American Thought Leaders - A Mathematical Challenge to Darwinian Evolution | Douglas Axe

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Modern biology often presents Darwinian evolution as a settled explanation for the origin and diversity of life.Douglas Axe is chair of molecular biology at Biola University and author of “Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed.”In this episode, he argues that when you look at the mathematical probabilities that undergird molecular genetics, there are hard limits that random mutation and natural selection cannot overcome.Notably, Axe does not deny the existence of natural selection. Indeed, he argues that minor adaptations—such as virus mutations or dog breed variations—are well established. But can random mutation and selection explain the origin of complex, functional biological systems when the odds of forming a single functional protein fold are a staggering 1 in 10?We explore various questions: If random processes cannot generate complex biological systems, what does that reveal about the origin of life? Why do children intuitively believe that the natural world was intentionally created? And why is the scientific community comfortable searching for intelligence in deep space through the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), yet resistant to detecting it in the origins of biological life?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

I think a rational, open-minded person would say the evidence is already there in the peer-reviewed public scientific literature to say that the Darwinian mechanism cannot be the explanation for life. Douglas Axe is the endowed chair of molecular biology at Biola University, an author of Undeniable. In terms of a probability, how likely is it that blindfolded you could throw a dart and have it land on this sweet spot, which is a sequence of amino acids. that folds into a functional protein and actually does something.

And the answer was, one in 10 to the 77th power. It should be the end of Darwinism. In this episode, he unpacks this astonishing claim, the physical limits of random mutation, and why he believes academia remains deeply resistant to alternative models. The fact is, just looking at humanity as one of the species, you see aspects of us that are truly remarkable. This is American Thought Leaders,

And I'm Janja Kellick. Doug Axe, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Great to be here. Your position is that especially newfound evidence about how biology works actually tells us that there is some sort of design in play. Give me the best evidence for this you have. There's a lot of evidence. I think I tend to gravitate toward simpler arguments rather than complex arguments. And I think simply put, living things occupy a very, very, very, very improbable space point in a space of possibilities.

You can think of it that way. And therefore, however they got there, it had to be someone who knew how to position them there. engineered things are like that. For an internal combustion engine to work, all kinds of things have to be right. If you just throw metal parts together randomly, almost none of them will function as an internal combustion engine or as anything. Because all of these functional things occupy very, very, very small spots in very, very large spaces. Life is that in spades, way beyond anything that humans make. So when you just look at a living thing, you're looking at something that is in a sense improbable,

but I would qualify that, improbable for it to happen just by natural causes, but of course if someone knew what he was doing and knew exactly how to make the thing, just the way we make internal combustion engines, then that becomes probable. But the argument, of course, right, the Darwinian view is that all sorts of small incremental changes a very long period of time because of natural selection result in these amazingly complex systems. So it kind of makes some sort of theoretical sense. I want to understand what is the biological evidence that there is some kind of design? Because that's your contention, right?

Yes. So if I go back to the internal combustion engine and we've got just a, we'll say a cement mixer with a bunch of bits of metal in it, chunks of metal however big you want, you simply can't get. a little bit of an internal combustion engine and have it do anything. That's the way the engineered systems are. You have to have the whole thing put together to get any benefit at all.

And so that's really kind of an obvious, glaring problem with the Darwinian theory. It pretends that you can get to very improbable endpoints by getting benefit in small steps. You can obviously get to a very improbable endpoint in small steps, but you won't realize the benefit until you're there. And so that's what makes it not work.

You can't roll the metal bits around in this cement mixture and be popping out first a toaster and then a blender and then a scooter and then an internal combustion engine. That's just sheer nonsense. So it's a flawed idea, I think, at the very, very bottom. And then the biological evidence is that when we actually look at the parts of living things, they're far more complicated than the parts of an internal. combustion engine. And I mean, I've looked at single molecule parts and you think, well, single molecule, that's got to be simple, like a pebble. It's not. A single molecule in life can be a very

elaborately constructed and configured thing that does remarkable things in one piece, one molecule. I mean, I get the sense that you figured, you started thinking about this through your work on protein folding when you're doing your postdoctoral work at Cambridge. And so could you tell me about that work and whether I'm right or whether you were already thinking about this or I was I started to frame ideas when I was doing my doctoral work. So that was here in Southern California. I was at Caltech doing a PhD in biochemical engineering and my PhD was not on evolution. But it was a period in life. Sometimes you have those periods in life where you can think about things before you have

