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