Stephen C. Meyer | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 43
|
Time
Text
This is Darwin's historical scientific method.
When you're trying to explain an event in the remote past, you want to draw on your knowledge of cause and effect.
And if the effect is a lot of new digital information, we know of a cause that can do that, and it's a mind or an intelligence.
Here we are on the Sunday special with special guest Stephen Meyer here.
He's the author of the book Darwin's Doubt, an intelligent design advocate.
We'll get to all of that in just a second, but first, let's talk about your impending death.
We're all going to die at some point, and that's why you should have life insurance.
Life insurance can feel like assembling the world's worst jigsaw puzzle.
It is confusing, it takes forever, and when you're finally done, it doesn't even look cool.
But if you have a mortgage or kids or anybody who depends on your income, it's a puzzle you need to solve.
PolicyGenius can help you do it.
PolicyGenius is the easy way to get life insurance.
In just two minutes, you can compare quotes from top insurers and find the best policy for you.
When you apply online, the advisors at PolicyGenius will handle all the red tape for you.
They will even negotiate your rate with the insurance company.
No commissioned sales agents, no hidden fees, just helpful advice and personalized service.
PolicyGenius doesn't just make life insurance easy.
They also make it easy to find the right home insurance, auto insurance, disability insurance.
They're your one-stop shop for financial protection.
So, if you find life insurance puzzling, Absolutely.
Head on over to policygenius.com.
Do the responsible thing.
Go check it out.
In two minutes, you can compare quotes, find the right policy, and save up to 40% doing it.
Heck, you can do it from your phone right now.
You can just pause what I'm saying.
Go get yourself some life insurance at Policy Genius.
Policy Genius is the easy way to compare and buy life insurance.
Go check them out right now.
It just takes a couple of minutes, and you're doing the responsible thing.
Policygenius.com.
Go check them out right now.
Well, Stephen, thanks so much for joining the Ben Shapiro Show.
Absolutely.
So let's start from the very beginning.
Yeah.
Because people are going to ask.
So you talk a lot about evolution and science.
Obviously, your books, Darwin's Doubt and Signature in the Cell, are both heavily scientific.
So what is your scientific background, so folks know?
Well, I started and double majored in physics and geology, and then I worked as a geophysicist for five years in industry.
And went from there to do the program in the philosophy of science, specifically philosophy of biology at Cambridge University, where my PhD dissertation was on the origin of life problem, which is a very interdisciplinary question.
How did life first arise from presumably the non-living chemicals?
So it's biochemistry, molecular biology, thermodynamics, information theory.
It's a question that has lots of different subjects involved.
So it's a very interdisciplinary PhD.
Okay, so with all of that said, if you go to your Wikipedia page, the first thing that it says is that you are the advocate of a pseudo-scientific theory called intelligent design.
So let's start with a couple of questions on that.
First of all, people suggest that you are a creationist.
What is the difference between intelligent design, the argument for intelligent design, and creationism?
Well, creationism takes the Bible as the basis of the theory.
So, creationism is an interpretation or a deduction from religious authority, whereas intelligent design is an inference from biological and physical cosmological evidence.
So, the one starts from the data of the natural world, the other starts from Scripture.
The other difference is that most creationists hold to a view that the earth is very young It was created maybe 10,000 years ago or something like that.
ID itself is an age-neutral theory, but most of us hold the standard ancient dates for the universe and for life and planet Earth, so I'm an old Earth guy.
So the case that is generally made against intelligent design is the idea that it's not a scientific theory.
So is intelligent design the idea that there was somebody, you don't actually say God, but something, there was some intelligent force that moved the universe, that created life on Earth, that was responsible, in your book, for the Cambrian explosion?
How is this a scientific theory as opposed to just, as maybe Richard Dawkins would say, a God-of-the-gaps argument?
Well, one of the things I did when I first set off to grad school, my story is that I encountered this information argument.
One of the most extraordinary discoveries of 20th century biology is that the foundation of life is information in a digital form.
The DNA molecules stores information in a four-character digital code.
And this discovery of Watson and Crick in the '50s has, over time, created an impasse in both chemical evolutionary theory, which are the theories about the origin of the first life, and theories of biological evolution as well, which are theories about how you get new forms of life from pre-existing forms.
Because to build anything in biology, you've got to have code, you've got to have information.
So I became fascinated with that question and the possibility that the information at the foundation of life was actually an indicator of the activity of mind, of an intelligence.
But to determine whether or not that argument could be formulated scientifically, I had to dig in a little deeper into how scientists go about reasoning about these origins questions, about events in the remote past.
And oddly, one of the people most helpful to me in that was Charles Darwin himself.
Because in the 19th century, he and his mentor Charles Lyell, the great geologist, developed a method for investigating historical scientific questions.
And they had a principle of reasoning they called the Vera Causa principle, or the idea that if you want to explain an event in the remote past, you should posit a cause which is known to have the powers to produce the effect in question.
And as I began to think about that, I realized that it was possible to formulate a case for intelligent design in a strictly scientific manner using the method of Lyell and Darwin, because as we think about the origin of information, the one thing we know is that it always arises from an intelligent source, whether we're talking about a hieroglyphic inscription or a paragraph in a book or information embedded in a radio signal.
Whenever you find information, especially if it's in a digital or alphabetic form, you trace it back to its source, you always come to a mind, not a material process.
So using the same scientific method of reasoning that Darwin used, I came to a different non-Darwinian conclusion, which was that there is evidence of intelligent design, not just what the Darwinians call apparent design in the history of life.
So if our theory is unscientific, the Darwinian theory would be as well, but I think both are scientific.
I just argue for one and critique the other.
So the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, has suggested that science is basically that which can be falsified.
So what evidence would have to arise for the theory of intelligent design to be falsified?
You would have to find an undirected process that was capable of producing information beyond a threshold that we have defined mathematically.
There's an amount of information that might arise by chance based on what are called the probabilistic resources of the universe.
But if you get beyond that from an undirected process, that would falsify our claim that only mind can produce that amount of information.
There's also other ways of conceiving of what makes something a good scientific theory rather than Popper's idea.
It's been critiqued by philosophers of science.
