Hello. Like many of the previous speakers, I want to start by thanking the organizers
for inviting me here. It's been a great couple of days, and the hospitality over the last
couple of days has just been wonderful for me and my wife and our other friends. So my
title of my talk is How Biologists Are Already Using Intelligent Design Principles, and why
their explanations for this are problematic. The word intelligent design has been used
here, and it basically means God's intelligence designing the earth. So imagine that you woke
up one day in the future, and you found that the intelligent design movement had won the
day, and all biology and all biophysics scientists followed the principle that life had been
intelligently designed. What would the world look like? How would people do science differently?
Well let me give you an analogy. To answer how science might look different, let's imagine
that you were an engineer working in a computer company. You're given a chip made by a rival
manufacturer. It works very well. Your job is to see how it works so that you can make improvements
on it and make your company's own version to sell. This is known as reverse engineering.
Now imagine how your work would look different in two different cases. In case one, you were
told that the chip was created by making random circuits and throwing away the ones that didn't
work. And you continue to do this until the chip is found that works. In the second case,
you were told that the chip was designed by a brilliant designer, a master engineer. Now
can you imagine that your work would look differently depending on which one of these stories you believed
about the chip. I would expect that in the first case, I would find a lot of junk. Well
in the second case, even if I found things I didn't understand at first, I would believe
that they had a purpose and so I worked really hard to find out what the purpose was for the
things that I didn't understand. So which one better understands the way biology is being
done today. Well I'm here to tell you that an enormous amount of biology that is being
done today is being done on the second premise. That biological systems are extremely well designed.
It is as if the intelligence design movement had totally won the day already. All kinds of
biological research is being done as reverse engineering in which it is assumed that living
systems are nearly optimally designed. Of course the scientists by and large do not give credit
to God. And I will discuss later in this talk how they explain their findings and give a critique
of that. So a lot of the work that I'm going to be talking about here is in a publication,
this publication available online. And in this article I quote from and cite many articles
from the scientific literature. It's also based on my own experience from going to physics conferences
in the U.S. and sitting in on some very crowded by physics sessions as well as personal
conversations I've had with well-known biophysicists including people like Bill Bialica from Princeton
who does not believe in God as far as I know. A general term for this type of thinking I'm going
to give you is the word teleology. Teleology means looking for a purpose or a goal in something.
In design systems we assume that there is a goal that was set and things were done to reach that goal.
In standard evolution there is no purpose and no goal. So for instance Richard Dawkins titled his book
on evolutionary theory The Blind Watchmaker. No purpose. But the literature on biological systems
now of people actually doing biology is full of terms like teleology and purpose and goals and design.
And so all of these imply the idea of not being blind but actually having a purpose in mind.
So I'm going to give you several quotes here for examples of this.
This one is fairly lengthy but I'm going to read some parts of it at length because this is a famous biologist
writing a review article in a well-known biology journal. And he says that biologists must learn to embrace the idea of teleology.
So he says why is the sky blue? Any scientist will answer this question with a statement of mechanism.
Atmospheric gas scatters some wavelengths of light more than others. To answer with a statement of purpose,
in other words to say the sky is blue to make people happy, would not cross the scientific mind.
Yet in biology we often pose why questions as to the purpose and not just the mechanism that interests us.
So the question, why does the eye have a lens, most often calls for the answer that the lens is there to focus light.
And only rarely the answer that the lens is there because lens cells are induced by the overlying ectoderm.
As a group, molecular biologists shy away from teleological matters,
perhaps because early attitudes in molecular biology were shaped by physicists and chemists.
And I'll come back to that in a little bit.
Geneticists routinely define function not in terms of the useful things that the gene does,
but by what happens when the gene is altered.
Molecular and biology and molecular genetics people continue to dodge teleological issues.
And they would continue that if it were not for their field's remarkable recent successes.
Molecular biologists are forced to wrestle with an overtly teleological question.
