Why Some Scientists Are Rethinking Darwin’s Theory of Evolution | Stephen Meyer

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] For decades now, we’ve been told the biggest questions of how life and our universe came to be were settled. But what if they’re not?

Stephen Meyer has spent his career digging into the deepest mysteries of our existence. A philosopher of science, he is the founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Darwin’s Doubt” and “Return of the God Hypothesis.”

“Many leading evolutionary biologists today are calling for a new theory of evolution, because they recognize that the mutation-natural selection mechanism has limited creative power,” Meyer says.

While Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection can explain small-scale variations—for instance, finch beak size changes, moth wing color changes, or bacteria developing antibiotic resistance—it cannot explain the origins of new species or new body plans, Meyer contends.

Now, in a new film, “The Story of Everything,” coming to theaters April 30, Meyer lays out a case that could reshape how we think about life itself.

“The scientific discoveries of the last one hundred years and right up to the present are pointing in a very different direction than people thought in the late 19th century,” Meyer says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Stephen Meyer, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Stephen Meyer:

It’s great to be with you, Jan. Thank you for inviting me into such a beautiful studio as well.

Mr. Jekielek:

You know, I have to offer you huge congratulations on The Story of Everything. It’s a beautiful, marvelous film, and I hope it does incredibly well. And at the outset, I’ll recommend everybody go see it. But let’s start here, okay? Back when I was studying biology in my undergraduate degree, in my third year of biology, something occurred to me. And that was that people would say, I believe in evolution.

I realized, as I was studying evolution and continued to study evolutionary biology, that when people said that, they meant different things, okay? And so, for example, what I first thought people were saying was that evolution by natural selection, this kind of specific Darwinian mechanism, happens, right? Which I think is true as a concept, right? Like, you can see it in viruses, for example.

Mr. Meyer:

Indisputably true.

Mr. Jekielek:

Exactly. Indisputably true. However, what struck me was that when people say that, often they would really mean, I believe that that’s where humans come from. There was this kind of quasi-religious belief in it, right? Which was just odd to me because it was very obvious to me that there were all these different—clearly there would have to be all these different mechanisms at play to get the diversity of life. It’s like we’ve been arguing almost at cross-purposes around this question. That’s where I want to start.

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, that’s a great place to start because there’s a great deal of equivocation around the term evolution. It can mean many different things, and just the initial observation or reaction to what you’ve said is that there’s a huge difference between the idea that natural selection is a real process that takes place and the claim that natural selection acting on random variations and mutations has unlimited creative power. It can be a process that is a real part of biological phenomena without necessarily having unlimited creative power. Many leading evolutionary biologists today are now calling for a new theory of evolution because they recognize that the mutation-natural selection mechanism has limited creative power—quite limited creative power.

I attended a conference in 2016, now ten years ago, at the Royal Society in London that was convened by a group of biologists and evolutionary biologists who have been calling for a new theory of evolution precisely because they realized that the mechanism of mutation and selection has such limited power that it does a nice job of explaining small-scale variation and adaptation, all the classic examples that we learn about in the biology textbooks, the same ones that are repeated over and over again, there’s a fairly limited number of these.

But the peppered moths that change coloration from dark to light and dark again, or maybe it’s the other way around, the Galapagos finches with the beaks that get a little bigger, a little smaller, and change shape in response to varying food supplies and weather patterns, antibiotic resistance, and so forth. Natural selection does a nice job of explaining that small-scale variation, but it doesn’t do a good job of explaining the origin of what biologists call morphological innovation, the origin of major new body plans or new forms, new organs, new tissues, but especially new body plans in the history of life.

We find again and again in the fossil record that this kind of morphological innovation occurs very abruptly, and the mechanism of natural selection does not explain that well; it runs out of capability very quickly. So we can talk more about why that’s the case, but the distinction between just the fact of a mechanism that does something and the claim that it can do everything is often overlooked.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, you know, back in that same class that I was taking, there was a man who became my friend. Actually, I thought of us as kids then, I guess. But Dennis Venema, he had the audacity to do one. We all had to do a seminar as part of this seminar series, right? And so he had the audacity, in front of a group of people who were definitely committed to evolution, okay, to do a seminar on flaws in evolutionary theory, okay? And he was an evangelical Christian. Later, he actually became part of this BioLogos group, which is, you know, based…

Mr. Meyer:

Quite committed now to the adequacy of evolutionary theory and to the creative power of natural selection.

Mr. Jekielek:

So that’s, yes, no, and so it’s interesting, right? But what I thought when I saw this, because this is kind of like, you know, that the class is kind of, you know, pitchforks and tiki torches. Yes, right, it becomes like this kind of thing because people are so emotionally invested in this, right?

Mr. Meyer:

I have a blessed memory of a friendly debating partner, Michael Ruse, who passed away last fall, and he’s on the other side of the issue, obviously. He was a committed neo-Darwinist. But he wrote an important book in which he acknowledged or really spotlighted the fact that for many of his colleagues, Darwinian evolution functions as a kind of secular religion. And you can see why, because it’s answering one of the most fundamental questions that any worldview or religion has to answer, which is: what is the thing or the entity or the process from which everything else came?