Typically, a more popular view among philosophers of science is that what scientists are really doing is they're making inferences to the best explanation.
And that's how I frame the argument in Darwin's Doubt and in Signature in the Cell for Intelligent Design.
A best explanation would be one that posits a cause which is known to produce the effect in question, and in the best of cases, where there's only one known such cause, and that's the kind of argument I make for intelligent design, that only intelligence, only mind, is capable of generating the amount of information needed for these big jumps in biological complexity in the history of life.
So in the history of science and the philosophy of science, there's been this interesting battle between sort of religious folks who believe that religion should stay separate from science and folks who believe that religion and science are intertwined.
And that on the one side, you have sort of the Thomas Aquinas that God and nature speak in the same language.
And on the other side, you have the William of Ockham argument that basically God can do whatever he wants.
And so what we don't want is a theory of science that can disprove God.
And the flip side of that is sort of Stephen Jay Gould's non-overlapping magisteria argument that science handles this stuff, and religion handles this stuff, and there's no crossover.
Right.
So where does intelligent design lie in that gap?
That's a really great question.
There's basically three different approaches to the interface between science and religious belief.
One is the idea that the two are in conflict, and that was the kind of dominant view that came out of the late 19th century.
Most historians of science now reject that.
It's very simplistic.
Another view is the Stephen Jay Gould view, is that science and faith occupy non-overlapping realms of inquiry.
The Galileo aphorism was science tells you how the planets go, not how to go to heaven.
Or how the heavens go, not how to go to heaven.
But the theory of intelligent design, I think, shows that that's also simplistic.
There are many scientific questions and religious questions that are completely separate.
But there are some questions that both science and religion speak to, and my view is that when they speak to the same questions in the same way, that there is actually far more agreement than people realize.
In fact, substantial agreement.
For example, the origin of the universe, we now know, had a beginning.
Or the universe had a beginning, and this is one of the first words of the biblical text, that there was a beginning.
So that's a point of agreement about the same issue.
Is the universe finite or infinite?
Both science and religion are now telling us the same thing, that the universe had a beginning.
Intelligent design is telling us that life and the universe were designed, and that's something that you would also find affirmed in the theistic religious traditions.
So that's a point of agreement about a special question, in this case about the origins of life.
I don't say that science and religion talk, they have many areas of specialized inquiry, there are different questions that each address, but there are overlapping areas of interest.
And increasingly what we found is that there is increasing agreement as we understand the science better, and as we get better, more sophisticated biblical interpretations sometimes as well.
One of the biggest, probably the biggest, argument against intelligent design, obviously, is made by the New Atheists.
It's fascinating to watch the crossover between Neo-Darwinian thinkers and the New Atheists.
They basically are the same group of people.
They're the same group of people, absolutely.
So it seems to me that... No surprise, because Dawkins said, you know, that Darwinism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled Atheism.
Or atheist.
And also the Darwinian view, the strictly Darwinian view, is not just the idea of evolution as change over time, but the idea of an undirected, unguided process that produced the appearance but not the reality of design.
So they see nature essentially as being a self-creating entity that can produce all the wonders and intricacies of living organisms without any guiding hand whatsoever.
And so that lends itself to a strictly materialistic or atheistic worldview.
Well, people have suggested that intelligent design advocates are anti-evolution, that they don't believe in the theory of evolution.
So, what does the theory of evolution say, to start, and then what in it is an argument too far?
That's a great question.
The term evolution is a term that has multiple meanings.
So, if you want to avoid the fallacy of equivocation, it's really good to define terms right from the beginning.
So first meaning is change over time.
Obviously, and that can mean a couple different things itself.
It can refer to the small scale variation that we see with things like the Galapagos finches where their beaks get a little bigger, a little smaller in response to varying weather conditions.
It can also refer to the fact that life on the planet today is different than it was in the period of the Jurassic when you had the dinosaurs roaming the earth or in the Cambrian when you had trilobites.
We've had change in the representation of life forms over time in the fossil record.
Nobody doubts either of those meanings of evolution.
Second big meaning of evolution is the idea that all forms of life are connected by common ancestry back to a single ancestral form, a single one-celled organism.
So Darwin represented that idea with his concept of the tree of life.
That's an idea of evolution that's consistent with the idea of intelligent design.
Those many intelligent design proponents and others, other scientists, including evolutionary biologists, are getting increasingly skeptical about it because there's so much evidence of discontinuity in the fossil record and discontinuity in the study of genomics, where we have things like orphan genes, which are big classes of genes that are unique to certain taxa and don't show any similarity to other genes anywhere else in the genomic databases.
So you have this sense of genetic information popping into existence in different classes of organisms, discontinuity.
Third meaning of evolution is the one though that's really contentious.
And that's the idea that natural selection and random mutation are sufficient to produce all the new forms of life and the appearance of design that living forms manifest.
So, it's an unguided process that produces the appearance but not the reality of design.
And that's the meaning of evolution that the theory of intelligent design is challenging.
Some intelligent design proponents may be skeptical about common descent, others are not, but it's that third meaning that unites us, and it's what the theory of intelligent design is about.
We're challenging the idea that purely undirected processes can produce the complexity or the information necessary to build the complexity of living organisms.
So you make a couple of arguments in your two books, Darwin's Doubt, as well as Signature in the Cell.
One is a DNA-related argument, one is a fossil record-related argument, but they go back, as you say, to that theory of evolution that suggests that natural selection and genetic mutation are enough alone to lead to the way that life has developed over time.
I'm wondering if you can start by spelling out, where is the discontinuity with regard to the establishment of life?
Well, the first big discontinuity is the origin of life itself, which is what my first book, Signature in the Cell, addressed.
And many people don't realize that Darwin himself never addressed the question of the origin of the first life.
He speculated about it in a letter to a friend, but this was not something he addressed in The Origin of Species.
He presupposed the existence of the first living cell.
And there's a major discontinuity between chemical processes that we observe and what we see in actual living organisms.
And it's a complexity gap that's absolutely extraordinary.
We've got tiny miniature machines, we have not only the DNA with the digital code in it, but a complex information processing system, and even the simplest living cells on Earth.
So that's a big discontinuity.
Then there is a series of discontinuities in the fossil record as we find greater and greater complexity arising over time.