What purpose does all this complexity serve?
These elements can be seen as the foundation of a new calculus of purpose.
And let me just say that again.
He's saying that biology has to embrace a new calculus of purpose, of design, in the actual biology.
Enabling biologists to take on the much neglected teleological side of molecular biology,
what purpose does all this complexity serve, may go from a question few biologists dare to pose
to one on everybody's lips.
This is a well-known biologist writing in a secular biology journal.
Now in these next quotes, I'm not going to read them all, but I'm just going to summarize them.
In this one here, again, these are some quotes from the mainstream literature.
Not only teleology, but explicitly the word design is now accepted and common.
In the first quote of here, a non-causal explanation means one looking at the end of the process, not just the beginning.
Aristotle called such things final causes, which is another way of talking about teleology.
One looks for the purpose and then works backwards to find out what things were needed to find that goal,
or to achieve that goal, just like we did with the computer chip.
So in the literature now, in the article that I did, I did a survey of all of these engineering concepts here,
which are now commonly used in systems biology.
It's not just a language, but it's actually driving the science.
So the following things are all found in biology and are found to be just the same as engineering concepts.
Feedback loops, thresholding and discrimination.
If you're not an engineer, I'm sorry, I don't have time to explain all of these,
but these are all things that are learned in graduate school engineering.
Oscillators and frequency filtering, control and signaling, information storing, timing and synchronization,
addressing and routing, hierarchies of function, redundancy, fail-safes, interactive adaptation, optimization and trade-offs.
And actually, in many cases, engineers are learning good methods of doing things
by looking at biology and learning new methods from them.
Here's another quote, which I again will not read these at length here,
but you can see in them how design is now being used.
And in the first quote, this is a writer who is not a believer as far as I know,
who is going to write an entire paper about design in the living systems
and yet feels compelled for political reasons to say there is no implication of a designer.
Do you see that here? I think I have a laser pointer.
So he fills in the parenthetical remark to say, even though I'm going to talk in this whole paper about design,
nevertheless, don't take me to be talking about God.
In the second quote, there is the term of information science, which is being used
and called the essence of all biology.
Now, in the past decades, the term information was rejected by many people to talk about biology
because information intrinsically implies teleology, gathering knowledge about a system to accomplish a purpose.
In other words, information science is a highly sophisticated type of engineering.
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.
We had a dance just a few minutes ago, a very beautiful dance.
And when we look at these molecules, this is the molecule that is used to reproduce DNA inside of every living cell.
And it is, I would say, a type of dance.
The video I'm going to show is the DNA duplication mechanism.
It's produced by a professional scientific institute in Australia.
And it's based on years of research and computer modeling.
So let me go forward to that now.
And imagine in your mind the dance that God has put into the cell.
And I think this will start.
Oh, let me go back.
So it should start in just a minute.
One more try.
So I'm willing to wait because this is a beautiful video.
So while we're waiting for that, let me just tell you a little bit more about it.
This is a mechanism that is used to copy DNA.
Whenever you have a DNA and a cell divides into two, you have to take the two strands of DNA and copy them.
Okay.
And so now you can see this is the weaving mechanism or the dancing mechanism by which the DNA is copied.
And I want to emphasize that this mechanism has to work before natural selection can work.
Because natural selection is based on the idea of copying the DNA from one generation to the next.
So this whole mechanism has to be there before natural selection can do anything.
Because you have to copy the DNA.
So let's just enjoy it with the music for a minute.
We can turn up the music a little bit.
All of this is necessary for life even to exist, for the DNA to be copied.
And these are all molecules and each one of those dots was a single atom.
So duplicating an information string with billions of sites is not easy.
And this is the kind of mechanism that we need in order for that to work.
So, how do biologists who are not believers in God think about these things?
Essentially, they would argue that this high level of design is to be expected as an outcome of Darwinian evolution.
And the argument is that weak organisms will be killed off.
