Mathematical Challenges to Darwin’s Theory of Evolution

welcome to uncommon knowledge i'm peter robinson filming today in fiesole a city in the hills of florence italy today with me three guests david berlinski is a philosopher, mathematician and author who has lived in Paris for a couple of decades and is now the editor of inference the international journal of science david gallaranter is a professor of computer science at yale and the author of several books, including the most recent tides of mind discovering the spectrum of consciousness stephen meyer is a philosopher and author, he directs the science and culture center at Discovery Institute a think tank in Seattle this is what brings us together in the Claremont Review of Books last spring David Gallaranter published an essay titled Giving Up Darwin cites Stephen Meyer's thoughtful and meticulous book Darwin's Doubt Convinced Me That Darwin has failed deniable

darwin

and other essays a book by david berlinski is also an essential quote david gallaranter david berlinski stephen meyer welcome thank you very good definitions uh

darwin

's book is about the origin of species and to quote the quote from david gallaranter's essay There is no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances - changes in fur density, wing style or beak shape - but there is every reason to doubt whether it can explain the big picture, not the fine-tuning of existing species but the emergence of new ones. some quote well, I'm a layman, I don't know anything, start by convincing me someone that you're not just defining Darwin's term disadvantaged species, who wants to take David? um, there's really very little disagreement on the topic of which species.

It's and I think it doesn't have to be a technical term, I think pretty much any alert child knows when it goes from one species of pet creature to another species or any cat, yeah, a cow or a sheep or something like that. Part of our innate vision of the universe, no one wants to define anything to the disadvantage of Darwin. I think you're looking at three scientists here and I think each of us has appreciated it and I speak only for myself, but I would be surprised if he appreciated the beauty. of what Darwin did, it certainly wasn't a joy to conclude that Steve was right, it wasn't a joy for me to give up a beautiful

theory

and one was beautiful, beautiful is aesthetics, so there is something subjective in it, but explain why Darwin attacked.

You're beautiful, uh, you know, every uh, every year of my life, I'm less convinced that there's anything subjective about beauty, oh, really, the fact that here we are in Florence and every person in the city wants to see the Miguel Angel, so I mentioned the portrait and there are slaves in the academy and the great paintings in the Uffizi. People come from all over Asia. The people come from Africa. They come from all over the world. There is spectacularly little disagreement. I mean your disagreement. about theorems and topology also when people say I believe in proof I don't believe in proof there is disagreement about everything in human life but I think less about art greater than any other subject beauty is something in which I believe scientists they tend to agree To use as an indicator in the direction of truth, I found Darwin's

theory

beautiful to the extent that it explains big things by generalizing small things.

You mentioned the change in fur density in a creature with fur shaped like a bird's beak. or a bird feather, Darwin cannot explain those things through principles of natural selection and when he says well, we can start from these small changes, a beak is three inches instead of three and a quarter inches, we can use the same mechanism by which we explain why there are sheep and cows why there are monkeys and also orangutans and why why apes are different from monkeys the fact that we can explain this huge question where do species come from and the origin of species Use The same mechanism that will work for small variations in a sheep's fur or a bird's beak is one aspect of what makes the theory beautiful.

I mean, other people see it differently quickly because I want to get into the arguments. against, but did you have the same answer? Does Darwin seem beautiful to you for even a minute Stephen? It was a complete synthesis and therefore, from the point of view of what scientists are looking for, it had appeal. It was also a well-argued book. The origin. of species, but it was well argued on the basis of evidence that was known in the 19th century and not on things that we have learned mainly from the 20th and 21st centuries. Well, we come to that now again from the quote from David Gallaranter's essay, Darwinian, the problem of the fossil record.

One of the fossil records of Darwinian

evolution

, I'm quoting, is gradual, step by step, yet in the Cambrian explosion of about 500 million years ago, a surprising variety of new organisms, including the first animals, appear. suddenly in the fossil record in just a span of a year. 70 million years close quote now 70 million years seems to be enough time for all kinds of amazing things for this layman to explain why the Cambrian explosion is such a problem, since the Cambrian explosion was something so problematic that it even began to convince this Man, you know it was a problem that even Darwin was aware of and wrote about it in The Origin of Species.

He said it was inexplicable in his view of life, but he felt that future fossil finds would fill the gap. ancestral forms that were evident, what happens in the Cambrian is that you obtain a large number of what are called animal body plans, where a plant body is a unique configuration of body parts and tissues and they arrive very abruptly in the fossil record without a discernible connection. to earlier precursors or earlier ancestors in the Precambrian record, if this wall were the side of a midway canyon, we would see that you said you have a strip of rock and in that strip you would find a lot of new forms of animal life and underneath of the layers beneath there would be no intermediate, there is nothing, so the Cambrian explosion itself has been dated differently, but increasingly, the date that David used of 70 million years is a very generous state for the injury.