One of the big ones that I talked about in Darwin's Doubt was one that bothered Darwin a great deal, which was what we now call the Cambrian Explosion.
Which is the origin of the first major groups of animals in the fossil record.
They're attested in the Middle Cambrian in particular, and many groups of animals exemplifying completely new body plans arise in a very narrow window of geologic time, very abruptly, without discernible connection to ancestral precursors in the lower Precambrian strata.
And that's one of the big discontinuities in the history of life.
There are many others.
I've written an article with a German paleontologist, Gunther Beckli, about 17 such major discontinuities.
The mammalian radiation, the origin of flowering plants, the first winged insects, the first dinosaurs.
Most of the major groups of living forms on earth arise discontinuously.
So, that's a big deal.
The even bigger question, though, that I address in the book is Apart from that discontinuity, which is a puzzle for Darwinism, how would you build those organisms?
What process could account for the origin of all that new form, especially now that we know you need information, the information in DNA and from other sources, to build complex new forms of life?
Let's talk about information theory.
So, for folks who haven't read your books, don't know anything about information theory, why does information theory suggest that there must be some sort of designer?
Obviously, people like Dawkins who suggest that evolution is the universal acid.
They say that these things can arise by themselves.
They would also make the suggestion that the information in DNA is not necessarily directed, that it only seems directed to us because we're here to actually look at the direction in which it moves.
It could theoretically be random.
What does information theory have to say about that?
Well, it's actually helpful first to go back to the molecular biological revolution of the 1950s.
Watson and Crick discover in 1953, they elucidate rather, the structure of the DNA molecule.
They discover it's got this beautiful helix structure, there's these four chemical subunits that run along the interior of the helix called bases or nucleotide bases.
In 1957-1958, Crick, who was interestingly a codebreaker in World War II, ...posits what's known as the sequence hypothesis, which is just a breakthrough moment in the history of biology, where he realizes that the nucleotide bases on the inside of the double helix are functioning like alphabetic characters in a written language, or what we now think of as like the zeros and ones in a section of software code, which is to say it's not the physical or chemical properties of those bases that
is important to their function, but rather it's their sequential arrangement in accord with an independent code which was later elucidated and we now call the genetic code.
So what we have is a true information bearing system that is expressing information as it happens for building the proteins and protein machines that cells need to stay alive.
So in Seattle where I live, we've got great information companies.
We've got Microsoft, which writes code.
We've got Boeing and other manufacturing companies that use code.
And there's a process called Computer Assisted Design and Manufacturing, CAD-CAM, where an engineer might write some code, code would go down a wire, be converted into another machine language that could be read by a manufacturing apparatus, and that information will then direct the construction of a mechanical system.
If you're at Boeing, it might put rivets exactly in the right place on the airplane wing.
And the same thing that's going on inside the cell, that you've got information directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that are absolutely necessary for survivability.
So the big question is, where does that information come from?
And also, what kind of information is it?
And that's where the information theory comes in.
In the late 40s, there was a scientist named Claude Shannon who developed a mathematical theory of information.
But his theory of information had to do with the reduction of uncertainty, which he showed was inversely related to probability.
The more improbable an arrangement of characters, the more Shannon information that was carried.
But his notion of information didn't capture The notion of meaning or communication function.
So you could have a series of characters that were basically gibberish, but because they were aperiodic and random, you couldn't really tell whether they were meaningful or not.
But they had a big information measure.
So Shannon didn't capture the difference between functional or meaningful information and just an improbable arrangement of characters.
So, it's actually not information theory, but it's information theory plus a qualitative judgment about what the sequence is doing that allows us to recognize the kind of information that we're familiar with in our own parlance.
The dictionary talks about variable sequences of characters for conveying a meaning or a function.
And that's what we have in DNA.
Francis Crick was very clear on that from the beginning.
He said, it's not mere Shannon information, it's information that's functional.
And that's the kind of information that, in our experience, always indicates the prior activity of an intelligence.
If it's just a random arrangement, it might be undirected processes.
But if it's very specific and complex, and it's operating in accord with a symbol convention, then you've got information that is the product of mind.
So this is where we get into the theories of probability, because the question becomes, could there have been such a strand of DNA that comes about by chance?
Because the theory obviously, as you mentioned, of evolution suggests that it's mutations now in the DNA that create all of the change in human life over time.
origin of life problem for just a second.
Yeah, yeah, that's good.
That's good to skip that right now.
And then we'll, but when it comes to the information string in the DNA, the contention is basically that given enough time, you run the experiment enough times, and eventually you will end up with an evolution that combined with natural selection, it preserves the mutations that are good, and you will end up with something that looks designed even though it is not designed, and you will end up with something that looks designed even though it is not designed, that mutation over time being Why doesn't that work?
It's, there's a mathematical problem, and it's a profound one.
My colleague David Berlinski calls it the combinatorial problem, or the problem of combinatorial inflation.
Maybe a simple analogy, a way to get into it.
We know from our experience with software code, writing and using it, that the last thing you want in a section of functional software code is a series of random changes to those zeros and ones.
If that happens, you're going to degrade the information that's in that code long before you'll ever generate a new software program or operating system.
And Richard Dawkins and many, many other biologists have acknowledged that what we have in DNA is akin to machine code, or as Leroy Hood puts it, digital code.
It's functioning in exactly the same way.
So what we've learned from software writing and using is highly relevant to understanding whether or not the mutation selection mechanism would actually generate, could generate, conceivably or realistically, new information.
And there's a reason that changing software at random invariably degrades the information before you get anything useful and new.
And that is because there's so many more ways to go wrong.
In any system of digital or typographic or alphabetic communication, there are vastly more ways of arranging the characters in question that will generate gibberish.
Then there are ways of arranging those same characters that will generate something functional.
So if you start randomly changing things, you're overwhelmingly more likely to find a gibberish sequence than a functional one.
And as we've actually tried to quantify that, how much more likely, the quantitative odds are prohibitive.
There's a scientist who worked for 14 years at Cambridge University, Douglas Axe.
Did his PhD at Caltech.
went on to do a long-term molecular biology research postdoc at Cambridge to try to quantify this question.