And therefore, since inefficiency generally makes things weaker, inefficiency will increase.
There's two problems with this.
The first is that's not been historically a prediction of atheistic Darwinism.
Just like we did sort of in our thought exercise at the beginning of my talk,
if we imagined that a device was randomly made, we would expect a lot of junk.
And that's historically how Darwinists have actually argued that there is a lot of junk,
as Vazerana talked about earlier.
Secondly, although this might work as an explanation for some improvement of efficiency,
it does not explain why everything is so exquisitely well done, so nearly perfectly well done.
So, I'm not going to go into great length about the ENCODE project.
We heard from Dr. Rana about all the amazing results from the ENCODE project.
So, I'll just summarize here.
It is still somewhat in debate about how much of the ink, the DNA, really could be considered to be junk.
But I remember, I'm old enough to remember that it was just universal that everyone talked about vestigial organs.
Things like the appendix and the tonsils, which now are known to have function and to be part of our immune system.
There are many arguments that have been made over the years about how biological systems are badly designed.
But as I have said, in general, the field of systems biology is moving rapidly toward an optimal view of things,
in which everything is well designed.
So, when we think about these claims that the design, the efficiency, the optimization of life comes from natural selection,
there are some problems with this.
And I'm not going to go into detail on this paper because it's fairly technical.
But a few years ago, I did some numerical simulations in collaboration with two others
to ask whether it makes sense that natural selection can give optimization to living systems.
People tend to assume this, and even though they assume this, surprisingly,
very little has been done to actually prove that it can happen.
So, just to summarize these results then, I call this the catch-22 problem.
Catch-22 is an English phrase that means a situation in which if you choose one option, you lose,
but if you choose the other option, you also lose.
And this is based on the movie called Catch-22.
If we suppose that living systems can easily add new things, then all kinds of new, non-functioning things will appear,
what sometimes are called vestigial organs.
And this was historically what Darwinists predicted, what they thought was the case.
And they felt that living systems should be full of non-functioning elements.
And that's the argument for junk DNA that we heard earlier from Dr. Rana.
But that doesn't lead to optimization, it leads to creatures carrying around all kinds of useless stuff,
hoping that maybe one day it will have some use.
The new thinking on optimal design in systems biology does not allow a lot of useless stuff.
So to fix this problem, let's suppose that we say natural selection removes such useless stuff,
because the creatures with useless stuff die off.
That's the main argument I've heard from the optimal design people who don't believe in God.
But if that was the case, then evolution could never move forward,
because new things that don't have any function will not remain in the population long enough and will be killed off.
And so again, it's a Catch-22.
If there is rapid generation of these useless things, then you have a body full of vestigial organs,
and if there's killing off of those things, then you never develop anything new.
Now let me just, in my final section here, talk about why teleology was banned from science.
And a very good book on this is by a man named Peter Harrison,
who gave a history of the scientific revolution, which happened around the same time as the Reformation in Europe.
And that was not a coincidence, it was the same kind of thinking that was going on in both spheres.
So if we go way back to ancient times, it was very common for people all around the world
to read science, to read into nature what we might call signs and portents,
looking for things in the natural world or in the Holy Scriptures that would be sort of personal messages to me from God.
And this led to very bad science and bad theology.
Because there was no limit to the speculation and imagination people might have to interpret something.
And so one could say the Reformation in Europe was a revolution of sober or non-superstitious thinking.
Of people saying, let's hold back from wild speculation and interpret things as they are.
And this led to a very straightforward looking at the Bible and it also led to a straightforward look at science.
And that led eventually to the scientific revolution.
After the Reformation, after the scientific revolution, the enlightenment which followed,
which gave rise to what we now call modern secularism, went further to abolish all ideas of purpose.
And to create the idea of a universe as a machine with no soul.
But as I have said, biology and physics are bringing back into our terminology the idea of purpose.
And teleology.