The age range is actually narrowing as a result of additional findings. Now around 10 million years is the increasingly accepted date and there is a big explosion in a Chinese scene. There are 13 to 16 different major groups of animals that have emerged over a period of five to six million years. window is incredibly abrupt geologically when you consider the age of the Earth, four and a half billion years, it is also very abrupt biologically because there is a

mathematical

branch of Darwinian theory called population genetics that allows us to calculate how long, how much

evolution

ary change. What we should expect in a given period of time if we know things like mutation rate, generation time, population size, and 5 10 even 70 million years is a blink of an eye in terms of the calculations that are made. they can do for what are called waiting times and the expected waiting times for the amount of change that is evident in the Cambrian exceed the time scale, if you will, hundreds of millions or billions of years, so This is a truly unexpected event both biologically,

mathematical

ly and geologically from a Darwinian perspective.

Everything, okay, let's go back to David Gallarant or we'll move out of the fossil record, I'm coming to see you, don't go anywhere, I'm patient, oh, thanks, David Gallaranter, Darwin's main problem is molecular biology, uh, now This is complicated for me, but I'll go. continue quoting your essay and then ask someone to unpack it for this layman here for this layman who can't distinguish between a cat and a dog, the species that I am, treat me like a slow student quoting what I'm quoting you what means generating new forms of life many biologists agree that generating a new form of protein is its essence argument step number one argument step number two and inventing a new protein means inventing a new gene I want to give you an overview of that.

Steve is the real biologist. Life means new life. New way of life means new protein. It means new gene. Well, I'll explain it in terms that will be familiar to David if you want to give me a computer. a new function write a new program to fulfill a new function you have to give it a new code and the great discovery of biology of the 20th century after Watson and Crick and what is now called the molecular biological revolution is the same thing that happens in life, you want to invent a new form of life, you must have, you must have a code in the form of information inscribed along the backbone of the DNA molecule and we are learning and other forms of information, so you need the information to build the protein molecules that serve the different types of cells and then additional information is needed to organize the cells in the plants of the body, so the Cambrian explosion is an explosion of biological form but it is also an explosion of biological information. and that fact gives us a way to approach this question that darwin didn't have because we know something about what it takes to generate information in our digital world of high-tech computing, right, I know I have to say that David Gallartner in his The Essay It's very easy for Darwin, first he says the theory is beautiful and he says how sad it is to have to throw it away and then he says this molecular stuff, Darwin couldn't have known anyone, so yes, tell me yes, tell me if I've done it. .

I did it more or less well in Darwin's time, I was good enough to imagine that the basic unit of life, a cell, was like a small brick of gelatin, it was something undifferentiated and quite simple, and one could imagine putting together many, many, many of them. getting different forms of life is more or less fair, yes it was good enough for Darwin, it probably is good enough for us too, but it's not true, that's the big problem, the cell is an incredibly complex machinery, unfathomably complex and not we have understood it. its complexity every time we look there seems to be an additional layer of rogue complexity that needs to be factored into our theories, let's not forget that the eternal goal is to explain the emergence of this complexity, yes, and if we are continually behind the curve because the complexity increases every Every time we look at that eternal goal it also moves away from sight it does not get closer it moves away it is increasingly difficult to build a theory for that right now someone gives me a notion of mathematics here things are more complicated than darwin knew that we understand what to produce new forms of life now means not only new forms new activities in which life is involved but a previous code or is it fair, you are the man who knows, you know the mathematical element of This is not about population genetics in the predictive sense complex and sophisticated that um c was referring to, but simply the simple matter of the code.

It is remarkable that young people learn in high school. It is notable for me or in elementary school to learn that proteins. molecules are assembled because there are codes there are codes in the nucleus of the cells that explain them character by character codon by codon this codon means this amino acid and the next means that and the next means that but the but the mathematics the mathematics The basis of these Codons is very simple and then Darwin could have understood perfectly if he had the facts, each of these positions has to be occupied by one of the 20 amino acids.

Okay, so you pick one of the 20 guys for this position and one of the 20 guys for this position, they talk about visualizing a chain of rhythms, yeah, like they're building a protein. Four accounts of different colors, approximately, about the construction of a protein from amino acids. Yes, and I'm doing it by choosing the amino acids one by one. one by one by one and now I have 20 options each time, if there are several hundred of these things on the necklace bead string, it is a large necklace that wraps around your neck 18 times, so there are several hundred or five times.