The neo-Darwinian explanation of the origin of new forms of life is part of the answer to that really fundamental question, which is not only a scientific question but a philosophical worldview question. Ruse’s critique of some of his own colleagues was that, because it functions like a secular religion, sometimes there’s a resistance to a more dispassionate scientific evaluation of its merits.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s just like, to me, the eye. Just the eye, right? We have a complex eye in an octopus, for example, that’s different in some foundational ways than a complex eye in a human being. But no one’s been able to explain to me how you get an eye with no lens and all these complex things through a process of natural selection. I actually think you never get an eye through the process of natural selection because there are just so many of these intermediate forms.

You know, actually, let’s do this because I even think that maybe there are viewers out there who hear about this natural selection evolution; you might not even understand the exact mechanism. So let’s just kind of define what it is very quickly and how—I mean, if I’m wrong, you tell me, right? But I just don’t think you ever get an eye through natural selection.

Mr. Meyer:

Natural selection is the idea that the Darwinian process as a whole envisions differential reproduction, that there would be organisms that would reproduce, leave offspring with varying traits, that some of those traits would be more favored in a competition for survival, and that those would be differentially or on a statistical basis passed on more frequently than those traits that are not as advantageous.

Over time, the idea is that there would be an accumulation of the more favorable traits and that the differences represented by those genetic or mutational variations that arise in a population would eventually become fixed in the population, and there would be an overall directional change to the organism. So something fundamentally new would arise.

Mr. Jekielek:

And if I may, let’s talk about the—I’ll just use quickly to reframe with this example, right? Darwin’s finch. Okay. The reason you get a finch that has a very, very long beak is that there’s some kind of food out there that a long beak can get.

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, there’s actually been a study of this by a couple called the Grants, and they showed that there were variations in the weather patterns in the Galapagos, and that part of that resulted in—I think it was a series of droughts, and so that there were only very hard nuts left, and so the finches that survived better were on average had a 5 percent longer, or forgetting the exact figure, beak that enabled them to crack through the nuts. And so you’ve got a small-scale variation or adaptation of the structure of the beak to permit more effective Galapagos finch foraging.

Mr. Jekielek:

But the bottom line is the ones that have the longer beaks, in this case, survive more often, which is why over time, you get a longer and longer beak. Basically, that’s the process, right?

Mr. Meyer:

That’s the claim, that that process can go on in an unlimited way, producing all forms of life that we see.

Mr. Jekielek:

But how do you get an eye with that?

Mr. Meyer:

Let’s go more fundamental. The eye, like everything else in the body, depends upon the function of large biomacromolecules called proteins. Proteins do all the important jobs in cells. They catalyze reactions at very fast rates that would not otherwise occur. They build the structural parts of miniature machines. They help process information. And they’re part of what, in the case of the eye, is called a biosynthetic pathway, the vision cascade, that allows vision. Even to get a light-sensitive spot, you have to have a whole series of proteins that are interacting with each other in a kind of chain to make light sensitivity possible.

And so if we want to explain the origin of anything novel in life, we have to explain the origin of proteins. Now we know proteins are built by reference to the information that’s stored on the DNA molecule, and that information is stored in essentially a digital form. There’s a four-character digital code of little subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule that function like alphabetic characters in written text or the zeros and ones in a section of software.

Now, we know something from our experience of software, and that is that if you start to change the zeros and ones in a section of software for doing something specific, for a specific app or a program or an operating system, and you start to change them very much, you will degrade the function of the code so that the app, program, or operating system will no longer work long before you will have made enough changes to produce something fundamentally new.

So when I ask in talks, if there are computer programmers there, I’ll ask, you know, if you’re going to, if you start changing zeros and ones in a section of functioning code, are you going to build something new first, or will you degrade what you have first? And they laugh. The answer is obvious.

Well, it turns out we’ve learned the same thing is true of the digital code in the DNA. That makes the protein molecules. You can alter it a little bit. And if you do, you can sometimes alter the function of the existing protein, provided you don’t change the overall structure of the protein that’s called a fold. The fold makes possible sometimes multiple functions that are related but within that structure.

But as you accumulate random mutations, usually between three and five, maybe up to seven percent, I mean maybe it’s even ten percent, but a very small number of mutations in various proteins will cause the structural stability of that fold that makes protein function possible at all to simply degrade. There’s a loss of what’s called thermodynamic and structural stability. The thing unravels. But we’ve also learned that to build a new fold capable of a completely novel set of functions, the sequence differences between them are on the order of 65 and sometimes as much as 80 percent.

So the same thing holds in the gene-protein world; that holds in the computer science world. If you start randomly changing things at the genetic level, and that’s what a mutation is, as those accumulate, you’re going to inevitably degrade and destroy the possibility of function in what you have long before you will have changed it enough to produce something fundamentally new that will create genetic and morphological novelty. So that’s the problem.

And that applies not only to the origin of the eye, because the eye depends on all these proteins in what’s called the vision cascade, but it applies to virtually every significant biological change that you could imagine. So this is one of a legion of, at least let’s call it a suite, of fundamental problems with the idea that the mutation-selection mechanism is fundamentally creative. It’s a real process. People like me who hold to the theory of intelligent design affirm that it’s a real process. It’s part of what we know about how biology works, but it has very limited creative power.

Mr. Jekielek:

And this is actually one of the key arguments you make in The Story of Everything, which I think you develop. You know, it’s absolutely fascinating that the scientific discoveries that we’ve made in the realm of exactly the kinds of things that you talk about actually have given us a lot of information that we didn’t have that might have made us overlook that, you know, creative power that’s somehow, you know, in the system but isn’t explained by the randomization.

