of the universe, the evidence that the material cosmos itself had a beginning was one of the things that moved him off of that materialistic perspective, that it was clear to him that as he described it, that the evidence we had for a beginning was evidence for what he called a super, with a space in between, natural events, nothing within the cosmos could explain the origin of the cosmos itself, if matter, space, time and energy have a beginning and as best we can tell they do and there are multiple lines of evidence and theoretical considerations that lead to that conclusion and I developed that in return of the god hypothesis, it is the evidence from observational astronomy and also developments in theoretical physics converge on that conclusion.
And if that's the case, if matter and energy themselves have a beginning, and indeed if space and time themselves have a beginning, then we can't invoke any materialistic explanation to explain that.
Because before there was matter, before the beginning of matter, there was no matter to do the causing. And that's the problem.
There must be something. For there to be a causal explanation for the universe, it requires a transcendent something.
And when you also consider that we have evidence for design from the very beginning in the fine-tuning of the initial physical parameters of the universe, the initial conditions of the universe, the initial establishment and fine-tuning of the physical laws, then you have evidence for that transcendent something being a transcendent intelligent something.
And if something is intelligent, capable of making choices between one outcome or another, that's really what we mean by personhood.
I mean, this is very close to a, the idea of a personal gun, now that entity may not want to have anything to do with us, but we're talking about a conscious agent when we talk about evidence for intelligent design, and then we have further evidence I think in biology with the presence of the information and information processing system inside cells.
And so when you bring all that together, I think you can start to address the who question.
So after I wrote Signature in the Cell and Darwin's Doubt, a lot of my readers were asking, OK, that's great.
We have evidence of a designing intelligence, but who would that intelligence have been? Is it a space alien, something imminent within the cosmos, like Crick and others have proposed?
Or is it a transcendent intelligence?
And what can science tell us about that question? So I thought it's a natural question that flows from my first two books.
I would stipulate that the theory of intelligent design, formally as a theory, is a theory of design detection.
And it allows us to detect the action of an agent as opposed to undirected material processes.
We have this example that we often use. If you look at the faces on the mountains at Mount Rushmore, you right away know that a designing intelligence of some kind was responsible for sculpting those faces.
And those faces exhibit two properties which, when found together, invariably and reliably indicate a designing intelligence.
And we've described those properties as high probability and what's called a specification, a pattern match.
And we have evidence of small probability specifications in life.
If something is an informational sequence, it's another way of revealing design, so that we can get into all of that.
The point is, we've got evidence of design in life, but, the cosmology and fine-tuning allow us to adjudicate between two different design hypotheses, the imminent intelligence and the transcendent one.
And I thought, well, let's take this on. It's a natural, it goes beyond the theory of intelligent design, formally speaking, and it addresses one of the possible implications of the evidence of design that we have in biology, that maybe we're looking at a theistic designer, not a space alien.
I just want to pick one or two things from different books. Signature in the Cells, you have it there behind you.
And when you simply begin to look at the complexity of cells.
You realize that they are like little mini cities, that actually everything, so much happens within.
And I guess we are learning more and more about everything in life.
And you talk to doctors and they tell you that they are learning more and more about how the body functions. And there's a lot of the unknown.
But when you look at that just complexity of, we call it the simple cell, which isn't really very simple, that new research and that new understanding, surely that should move people to a position that, this is impossible, that this level of complexity simply just happens.
So tell us about that, just the cell, which is not simple.
Yeah, that's the sort of ground zero for me in my research and interest in the question was this origin of life problem.
That's what I did my PhD on.
And I think it's really interesting. We could have debates about the adequacy of Darwinian evolutionary theory.
I'm sceptical about what's called macroevolutionary theory.
But set that all aside. Darwin presupposed one or a few simple forms.
And in the immediate wake of the Darwinian Revolution, people like Huxley and Heckel started to develop theories of the origin of those first simple cells.
And they regarded the cell in the late 19th century as a very simple, as Huxley put it, a simple homogenous globule or homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.
And they viewed the essence of the cell as a simple chemical, it's coming from a simple chemical substance they called protoplasm.
And so it kind of, and they viewed it as a kind of jello or goo, which could be produced by a few simple chemical reactions.
That viewpoint started to fall by the wayside very, very quickly.
By the 1890s, early part of the 20th century, we were learning a lot more about the complexity of metabolism.
When you get to the molecular biological revolution in the late 1950s and 1960s, nobody any longer thinks the cell is simple because the most important biomacromolecules are large information-bearing molecules that are part of a larger information processing system.
And so this is where I think, and in confronting that.
And so any origin of life theory has to explain where that came from.
My supervisor used to say that the nature of life and the origin of life topics are connected.
We need to know what life is in order to formulate a plausible theory of how it came to be.