Whatever it is, there are a lot of possible options, the number of ways you can arrange the emerald followed by the ruby, followed by the opal, followed by the platinum and another ruby ​​and another ruby ​​and a diamond and, uh, aquamarine , the number of ways you can arrange which is huge grows exponentially because as the rope gets longer, even when the rope is short, even if it's a cheap necklace for your first girlfriend and it's all you can afford, it still There are an astronomical number of options and Darwin could have easily calculated that he simply didn't know about amino acids.

He didn't know about the necklace. He didn't know about the rope. It's not the math that stumped him. It's the biology. The math is simple for a high school student. can calculate How many options are there if there are 20 gems for position number one and 20 gems or position number two and you have 60 gems in total and the task here let me 20? You're trying to silence yourself so I'm quoting even you can,even I understood it, you understood it well, even mathematicians can understand it. has a memorable phrase to describe this mathematical problem. He calls it the combinatorial inflation problem.

Yes, as the required length of the protein molecule grows, the numbers grow exponentially. inflate exponentially, and thus the odds of a random search finding the maker of the pretty necklace, to use the correct metaphor, fell precipitously, and in this enormous, unimaginably vast universe of possible combinations, the number of combinations that would produce a useful protein is what is very extremely rare extremely rare and this is what we didn't know until the last two decades There was an extraordinary conference in the 1960s held by several MIT scientists, some of whom David knew very well Murray Eden Marchette and they were the first to see the mathematical problem with Darwinism.

They called it their lecture was called mathematics.

challenges

to neo-Darwinism, but at the time they could calculate the number of possible arrangements, but they did not know at the time how many of the arrangements would result in functional proteins that would do a job in the cell, so they did not do so. they knew that they couldn't measure exactly how difficult the search was, it would be random, especially computer scientists, Murray Eden and others knew that based on computer science, if this works as a true linguistic system, it will be like that. It is unlikely that you can do a random search and find a meaning, a meaningful string of characters in DNA that will produce a meaningful protein.

Okay, but people didn't know that several different experiments had been done in the 1960s and early 2000s. measures of the rarity of genes and functional proteins versus all the correct gibberish sequences and for a short, for example, only one result for a short protein 150 amino acids long, the ratio is a uh protein that will fold into a functional structure compared to 10 to the number 77 gibberish sequences, so the ratio of functional to non-functional is one in 10 raised to the 77th power, okay, so functional proteins are extremely rare, it's very difficult to imagine random mutations leading to functional proteins, except that, and here I quote Dr.

Gallaranter again, but the theory understands that mutations are rare and successful, even rarer. Darwinism knows this to balance the fact that there are many organisms and an astonishing immensity of time. Your chances of winning may be infinitesimal, but if you play the game often enough, you will win in the end. That's the question: do you play it often enough? there is always enough frequency and the question is: does the history of life that Darwin was concerned about allow you enough opportunities to make it, let's say, probable or even possible that you? Statistically you'll hit one of those incredibly rare necklaces that folds into a protein that can get trapped in a cell and actually do anything.

I'm not a biologist, so I look at this and say yes. Sure there's enough time, you know there have been a lot of creatures on Earth and life has lasted a long time, but when biologists look at this and try to nail it down and figure it out, they try to guess, they try to use heuristics to make a guess like using the number total number of bacteria over their lifespan as a measure of the total number of mutations we are playing with. The point is whichever angle you look at it, the answer is no, there hasn't been enough time for the number. "The number of launches we've had is too insignificant to even talk about, it's not even close to insignificant and it's certainly not even remotely reasonable, so we would get it if we had a reasonable amount of time, but we haven't.

So which let me be very explicit from my little Winnie the Pooh bear sized mind. You are saying that it is unlikely that Darwin would have to be able to. It is unlikely that species arose in the way that Darwin said it is. impossible, Darwin he was just mystical man lovely beautiful idea hardly any difference hardly any difference improbable impossible we're talking about probabilities that are so prohibitive if you want to say it's impossible well I'll defend you by saying it's impossible if you want to say it's highly unlikely may also be on your side as a defense attorney, but it makes no practical difference.

Luckily, we've known these things for hundreds of years. A million monkeys in front of a million typewriters, all typing at random. We know that they are we are not going to produce the complete works of Shakespeare in a reasonable time it is like that wonderful episode of the simpsons do you remember that mr burns has a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters? They are going to produce the best novel ever written, he takes out a piece of paper and says it was the best of times it was the blurry moment it was the best of times it was the first time stupid monkey stupid monkey or to leave the discussion even further down the film by Jim Carrey where he's trying to get a date with a young woman he likes and she tells him to go away, he says well what are the chances that a girl like me and a guy like you can be together?