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, exactly. It’s the advance of science that has made us more confident that there is a designing intelligence behind life in the universe. We don’t deal a great deal with the question of biological evolution in the film. We talk a bit about the miniature machines that are present inside cells and how difficult they are to explain by a step-by-step gradual Darwinian process of natural selection. We look particularly at two machines that I think are really fascinating.

One is the bacterial flagellar motor that our colleague Michael Behe has made famous. The other is the ATP synthase, which is a little turbine. So one’s a rotary engine, the other is a turbine, and they’re inside cells. In the 19th century, as you were saying, or alluding to, the view was, right after Darwin published The Origin of Species, that the cell is a simple homogeneous globule of undifferentiated protoplasm.

That’s a favorite quote of mine from Thomas Henry Huxley. I like it because he was one of the great scientists in the 19th century, and it now seems so ignorant to us because as we’ve opened up the cell, we found this exquisite realm of digital nanotechnology. And if you look at these machines, they’re made of multiple protein parts. And if you have some, even a large set of those, but not the totality of the parts, then you get no function.

Natural selection selects for functional advantage. If the intermediate structures on the way to an eye or on the way to a flagellar motor or an ATP synthase confer no function, then there’s nothing there to be preserved and passed on by the process of natural selection, and the evolutionary process will terminate before the system ever gets built. So we do have a bit in the film about that. It is a critique of biological evolution, but the film’s much more concerned with the question of the origin of the first life itself. How do you get life going? That’s something Darwin never addressed.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right. Let’s go back to Jan, third year university.

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, sure. Okay.

Mr. Jekielek:

It was a very strange thing for me because it became very clear to me that evolution by natural selection wasn’t the only mode, right? This is actually where my work became looking at alternate models of evolution. Because, again, I still am perplexed in a way, unless we’re really just talking about ideology, right?

Mr. Meyer:

And that’s very cutting edge because that’s where the field has gone. People are saying we need a new theory. There’s got to be some other mechanism that provides the creative impulse or the creative power that mutation and selection doesn’t provide. What did you find in your studies?

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, no. So I mean, I just, I had basically started, I started a PhD, ended up finishing it as a master’s. My life got kind of thrown a massive curveball, if you will. I was looking at the hybridization between two species of lemurs, actually, okay? And just because I was curious, I had heard about this particular unusual situation in this one reserve in Madagascar where it looked like two species were coming into one, right? And I was just interested in, again, alternate models, and I was like, oh, this looks exciting. And I get to go to Madagascar.

Mr. Meyer:

I think there was a film about Madagascar with lots of lemurs.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, there was. And in fact, nobody had understood what I studied until that film.

Mr. Meyer:

Until the cartoon came out.

Mr. Jekielek:

They went to see the cartoon and then everybody knew, yes, exactly. But this is, you know, what I came to, right? And I think when a lot of people say, I believe in evolution, right? What they’re saying is that human beings are meat, or human beings are meat computers, or something like that, right? Like it’s just, we’re not the product. There’s no kind of, you know, divine inspiration here. There’s no, we’re not made in the image of God, as certain faiths would describe Christianity, notably, and others, and there isn’t that significance, you know.

Mr. Meyer:

This gets back to that meaning of evolution. There are three basic meanings of evolution. One is that there has been change over time, and that can refer to small-scale adaptation, like the Galapagos finches or the peppered moths. Or it can refer to the idea that life on the planet now is different than it was a long time ago. So if we look in the fossil record, we no longer have trilobites or triceratops. So the composition of life on the planet is different than it was as recorded in the fossil record a long time ago. So that meaning of evolution, I think, is pretty much indisputable.

But then there’s a second meaning of evolution, I think, is pretty much indisputable. But then there’s a second meaning of evolution. It’s the idea that there’s been continuous change over time, such that the best way to represent the history of life is a great branching tree, where the base of the tree is represented by one or very few simple, presumably one-celled organisms. And that we’ve had a kind of continuous and gradual morphing and changing of those very simple forms into all the forms we see today, but everything is related by common ancestry. That’s a more controversial meaning.

But then the most controversial meaning is the third meaning, and that has to do with the action of mutation and natural selection, but not just the idea that the process occurs, but rather that it has sufficient creative power to explain all of the change implied by that tree of life picture of the history of life and also the appearance of design that living organisms manifest.

So a big part of the idea of Darwinian evolution was the idea that there is this unguided, undirected process that can account for the appearance of design without the process having been designed or directed in any way? So it’s a larger materialistic worldview. Richard Dawkins has famously said, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually-fulfilled atheist. Well, why? Because you give an account of the appearance of design without there being a designer. An undirected process is doing all the creative work.

Mr. Jekielek:

There’s this, you know, in preparation for this, we pulled a quote from Darwin from The Origin of Species. You know, it’s just appropriate even for our discussion right now. But if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. Yeah, right. This is kind of in the sphere of, in the context of the eye and the context of, you know, molecular motors.

Mr. Meyer:

Like the molecular motors, sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

And the creative power that you just described.

Mr. Meyer:

Can I comment on that just briefly? Just to clarify for your audience, because that’s a quote that Michael Behe has highlighted, because it does establish a standard for the explanatory efficacy or sufficiency of Darwinian theory that Darwin himself put forward. And in the case of, if we look at the bacterial flagellar motor that Michael Behe has made famous, it’s got roughly 30 protein parts.