How rare or common are the functional sequences that would make a new protein or a new gene capable of making a new protein?
How rare are the functional ones in comparison to the non-functional ones?
And for a relatively short protein, about 150 amino acids long, he determined that the ratio of functional to non-functional sequences was about 1 over 10 to the 77th power.
Now to put that in context, there are only 10 to the 65th atoms in the Milky Way galaxy.
So what that means is that a random search for a new functional sequence is Going to be like looking for one marked atom among 1 trillion galaxies of the size of the Milky Way.
And it turns out that even 4 billion years of life's history is not enough time to solve a search problem of that magnitude.
And I go into all the math of this in the book and it's pretty straightforward.
There's only 10 to the 40th organisms in the history of the planet.
Not enough replication events to search a space 10 to the 77 big.
So you're looking at, even if you take the whole history of life on the planet into account, you're only going to be able to search a tiny, tiny fraction of the total relevant sequences.
So you've got a really big haystack, really small number of needles, and very little time to look for them.
The bottom line is it's overwhelmingly more probable that such a search will fail than succeed in the known time of life on planet Earth, which means that the mechanism is more likely, the hypothesis that the mechanism produced new information is more likely to be false than true.
And so the result of this is, as you say, that it's more likely that it's designed than that it was randomly done in terms of DNA, and that's reflected in the fossil record, to the extent that there's sort of these jumps in the fossil record, and this is what you talk about in Darwin's Doubt, is that it's not a continuous process of mutation upon mutation building one on the other just randomly.
It becomes a big engineering problem, because it's not just that there's gaps in the fossil record.
You have to ask, well, how would the evolutionary process produce All the new information necessary to build these completely new body plans, new cell types, new anatomical structures.
And we know it would take a lot of new information.
And so then you've got to look, well, is there enough time to do that?
Do you have enough trials through this mechanism?
And the answer is just overwhelmingly no.
It's not plausible at all mathematically.
And on the flip side, We do know, however, of a cause that is sufficient to produce new information.
This is why it's not a god of the gaps or an argument from ignorance.
We're drawing, and this is Darwin's historical scientific method, when you're trying to explain an event in the remote past, you want to draw on your knowledge of cause and effect.
What kind of cause is out there that we've observed that is capable of producing the effect in question?
And if the effect is a lot of new digital information, we know of a cause that can do that, and it's a mind or an intelligence.
And it happens that that's the only known cause that can produce lots of new information, and it's certainly much more plausible than the Darwinian idea of a random search.
And we show why, mathematically, it's much more plausible.
Now, one of the theories about the idea that randomness is still in the system is Stephen Jay Gould's idea of punctuated equilibrium, that essentially small groups of animals kind of went away from the big group, they did all their changes and then they reintegrated.
Why doesn't that work, the idea that the jumps in the fossil record are a result of small groups breaking away in a certain level of group selection?
Yeah, Gould's model was a terrific advance as far as its accuracy in describing the fossil record because he described these big punctuations or big jumps and then the long-term stasis that would occur, lack of directional evolutionary change.
That's what we see in the fossil record, very non-Darwinian.
The problem was he didn't really have a mechanism That could produce the amount of change that we're seeing.
I do a whole chapter on this in Darwin's Doubt, but the mechanism he proposed was called species selection.
A lot of other evolutionary biologists, including Richard Dawkins, were very critical of the mechanism, and in a way rightly so, because what it came down to in the end was that species selection itself depended on the natural selection random mutation mechanism.
And that mechanism requires lots of time to get the job done.
And it turns out four billion years isn't enough.
But certainly the abrupt jumps that Gould was talking about were not allowing the mechanism enough time to work.
So he had this kind of irony in evolutionary biology in the 80s and 90s in particular.
Gould's model pretty much was dismissed by the early 2000s.
But Gould's model was viewed as a good one for describing the fossil record accurately, but it didn't have a mechanism.
The Darwinians had a mechanism, but it was inconsistent with the fossil record.
And also, as we've later critiqued, the mechanism lacked the creative power to generate the information necessary to build major innovations in the history of life.
So from a design perspective, what exactly is the theory of how one species would become another suddenly?
Is it that there is a bunch of dead DNA that is suddenly activated?
Or is it that something injects new information into the system?
How exactly would that work?
What's the mechanism?
Well, the question of species raises this whole question of envelopes of variability.
We see evidence of design, the loci of the design are when you get the major innovations occurring in the history of life.
But the information that is present in a major group of organisms might be sufficient to allow a lot of variation within an envelope.
So that's why there is evolution.
We think there's clearly evolution that takes place.
The question is how much information was present and how how wide the envelopes of variability are that are generated by that information.
So there's a terrific evolutionary biologist and cell biologist at the University of Chicago, also named Shapiro, James Shapiro, who's got a new theory of evolution he calls natural genetic engineering.
And he notices that and has documented that many of the mutations that we actually see at work are not random at all.
They're an expression of what he calls pre-programmed adaptive capacity where there's an external trigger or stressor put on an organism and that triggers the production of certain proteins for which the organism had the capability of building all along because it had the genetic information there.
And so a lot of the evolution we see is actually pre-programmed adaptive capacity, which is really an exciting biological phenomenon that the Darwinians haven't really taken full account of, but it does raise the question of the origin of that adaptive capacity.
Where did the pre-programming come from?
So, intelligent design says the inputs of information from outside the system, from an intelligence, are located in that pre-programmed adaptive capacity, but the theory also acknowledges that there is evolution possible going downstream as a result of that pre-existing information.
All right, so let's talk about the origin of life problem.
The question being, how did organic life arise from non-organic material?
There are some experiments that were done in the early 20th century in which, under certain conditions, it looked as though maybe organic material could be created from non-organic material, but there really, as you point out, has not been a great explanation of how non-organic material could create an information system like DNA.
I was wondering if you could elucidate that.
So, yeah, the famous experiment still in a lot of the biology textbooks is the Miller-Urey experiment of 1952-1953.
three.
They sparked a chamber that had gases known as reducing gases that then spontaneously produced a few of the 20 protein-forming amino acids, two or three.
The problem is that amino acids do not a protein make, and proteins by themselves do not make life.