And now that we know that life is much more complex and that we have an integrated informational complexity that characterizes life, those 19th century theories and the first origin of life theories associated with figures like Alexander Oparin, for example, from the 1920s and 30s.
These are not adequate to explain what we see.
But what's happened, and this is what I documented in Signature in the Cell, is that none of the subsequent chemical evolutionary theories, whether they're based on chance or based on self-organizational laws or somehow based on somehow combining the two, none of those theories have proven adequate either.
This problem of sequence specificity or functional information has defied explanation by reference to theories that start from lower level chemistry.
It's proven very, very difficult, implausible in the extreme.
Here's the problem. Getting from the chemistry to the code is the problem.
And undirected chemical processes do not, when observed, move in a life-friendly, information-generative direction.
And this has been the problem. So the impasse in origin of life research, which really began in the late 70s, was documented by this book I mentioned, the mystery of life's origin and books, another book, for example, by Robert Shapiro called, Origins, A Sceptic's Guide.
That impasse from the 1980s has continued right to the present.
Dawkins was interviewed in a film in 2009 by Ben Stein, the American economist and comic.
And very quickly, Stein got Dawkins to acknowledge that nobody knows how we got from from the prebiotic chemistry to the first cell.
Well, that's kind of a news headline.
We get the impression from textbooks that the evolutionary biologists have this all sewed up.
They don't by any means. This is a longstanding conundrum.
And it is the integrated complexity and informational properties of the cell that have, I think, most fundamentally defied explanation by these chemical evolutionary theories.
And I think that's very significant when you think of the whole kind of evolutionary story.
Darwin thought that if you could start with something simple then the mutation selection, oh, he didn't have mutations, but the mutation, sorry, the natural selection variation mechanism, could generate all the complexity of life. You'd go from simple to complex very gradually.
Well, if the simplest thing is immensely complex and manifest a kind of complexity that defies any undirected process that we can think of, well, then you don't have a seamless evolutionary story from goo to you.
Because I guess when you're Darwin's doubt, the next book you wrote, I guess when Charles Darwin wrote Origin of the Species, he assumed it was settled.
But science is never settled.
There are always developments. And yet it seems, oh, that's sacrosanct, and that cannot be touched and must be accepted.
Yeah, and what I did in the second book was show or argue that the information problem is not something that only resides at the lowest level in the biological hierarchy, at the point of the origin of the first cell, but it also emerges later when we have major innovations in the history of life as documented by the fossil record, events such as the Cambrian explosion or the origin of the mammalian radiation or the angiosperm revolution.
There are many events in the history of life where you get this sudden or abrupt appearance in the fossil record of completely new form and structure.
And we now know in our information age, as it's come to biology, that if you want to build a new cell, you've got to have new proteins.
So you have to to have information to build the first cell.
But the same thing turns out to be true at the higher level.
If you want to build a completely new body plan, you need new organs and tissues.
You need to arrange those organs and tissues in very specific ways.
And you need new proteins to service the new cell types that make the organs and tissues possible.
So anytime we see the abrupt appearance of new biological form, that implies the origin of a vast amount of new biological information.
And so in Darwin's doubt, I simply asked, well, is there, can the standard mutation natural selection mechanism explain the origin of the kind of information that arises and the amount of information arises?
And I argue there that no, it doesn't. That we have, there are many, many kinds of biological phenomena that Darwin's mechanism explains beautifully, the small scale variation adaptation, that sort of thing.
So 2016, a major conference at the Royal Society in London.
First talk there was by the evolutionary biologist Gerd Müller.
The conference was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who think we need a new theory of evolution.
Whereas Darwinism does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation, it does a poor job or a completely inadequate job of explaining large-scale morphological innovation, large-scale changes in form.
And Mueller, in his first talk at this 2016 event, outlined what he called the explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism, and he made that point very clearly.
And so it's, I think it's a new day in evolutionary biology, the word of this is not percolating so well perhaps but that was part of the reasons I wrote Darwin's doubt is that within the biological peer-reviewed biological literature it's well known that the problem of the origin of large-scale form, the origin of new body plans is not well explained by the mutation selection mechanism.
At this 16 conference, the conveners included many scientists who were trying to come up with new mechanisms that might explain the problem of morphological innovation.
Afterwards, one of the conveners said the conference was characterized by a lack of momentousness.
Effectively, the evolutionary biologists proposing new theories of evolution and new evolutionary mechanisms had done a good job characterizing the problems, but had not really come up with anything that solves the fundamental problems that we encounter in biology when we see these large jumps in form and structure arising.
And in Darwin's Doubt, I didn't just critique standard neo-Darwinian theories of evolution, but many of these newer theories as well, showing that invariably the problem of the origin of biological information and the form that arises from it is the key unsolved problem in contemporary evolutionary theory.