It is a tiny rotary engine that sits in the cell membrane of a bacterium. And it has a rotor, it has a stator, it has U-joints and bushings, it has a long whip-like tail that functions like a propeller. And if you have only some of those parts but not all, say if you’ve got 26 or 25 or 24 or whatever it is, the motor will not function.

So if you’re trying to build a motor through natural selection and random variation, you need to build that successively through a series, as Darwin is saying, of incremental steps. And as you add parts, presumably each combination of parts must confer some functional advantage on the organism. The problem is when there’s no functional advantage until you have all of the parts or a core set of parts that are hard to reach through that gradual process. And that’s the mysterious part, from a Darwinian point of view, of all of these molecular machines.

They’re multi-part, functionally integrated systems that require either all of the parts or a very large core set of the parts to function at all, which means that the intermediate steps would not be preserved and passed on. Which again, natural selection only selects for functional advantage. If there’s no functional advantage until you get to a very complex endpoint, you’re not going to be able to build it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Let’s talk about, so actually, again, speaking of the Biologos people, I think one of the most compelling arguments for natural selection, right, being a major process, okay, and I’m very curious how you I think the Biologos people would point to this. Basically, human and chimpanzee genetics are, you know, people say it’s 98.8 percent overlap. That’s kind of astonishing. And then there are certain types of gene patterns that people will point to, the science has revealed, so people would say, I think, that science has revealed, no, actually, there is definitely a common ancestor. And look at, like, explain to me why the genetics are so similar, right?

Mr. Meyer:

Well, they’re not. Those numbers are dropping fairly precipitously. And the final number when we compare gene sequences, I think, is yet to be determined. But it’s dropping at least into the mid to low 90s and probably going to go lower.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, but there’s a shocking amount of similarity if there’s no common ancestry.

Mr. Meyer:

There’s a shocking amount of difference morphologically and behaviorally between chimps and humans, clearly, that cannot be accounted for by the alleged small 2 percent of gene differences. But there’s a more interesting and more important study that’s just come out in the journal Gene. And that is that the proteome, the things that the genes make, the ensemble of proteins that the genes make, are in sequence comparisons running between 45 and 65 percent similar. And that tells us something very important: how do you account for that? Well, that the information processing systems in the two organisms are profoundly disparate, very different.

So the genes are functioning as the genetic information is functioning as essentially a library that can put together proteins. We also know that the same genes can be read and concatenated differently to produce very different proteins. And so what’s, and this helps explain a long-standing mystery, which is, if our genetics are so similar, then why are we behaviorally, morphologically, and anatomically so different?

The answer is that the way that the information is processed, the way it’s expressed, is very different in the two organisms. And so if high degrees of similarity point to common ancestry, what do very divergent modes of information processing point to, perhaps, separate ancestry? So I don’t think this is all a closed question. And I think we’ve kind of been given one little smidgen of what’s really going on when we just analyze the lowest level in the biological hierarchy and say, yeah, there’s a lot of genes.

For example, in both organisms, we have a gene for making hemoglobin. Hemoglobin captures molecular oxygen in the blood. There’s really no reason for the gene for making that protein to be very different at all in the two organisms. But to account for higher-order anatomical structures and behavioral structures that are grossly different, the genetic information is going to have to be expressed and processed very differently.

So the genes are functioning as a kind of library, and then there’s something that’s accessing the information. You can pull this gene and this gene. You can put them together this way or this way, or you might insert something else. So the genetic text can be concatenated and aligned in different ways to produce completely different proteins for completely different biological functions.

So there’s a great disparity in this information processing system between the two organisms, and that’s what accounts for the difference in the so-called proteome. And I think that’s much more significant because it’s telling us how an animal is actually built; it’s not just the bottom-up genes; it’s how the genes are processed and expressed. Something called a developmental gene regulatory network that we probably ought to talk about because it’s one of the things that the mutation-selection mechanism also can’t explain. It’s a very important part of body plan development.

Mr. Jekielek:

I think this question, right, of why would, for example, mammals, right, and humans, all be so much more similar genetically in terms of the code, right? And then why would vertebrates be much more similar, right? And then why would we have all this sort of classification of species? I remember Dennis telling me back in the day, because I think when he did that seminar in third year, that he was, I think he was pretty much a creationist at the time, but he changed his mind, and he changed his mind because he said, I looked at the genetic data, and I saw these kinds of patterns, and right, that’s what made me think that there’s sort of, you know, that there’s more of a role of evolution by natural selection. It’s not that he stopped being a Christian; he very much stayed being a Christian, but he thought it became a lot more compatible in his mind, and that’s indeed what he’s been speaking about over the years and so forth. But how does that conceptually, how is that explained in your view?

Mr. Meyer:

Well, there’s an assumption of genetic reductionism there. The genes are the only thing that determines form. The genes have information for making the small-level protein parts. But the proteins have to be arranged into biosynthetic pathways. The pathways characterize different types of cells. Different types of cells have to be arranged into different types of tissues and organs. Different types of tissues have to be organized into different types of body plans.

So, the question of macroevolution is about the origin of new forms, about the origin of form at the higher level of body plans. The assumption that led to the conviction of common ancestry on the basis of alleged high degrees of genetic similarity overlooked the importance of all these other layers of organization that have to be accounted for in explaining the origin of biological form.