It's not good, he says, what do you mean? He's not good like one in a hundred and she's like one in a million and then he says well, but if there's a chance, yeah, then you're telling me there's a chance. I read it. Here's a precise way to take advantage of this probabilistic argument if you have 1 out of 10 to the 77th power is your ratio, but then you have all, if every organism in the history of the planet, we can estimate that about 10 to the 40th power. , so you define bacteria as a small thing, everything, every keto, every bacteria, yes, every time. in one of those replicas there is the possibility of a mutation that could be searched in the possibility space, so you have 10 to the 40th possible mutations versus a search space of 10 to the 77th, so if you do your calculations exponentially you'll end up with yourself.

What it means is that you can search for ten trillion trillion possible combinations? So in that case, are you more likely to succeed or fail? You are overwhelmingly more likely to not find one of the functional combinations, even taking into account all the organisms that have ever lived on earth and that means that the winning hypothesis is overwhelmingly more likely to be false than true, it just didn't happen, okay, one last part of the argument here that you mentioned, there are other parts in this book, of course, and in David's book, um, but here's one last word that you mentioned in your essays, which forces you David Gallartner to help create a new one and this is the question of whether mutations turn out to be harmful at least as often as they are useful if I. has the right to help create a new form of organism, a mutation must affect a gene that does its work early and in the development of the life form and controls the expression of other genes that come into play as the organism grows There are evidently no examples in the literature of mutations that affect early development and the body plan as a whole and are not fatal.

Someone explain that to me briefly. Who wants you to start with Stephen? to direct the assembly of an animal that I have to arrive early before they finish assembling them, putting on all the hooves and putting on the wool. If it's a sheep, I like sheep. to say you know I have to get there early before they start building them so they don't accidentally build a mouse or a leopard or a zebra. I have to say look, there will be a sheep with bones that high and we need a nose that big and we need sheep ears and we need hooves if sheep have hooves, I know they do, we need wool, you know, put all these things together, like this that I have to act early now yes I'm going to do it now yes I'm going to create a new species, I'm going to mutate and instead of building a sheep, I'm going to build a small horse, because horses come in cheap sizes, what are they called?

Well, anyway, they're called Shetland polonies. that there may be a mutation that makes me ask for purple wool or the wrong color hooves or stomachs that don't quite fit, but a mutation that will recreate the creature in such a way that it is a different creature, the biologists tell me. and the farmers tell me it's almost certainly fatal, I mean a mutation that makes a big difference and it starts turning its head upside down, starts giving it 17 tails or too many internal organs or forgets about blood or something So because this is true from the beginning that I am acting when I am doing tremendously important things and if I make a mistake in this very important stage I will not make a small mistake in the density of the fur, it will be a big mistake in the design of the internal of the external that makes its creature what it is that is an informal intuitive explanation a good argumentative disjunction if you talk about important changes if they come late in development they are not going to make a difference the organism is already built it can have more sumptuous eyebrows, okay, if they arrive early they can't make a difference because they inevitably destroy the organism, many things later depend on those early cell divisions, so we face a real destructive dilemma, late, no.

Well, early, no, well, when we have exhausted the possibilities and I'm sure David Gallaranter wants to defend Darwin once again and say that he couldn't have known that this is not an attack on Darwin as a man or a thinker or a scientist , but it is the job of the signs to discover which guesses are correct and which are incorrect. Scientists are paid to make guesses, not to make correct guesses, but to make interesting and plausible guesses, and if the scientists after the guess has been made don't do their job don't investigate the gas don't do their best to find out if it is true or false then we are false to science and we are betraying science agree intelligent design from David Gallartner essay the evidence suggests to meyer, who is sitting with us today, that an intelligent designer must have been responsible .

I cannot accept intelligent design as presented by meyer. The attitude towards intelligent design and I quote is warm but distant, it's the same attitude I show towards my ex-wives, so you have a man who can't accept it, another man who definitely wants to keep his distance which leaves Meyer. So I don't know, you want to start the easier case, try to convince David, tell us what, tell us what intelligent design is that distinguishes it from some kind of effort to sneak God in through some back door, surely the parents just designed intelligent design. a word that is definitely not steve's intention in this book on intelligent design it is not a way to present a theological argument it is a purely scientific approach and absolutely scientifically valid and one can agree or disagree with it, but one does not have to reject it To the extent that theology is making an illegal move because that's not what it's doing, that's not what looks good, let me outline the argument briefly and then we can discuss it.

The great discovery of the 1950s and 1960s was that the DNA molecule codes. information in approximately digital, alphabetical or typographic form. That's why you use the term digital correctly, because in computing we have characters, you know zeros and ones. This is correct. 1957 is the sequence hypothesis. You realize that the information in DNA or the chemical subunits of DNA called nucleotide bases functioned like alphabetical characters in a written text or like zeros and ones in a section of a computer code, that is, they were not its chemical properties. those that gave them their function. but rather its specific arrangement according to an independent symbol convention which was then explained in the form of what we call genetic code, so we had genetic text functioning according to a code, so it really was pure information, It was pure information.