So they were really quite a long ways away from demonstrating anything like a spontaneous chemical origin of life.
It's ironic that that experiment was performed in the same year as Watson and Crick's discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule and the subsequent elucidation of the information-bearing properties Because in what's called chemical evolutionary theory, by the 1960s and certainly by the early 1980s, the field reached a state of impasse precisely because the biologists and the biochemists realized that to build an actual living cell, you've got to have information-rich molecules.
You can't just have the components, you can't just have the letters, you've got to have the sentences.
And so there were a number of problems with the Miller-Urey experiment.
One was they presupposed conditions on the early Earth and in the early Earth's atmosphere that didn't actually match the conditions on the early Earth.
We didn't have a reducing atmosphere.
We had a slightly oxidizing or neutral atmosphere.
You rerun those experiments, you don't get amino acids forming spontaneously.
But the bigger problem was how do you arrange the amino acids in the very specific ways that are required to form a three-dimensional structure called a a protein fold.
And that problem hasn't been solved apart from watching DNA do it inside living cells.
So to build proteins, what we know is you need information stored in the DNA molecule.
And so as the molecular biological revolution unfolded in the 50s, 60s, 70s, the scientists working on the origin of life realized the problem was much harder than they realized because they didn't just need to account for certain kinds of building blocks of life.
They needed to account for the information that would organize the building blocks into DNA molecules, into protein molecules, and into the complex information processing systems that characterize even the simplest living cells.
So one of the theories that has been posited to sort of solve this problem is the so-called RNA world thesis.
Can you talk about what exactly that is?
So one of the reasons the origin of life problem is so hard for evolutionary biologists is you can't invoke natural selection reasonably.
Because natural selection depends on self-replication, differential survival of lots of offspring.
But that only happens...
Organisms only divide and reproduce on the basis of things that are happening at a molecular level that involve information-rich DNA and proteins.
So if you're trying to explain the origin of information-rich DNA and proteins, you can't invoke prebiotic natural selection.
It's a contradiction in terms, as one of the great evolutionary biologists Dobzhansky said.
So, that made the origin of life problem even harder than the problems we've been talking about previously, as far as explaining the origin of the information for new forms of life.
But one theory that attempted to get around that is called the RNA world, and it was based on the observation that some RNA molecules can perform two functions at once.
They can perform the function of information storage, like DNA, but they can also catalyze certain reactions.
Like proteins.
Proteins catalyze at much faster rates than would otherwise occur.
Really crucial biochemical reactions that are crucial to metabolism.
So if RNA could do both, the thought was, then maybe life started with an RNA molecule that could copy itself, that could get natural selection going at a molecular level before you had life.
The problem has turned out again to be an information problem.
So we've done experiments on RNA.
It's turned out that people have, they call them ribozyme engineering experiments.
And the name is apt because it is a lot of intelligent design.
It's a lot of engineering.
But people have tried to engineer RNA molecules by arranging the sequence of bases.
RNA, like DNA, has these bases that carry information.
And they've arranged the bases very specifically to try to build RNA molecules that would copy themselves to get a self-replicating system going, which would get natural selection going.
Problem is, number one, we have been able to design some RNA molecules that will copy about 10% of themselves, but only if the bases are very specifically arranged.
Which means that to get a self-replicating system going, you've got to have information.
And where is the information coming from?
It's coming from the intelligent biochemist who's doing the ribozyme engineering.
So what's actually being simulated in these simulations is the need, we argue, for intelligent design.
The RNA world doesn't refute the intelligent design argument based on information.
It actually demonstrates or illustrates the need for intelligent design.
And so, I don't think it really solves the problem, unless RNA world people are saying, well, that's where the intelligent designer input the information in the first place.
Okay, so it seems like the biggest blowback that you've gotten, obviously, in terms of intelligent design, is the term intelligent design, because it seems like most of the critiques that you've made of neo-Darwinism are fairly well accepted.
Is that accurate?
Increasingly so.
In 2016, a number of us attended a conference at the Royal Society of London in, obviously, London, and it was a group of leading evolutionary biologists called The Meeting to address new trends in evolutionary biology, they called it.
It was innocuous way of saying neo-Darwinism is dead.
And we need a new theory.
The first talk of the conference was by a leading Austrian evolutionary biologist named Gerd Müller, who enumerated five, what he called, explanatory deficits of Neo-Darwinism.
Elsewhere he's written that Neo-Darwinism has no theory of the generative, by which he means it explains the small-scale variations very well, Like the Galapagos finches, but it doesn't explain the origin of major innovations in the history of life.
And so many evolutionary biologists are now, there's an aphorism that's afoot, it's mutation and selection explain the survival but not the arrival of the fittest.
The problem is the main mechanism of evolutionary change doesn't seem to have significant creative power.
And that's the problem, I think, increasingly being recognized.
And as a result of that, many people within evolutionary biology are looking for new mechanisms, calling for the formulation of a new theory.
And that's kind of striking.
It's an astounding admission.
When you think about how the theory is presented through the textbooks, with science popularizers, the new atheists, the public spokesmen for science, the National Center for Science Education, The National Academy of Sciences.
When they talk about evolution, it's a fact.
Richard Dawkins has said that if you find someone who questions it, they're either stupid, wicked, or insane.
But the reality on the ground, or rather in the peer-reviewed literature within evolutionary biology, is very different.
There's a recognition that the fundamental problems haven't been solved.
And one of which is, Mueller acknowledged, the problem of the origin of biological form.
When I saw that, it's in a table in a book that he's written with another evolutionary biologist.
It's a list of unsolved problems, one of which they list, the origin of biological form.
I was stunned.
That's 2003, MIT Press.
That was the very problem that Darwin was supposed to have solved in 1859, and it's now an open question.
Well, with that said, it seems like, for a lot of folks like Dawkins, it's not about the God of the Gaps, it's about the Darwinism of the Gaps.
The idea that eventually we're going to figure out that Darwinism still holds in these circumstances where it appears not to hold.
Is that accurate, or does he have a theory for how to fix it?
Well, yeah, there's a very good explanation for that in the sociology and philosophy of science.
The assumption is we have to have a materialistic explanation.
