The Michael Medved show is a national radio show broadcast out of Seattle, Washington. According to Talkers magazine, he has the fifth largest radio audience. He has a regular weekly segment on science and culture featuring  scholars from the Discovery Institute.

Here is the segment from this past week, courtesy of the Intelligent Design: The Future podcast.

The MP3 file is available for download. (38 minutes)

The description is:

On this episode of ID the Future, the Michael Medved Show welcomes Dr. Stephen Meyer to talk about his new bestselling book, Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design. Listen in as Meyer and Medved discuss the mysteries of the Cambrian explosion and why this phenomenon continues to stump Darwinian evolutionists.

Each week, leading fellows from Discovery Institute will join Michael Medved to talk about the intersection of science and culture. Listen in live online or on your local Medved station, or stay tuned at ID the Future for the weekly podcast.

Topics:

• Darwinism offers a materialistic account of where humans and animals came from, but is that all human beings are?
• Darwin was the first to have doubt about his theory of evolution because of the sudden origin if many different animal forms in the Cambrian era
• The book is about the sudden origin of these animal forms and more generally about how much information is needed to make an animal genome
• An animal is not just the form or the organs it is also the information to make new proteins and the instructions to make proteins are in the DNA
• At least 20 new phyla appear suddenly in the Cambrian fossils and the question is what is capable of creating all of that new information
• Mathematicians and computer scientists are especially likely to doubt evolution as a way of making new features because they know that random changes to the code base of an application are more likely to break things and degrade performance
• Naturalists have tried to explain the Cambrian explosion as being a case of the transitional fossils being not yet discovered
• The consensus of science at this time is that there is no known naturalistic explanation for the sudden origin of these animal types
• Caller: how abrupt are we talking about for the introduction of these new animal forms?
• Meyer: We can calculate the amount of time that is needed to generate change, and the period of time that is needed to generate new forms of life exceeds the time available
• Caller: is it possible that meteors, asteroids and comets could transport biological components to the Earth to shorten the development time?
• Meyer: that’s related to my first book on the origin of the first living cell “Signature in the Cell”, and that life-from-space hypothesis would only get you building blocks, but not the bio-molecules that have the building blocks sequences – it’s the difference between a pile of Scrabble letters and a Shakespearean play – it’s the arranging of the components that is the problem
• Medved: The book has a lot of endorsements from scientists who are working at good universities and institutions
• Meyer: the strange thing about exploring the limits of evolution is that you can cite mainstream papers to criticize the Darwinian mechanisms, and then the proponents of Darwinism just assert that no criticism of Darwinian evolution is allowed
• Caller Greg: are you saying that all the phyla came in during the Cambrian explosion?
• Meyer: No, of the 26 phyla that we see in the fossil record, 20 come in during the Cambrian explosion
• Caller Greg: But there are some sponges that existed before the Cambrian explosion, so maybe all the Cambrian phyla came from sponges?
• Meyer: There are 3 phyla present in the pre-Cambrian but they are not ancestral to the 20 Cambrian phyla, the sponges are very simple – 6-10 cell types, arthropods have 60-90 cell types – you can’t go from sponges to compound eyes in just 5-10 million years
• Meyer: even the sponges in the pre-Cambrian appear abrutly at the end of the pre-Cambrian
• Caller Greg: but there are complex worms in the Pre-Cambrian as well, and maybe those are ancestral to the 20 new phyla that appear suddenly in the Cambrian explosion
• Caller Greg: what you’re saying is that we scientists don’t understand what happened so an intelligence did it
• Meyer: No, what I am saying is that the Cambrian explosion involves massive amounts of new biological information, and none of the naturalistic Darwinian mechanisms can create that much new information in that short of the time
• Caller Greg: it’s magic!
• Meyer: there are two points in the development of life forms where intelligence is needed: the origin of life and the Cambrian explosion, and this is because of the new information that is being added
• Caller Greg: new information is added by Hox Gene duplication
• Caller: don’t we have to look a bit more at epistemology when discussing these issues?
• Meyer: Yes, we have to highlight that many people reject intelligent design because of a pre-supposition of naturalism that prevents them from seeing that intelligence explains anything regardless of the evidence
• Caller: well if you define evolution as change over time, then evolution happened, and who cares about the details like the origin of life and Cambrian explosion?
• Meyer: well there are many definitions of evolution: 1) change over time, 2) universal common ancestry, 3) undirected random process can explain the origin of life and the explosion of new animal forms in the fossil record
• Meyer: I accept 1) and I am skeptical of 2) and 3)

You can read more about caller Greg and Hox gene duplication at Evolution News.

I subscribe to the ID the Future podcast, and I really recommend that you do as well!

Previous entries

• Stephen C. Meyer on Thomas Nagel and intelligent design
• Stephen C. Meyer on Richard Dawkins and the Cambrian explosion
• John G. West discusses Darwinism and the value of human life
• Stephen C. Meyer and John Lennox discuss human exceptionalism
• Jay Richards and Stephen C. Meyer discuss scientific consensus
• Dan Barker debates Casey Luskin on academic freedom
• Zack Copplin debates Casey Luskin on science education