A genuine information storage system qrik, by the way, was a code breaker in World War II, so this is a fascinating application of information science to molecular biology. Now what it is and this is the argument I make is that what we know from experience. Is that information, whether we find it in a hieroglyphic inscription or in a paragraph of a book or in information embedded in a radio signal or in a section of computer code? Whenever we find information and trace it back to its ultimate source, we always arrive at a mind. It is not a material process and what I do in the book on Darwin's doubt in my previous book signing in the cell showed that these undirected evolutionary mechanisms that have been proposed as an explanation for the origin of information fail for various reasons of the ones we have talked about.

The reason the Darwinian mechanism fails is because it cannot search space when it is so vast, the odds are overwhelmingly against it, so if we, from a materialistic evolutionary point of view, have noexplanation for the origin of the information that is necessary to build new biological systems. form and yet we know from our uniform and repeated experience what is the basis of all scientific reasoning of a source of information of a cause of the origin of information that causes intelligence or mind and that is why what I have argued in both Darwin's doubts and the signature in the cell is that what we are seeing in life is evidence of the activity of a directing mind in the history of life david berlinsky to quote the old saying if you see a turtle on a fence post , you know it wasn't like that. get there on your own look around you there is intelligence behind this creation we inhabit yeah that's easy for a man like you yeah i guess you don't leave me much to chew on um not much you're a contrarian man what do you mean?

I don't know, I mean look for intelligence in the world, intelligence behind the world, uh, I really trust this objection, whatever he comes up with, you will be the one who responds to the cruelest kisses at starvation prices, actually It is not like this. From my point of view, it doesn't really give us much. It's not a theory yet. I'm certainly prepared to say that there is a lot of manifest intelligence in the world, but at the same time, I think that's not really a tautology for you, don't look at this, it's information, yeah, it's pretty good information, yeah, It's pretty good, yes, it's information.

I recognize that information in some broad sense, perhaps in Shannon's sense, perhaps a more elegant formulation. of information theory, but I am much more convinced by something that leads to a strong counterintuitive claim, for example, that information is embedded in a topology in a certain way that makes it inevitable that certain forms of life will arise that would be interesting. conclusion and for a while I thought there was such a mathematical construction, I don't think my confidence was entirely well founded, but it was a good idea, but just to say that the world is charged with the greatness of God, I could have said that. before thinking about biology, it's true david gallarantner.

I am quoting your essay again if there was an intelligent designer what was his strategy how did he manage to back into so many corners wasting energy on so many doomed organisms what was his purpose and why did he do such a sloppy job? Why are we so prone to illness, distress and so on? Close quote, but aren't you setting the status pretty high? Aren't you saying that, in effect, Stephen Meyer can explain all the mysteries of the human heart or he is not allowed to say anything, that is, the difference between a purely materialist view that everything we see around us arose purely by chance and Stephen's view that there is intelligence, however little we can say about it.

Little do we understand what we mean by that, which remains a fundamental finding. The question is whether the world around us that you are targeting meets your standard of intelligence, whether the design we see is in fact intelligent design or a total disaster. I look at the world at large I see a disaster when I look at the mind of man I see a worse disaster I see a creature as likely to do evil as good or more likely um I see many creatures that are destined to make it disappear without leaving any contribution that we can associate with value, not even turn into oil or something.

I don't look at the world as we know it as more likely the result of intelligence than a random game. just random, taking your risks, I think if you take risks you would end up with a mess like the world, you would have some lucky breaks, there are really great people, there are some beautiful cities like Florence, they are all similar. In the valley there are wonderful things, but in general I would fail in this world if I qualified it and this is an important point in the Talmud, by the way, I will not magnetize. There is a famous argument between basically two schools in Beijing. of thought that they are uh that lived at the same time famous for not agreeing on everything one of them looked a lot like David but and but there is only one there is only one question that they ever agreed on and that question was uh, Is it good that the earth? it was created it's good that the universe was created it's it's it's it's good that it happened um and hillel says and chamai agrees with him no, it's a catastrophe if we had to go back and do it all over again we have to tell the Almighty, no.

