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Hello. Like many of the previous speakers, I want to start by thanking the organizers

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for inviting me here. It's been a great couple of days, and the hospitality over the last

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couple of days has just been wonderful for me and my wife and our other friends. So my

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title of my talk is How Biologists Are Already Using Intelligent Design Principles, and why

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their explanations for this are problematic. The word intelligent design has been used

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here, and it basically means God's intelligence designing the earth. So imagine that you woke

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up one day in the future, and you found that the intelligent design movement had won the

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day, and all biology and all biophysics scientists followed the principle that life had been

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intelligently designed. What would the world look like? How would people do science differently?

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Well let me give you an analogy. To answer how science might look different, let's imagine

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that you were an engineer working in a computer company. You're given a chip made by a rival

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manufacturer. It works very well. Your job is to see how it works so that you can make improvements

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on it and make your company's own version to sell. This is known as reverse engineering.

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Now imagine how your work would look different in two different cases. In case one, you were

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told that the chip was created by making random circuits and throwing away the ones that didn't

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work. And you continue to do this until the chip is found that works. In the second case,

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you were told that the chip was designed by a brilliant designer, a master engineer. Now

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can you imagine that your work would look differently depending on which one of these stories you believed

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about the chip. I would expect that in the first case, I would find a lot of junk. Well

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in the second case, even if I found things I didn't understand at first, I would believe

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that they had a purpose and so I worked really hard to find out what the purpose was for the

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things that I didn't understand. So which one better understands the way biology is being

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done today. Well I'm here to tell you that an enormous amount of biology that is being

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done today is being done on the second premise. That biological systems are extremely well designed.

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It is as if the intelligence design movement had totally won the day already. All kinds of

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biological research is being done as reverse engineering in which it is assumed that living

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systems are nearly optimally designed. Of course the scientists by and large do not give credit

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to God. And I will discuss later in this talk how they explain their findings and give a critique

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of that. So a lot of the work that I'm going to be talking about here is in a publication,

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this publication available online. And in this article I quote from and cite many articles

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from the scientific literature. It's also based on my own experience from going to physics conferences

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in the U.S. and sitting in on some very crowded by physics sessions as well as personal

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conversations I've had with well-known biophysicists including people like Bill Bialica from Princeton

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who does not believe in God as far as I know. A general term for this type of thinking I'm going

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to give you is the word teleology. Teleology means looking for a purpose or a goal in something.

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In design systems we assume that there is a goal that was set and things were done to reach that goal.

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In standard evolution there is no purpose and no goal. So for instance Richard Dawkins titled his book

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on evolutionary theory The Blind Watchmaker. No purpose. But the literature on biological systems

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now of people actually doing biology is full of terms like teleology and purpose and goals and design.

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And so all of these imply the idea of not being blind but actually having a purpose in mind.

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So I'm going to give you several quotes here for examples of this.

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This one is fairly lengthy but I'm going to read some parts of it at length because this is a famous biologist

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writing a review article in a well-known biology journal. And he says that biologists must learn to embrace the idea of teleology.

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So he says why is the sky blue? Any scientist will answer this question with a statement of mechanism.

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Atmospheric gas scatters some wavelengths of light more than others. To answer with a statement of purpose,

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in other words to say the sky is blue to make people happy, would not cross the scientific mind.

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Yet in biology we often pose why questions as to the purpose and not just the mechanism that interests us.

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So the question, why does the eye have a lens, most often calls for the answer that the lens is there to focus light.

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And only rarely the answer that the lens is there because lens cells are induced by the overlying ectoderm.

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As a group, molecular biologists shy away from teleological matters,

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perhaps because early attitudes in molecular biology were shaped by physicists and chemists.

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And I'll come back to that in a little bit.

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Geneticists routinely define function not in terms of the useful things that the gene does,

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but by what happens when the gene is altered.

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Molecular and biology and molecular genetics people continue to dodge teleological issues.

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And they would continue that if it were not for their field's remarkable recent successes.

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Molecular biologists are forced to wrestle with an overtly teleological question.

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What purpose does all this complexity serve?

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These elements can be seen as the foundation of a new calculus of purpose.

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And let me just say that again.

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He's saying that biology has to embrace a new calculus of purpose, of design, in the actual biology.