We now know that there are other layers; there is information stored at higher levels beyond the genome, and we know that there are processes at work that are responsible for differentially expressing that genetic information during the process of animal development. That’s actually one of the things I would love to explain about something called developmental gene regulatory networks because genetic information alone will not make an animal. The genetic information has to be processed and expressed in very specific ways.

Mr. Jekielek:

And I’ll just say one thing before you continue, right? I mean, there is an explanation as to why things that are somewhat similar in form would have similar genetic codes too, right? Because you need similar types of proteins to do that kind of stuff.

Mr. Meyer:

The lower-level parts, of course, are going to be very similar. It’s the way the lower-level parts, the lower-level protein parts and cells, are organized into very different kinds of structures. We’ll talk about animals for the present. So, something called a developmental gene regulatory network is absolutely crucial to building an animal form, an animal body plan, the idea is that as cells go through their division—from a fertilized egg, it divides into two, then into four cells, and then into eight, then into 16—there’s this geometric expansion in the number of cells.

At different points along the way, different parts of the genome are expressed to produce very specific proteins to service very specific types of cells as they are differentiating one from another. So you have bone cells or nerve cells or muscle cells, with different types of proteins being built at just the right time so that those cells are being differentiated, say, if it’s a bone cell or a muscle cell.

What a developmental gene regulatory network does is map the genetic information in the genome and the different gene products, the proteins, and also something called regulatory RNAs that regulate in turn. So you have a gene that produces a regulatory RNA, and that regulatory RNA will then either turn on or turn off other parts of the genome in different cells at just the right time so that the right proteins are built in the right cell to allow for the differentiation of cells as the animal is developing. And this is all beautifully choreographed. Everything turns on and off at just the right time.

Now, as scientists have mapped this, in particular one scientist at Caltech with colleagues, scientist Eric Davidson, who alas passed away just a few years ago. As they map this and map the functional relationships involved, what they came back with was something that looked like a beautiful integrated circuit, where you see all these one-to-many and many-to-one functional relationships. But instead of being a circuit that is describing the flow of electricity, it’s essentially describing the flow of information and the way the information is controlling animal development. So that’s just a fascinating piece of science that’s just extraordinary.

But here’s the rub for macroevolutionary theory, the idea that the mutation-selection mechanism can generate large-scale changes, changes sufficient to account for the change of one body plan into another, where a body plan is a unique organization of body parts and tissues. So what Davidson and colleagues found was that as you start to alter, by random means or otherwise, any of the core elements of these gene regulatory networks, the whole process of animal development shuts down before you reach the termination point of a fully developed animal form.

But that creates a problem for evolutionary theory because if you wanted to change body plan A, some animal form, maybe an arthropod of some kind, into body plan B, some other kind of animal form, what we know is you’ve got to have a new gene regulatory network that coordinates the expression of all that genetic information in a different way.

Mr. Jekielek:

You can’t get it little step by little step.

Mr. Meyer:

You can’t get it little step by little step; you can’t change it at all. I mean, very modest changes are allowed, but very little. So if you can’t change the developmental gene regulatory network into a fundamentally different one, you will never be able to change the body plan into a fundamentally different one. So this creates a huge problem for the origin of animal body plans. And the animal body plans arise abruptly in the fossil record, we know. I wrote a whole book about this called Darwin’s Doubt, a book about what’s called the Cambrian explosion. And so there are really profound mysteries.

Now, this is a problem not only for neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, but for any theory of evolution, because evolution is fundamentally about major change. If you can’t change the developmental gene regulatory networks in a significant way, you will not be able to change body plans in a significant way. So this is really a fundamental challenge to all forms of macroevolution.

And it underscores what we’ve been talking about, that the most important aspect of morphological development, and in turn evolutionary transformation, is not going to happen just at the genetic level. It’s going to happen at the level of the processing of that information. And that’s where things are highly constrained.

If you think of it, when you look at it, it’s called a dGRN [developmental gene regulatory network]. It looks like an integrated circuit and is also subject to the constraints problem of engineering, and that is the more functionally integrated a system, the more difficult it is to perturb any part of the system without defecting to the whole. And that applies to human integrated circuits. It applies to this genetic integrated circuit that’s responsible for body plan development. And if you can’t change it much, you’re not going to get a new body plan.

Mr. Jekielek:

Even with a watch, right? If you take a part away or add a part, the system stops working.

Mr. Meyer:

That’s right.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, why the hostility—an incredible hostility—towards the idea that there’s some kind of creative force? There seems to be this deep disinterest in exploring that there’s some kind of creative force here.

Mr. Meyer:

I don’t think there’s that much hostility to the idea of a creative force, more to the idea of a creative intelligence.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, okay, so yes.

Mr. Meyer:

And again, it doesn’t have to be the Christian view.

Mr. Jekielek:

Thank you for correcting that, yes.

Mr. Meyer:

The creative force would put you more in a pantheistic frame where maybe people wouldn’t be quite so hostile to that. The underlying ideology that has really governed modern science since the late 19th century is one of materialism. There’s a materialistic worldview that many scientists have, in a sense, bolted onto science and said that science equals materialism. Or more precisely, there’s been a convention that’s arisen that says if you’re going to explain something scientifically, you must explain it by reference to strictly materialistic processes: matter and energy, natural processes. No creative intelligence is allowed as a possible feature in your explanation.

Mr. Jekielek:

So that, and that in itself is a kind of faith system.