kids often. So I got married as a grad student. I didn't have kids. I'm in an intellectual environment. It was kind of a time in my life when I could sit down and ponder things. And what I was pondering while I was in my PhD work is, would it be possible? First of all, I didn't find the evidence for Darwinian evolution to be at all compelling. But I was asking whether it would be possible to put it to a sort of test at the molecular level, to look at proteins, which are, in a sense, the smallest scale where fitness and selection apply, because these proteins do work,

and the work helps organisms, so it contributes to fitness, but there's one gene that has the genetic information for making this protein chain do its work. And so I thought this is an ideal system for looking at the likelihood of mutation and random events happening to a single gene could stumble upon a new,

a new folded protein that would do a new function. But I was not able to do that work during my doctoral stay at Caltech, but I was framing ideas that led me to seek a postdoc where I could do that work, and that ended up taking me to Cambridge where I was able to do that work. So tell me about it.

About the work. Yeah, like what did you find? Well, it was a lot harder. I was kind of arrogant. I thought I could do, I had told my wife when we had not been married very long, I was gonna, we're gonna go to Cambridge, I was gonna topple Darwinism in a few years,

and then we'll come back and do something else. And that's kind of the way I thought. But it turned out to be, A, harder to configure the sort of experiment that would get to the information that I was after, the data that I was after. And B, I grossly overestimated the impact that a paper authored by me would have and grossly underestimated the number of people

who'd been contributing to this for decades before I came on the scene. But I'm not the only young guy who's full of hubris. I think it's maybe kind of, it kind of helps people to get to a point that they wouldn't have gotten to if they were terrified of big ideas. I certainly was not,

but not for entirely virtuous reasons. So I was interested in looking at a single gene in a bacterial cell, messing it up, and then putting, we call it a library, you make millions of these genes, you put them in bacterial cells, and then let the cells tell you whether that gene still works. And that way you can actually measure,

you can quantify the fraction of these messed up versions of a gene that work. And then you can do a little bit of math and say, well, what if the whole thing were nothing but a mess, what's the likelihood that out of a mess, you would pull something that works? And that was a result that I published, had published in the journal of molecular

the biology in 2004. And the number at the time, it got accepted, went through rigorous peer review. It was, if you wanna think of it in terms of a probability, how likely is it that blindfolded, you could throw a dart and have it land on this sweet spot, which is a sequence of amino acids that folds into a functional protein

and actually does something. And the answer was for doing a particular job, one in 10 to the 77th power, which is one in 100,000 trillion, trillion, trillion, and trillion and chilling. Highly unlikely. Highly unlikely. Mind bogglingly unlikely. And I thought as it was going off to press, I thought, well, when people read this, I didn't say anything snarky in the paper because I wanted to get through peer review. I only hinted it, this does raise some questions about the origin of new

protein folds. But I was thinking that when this result is public, it should be the end of the theory and of course that was it was a dash of hubris with some other things naivety about how how social the scientific enterprise is it's a culture it does not I was thinking of it in like purely rational terms and it turns out it's a more complex beast let me jump in here okay why would why does that result in your mind or why did it you know just fundamentally undermine the dominant viewpoint. And do you still think that's the case? Oh, yeah.

If everyone could grasp that and took it seriously, it should be the end of Darwinism for two reasons. One reason is that the functional unit that I was looking at, a single protein chain folded and performing a single function, is virtually, arguably the smallest level of the individual. that you see in living things. It's a single molecule. Nothing like the innovation you need to create a new cell type,

nothing like the innovation you need to create a new organ, nothing like the innovation you need to create a genuinely new organism. This is at the very lowest level. And so I thought if it fails at that level, it failed the whole thing. And the other thing is the numbers, and not if you say one in 10 to the 77th power, to your average person, that doesn't mean anything.

They think 77, that's a pretty big number. It's not, one with 77 zeros after it, which is a much bigger number than 77. But most people don't have a good feel for that. And even people who are evolutionists would say, yeah, but there's been billions of years, but that shows a lack of ability to like put these numbers together. A billion years is 10 to the 9 years.

I'm talking about 10 to the 77th power. So you can do math and say, there have not been on planet Earth, anything like 10 to the 77th organisms ever throughout the history of life. Like you're talking about all bacterial life, all single cell. A generous estimate would be 10 to the 40th, that there might have been so far in the history of life on this planet. Does that include viruses? They're not organisms.

So it's including all bacteria. So that's the simplest thing that's an actual living organism. So that's actually a very interesting number. I didn't know that. 10 to the 40 is the estimate. So the comparison there, though, if you think of every living thing as being an opportunity

for natural processes to stumble upon some new invention, even at the small level of a single molecular invention, then on this planet there have been 10 to the 40th opportunities to hit a target that's one part in 10 to the 70s.