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Enabling biologists to take on the much neglected teleological side of molecular biology,

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what purpose does all this complexity serve, may go from a question few biologists dare to pose

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to one on everybody's lips.

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This is a well-known biologist writing in a secular biology journal.

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Now in these next quotes, I'm not going to read them all, but I'm just going to summarize them.

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In this one here, again, these are some quotes from the mainstream literature.

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Not only teleology, but explicitly the word design is now accepted and common.

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In the first quote of here, a non-causal explanation means one looking at the end of the process, not just the beginning.

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Aristotle called such things final causes, which is another way of talking about teleology.

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One looks for the purpose and then works backwards to find out what things were needed to find that goal,

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or to achieve that goal, just like we did with the computer chip.

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So in the literature now, in the article that I did, I did a survey of all of these engineering concepts here,

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which are now commonly used in systems biology.

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It's not just a language, but it's actually driving the science.

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So the following things are all found in biology and are found to be just the same as engineering concepts.

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Feedback loops, thresholding and discrimination.

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If you're not an engineer, I'm sorry, I don't have time to explain all of these,

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but these are all things that are learned in graduate school engineering.

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Oscillators and frequency filtering, control and signaling, information storing, timing and synchronization,

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addressing and routing, hierarchies of function, redundancy, fail-safes, interactive adaptation, optimization and trade-offs.

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And actually, in many cases, engineers are learning good methods of doing things

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by looking at biology and learning new methods from them.

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Here's another quote, which I again will not read these at length here,

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but you can see in them how design is now being used.

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And in the first quote, this is a writer who is not a believer as far as I know,

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who is going to write an entire paper about design in the living systems

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and yet feels compelled for political reasons to say there is no implication of a designer.

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Do you see that here? I think I have a laser pointer.

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So he fills in the parenthetical remark to say, even though I'm going to talk in this whole paper about design,

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nevertheless, don't take me to be talking about God.

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In the second quote, there is the term of information science, which is being used

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and called the essence of all biology.

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Now, in the past decades, the term information was rejected by many people to talk about biology

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because information intrinsically implies teleology, gathering knowledge about a system to accomplish a purpose.

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In other words, information science is a highly sophisticated type of engineering.

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Now, in this next slide, I'm going to show you just one example of the kind of design that we see at the cellular level.

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We had a dance just a few minutes ago, a very beautiful dance.

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And when we look at these molecules, this is the molecule that is used to reproduce DNA inside of every living cell.

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And it is, I would say, a type of dance.

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The video I'm going to show is the DNA duplication mechanism.

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It's produced by a professional scientific institute in Australia.

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And it's based on years of research and computer modeling.

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So let me go forward to that now.

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And imagine in your mind the dance that God has put into the cell.

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And I think this will start.

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Oh, let me go back.

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So it should start in just a minute.

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One more try.

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So I'm willing to wait because this is a beautiful video.

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So while we're waiting for that, let me just tell you a little bit more about it.

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This is a mechanism that is used to copy DNA.

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Whenever you have a DNA and a cell divides into two, you have to take the two strands of DNA and copy them.

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Okay.

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And so now you can see this is the weaving mechanism or the dancing mechanism by which the DNA is copied.

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And I want to emphasize that this mechanism has to work before natural selection can work.

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Because natural selection is based on the idea of copying the DNA from one generation to the next.

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So this whole mechanism has to be there before natural selection can do anything.

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Because you have to copy the DNA.

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So let's just enjoy it with the music for a minute.

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We can turn up the music a little bit.

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All of this is necessary for life even to exist, for the DNA to be copied.

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And these are all molecules and each one of those dots was a single atom.

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So duplicating an information string with billions of sites is not easy.

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And this is the kind of mechanism that we need in order for that to work.

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So, how do biologists who are not believers in God think about these things?

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Essentially, they would argue that this high level of design is to be expected as an outcome of Darwinian evolution.

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And the argument is that weak organisms will be killed off.

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And therefore, since inefficiency generally makes things weaker, inefficiency will increase.

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There's two problems with this.

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The first is that's not been historically a prediction of atheistic Darwinism.

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Just like we did sort of in our thought exercise at the beginning of my talk,

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if we imagined that a device was randomly made, we would expect a lot of junk.