Mr. Meyer:

We’re talking about, right? It’s a presupposition; it’s become a kind of normative convention within science, and it reflects an underlying commitment to not just a methodological convention but to a metaphysical commitment in materialism. And so now—and that’s where I think my late friend Michael Ruse’s insight comes in—is that if evolutionary theory, if neo-Darwinian or some other materialistic evolutionary theory is being challenged; many people will sense that as a challenge not just to the science they hold, but also to the deeper worldview commitments or metaphysical commitments they have. And like all of us, if our deep metaphysical or religious beliefs are being challenged, we can easily respond emotionally or less than objectively. So, I think the debate gets very hot, and I think less so in the last five or ten years.

I think there’s a lot more acceptance that, first of all, neo-Darwinism is not an adequate evolutionary theory. We need a new one if we’re going to operate within the framework of materialistic evolutionary biology. An increasing number of scientists are now aligning with our work on intelligent design. They’re using it to make new discoveries. They think it’s a useful framework for understanding life. There’s a compelling argument for intelligent design as part of the explanation for how things got here.

Mr. Jekielek:

So, great. You’ve set up a very important question that I want to ask you. You know, you come in; you’re someone who believes in God. What should we, as viewers of the show, or what should I understand about your suppositions and how you came to research and believe what you do and explore this?

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, sure. It might be good just to define the theory, first of all. The theory of intelligent design holds that there are certain features of life in the universe that are best explained as a product of a designing intelligence, creative intelligence, rather than a strictly undirected physical or material process, such as in the biological realm, natural selection acting on random mutations. The kinds of features we’re talking about are things like the digital code that’s stored in the DNA molecule, the complex information processing system that not only takes that stored information and processes and expresses it in the construction of proteins and protein machines, and the presence of nanomachinery inside life.

Certain patterns in the fossil record are also things we think would be best explained because a creative intelligence has played a role in the origin and history of life. In the realm of physics, we have phenomena like the fine-tuning of the initial arrangement of matter and energy at the beginning of the universe and the fine-tuning of the laws and constants of physics. The basic parameters of physics fall within very narrow ranges or tolerances, outside of which not only life but even basic chemistry would be impossible. Many physicists have come to the conclusion that the fine-tuning is the result of a fine-tuner, of a transcendent intelligence.

Mr. Jekielek:

And if I may, you make that argument beautifully in The Story of Everything.

Mr. Meyer:

It’s one of the three things we look at. In the film, we look at the evidence for the beginning of the universe and, with it, the very real possibility that we’re looking at evidence of a creation event. We also look at the discovery of fine-tuning, and we examine the interior of the cell, including the discoveries of miniature machinery and the digital code that makes the proteins that create the machines and everything else inside living cells.

As far as the theory of intelligent design goes, I attended a conference early in my scientific career. I was working as a geophysicist for an oil company, doing digital signal processing of seismic data. It was an early form of information technology. I attended a conference where there was a very intense debate about the origin of the first life. A new book had come out at the time called The Mystery of Life’s Origin.

At the conference, one of the leading chemical evolutionary theorists, someone who had formulated a very popular theory about how non-living chemicals in the so-called prebiotic soup or environment arranged themselves into the first living cells, named Dean Kenyon, repudiated his own work. He said that he thought it was time for the philosophers and the theologians to reopen what he called the natural theological question, which is whether what we’re seeing in nature is actually pointing to the existence of a creative intelligence or a creator.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, so he just told you, and you’re like, wow, that’s interesting.

Mr. Meyer:

No, it was shocking. It was a shocking sort of about-face from a leading evolutionary biologist. He worked on the theory of chemical evolution, how you get from chemistry to the first living cells. Both he and these other authors were intrigued by the idea that what we were looking at inside the cell was evidence of what they called an intelligent cause, because the crucial feature that had not been explained about the origin of life was the origin of the information stored in the DNA molecule.

In 1953, Watson and Crick elucidated the structure of DNA as a double helix. In 1958, Crick realized that the chemical subunits along the spine of the DNA molecule functioned like alphabetic characters in a written text or like the digital characters in a machine code. This puts the whole question of biological origins in a completely different frame. The scientists were able to fairly quickly figure out what the information on the DNA strand did and where the information resided, but the question of where it came from has remained unanswered within an evolutionary framework.

Yet, we know that information, especially in a digital or alphabetic form always arises from the mind. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we’ve ever created. Richard Dawkins has acknowledged it’s like machine code. Well, we know that computer code comes from a programmer.

And we know that whenever we see information and we trace it back to its source, whether we’re talking about information in a book or information in a hieroglyphic inscription or information we’re transmitting as we speak to each other, information transmitted over a wire always arises first in a mind, in an intelligence. So the discovery of information at the foundation of life, I’ve argued, is a powerful indicator of the activity of a master programmer or intelligence in the origin of life.

Interestingly, the method of reasoning that I used to come to that conclusion has a name. It’s a scientific method. It’s either called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inference to the best explanation. It’s the very same method that Darwin used in The Origin of Species. We’re using standard methods of what are called historical scientific reasoning or forensic scientific reasoning to come to the conclusion that intelligent design must have played an important causal role in the origin of life, as evolutionary biologists use in their own work.

So there’s no special pleading here; it’s not a special kind of science. We’re using the same scientific methods, but we’re just coming to a different conclusion because we’re taking the fact of information as a foundational feature of living systems very seriously and saying that has to be explained. And it has to be explained by reference to the same types of causative processes that we see at work all around us. We know that it takes a mind to generate information, so when we find it at the foundation of life, the most logical thing to conclude is that a mind did, in fact, produce it.

