Evolution News reported on a 27-minute debate featuring Dr. Stephen C. Meyer – probably the best proponent of intelligent design there is.
Description:
We often say that Darwinists are reluctant to debate advocates of intelligent design, but here are two who deserve a tip of the hat. Keith Pannell is a chemist at the University of Texas at El Paso who hosts a program, Science Studio, on the NPR station there. He invited Stephen Meyer on to talk about the science of ID, pegged to the Dover anniversary.
Clearly Pannell is an ID critic so he gets kudos for being willing to have a civil and informative conversation. Perhaps feeling insecure about facing the author of Darwin’s Doubt by himself, Dr. Pannell invited a biologist colleague, Ricardo Bernal, to serve as “co-host.”
So it was two against one, but no worries. Meyer is, as always, superb, and the discussion sounds like it was an education for the two Texas scientists. Listen and enjoy.
I took a back-up of the MP3 file here.
Summary:
- How did Dr. Meyer get interested in science?
- What is intelligent design? (origin of life, fine-tuning)
- What is creationism? (young Earth, different epistemology)
- Who does Dr. Meyer think the intelligent designer is?
- Finding the best explanation from multiple competing hypotheses
- Critic: aren’t you arguing for a designer from ignorance, then?
- The importance of naturalists acknowledging what they do and do not know about the origin of life
- We do have experience with intelligent causation, whenever we sequence symbols to have meaning and purpose, e.g. – writing
- Critic: information in DNA is not digital information, is it?
- Information in the cell follows a 4-character alphabet
- the sequences are composed of many parts / symbols
- the sequences themselves are specified to have function
- Critic: the complexity just emerges from change over time
- the origin of the first life is immune to explanation of change over time, because there is no replication – this is the first replicator
- Critic: but isn’t it just ignorance about the origin of life?
- what we do is look at a number of competing hypothesis and what they are capable of, and see whether each cause is capable of generating the effects we observe in nature
- Critic: where is the experimental verification of your theory?
- well, in the appendices of Signature of the Cell, we predicted that the non-coding regions of DNA (junk DNA) would be found to have function, and that was later proven out
- the Darwinists said that non-coding regions of the DNA was junk, but that’s not what has been proven experimentally
- Critic: where was this prediction written up, who wrote it?
- intelligent design theorists predicted it: Dembski, Kenyon, Mims, Sternberg
- Critic: but we used the scientific method to disprove the Darwinian predictions, you don’t like the scientific method
- intelligent design proponents love science, and the scientific method, and they do work in labs to confirm their hypotheses, (WK:for example, the probability of generating a protein by chance)
- Critic: what about the Dover court case that you lost?
- the Discovery Institute objected to actions taken by the Dover school board
- Critic: what about the molecular machines, how are they related to intelligent design?
- even in the simplest living organisms, there are tiny machines that are tightly integrated, and cannot be built up in a stepwise fashion
- Critic: I’ve worked with the ATP-synthase and other molecular machines, but “you can kind of begin to tease how some of these molecular machines have come about” – pieces have multiple functions, and they are co-opted into larger systems
- the problem with the co-option argument breaks down when you look at the specific details of different machines
- for example – the type III secretory system cannot be an precursor to the bacterial flagellum, it is younger, not older than the bacterial flagellum
- Critic: what would it take for your view to be falsified?
- demonstrable undirected processes that are capable of creating functional information in DNA, or processes that can build up an irreducibly complex molecular machine within the time available with a decent probability
If you like this debate, check out Stephen C. Meyer’s two books: “Signature in the Cell” and “Darwin’s Doubt”.
WINTERY KNIGHT 