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And that's historically how Darwinists have actually argued that there is a lot of junk,

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as Vazerana talked about earlier.

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Secondly, although this might work as an explanation for some improvement of efficiency,

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it does not explain why everything is so exquisitely well done, so nearly perfectly well done.

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So, I'm not going to go into great length about the ENCODE project.

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We heard from Dr. Rana about all the amazing results from the ENCODE project.

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So, I'll just summarize here.

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It is still somewhat in debate about how much of the ink, the DNA, really could be considered to be junk.

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But I remember, I'm old enough to remember that it was just universal that everyone talked about vestigial organs.

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Things like the appendix and the tonsils, which now are known to have function and to be part of our immune system.

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There are many arguments that have been made over the years about how biological systems are badly designed.

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But as I have said, in general, the field of systems biology is moving rapidly toward an optimal view of things,

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in which everything is well designed.

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So, when we think about these claims that the design, the efficiency, the optimization of life comes from natural selection,

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there are some problems with this.

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And I'm not going to go into detail on this paper because it's fairly technical.

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But a few years ago, I did some numerical simulations in collaboration with two others

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to ask whether it makes sense that natural selection can give optimization to living systems.

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People tend to assume this, and even though they assume this, surprisingly,

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very little has been done to actually prove that it can happen.

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So, just to summarize these results then, I call this the catch-22 problem.

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Catch-22 is an English phrase that means a situation in which if you choose one option, you lose,

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but if you choose the other option, you also lose.

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And this is based on the movie called Catch-22.

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If we suppose that living systems can easily add new things, then all kinds of new, non-functioning things will appear,

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what sometimes are called vestigial organs.

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And this was historically what Darwinists predicted, what they thought was the case.

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And they felt that living systems should be full of non-functioning elements.

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And that's the argument for junk DNA that we heard earlier from Dr. Rana.

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But that doesn't lead to optimization, it leads to creatures carrying around all kinds of useless stuff,

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hoping that maybe one day it will have some use.

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The new thinking on optimal design in systems biology does not allow a lot of useless stuff.

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So to fix this problem, let's suppose that we say natural selection removes such useless stuff,

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because the creatures with useless stuff die off.

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That's the main argument I've heard from the optimal design people who don't believe in God.

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But if that was the case, then evolution could never move forward,

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because new things that don't have any function will not remain in the population long enough and will be killed off.

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And so again, it's a Catch-22.

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If there is rapid generation of these useless things, then you have a body full of vestigial organs,

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and if there's killing off of those things, then you never develop anything new.

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Now let me just, in my final section here, talk about why teleology was banned from science.

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And a very good book on this is by a man named Peter Harrison,

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who gave a history of the scientific revolution, which happened around the same time as the Reformation in Europe.

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And that was not a coincidence, it was the same kind of thinking that was going on in both spheres.

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So if we go way back to ancient times, it was very common for people all around the world

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to read science, to read into nature what we might call signs and portents,

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looking for things in the natural world or in the Holy Scriptures that would be sort of personal messages to me from God.

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And this led to very bad science and bad theology.

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Because there was no limit to the speculation and imagination people might have to interpret something.

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And so one could say the Reformation in Europe was a revolution of sober or non-superstitious thinking.

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Of people saying, let's hold back from wild speculation and interpret things as they are.

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And this led to a very straightforward looking at the Bible and it also led to a straightforward look at science.

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And that led eventually to the scientific revolution.

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After the Reformation, after the scientific revolution, the enlightenment which followed,

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which gave rise to what we now call modern secularism, went further to abolish all ideas of purpose.

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And to create the idea of a universe as a machine with no soul.

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But as I have said, biology and physics are bringing back into our terminology the idea of purpose.

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And teleology.

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And in the physics world, there's a similar thing going on with what is called fine tuning.

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Where not just biology, but the whole universe looks like it is designed and has purpose.

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Now, many modern people fear that the intelligent design movement will lead us back to the bad old days of superstition.

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And looking for portents and miracles in everything that we see.

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But for at least 200 years after the Reformation, many leading scientists, really I would say the majority,

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active Christians who saw God's purpose in nature.

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Not going on flights of fancy, but being very careful in their science.

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So in the following, I'm going to just give you a survey of famous scientists.