So that includes all the different components of, like, a cell here that you're saying? I'm just trying to understand. The 10 to the 40th? Yeah, because the protein is just a piece of an organism. No, no. If something is going to be an adaptation in Darwinian terms,

then it is a genetic change, so this is neo-Darwinism, a genetic change that proves beneficial to its possessor. Right, and which then creates selection. Selection. Yeah, but that happens at the level of the individual, of the organism. Right. So the 10 to the 40th is the maximum number of things that where that experiment could have played out.

Got it. 10 to the 40th times, maximum. Generously. So you have generously 10 to the 40th opportunities for a target that is one part in 10 to the 7.7. That creates a selective advantage for that organism. But that means you're short of even a 50-50 chance of success by 37 orders of magnitude, which is staggering. It's just bogglingly unimaginable. Which means it's impossible.

And because we're looking at the very smallest thing, we're not looking at tissues or body plans. In my mind, it's done. We can move on now. We can move on from the Darwinian era. And I have not changed that opinion one iota. I'm absolutely confident that that's true, that if we were all thinking about this rationally and carefully,

we'd be gone. We would have left the Darwinian era in, in the dust back there and moved on to something else. But what I didn't realize when I was younger, but I came to realize it, is how political and socially complex every human enterprise is with human players. And science is no exception.

I kind of thought that it would be, and a lot of people still do think that there's kind of this, yeah, but scientists, aren't they after the truth? So won't they change their opinion if evidence no longer squirts with their opinion? That's exactly how I was thinking. It turns out there are power structures in the scientific establishment. So there might be people who read my paper who actually did abandon their confidence in Darwinism, but they're very careful not to speak out about it because they would lose their job.

So there's all these complexities to how science actually works. And I'm not being cynical here. I'm being realistic, but it is a very human enterprise with all the, complexity of other human enterprises. Something about my past, which I've mentioned a number of times on this show, is that I was studying evolutionary biology back in the day. And one of the things that struck me early, and I was someone who was roughly an agnostic,

who was just interested in understanding how the world worked and science was going to be my tool for that. It struck me that Darwinian evolution didn't explain, the entirety of the complexity of life, but certainly happens, right? I mean, we see that in, you know, we see it in the evolution of viruses, we see the evolution of bacteria, we see that, we see Darwinian evolution, you know, the selective pressures being applied, certain things surviving more than us, we see it all the time, it's a real process, right? So when you're saying we're done with

Darwinian evolution, what are you right, what are you saying exactly, right? Thank you. I should nuance that. I think COVID was a great sort of public example. Everyone got a biology lesson in the COVID area. They didn't like it. It wasn't a pretty lesson. But part of the lesson was there are these infectious agents. They have proteins on the outside. So everyone suddenly learned about spike protein. If you remember this going way back. And we were talking about vaccines and herd immunity. And the idea was there are these proteins that are potentially targets for our own immune system to grab onto the thing, tag it as an enemy invader, and our own immune system crush this invader and give us health or take us through an infection. But COVID-19, there's still COVID out there. We never eliminated the virus, but it wouldn't be called 19 now. We're in 2026.

So every season, and this is the same with influenza and all these infectious agents, you may have developed immunity to a nasty case of the flu, the true flu, influenza in 24, and then winter of 2026 or 27, you might get influenza again. And that's because some of these proteins have evolved. They have changed some of their amino acids, your antibodies that used to work, and they got you out of the infection in 2024. They're no longer effective in 2027. Usually it will mean that you'll develop the...

Or as effective. As effective, right. They won't prevent you from getting a new infection. They might give you a head start in getting the new antibody that you need to tackle this one. But that's why you can have flu many times in a lifetime. You are immune to the old virus, but the world moves on. The world of viruses moves on. And that's exactly why it moves on because the old one no longer infects.

the ones that do, in fact, are getting past people's immunity. So that's evolution, pure and simple. What it doesn't explain is the development of a genuinely new thing. It is simply changing the camouflage. It's changing the outer fine-grained shape of a particle so that things that used to stick to it no longer do because little changes have happened. It's not inventing a new virus. It's not a new form of the virus, much less inventing a new form of life.