Whatever you do, the suffering outweighs the good, oh okay Stephen, so intelligent design wasn't so clever. I see it a little differently. I see two things when I look at nature. I see evidence of Aboriginal design or design. and the original meaning from the beginning, you know in different different groups of organisms, but you also see evidence of decay and that is also something that is consistent with that when designers make things, then we have something we call entropy and I think here a theological perspective helps. because I think from a Judeo-Christian perspective you would expect to see evidence of either original creation or original design, but you would also expect to see something gone wrong in nature and I think we see both, so my theological perspective. informs my ability to answer that question about things in nature that don't look so good, it's interesting, for example, the problem of virulent bacteria, you know, they're nasty bugs, they're invariably the result of a loss of information like result of the mutational process, so the same process that Darwinists have invoked to explain the origin of good design is actually, I think, responsible for the evidence of decay, so I think there is a question in philosophy known as theodicy, you know the problem, yes, and I think there are ways to think about it, but, to me, design evidence is powerful, it's pervasive both in life and at the level of the physics of things like fine things. adjustment of the laws and constants of physics, then I see a very powerful signal of design, but I do not deny the decay and suffering in the world and I have a theological way of understanding if bad viruses are always a result.

That fits perfectly with theology with theology suggests that good is the entity evil has no independent existence, it is always a defect or a deficiency in the good, right, isn't it? I think it does fit and there is quite a bit of microbiology that actually supports that view, but back to you, dr. gillardner, what are two of the great jewish minds in history doing saying creation is evil when the beginning of the hebrew scriptures is god saw it was good? um, we're moving away from darwin just a little bit, but I can't resist, I can't resist that one, it's absolutely true that he saw that it was good and the two creation stories agree that the world is a good thing and, however, immediately to the extent possible.

When it comes to the Bible, men begin to ruin it from Adam and Eve to Cain and Abel, Noah and his ark, the stories of the patriarchs and the world they lived in to Moses who leads Israel to the Promised Land. and people are constantly fighting, arguing, fighting, being a nuisance in every way imaginable, so God creates a perfect world, on the other hand, he has not created a perfect creature, that is why we are forced to study and fight. the good and I try to fight in that direction, but you know, I mean I don't have any theological argument with Steve, what is my argument with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering it, it seems to me that it is widely dismissed in my academic world. as a kind of theological work, it is an absolutely serious scientific argument, in fact, it is the first, most obvious and intuitive one that comes to mind; it needs to be addressed intellectually, not through bigotry, anti-religious bigotry, which is one of the most important facts of the intellectual world in the United States, the West, in general, the case, the case for intelligent design is not based on, since You know, we can have a theological discussion like we had a little bit here, but the case for intelligent design is not based on an interpretation or a deduction from the text of Scripture, it is an inference from biological evidence and in that sense it is different, he makes that statement and you say yes, he is being honest about it and anyone can verify not only that, but I think it is an important statement because outside of the scientific world one might not know how ideologically bent the world is becoming. of science parts of the world of science.

I say this with real sadness and it is certainly not true for all scientists or even both scientists, but we have a warning. In what happened to our English departments and our history departments, it could happen to us, very well, in establishing my type of my last round of questions. Here I am going to quote you once again. David Gillarantner, Darwinism is no longer just a scientific theory. but the basis of an emergency worldview and religion for the many troubled souls who need an accurate quote now many people have invested a lot of energy in discrediting dr. berlinsky and dr. meyer over the years you, dr. gillardner, he is a professor of unquestionable competence and achievement in computer science and computer science is in it, honey, it is right in the middle of the new world we are creating, it is technocracy, we don't have to ask fundamental questions, we just have to deal with zeroes and some, it is totally rational, it is producing. a cornucopia of new wealth and now Gallartner is going over to the other side, he's been with us all along, so what has the reception been, traitor in New Haven and in your profession in academia, I mean, that's a Serious question, what is happening?

Well, I already have it. make a distinction between the way they have treated me personally, which is not a very polite and inclusive way on the part of my colleagues at yale, they are good guys and I like them, they are my friends, on the other hand, when I look at their intellectual behavior , what they publish and, much more importantly, what they tell their students. um darwinism has actually gone beyond a scientific argument as far as they are concerned you take your life in your hands to challenge it intellectually yes they will destroy you if you challenge it now i haven't been destroyed i'm not a biologist and you know i don't I claim to be an authority on this topic but um and you know a book review is not the same as a book, it's kind of a satellite around the book anyway it's still a case that I have nothing personally to accuse my colleagues, but what I have seen in your intellectual behavior and in universities across the west is nothing like freedom of speech on this issue is a bitter rejection not just a kind of fundamental uh bitter uh angry indignant violent rejection that It is not at all close to a scientific or intellectual discussion.

I've seen that happen over and over again. I am a Darwinist. Don't say a word against it or I will or I don't want to? listen to you period, which shows that you are attacking their religion, in fact, I am attacking their religion and I don't blame them for being so heads up, it is a big problem for them, without a doubt, Dr. Berlinsky, who has his doctorate in philosophy , I want to start this is not strictly darwin but it is a I'm indulging myself this is a quote that I have found compelling for a long time but for a long time I have thought that I really want to try it with berlinsky so here we are go, okay, try , I will try, I am c.s lewis, granted that reason is prior to matter.