We can't allow creative intelligence or agency or mind to... We can't posit that as part of the explanation for how life got here.
And there's a rule that many scientists take as normative.
It's called methodological naturalism.
And it says if you're going to be a scientist, you have to explain everything by reference to purely undirected material processes.
And if you deviate from that in any way, you're not being scientific.
That's why I got called a pseudoscientist on the Wikipedia webpage.
It was a little bit of an upgrade because previously they had me down as a theologian.
No training in theology.
But in any case, this methodological rule is actually only as recent as the late 19th century in science.
The founders of modern science, Newton, Boyle, Kepler, they didn't adhere to this at all.
They saw design in science, well, in the natural world, and they wrote about it in their science treaties.
For example, in the General Scolium to the Principia, Newton's great work on gravitation.
He's got a terrific argument for design based on the fine-tuning of the planetary orbits.
So design arguments were part of science from its foundation, but they became verboten in the late 19th century after the origin of species.
And there's a very curious thing about this rule of methodological naturalism.
If you're investigating an origin question or a causal origins question, It's a rule that actually limits the intellectual freedom of the scientist.
There's a lot of areas of science where methodological naturalism is innocuous, but if you're asking the question, what caused life or the information necessary to produce life to arise, and you recognize that it could be an undirected material process, or it might have been a mind, but then you decide in advance that you're not going to consider any evidence of mind, of course you're only going to get materialistic explanations, but the explanations may not be adequate.
I mean, imagine you go into the The British Museum, you look at the Rosetta Stone, you see all those inscriptions in three different languages, and you say, well, I'd like to say it was ascribed, but since I adhere to methodological naturalism, I've got to say it was wind and erosion or something like that.
The rule actually limits scientists from following the evidence where it most naturally leads.
Information based on our knowledge of cause and effect is a strong indicator of the activity of intelligence, and yet we can't say that or consider that if we accept methodological naturalism.
And that's what's going on.
That's why the dialectic kind of goes in circles where you get a new evolutionary model every few years, and then they circle back to the one that was rejected, you know, 20 years ago and start the cycle all over again, because we're really looking in the wrong place.
We're barking up the wrong tree.
I mean, it does raise the question, if you're a methodological naturalist and all you believe is that undirected processes are responsible for everything, why you believe in such a thing as objective truth, for example.
Or the reliability of the human mind, as we were discussing before the interview.
Right.
I mean, if the idea is that the human mind is capable of grasping the world around it, and there is such a thing as objective truth that we can grasp, then that would suggest that our mind reflects the universe in some deep, profound way, as opposed to the sort of evolutionary biology belief, which is that we are just adaptable balls of meat.
And so whatever we think about the universe, maybe it's helpful in terms of our adaptation, but it's not necessarily true.
Very well put.
This was the very thing that bothered Thomas Nagel, the great philosopher of science from NYU.
Nagel got himself into a bit of trouble.
He wrote a favorable review of Signature in the Cell in the Times Literary Supplement.
And then there was a huge blowback, including from a lot of other fellow atheists.
Nagel's an atheist.
But Nagel accepted the critical arguments in Signature in the Cell and began to get more critical of Darwinism as well, not just chemical evolutionary theory, but biological evolutionary theory.
And in 2012, he doubled down by publishing his own book with Oxford Press called Mind and Cosmos, How the Neo-Darwinian Materialist View of Reality is Almost Certainly False, was the subtitle.
And his problem was the one that you just articulated, that clearly we live in a universe in which mind is a reality.
And if neo-Darwinism can't account for that, then it's missing something really big.
It's an inadequate explanation for something we observe all the time, which is the activity of minds.
I see it in our conversation.
I know I have a mind by my own introspective experience.
This is a part of reality too, and if evolution can't account for that, and if we exclude mind as an explanatory principle, we're going to have an impoverished understanding of the world around us.
And so, I think this is a very important aspect of the debate, is recognizing that mind is a reality.
Well, this actually is one of the...
Fascinating sort of theories that Dawkins puts forth is essentially that mind is a spandrel, that mind is just something that we feel like we have but it actually does not exist in the first place, which does raise the question as to why he does what he does for a living.
I mean if you're in the business of explanation, why bother operating along the spandrels?
But it's interesting that the Neo-Darwinists say that design in life is an illusion.
We have apparent design, but not real design.
First line from the Blind Watchmaker, page 1.
Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
But at the end of the day, Dawkins also has to say that mind itself, purpose of intelligence, is also an illusion.
That's an impoverished worldview.
We all know better than that.
Well, and it does raise questions, I mean, far beyond that for civilization as well, since we all have to live together and reason together.
I've had this exact argument with Sam Harris, who says he believes in objective truth and reason, and I keep saying to him, well, we're wandering balls of meat with no purpose in the universe, so what is this reason you're talking about?
We're a bunch of firing neurons over which we have no control.
Yeah, two points on that, and I think you've addressed them both.
I think you're addressing the point you just made in your new book, but our whole legal system is based on notions of moral responsibility, culpability before the law.
That presupposes our ability to choose as free agents, that we're not completely determined by undirected, you know, firings in our synapse.
You know, it was not just nature or nurture.
There's human free will and moral responsibility.
Our whole legal system is based on that idea.
And secondly, we have this epidemic of teen suicide in our country.
And I heard something you did on your show a little while ago, and I had a very similar experience of kind of existential anxiety as a young person.
I was a middle-class upbringing, had no great deprivation, but I had this recurring question, what's it going to matter in a hundred years?
Will any human achievement ever matter?
And this question of the purpose of human existence, I think, is gnawing at a lot of people in our culture, especially young people.
Because only agents, only personal agents, can confer meaning on something.
Nothing can mean something to a rock or to an atom.
And we find meaning in relationship to other persons.
And if at the end of the day we're just going to have this heat death of the universe, and there's no mind behind the universe, no personal agency behind the universe, there's no possibility of ultimate meaning.
And a lot of people sense that, and it's very deeply troubling.
And we're really not answering that question for a lot of young people.
I think one of the philosophical implications of intelligent design, which doesn't attempt to prove the existence of God, but it does imply that personal agency is fundamental to the cosmos, and it opens up the possibility that there could be a good answer to that question of meaning and purpose that I think is gnawing at a lot of people.