And in the physics world, there's a similar thing going on with what is called fine tuning.
Where not just biology, but the whole universe looks like it is designed and has purpose.
Now, many modern people fear that the intelligent design movement will lead us back to the bad old days of superstition.
And looking for portents and miracles in everything that we see.
But for at least 200 years after the Reformation, many leading scientists, really I would say the majority,
active Christians who saw God's purpose in nature.
Not going on flights of fancy, but being very careful in their science.
So in the following, I'm going to just give you a survey of famous scientists.
And I will not be reading these quotes at length.
I just want to survey them to show, in fact, that belief in design does not imply a return to mysticism and superstition.
So my first example is Isaac Newton.
Many people do not know that Isaac Newton and most of the founders of modern science were Christians who believed in God.
And this was not just a nominal belief.
And when I say nominal, there are many people who would say, I'm a Christian.
And by that, they just mean I was born in a Christian family.
They don't actually believe it.
But Isaac Newton was not that way.
Isaac Newton believed strongly in God and actually wrote two books on science and four books on theology.
He was someone who believed strongly in God.
And he brought his beliefs into his science.
And so, for instance, in these quotes, Newton really is making fun of people who don't believe in God.
Saying, he's really, you could say, dismissing people as foolish.
And he says here, atheism is senseless.
William Harvey is considered by many people the founder of modern medicine.
And he used his belief in God actually to drive his science.
Because when he was looking at the body, he wanted to deduce how the blood system worked.
And he assumed that it was well designed.
And so, when he found something, he didn't know what it was doing.
Namely, the valves in the blood.
He assumed that it was for some good purpose.
And he reverse engineered to find out how the system worked.
And so, he says explicitly in his writing that it could not be that there were so many valves there without design.
So, that drove him to look for the purpose of those valves.
Blaise Pascal, a very famous mathematician.
Also, a very dedicated Christian.
Said, men despise religion.
They hate it and fear it is true.
To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason.
And he wrote many things about his religious faith.
Leibniz, the father of calculus.
Actually, Newton claimed also to be the father.
They had a debate between them.
But Leibniz believed that the observation of nature showed the handiwork of God.
He says, in reflecting on the works, we are able to discover the one who wrought.
The one who made them.
William Thompson, who was raised to be Lord Kelvin.
The father of, considered to be the father of thermodynamics.
Had a very active Christian faith.
And he argued that our existence itself is evidence that nature is not just a fortuitous concourse of atoms.
He says, the fact that the scientist is even thinking about whether there is a creator.
There is evidence that there is not just dead matter, but there are people with brains and souls who are thinking things.
Because we are not blind.
Because we have purpose.
In some sense, it proves that there is purpose in the universe.
Because purpose doesn't just come out of nowhere.
And finally, I think I have one more.
In this present century, or I should say the 20th century.
There has been many more examples.
Werner von Braun, the father of space travel.
Said, finite man cannot begin to comprehend an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinite God.
I find it best to accept God through faith as an intelligent will, perfect in goodness and wisdom, and revealing himself through his creation.
So notice, all of these scientists are saying that God can be seen in what is made.
They are not just saying take an irrational leap.
They are saying believe because of what God has made.
And there are many others.
One I know personally is Dr. Bill Phillips, who won the Nobel Prize for his work in cold atoms.
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,
did not stop people from doing good science.
Quite the opposite, it led these people to do very good science.
So let me finish up then with my conclusions.
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,
of living systems in particular, which is to say teleology, the idea that things are designed with a purpose.
Many types of biology, such as systems biology, very little reference is actually made to evolution.
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.
And the emphasis is on reverse engineering of what we see in living systems with the assumption that it is very well made.
These scientists do not by and large acknowledge the existence of God, but attribute this good design to years of blind evolution.
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.
So there's still debate about these things.
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.
But that is not necessary.
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.
Belief in teleology can lead to good reverse engineering.
And so I'll finish with that.
Thank you.