So, yes, natural selection is real. You can prove it. DNA really does carry genetic instructions, and those can be modified naturally by mutation. And selection is a filter of some sort that helps to determine which of these variations go forward in the future. but none of that explains how you would hit a target like one part in 10 to the 77 power. Well, and I mean, basically, the argument is that the moment you get a bit more complex than that, this method does not create new functional systems or organisms or alterations. But what about let's then let's talk about Darwin's Finches, because that's always my favorite example, right?

And the idea is, for those that aren't familiar, that, you know, Darwin observed on the Galapagos Islands, all these different kinds of finches, some had long beaks, they would eat certain kinds of things, other said short beaks and other places they had short things. And his idea was that, you know, that this natural selection happened because there would be, you know, kind of some sort, they would, they start specializing in consuming a certain type of organism or something, which, you know, the ideal beak would develop over time. time. And the beak seemed to be a good model for this sort of very slow incremental changes, right, where the beak gets longer, the beak gets a little more curved, it confers a selective advantage, and so forth, right? So it doesn't work in those situations either? No, I think that would be a classic example. The question is, I think work was done, but I'm not an expert on the finch beaks. I think I recall hearing that a gene was identified that is involved in the development of the beak and there's like a you double the gene or something you get

a longer view there's some genetic explanation for beak variation in the fin so that could be a legitimate example of again this happening but it's not it's not you know radical changes the beak and you haven't invented the bird you're changing the form slightly i mean if you look at dogs i mean look at the huge variation from one breed to another in dogs Those are all one species, and they came over thousands of years from natural wild dog populations that don't look. I mean, there are some dog breeds that resemble a wolf, some more than others. But through breeding, humans over thousands of years have been able to pull out sort of these genetic streams that are already there. There's genetic complexity in the wild dogs.

and then through breeding, what we've effectively done is said, here are some very handy attributes that if we could purify and get a pure breathing form of a dog that's very good at this, and we know dogs can do it because these dogs are doing it, then that would be a handy thing to do. That's basically how breeding is worked. So you have a very significant difference from one dog breed to another. I would argue more significant than the finch beaks,

and yet they're all one species. Now, I would argue it's not that any genes were invented along the way. It was just sorting of stuff that's already there. Does your experiment and, you know, tend to the negative 77 likelihood of, you know, something new being invented, does that implicitly mean there's some sort of designer or design happening? I think if you just look at the number, if an agnostic, open-minded agnostic person were to look at the numbers, this person would be forced to a position that says there aren't enough opportunities on this planet. There haven't been enough opportunities on this planet for targets this small to have been hit.

And we're talking about one protein in my experiment. If you look at how many different proteins exist in different life forms and how many would be needed to create a new life form, you're talking about thousands, many thousands of these. So one in 10 to the 77th is nothing compared to one in 10 to the 77 times a thousand, 77,000. So I think a rational, open-minded person would say the evidence is already there in the peer-reviewed public scientific literature, to say that the Darwinian mechanism cannot be the explanation for life. And I also think some of this is more recent evidence, conservation of information theorem that's now been proven by Bill Dembski. I've done some work as well that's yet to come out,

that there can't be any alternative naturalistic account for such special things happening. Basically, if these targets are as infinitesimally small as the evidence indicates, then you can't have any natural cause for them, whether Darwinian or not, because you have to explain how did a cause that didn't know where it's going land in exactly the spot that it should have landed in. So that's going to be a problem for any naturalistic explanation. Is this Dembski's work that you're... William Denzky has spent a chunk of his career working on the conservation of information. He has in the last year, I believe, published a fully fleshed out conservation of information theorem, a proof of a conservation of information theorem.

So the idea there is it's not quite like conservation energy or momentum. I had a conversation with him when I said, conservation laws to a scientist pulls up these conservation of energy, conservation of momentum, where there's a rigorous mathematical equation, and you have a fixed asset in energy, and it can change its forms, but it's fixed. It's not quite like that, but what it is saying, proven out now, is you cannot get to high,

to information-rich systems without a source of information. You can't go from an information poor system to an information rich system unless a possessor of information has infused information. And natural selection is not a possessor of information. Right, because the implication is that it's random and subject to simply selective pressures. Right. Yeah. I want to talk about this intuitive approach that you, you know, kind of suggested at the beginning of our discussion. And the reason I don't like to lean on that is because, you know,

our intuition can be wrong sometimes. And in fact, often is wrong, even though, but sometimes I also agree that we can ignore it to our peril. But you make this argument that, you know, when you look at biological systems, just like when we as human beings tend to, you intuitively sense that there's something there. Explain to me this argument.