I can understand how men should come to know a lot about the universe in which they live if, on the other hand, I buy into scientific cosmology and scientific cosmology. We can also read the Darwinian theory of evolution. If I buy into scientific cosmology then not only can I not fit into religion but I can't even fit into science. Here we go, here's the reward if minds depend totally on brains and brains in biochemistry and biochemistry in the meaningless flow of atoms I can't understand how the thinking of those minds should have more meaning than the sound of the wind in the trees close quote he is in something that does not exist he is not existence Isn't consciousness the first question we have to answer?

It's not mine. It's totally wrong. It's just not even the first question I would think to ask. Because? It seems so convincing to you or C.S. Lewis. Yes, it's one of those things that is certainly true. I'm aware that I have my doubts about you and these two guys here, but those doubts don't really matter much. I am prepared to receive my friends like automatons, I don't care. has reached a point or reached something that is simply not interesting. I'm not sure I understand the point. I mean, does this make any sense to you? It makes sense to me.

This is what bothered Thomas Nagel and why he has become skeptical. The main characteristic of neo-Darwinism is that minds are real things and if you can't give an explanation of where they come from or what they do that isn't counterproductive, then you end up with a really incoherent good or Break the tie because his last book was about consciousness. . I have to agree. I also admire Nagel and the question of consciousness is notis resolved. You can discuss whether it is important or not. I think most people intuitively believe it's important. We are right, but the question about the origins of life and the origins of consciousness are the intellectual bookends of modern science and philosophy and we cannot say much about any of them, we cannot characterize any of them and if we cannot characterize them we are not really in a position to explain how they came about that seems to me to be a prior commitment to be able to say what we want to explain someone says that I am deeply disconcerted about consciousness everyone says that this is very fashionable they say in adolescent fashion, for love's sake of God, but I would like to have a better idea of ​​what is causing the bewilderment which I don't have because I can't sit in your seat when you are sitting there, so I can't experience your sensations when you are understanding them well, so why What is that intelligible from a scientific or philosophical point of view as an urgent issue if you say that most of your friends turn out to be automatons?

We'll turn you into an automaton and get a 50 coupon right now where you can spend it on flying, would you take the deal or not? 50 dollars, yes, my conscience, yes, for turning me into an automaton, excuse me, oh, but now you are just arguing about the price, yes, exactly, but that is true for all intellectuals. discussions we are always talking about the price the price seems too low to be disconcerted there are many things that are disconcerting in the world some of them we understand others we don't, but follow your conscience at least fifty dollars, yes, fifty dollars for my country, at least At least you have established a floor that we can climb to from there.

I think we all say it's a mystery, but we're framing the mystery differently, that's exactly right. is an enigma, I'm not even convinced that it's a mystery in the sense that the structure of a natural language, whatever it is, is valuable to you to me, maybe not to you, in the same way that yours is valuable to you, but not entirely. For me, but this is this, we have to be very skeptical about these claims of depth because when they are examined they are not always what they seem, they are not always like this, gentlemen, let me name three names that I think almost remade modern consciousness.

All three of you would agree with that formulation when you hear the names Karl Marx of the 19th and early 20th centuries is no longer taken seriously in some faculty rooms at American universities fundamentally Karl Marx is no longer taken seriously Sigmund Freud fascinating some interesting ideas , but psychology has now advanced so far beyond freud that at universities across the country they are renaming departments, departments of psychology and brain sciences, we are scanning brains, we are fine and now we have darwin and so do you three they are eliminating, what does this mean? The bad thing about the way people think about the world is this.

It won't fall easily. No one has defeated Freud every decade. I'm with David. You are wrong. Fraud increases in my estimation. Oh, it does. Yes, the fact is. Whether feminists in the 1970s were outraged by something he said or didn't say politically has nothing to do with the value of his writing, but I'm two out of three and Darwin certainly agrees with Marx and Darwin. marx is some kind of recovery let's agree on that um and bastard personally yes he didn't bathe much in a bastard certainly had no sense of style darwin is a different case i think you're on to something to group them together because they've talked about how Darwinism David talked about how Darwinism has become the basis of a worldview and if we look at the questions they address Marx Darwin tells us where we come from Marx has a utopian vision of the future and Freud tells us what to do with our guilt and between these three great materialist thinkers of the 19th and early 20th centuries they form the basis of a kind of comprehensive materialist worldview and answer the same questions that traditional Judeo-Christian religion has addressed. and so it's understandable that when we talk about the intense opposition that Darwin's skeptics often face, it's understandable when you realize that it actually makes sense because you're challenging a fundamental point in the worldview of many scientists. equates their worldview of scientific materialism with the practice of science itself and when you challenge one of the thinkers who supports that worldview you're going to get a very emotional sort of reaction and that's often what happens in the last question here and I.