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And I will not be reading these quotes at length.

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I just want to survey them to show, in fact, that belief in design does not imply a return to mysticism and superstition.

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So my first example is Isaac Newton.

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Many people do not know that Isaac Newton and most of the founders of modern science were Christians who believed in God.

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And this was not just a nominal belief.

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And when I say nominal, there are many people who would say, I'm a Christian.

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And by that, they just mean I was born in a Christian family.

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They don't actually believe it.

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But Isaac Newton was not that way.

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Isaac Newton believed strongly in God and actually wrote two books on science and four books on theology.

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He was someone who believed strongly in God.

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And he brought his beliefs into his science.

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And so, for instance, in these quotes, Newton really is making fun of people who don't believe in God.

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Saying, he's really, you could say, dismissing people as foolish.

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And he says here, atheism is senseless.

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William Harvey is considered by many people the founder of modern medicine.

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And he used his belief in God actually to drive his science.

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Because when he was looking at the body, he wanted to deduce how the blood system worked.

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And he assumed that it was well designed.

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And so, when he found something, he didn't know what it was doing.

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Namely, the valves in the blood.

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He assumed that it was for some good purpose.

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And he reverse engineered to find out how the system worked.

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And so, he says explicitly in his writing that it could not be that there were so many valves there without design.

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So, that drove him to look for the purpose of those valves.

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Blaise Pascal, a very famous mathematician.

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Also, a very dedicated Christian.

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Said, men despise religion.

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They hate it and fear it is true.

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To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason.

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And he wrote many things about his religious faith.

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Leibniz, the father of calculus.

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Actually, Newton claimed also to be the father.

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They had a debate between them.

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But Leibniz believed that the observation of nature showed the handiwork of God.

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He says, in reflecting on the works, we are able to discover the one who wrought.

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The one who made them.

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William Thompson, who was raised to be Lord Kelvin.

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The father of, considered to be the father of thermodynamics.

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Had a very active Christian faith.

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And he argued that our existence itself is evidence that nature is not just a fortuitous concourse of atoms.

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He says, the fact that the scientist is even thinking about whether there is a creator.

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There is evidence that there is not just dead matter, but there are people with brains and souls who are thinking things.

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Because we are not blind.

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Because we have purpose.

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In some sense, it proves that there is purpose in the universe.

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Because purpose doesn't just come out of nowhere.

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And finally, I think I have one more.

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In this present century, or I should say the 20th century.

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There has been many more examples.

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Werner von Braun, the father of space travel.

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Said, finite man cannot begin to comprehend an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite God.

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I find it best to accept God through faith as an intelligent will, perfect in goodness and wisdom, and revealing himself through his creation.

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So notice, all of these scientists are saying that God can be seen in what is made.

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They are not just saying take an irrational leap.

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They are saying believe because of what God has made.

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And there are many others.

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One I know personally is Dr. Bill Phillips, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in cold atoms.

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So we see in this short survey that believing in God, and in particular believing that God has designed the creation with purpose in a good way,

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did not stop people from doing good science.

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Quite the opposite, it led these people to do very good science.

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So let me finish up then with my conclusions.

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In this brief survey I have tried to show that in fact biology and biophysics are moving rapidly toward a view of a good design of things,

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of living systems in particular, which is to say teleology, the idea that things are designed with a purpose.

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Many types of biology, such as systems biology, very little reference is actually made to evolution.

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Oftentimes in the first paragraph they will say, well of course evolution led to this, but then they immediately go on to talk about all the design.

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And the emphasis is on reverse engineering of what we see in living systems with the assumption that it is very well made.

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These scientists do not by and large acknowledge the existence of God, but attribute this good design to years of blind evolution.

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But as I have discussed, no one has showed how that is possible, and by my own numerical simulations, it would indicate that it's a very difficult problem to make it happen purely through natural selection.

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So there's still debate about these things.

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A lot of it, I would say, is driven by fear that people have that embracing a role for God in our scientific thinking will lead to a return to mysticism and superstition.

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But that is not necessary.

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In fact the scientific revolution itself came from people who were religious Christians thinking rationally about their faith and the world that God had made.

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Belief in teleology can lead to good reverse engineering.

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And so I'll finish with that.

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Thank you.