So let's talk about how intelligent design should be taught in schools.
As we've mentioned, a lot of scientists basically accept the generalized critiques of neo-Darwinism that you've expressed in your books.
Is there a reason why we don't just say, we don't know?
In other words, why don't we try and just teach it this way?
Here's the theory of neo-Darwinism.
Here are all the flaws in the theory of Neo-Darwinism.
It would be very difficult for folks to try and kick that out of schools since you're not mentioning God.
Right.
And you're not mentioning any intelligent designer at all.
Why not teach it that way and then you're firmly within even the skeptic's view of what science ought to be?
That happens to be our science education policy at the Discovery Institute.
We propose that students are allowed to teach, to learn about the strengths and the weaknesses of Different scientific theories, including Darwinian evolution, but there are many... A lot of people have a stereotyped view of science, which is really inaccurate.
It's the men in white coats, and it's just about the facts, and there's no role for interpretation or debate or argument.
But science advances.
There's a wonderful Italian philosopher of science named Marcello Pera who says that science advances as scientists argue about how to interpret the evidence.
And what we've done is present a stereotype view of science to students where we just tell them the answer.
Well, here are the facts and the theory that explains it, and it's all a fait accompli.
A much better way to learn science is to learn about the arguments that are ongoing.
Now, we have this complication in the United States with our church-state jurisprudence, and we at Discovery think that at this point, at least, it's just borrowing trouble to try to buck that.
But what we certainly can do without any problem with the constitutional A constitutional precedent is to allow students to learn the strengths of Darwinian theory and also the scientific weaknesses as we find them increasingly in the peer-reviewed literature in biology and evolutionary biology.
I testified before the Texas State Board of Education several years ago in favor of a proposal to do exactly what I'm describing.
to teach the strengths and weaknesses.
And I submitted into evidence about 100 peer-reviewed papers of leading people in evolutionary biology pointing out serious weaknesses in the theory, especially around this problem of the lack of creative power of the mutation selection mechanism.
At that same hearing, well, prior to, my opposite number at the National Center for Science Education, a Darwin-only science education lobby, said to the press, the Dallas Morning News, you can't apply the strengths and weaknesses standard to evolutionary theory because the theory of evolution has no weaknesses.
Well, that's actually laughable when you get into the scientific literature.
And students ought, just as a matter of scientific literacy, to know about the problems with the theory that the scientists themselves are talking about.
So that's what we've been advocating.
And so, let's talk for a second about the intelligent designers.
When you say intelligent design, everybody goes to, OK, that's God.
But your theory doesn't actually suggest that it's necessarily God.
It just says there has to be some form of mind or intelligence that was responsible for this.
How do you connect the intelligent design theory to God, or is it connected to God at all?
Right.
Thanks for asking.
It's a great question.
And the first thing is to understand why, from the biological evidence, we make an inference to a mind of some kind.
When we're reasoning about the history of life, we're using this Darwinian principle, the Veracasa principle, or using our knowledge of cause and effect.
What do we know from cause and effect?
Well, we know from cause and effect that it takes a mind with self-conscious awareness to create or generate information in a digital form.
And so we can infer that there was a mind that at least had the kind of capabilities of which we are familiar because of our own introspective experience of having minds.
Now, when we're talking about the biological evidence, the designing intelligence responsible might be an imminent intelligence within the cosmos, or it could be a transcendent intelligence that has the attributes that Jews and Christians ascribe to the deity.
Both are logical possibilities.
So, I've always said, in my books on the evidence of design in biology, that the theory of intelligent design isn't an argument for God's existence, but it may have theistic implications.
It's theistic-friendly.
Now, I happen to be writing another book that is extending the design argument into the realm of cosmology and the foundations of physics where we find, at the foundation of physical law, these incredibly finely tuned parameters.
It's called the anthropic fine-tuning.
And the physicists since the 50s and 60s have been discovering dozens of these fine-tuning parameters both in the way the universe was set up in the beginning and the configuration of mass-energy and in the relative strengths of the different forces of physics and a number of other parameters like The expansion rate of the universe and the speed of light and things like this.
And it turns out we live in what they call a Goldilocks universe.
The forces are not too strong, not too weak.
The expansion rate not too fast, not too slow.
The arrangement of the mass-energy just right at the beginning.
We live in a just right universe that has made life possible.
Now that, I argue, and many physicists have argued, is also evidence of design.
But that evidence of design is located at the very beginning of the universe.
And neither the beginning of the universe, which we now know of as a result of our Big Bang theory, nor the fine-tuning can be accounted for by an agent within the cosmos.
Clearly no space alien or imminent intelligence could be responsible for the laws of physics and the fine-tuning of all those laws that make its very life possible.
Nor could such an agent be responsible for the origin of the universe itself.
So I think when you bring that other evidence into the picture, That I think you can make a very strong theistic design argument.
And in my next book, which is going to be called The Return of the God Hypothesis, I look at how a theism as opposed to other competing metaphysical hypotheses, such as pantheism or materialism or deism, best explains that ensemble of evidence from biology, physics, and cosmology.
So I do think you can make a theistic argument, not a proof for God's existence, but again an inference to the best explanation Of this ensemble of evidence we have about biological and cosmological origins.
Now, is there an easy way out for folks when it comes to the fine-tuning argument or to the information argument by simply saying that there is no such actual distinction between meaningful information and Shannon information, there's no such distinction between fine-tuning and non-fine-tuning, except that we're here to see it.
In other words, the only thing that distinguishes an information-rich segment of text from a non-information-rich segment of text is the fact that we speak English.
If there's a bunch of letters and we can read them, then we think that they're meaningful.
If there's a bunch of letters and we can't read them, we think that they're not meaningful.
So in other words, are we reverse projecting mind onto a universe simply because we're here to perceive it?
Well, no, because we do objectively recognize meaning and function.
There is a possibility of false negative judgments.
We might see a string of characters and not know the symbol convention, and therefore conclude that that string is just random or complex without being specified.
But when we make a qualitative judgment of specificity of arrangement, when we see that the arrangement of characters is necessary to perform an independently observable function, that's a kind of information that is real and is something that we know is only associated with the causal activity of intelligent agents.