Mueller and Newman wrote a book with MIT Press called On the Origins of Organismal Form, which was a kind of play on the origin of species.
Darwinism does a nice job of explaining speciation, small-scale changes within the limits of the pre-existing genomic endowments of an organism, but it doesn't do a good job of explaining new form that requires new genetic information.
And these authors, Newman and Mueller, listed in a table of unsolved problems in evolutionary theory, the problem of the origin of biological form.
That's what we thought Darwin explained back in 1859, and instead we realized that the mechanisms that he first envisioned have much more limited creative power and much more limited explanatory scope.
So that's what my second book was about, and also I think it's still, this is still very much right at the cutting edge of the discussion in evolutionary biology.
We can explain the small scale stuff, but not the big scale stuff.
Let's just finish off with actually disseminating the information, because all of this is about taking issues which are complex and actually making it understandable to the wider public.
And I guess part of that is, I mean, obviously being on the most popular podcast in the world, Joe Rogan, I was like, oh, there's Steve Meyer and Joe Rogan.
And taking that information and that turbocharges that.
So maybe just to finish off on the ability to disseminate this, because I think in the US, the ID movement is more understood, where I think maybe in Europe, it's certainly it's more misunderstood and not as accepted where there is an acceptance in the States.
But tell us about that and how being on something like podcasts like that turbocharge the message.
Yeah, well, I can tell you, you know, now that I'm getting introduced at conferences and things after The Joe Rogan Experience, it's as if I never did anything else in my life.
No, that's the only thing people care to mention.
I mean, he's got a monster reach. He's extremely, his questions on the interview were very probative.
Of course, slightly to moderately sceptical, maybe more, but I thought they were fair. I thought it was a great discussion and it was a lot of fun.
And, you know, we've had not only, I think he gets something like 11 million downloads on average for his podcast.
We couldn't even believe these numbers when we were told them.
But there have been over 25 million derivative videos that social media influencers and podcasters have made about the Rogan interview, analysing different sections of our conversation.
So, yeah, that was a huge boost to the dissemination of our message.
But one thing I realized in our conversation that there's a simple way to understand the information argument.
And that's one of our tools in getting some of these ideas out is distilling some of these things that we've been talking about at a fairly deep level to a more understandable level.
So let me just run that argument, that argument sketch or the distillation of the argument by your audience.
And then they would talk about some of the things we're doing to get the word out.
Our local hero in the Seattle area here is Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft.
And he has said, like Dawkins, that the digital code in the DNA, that the DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we've ever created.
Dawkins, as I mentioned before, says it's like a machine code.
It contains machine code.
Well, if you think about that, those are very suggestive quotations because what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that information always arises from an intelligence source.
If you have a section of software, there was a programmer involved.
If you have a hieroglyphic inscription, there was an ancient scribe involved.
If you have a paragraph in a book, there was a writer involved.
As we're effectively broadcasting, we're transmitting information, that information ultimately issues from our mind.
So whenever we look at information, an informational text or sequence, and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind rather than a material process.
All attempts to explain the origin of life based on undirected material processes have failed because they couldn't explain the information present in DNA, RNA proteins.
So the presence of that information at the foundation of life, based on our uniform and repeated experience about what it takes to generate information is therefore best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence.
It takes a programmer to make a program, to make a software program.
And what we have in life is, from many different standpoints, identical to computer code.
It is a section of functional digital information.
So that's a kind of more user-friendly sketch of the argument but the point is some of these some of these key ideas that are that make intelligent design so, I think so persuasive at a high scientific level if you actually look at the evidence, can be also explained fairly simply and so we're generating a lot of not just Joe Rogan podcast interviews but coming on many many podcasts and that sort of thing but also we're generating a lot of YouTube video short documentaries that get some of these ideas across and for your viewers, one that I might recommend which is on of any it was out on the internet it's called science uprising and it's a series of 10 short documentary videos, another one that we've done called the information enigma which I think would would help people get into these ideas fairly quickly, the information enigmas I think it's a 20 minute short documentary it's up online and we've had hundreds of thousands of views so we're doing a lot to sort of translate the most rigorous science into accessible ideas and disseminate that in user-friendly ways.
The best website for finding a lot of this compiled is actually the website for my most recent book, Return of the God Hypothesis. So the website there is returntothegodhypothesis.com.
Okay, well, we will have the link for that in the description.
Dr. Stephen Meyer, I really appreciate you coming along. Thank you so much for coming and sharing your experience and understandings of writing and making that understandable, I think, to the viewers, many of them who may not have come across this before.
So thank you for your time today.
I really appreciate you having me on, Peter.
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