I'm going to quote David Gillardner's essay for the last time. Darwin now poses a final challenge: whether biology will live up to the latter as well as he did to the former when his theory upset all the apple carts. How cleanly and quickly the field can move forward remains to be seen. surpasses darwin and moves on striking phrase this is one of the most important questions facing science in the 21st century close quote is generational Does an entire generation of biologists have to die before the field surpasses darwin? what's going to happen here could be generational at best, I mean, I think it would be a great outcome if the old guard died and, but you know, religion is taught, more than anything else, by parents to the children and and the young people have been brought. like little Darwinists, I mean the kids I see running around New Haven are all Darwinists anyway, the kids, I mean the students in my class are all Darwinists, so these guys know more about this than I do, no I'm hopeful, well, I think Darwin is. eternal because eternal eternal the name is eternal the idea is eternal the belief the commitment everyone is eternal the theory will disappear forever to a bad theory but no matter what it is a beautiful theory, it's okay, it's a beautiful theory, whatever it is, It will disappear but anything that replaces it will be called Darwinian, there is no doubt that no matter what Christian heresy arises on the tides of time, it is always called Christian heresy, this will be a Darwinian heresy, but that legacy, that memorial legacy, It will never disappear, it is part of history. of the topic just like newton will not disappear oh but newton oh david gallardo look I'm prepared for that because I read david gallartner's essay very carefully and of course it was based on your work and your work but as this david says look there is a variety of physical phenomena very big things planets stars newton is not very good at very small things quantum mechanics small particles we can't he is not very good at it but this enormous range dart newton is perfectly predictive fits behaves perfectly with a 98 of human experience, that's true and darwin doesn't have to go any further than the planets and stars, oh yes, but you're right, i think what david berlinsky means is that darwinism has filled a niche in our intellectual life that is necessary, you have to give some kind of explanation of where all these wonderfully intricate systems that we call living organisms came from and the fundamental commitment of Darwinism is some kind of bottom-up materialist explanation where molecules become more complex and form molecules, more complex molecules and cells and cells compete to form more complex organisms, so now what we are seeing are post-neo-Darwinian theories of evolution that are trying to provide new mechanisms that will explain things that the Darwinian mechanism does not take into account, so even you, who bears the scars of abuse by Darwinists, says that Darwin may have been wrong in his answers, but he was asking invaluable questions.

He is asking invaluable questions, but I think he was wrong. I think all Darwinians in the world. broad sense, get it wrong, they are trying to explain something very, very complex in terms of non-bottom-up directed processes and what we see in life complex miniature machines complex information processing systems digital code these are things that carry the seal of the mind and suggest more of a top-down rather than bottom-up approach, so I'm sure that people committed to a materialist view of things will continue to generate bottom-up explanations, but I think we are in a new day in which we are seeing life.

In light of our own high-tech digital computing technologies and realizing that these systems have all the hallmarks of design, let's start looking at life differently and I think looking at it from a bottom-up Darwinian approach is holding us back. The science. Starting to make predictions based on intelligent design, some of our guys were the first people to predict that the non-coding regions of the genome previously identified as junk by neo-Darwinians are in fact importantly functional, so we have to look at life as a system of design is actually providing insight into how life works, it's a new day you're going to go with, yes there have been big changes, let's put it this way, I think what we've determined is that Darwin created a 19th century. 19th century local theory without looking at extreme cases that was reasonably successful for breeders in explaining local characteristics such as beak size or wing growth, but completely failed to explain what it thought was explaining the emergence of biological complexity at the species level or higher order levels, it was not, it was a premature question to ask an audience about the origin of species, he could not say anything about what he did not know, what he could not understand and the fact that I didn't know or couldn't understand. these things is simply a reflection of the fact that we do not know or cannot understand those things in the 21st century, so the question was the question addressed was largely premature in the 19th century, it is still premature, we are just learning the structure of intellectual research.

It is necessary to understand something like the biological cell and it is a much more difficult problem than we ever suspected. Much more difficult. David Gallardo. Last words for you. Do you agree that it is much more difficult? It absolutely is an incredibly difficult problem. We'll figure it out, but it's not going to be that way. simple david glartner most recent author of tides of consciousness thank you david berlinski author of many you three author of many books but author in this case the relevant volume is the deniable darwin and other essays and steve meyer whose book in this case the the book relevant is darwin's doubt thank you all thank you thank you my friend I am peter robinson for your uncommon knowledge the hoover institution and the fox nation thank you