Mr. Jekielek:

One of the things that I’ve heard most often in people sort of dismissing intelligent design is they’ll just say, oh, there’s this amazing diversity. It’s all fantastic, but you just want to make it fit into this.

Mr. Meyer:

I love responding to arguments like that because they’re transparently fallacious, right? That’s an argument from personal motivation. It’s a form of ad hominem argument. That same accusation can be leveled at people who are developing Darwinian explanations. As you’ve already pointed out, there’s a kind of religious fervor around this. And I think the motivations of the proponents have to be set aside. And we have to evaluate the arguments on the basis of their merits.

Mr. Jekielek:

Because there is this fervor, this is, this is my point. This is what we notice, right?

Mr. Meyer:

It can exist on both sides. Of course, Christians would like to see evidence of a creator. And yes, materialists would like to be able to explain things without reference to such a creator. I mean, after all, it’s Dawkins who says that Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. And you can hear the sigh of relief in his voice as he says this. In the film, we have a quote from him where he says that science has now emancipated us from the idea that design points to a designer.

Well, what’s this idea of emancipation? That sounds like you’re looking for something. So everybody has motivations, right? The great thing about training in philosophy, and I’m a philosopher of science, is that it teaches you to say, OK, there are motivations, but let’s set that aside. Now, let’s evaluate the propositions. Let’s evaluate the evidence. Let’s evaluate the competing explanations and see which provides the best explanatory power.

And there’s a key criterion of explanatory success that is part of the method of reasoning that I used to develop the case for intelligent design. And it was the same method that Darwin used to develop the case for intelligent design. And it was the same method that Darwin used. And it’s the idea of causal adequacy. If you want to explain something, you want to posit a cause that is known to produce the effect in question.

Charles Lyell, who was one of Darwin’s mentors, the great geologist, had in his book Principles of Geology, a long subtitle. It said, the changes on the Earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation. And the idea is that the explanation that’s best is the one that posits a cause known to have the power to produce the effect in question. And I came across this when I was thinking about whether or not the information in DNA that’s inside the cell provided evidence for intelligent design. Is there a scientific argument, a rigorous scientific argument that could be made to support that conclusion? And I asked myself the question, what is the cause now in operation that produces functional digital information? And we know of one. It’s an intelligence.

One of the early scientists who applied the information sciences to analyzing molecular biology was a man named Henry Quastler. And he was quoted as saying, the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. That’s what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific knowledge. It takes a mind, conscious intelligence to generate information.

And that’s what we have at the foundation of life. And that, by the way, is one of the key stories in the film. The Watson and Crick discovery, the realization that we not only have a beautiful double helix molecule, but inside the molecule is this information. And then it’s the question: where does that come from? If you want to explain the origin of life, you’ve got to explain the origin of these large biomacromolecules that make life work, especially the ones that are chock full of the information that builds all the important structures inside the cell.

Mr. Jekielek:

And just to be clear, we’re talking about structured information, not the information that a shotgun spatter, or…

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, that’s actually a very crucial distinction. In the field of engineering, there’s a mathematical definition of information that was formulated by a great scientist in the late 1940s named Claude Shannon. Shannon’s idea of information is about, essentially, a measure of the improbability of a sequence in an information-carrying capacity or the improbability of a sequence in a channel of communication. And the kind of information we’re talking about in the DNA molecule or in a section of computer code or in a human language, is that you…

Mr. Jekielek:

Wildly improbable.

Mr. Meyer:

It’s wildly improbable, but there’s something else as well, and that is that there’s a specificity of arrangement of the characters that allows them to perform a communication function. So you can have Shannon information without the sequence being functional or communicative. You can have a sequence that’s highly improbable that doesn’t have any meaning in it or that performs no communication function.

When Crick talked about the information in DNA, he was very careful to distinguish the kind of information that was present in DNA from mere Shannon information. He said we’re talking about the specificity of the sequence. So it’s the difference in a simple example that I use, well, we use in the film, is the difference between, you know, the monkeys that might type at the typewriter, which would have a calculable amount of Shannon information but not be meaningful or functional, vs. a line of poetry like, time and tide wait for no man. The specificity of the arrangement of the characters gives that second symbol string something that’s not present in the first, which is the ability to convey meaning or to perform a communication function. And DNA performs the function of instructing the cellular machinery as to how to build the proteins and protein machines.

A good analogy for younger audiences in particular might be something like a 3D printer, a digital printer, that we have digital information that produces a three-dimensional structure. Engineers would know about what’s called CAD/CAM [computer aided design and manufacturing], where an engineer will sit at a console, write some code, and it will go down a wire. Then it’ll be translated into another machine code that can be read by a manufacturing apparatus. Then that manufacturing apparatus, for example, if you’re at the Boeing plant in Seattle where we are, might use that information to put rivets on the airplane wing in exactly the right place.

So you’ve got digital information producing a three-dimensional mechanical structure. That’s what’s going on inside cells. That is the kind of technology that we have encountered in the interior of what used to be thought of as simple homogeneous globular plasmas. To explain the origin of life, you’ve got to explain those complex inner workings, and those inner workings, I think, scream design.