So, no biologist really, when you get down to it, wants to say, well, the sequence of characters in the DNA, you know, the A's, C's, and G's in the DNA molecule, The arrangement doesn't matter for building proteins, because all we have to do is change the arrangement and see that the protein unfolds and doesn't catalyze a reaction.
There's a real objective way of recognizing function in biology, just as there is in human language.
So, I think in the information sciences, there's a distinction between specified or functional information on the one hand, and mere complexity or randomness or Shannon information on the other.
And that's a real distinction, and it underwrites the whole case for intelligent design.
You're right.
Okay, so the countervailing case for a lot of this stuff is the theory of multiple universes.
I was hoping you would ask about that.
People essentially saying that we are a bubble universe that is on a bunch of other bubbles.
They're an infinite number of universes, so all the probabilistic arguments that you make in favor of the chain of life and the creation of life, none of this matters in the end because there are a bajillion universes.
Right.
And we just happen to be one of them.
We just happen to be the lucky ones.
Exactly.
And they call it the observer selection effect.
We think we're special because all the conditions that are necessary for our existence are so incredibly improbable, but in fact Some universe somewhere had to arise that produced organisms such as ourselves, conscious and intelligent agents indeed.
But there's a problem with this whole approach.
Many problems, in fact.
And you might imagine in this new book that I'm doing, I'm writing quite a lot about the multiverse and critique of it.
But let me give you the most important problem.
And that is the multiverse itself requires prior fine-tuning.
The multiverse hypothesis presupposes prior fine-tuning.
Here's the problem.
If you have all these different universes out there, a gabillion of them, if the universes aren't in some way connected, then what happens in one universe has no material effect on events in another universe.
So the fact that there may be a gabillion other universes out there if they're disconnected, doesn't change anything in our universe, including the probabilities of our being here.
So to solve that problem, and in recognition of that problem, proponents of the multiverse have proposed a common cause for all the universes, so that they can portray the multiverse, all these different universes, as the result of something like a big cosmic lottery, where there's some mechanism as the result of something like a big cosmic lottery, where there's some mechanism that's churning out universes, where eventually one of them would have to have the right combination of factors
Now, the problem, though, is that in all the universe-generating mechanisms that have been proposed, there are There is prior fine-tuning.
There's something called inflationary cosmology and there's something called the string theoretic landscape.
So there's a string theory version of the multiverse and there's an inflationary cosmology version.
And in both cases there has to be exquisite fine-tuning for the universe generating mechanism to actually produce multiple universes.
So the problem of the origin of the fine-tuning has just been pushed back one generation One of my philosopher physics colleagues, Robin Collins, uses an illustration like this.
He says, so imagine you have some chef presents a beautiful loaf of bread to you, and you say, oh, chef, I'd like to compliment your skill as a chef, but I know you didn't actually design the recipe.
It was a bread-making machine.
There was no design in this.
There was just a bread-making machine that produced the bread.
But even if that were the case, The bread-making machine required prior design, as did the recipe for the dough that was put in it.
So, this is kind of analogous to what's going on with the multiverse.
It doesn't eliminate the problem of fine-tuning, it just pushes it back one generation.
You know, I had the problem with regard to the Big Bang.
So, a lot of folks have suggested that the Big Bang is not actually the beginning.
So, there is no in the beginning.
There was a prior universe that sucked in on itself and then blew out again.
Basically, time is eternal and there was no beginning to time, necessarily.
Well, there really aren't good cosmological models that eliminate what's called the singularity at the beginning temporally.
The standard Big Bang or the inflationary cosmology model both terminate in a definite beginning.
There have been a number of developments in theoretical physics that have reinforced that, the singularity theorem of Hawking, Penrose, and Ellis in 1968, and also a theorem independently in physics, the Bord-Guth-Valindkin theorem that established the beginning. the Bord-Guth-Valindkin theorem that established the beginning.
But what people have tried to do, theoretical physicists have tried to do, to get around the theistic implications of there being a beginning, is formulating a very abstract model of physics called quantum cosmology.
That's where the action is, if you want to get around the theistic argument for the existence of God based on the beginning of the universe.
And I'm writing about this too, it's really heady stuff, but it's based on an analogy to quantum physics.
And some of your listeners and viewers are very smart, so they might know about the weirdness of quantum physics, where particles act like waves and waves act like particles.
So there's this thing called a wave function that describes all the different places that a particle might be, and then how it might collapse and manifest one particular set of attributes upon an observation.
And by analogy, some of the physicists have said, well, maybe the universe came out of a bigger wave function, what they call a universal wave function, where there were all these different possible universes that were existing in what quantum physicists call superposition, sort of existing simultaneously in an abstract mathematical space of possibilities, not as physical reality.
And then somehow, some way, all those different possibilities collapsed, and we got a universe like ours.
Okay?
Now, this is a very bizarre thing for a number of reasons.
One, they've got a mathematical equation generating a material universe, which is a very not materialistic explanation of things.
It's almost as one of the proponents of this, Alexander Vilenkin noted, he said, math is an idea that exists in mind, so when we say that the universe came out of a big universal wave function equation, are we really saying that the universe came out of a pre-existing mind?
He raises that as a rhetorical question near the end of one of his books, and then simply changes the subject to finish the book.
The other crazy thing is that to get that mathematical equation that might explain our universe, you have to solve a prior mathematical equation, and you can't do that without an input of information which comes from the theoretical physicist.
So like in those origin of life experiments, they're actually modeling the need for a mind to generate information.
And you get this weird conclusion, in the beginning was the word.
It's very strange.
The attempt to get around the theistic implications of the Big Bang have generated other models which themselves have implications that are very theistic.
Okay, so in just one second I'm going to ask you a final question.
I'm going to ask about your own religious background, where you come from.
Wow!
Yeah, we covered a lot.
If you want to hear Stephen Meyer's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, go over to dailywire.com, click subscribe, and you can hear the end of our conversation there.
Well, the book is Darwin's Doubt, the author of Stephen Meyer.
Stephen, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
Yeah, we covered a lot.
Thank you.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Associate producer Mathis Glover.
Edited by Donovan Fowler.
Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.