Mr. Jekielek:

Yes, no, I mean, it’s fascinating. As we’ve been talking here, we’ve really covered a little bit more in depth, or a lot. I mean, the substance of the interview has been about this, the third part, which is the life aspect.

Mr. Meyer:

The biological part.

Mr. Jekielek:

Right, as opposed to like, kind of, the origin itself, which everybody’s now familiar with the Big Bang, but not the nuance. I mean, again, fascinating. I also love the graphics that you’ve created to build the story. The producers did a great job with that, with the production values you’ve created to build the story.

Mr. Meyer:

The producers did a great job with the production values. There are 400 visual effects in the film. There’s gorgeous cinematography that takes you deep out into galactic space. And then the animations take people deep inside the cell, where you can actually see these amazing processes. And that’s where I would really commend the film, because if one picture’s worth 1,000 words, 400 moving visual effects really are worth a lot more than we can convey in an interview because you see the evidence of design in front of you. And I think that’s what, for many people, has given them an epiphany watching the film.

Mr. Jekielek:

I mean, this has been quite some time in the making for you. I mean, you’ve written quite a number of books that kind of point in this direction, right? And now it’s The Story of Everything.

Mr. Meyer:

Everything. Well, we admit it’s a little bit of a pretentious title, but it’s literally true. We’re talking about the universe, right? It’s the story of where the universe came from, where its finely tuned structure came from, how that arose, and then how life arose within the universe. Those are the three big questions we look at. In each case, the scientific discoveries of the last 100 years and right up to the present are pointing in a very different direction than people thought in the late 19th century.

Not towards the idea of a self-existing, self-creating, self-organizing universe that can account for everything as a consequence of slow, gradual, undirected processes. but rather something that bears the hallmarks of a mind. Information is a hallmark of mind. That kind of tight functional integration that we see in circuits or in the eye. If we find the kinds of features that we find in living systems or in the fine-tuning of the universe, in any other realm of experience, we would immediately conclude that they were the product of a creative intelligence. And yet we’re finding them in parts of nature that we know we did not create. So that implies that there was a creative intelligence that preceded us.

Mr. Jekielek:

So what an amazing film you’ve put together. Again, I want to encourage everyone to go see it. And, you know, especially, kind of, this, another one of the parts that we didn’t talk at all about is the, kind of, you know, the unique set of variables that you call the fine-tuning of the universe to get the very specific elements. This is something I almost knew nothing about, and, you know, fascinating, compelling arguments you make in the film. Yes, a final thought as we finish up?

Mr. Meyer:

I appreciated the deep dive that you’ve elicited on biology. I forgot that you had such an extensive biology background, so we talked quite a bit more about the question of biological evolution. We went probably deeper on that here in the conversation than we do in the film. In the film, we do quite a bit on the question of the origin of the first life. I’ll tell you what I like about the film because it’s an adaptation of the third of my three books, the Return of the God Hypothesis.

I think the producers did a fabulous job. It weaves together a very compelling argument and into that argument stories of the discoveries of these three different classes of evidence that we think have theistic implications: the evidence that the universe had a beginning, that it was, as you say, finely tuned from the beginning to make life possible, and then the discoveries about the inner complexity and the informational complexity of the cell.

But additionally, it tells some really great stories, the stories of the scientists who discovered those different things, but also how those discoveries affected them at not just a scientific level, but at a deeper personal level, how many of them shifted their overall worldview away from the strict materialism that they had started with to something that was sympathetic to the idea that there was a designing intelligence behind the universe. Some even had full-blown religious conversions.

So we tell the stories of the scientists, and then the film is visually very beautiful with the animations and the cinematography. So for people who are believers in God, I think this is one of those films you can bring friends to without feeling you’re going to be embarrassed. Just the opposite. I think it will inspire some really great after-party discussions.

Mr. Jekielek:

Absolutely. You know, I do have one more question.

Mr. Meyer:

Yes, sure.

Mr. Jekielek:

And that is, as you’re framing out, for example, these developmental pathways, the protein developmental pathways and so forth, and the integrated circuit analogy, I was thinking to myself, the people who believe that we live in a simulation, this probably all makes a lot of sense to them. So is this what you’re arguing?

Mr. Meyer:

We have a little nod to the simulation theory. And the first thing to say about the simulation theory, which has become very popular with a lot of tech people, is that that’s a theory of intelligent design. It implies that there was a master programmer, but it also goes beyond that to suggest that somehow our reality is simulative of real reality, that there’s something illusory about what we’re experiencing. And there I repair to one of the classical arguments in philosophy from Descartes, where he also dealt with this idea that maybe we were the product of some kind of evil demon that was deceiving us into thinking that we existed.

But then he argued, well, if we’ve been deceived into thinking we exist and we’re thinking conscious agents who believe that we exist, having this false thought, the very fact that we’re having thought and that we’re consciously aware of something, even if it’s allegedly deceptive, means that we’re actually alive and aware and therefore we do exist. I think, therefore, I am.

So I kind of think that this simulation idea is a way of talking about intelligent design without going all the way to thinking about God, but it does imply a master programmer. And I think the idea that our experience is in some way an illusion is itself a self-defeating proposition. So we refute it much more simply in the film with David Berlinski saying something very dismissive and quite funny about it. So for people who are fans of Berlinski, you’ll definitely want to see that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Stephen Meyer, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Meyer:

It’s been a great conversation, Jan. Thank you very much.

 

This interview has been partially edited for clarity and brevity.