I find it hard to lean on it, that myself. But explain to me, explain to me the argument. I don't want to lean on it. I just think it's really interesting that it's there. Okay. So as I was toying with ideas for the book that became undeniable, I came across a quote by a professor of psychology. I'm not sure if she's still there. She was at UC Berkeley professor of psychology named Alison Gopnik. And she wrote an article that was published in the Wall Street Journal. And in that article, she said, quote, by elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate godlike designer.

even children brought up as atheists, end quote. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Now, she thought this is a bad thing. I don't think she declared herself as an atheist, but she thought this is a bad thing because what it means is these kids who, by the age of four, when they're in the garden, that garden and they see a butterfly or dragonfly, and they think that was made by something powerful,

a godlike designer, that by the time we have to instruct them on evolution, we have to undo this thinking because it becomes, set in by their own experience. And that's what she was arguing in the article. But I thought, what if the four-year-old is right? What if the four-year-old can go into the back garden and see that butterfly and intuit, even though no one has told him or her about God or creation, just intuit that there must be a godlike designer behind that?

What if that's actually something, what if there's something pure and innocent but correct about that? kind of like, you know, the emperor's new clothes. It's the kid who says something pure. Yeah, he's not with him. He's naked. Yeah, right. It's the kid who doesn't care about the politics and doesn't care about impressing people.

And this kind of brought back that kind of sense to me that maybe what Gopnik was referring to is an innocent but pure and somehow good intuition. And so I agree with you. You can't say our intuition tells us this. therefore it's correct. But in this case, I think it's interesting that there is an intuition. And then in the book, I say, let's go see who's correct and it is. So you can prove to someone who doesn't like the idea that life has to have been designed. It's proven now. I don't think it should not be controversial. And we can talk about why it still is. I think a whole lot of people would disagree with you. Right now, as you said that,

there's people, you know, lighting up their tiki torches and. No, I didn't say it isn't controversial. I said it shouldn't be controversial. So get all. those tiki torch lighters you want, they won't find a single one of them that can actually address the key failings of the Darwinian theory. And I've been at this for a while. I haven't seen a single person put forward who can actually do this. And I would challenge people who think that it's possible to defend the modern evolutionary theory against its most crucial failings, it can't be done. I think we're in an interesting era where the smartest people who are evolutionists know this and they're not coming forward to defend it.

But outline for me the most crucial failings. The most crucial failing is we've already said that COVID-19 can become COVID-20. That's not explaining. So natural selection is a thing. Mutation is a thing. DNA, of course, is a thing. And there's a connection between them. So yes, selection will affect the future state of a population. What natural selection and random mutation will not do or any other natural cause is invent a whole new kind of organism. It just won't happen. That's because we now know that the amount of information you need to make, say, new protein folds, to reconfigure cell types, to reconfigure tissues, to make an entirely new body plan is way beyond the paltry amount of information you can get. by a normal population, terrestrial population, experiencing mutation and selection.

You can get bits. You can't get thousands and millions of bits. That's the problem. So that's one, are there other, because I think you mentioned there's several things of this nature that are problematic? Well, we could go, there's layers to this. For humans in particular, It can be, you can show, it can be shown. I have argued, and I think it has been persuasively argued,

there is not a coherent understanding of humans that holds us to be purely physical things. So you cannot understand the operation of the mind, the intellect, as simply neural activity in the brain. The brain is physical, our body is physical, but when you try to push a physical view of humanity to explain our thought process, you end up with a self-defeating, incoherent picture of humanity. Because you're trying to make our thoughts be physical stuff, and they just refuse to be physical stuff. You can't make a thought into a physical thing, and my brain is a physical thing, so if I'm really thinking and working with thoughts, then it's not the brain. And then if you go the other direction and say, well, you're confused, you think you're thinking, but you're not, well, then everything's gone.

If we're, if we're that confused that we don't even know what we're thinking about, and we don't even, if the meaning we are attributing to the words we're using is non-existent, then we're deeply confused, and science is gone and everything is gone. So it is a fundamentally incoherent view to take humans to be purely physical things. So that's a totally different argument, nothing to do with the information argument, but it's another way to say that a physical, natural physical processes operating on a physical planet cannot possibly categorically impossible for them to have produced beings that are not just physical. Because where did the immaterial component of us come from? I've had Michael Eggnore on the show talking about, talking, just talking about, this viewpoint, I guess.

How do you respond to people that would say, Doug, you're a devout Christian. You have strong beliefs, so you're trying to conform reality to your viewpoint. I would, first of all, acknowledge all humans have a worldview, and it is a biasing thing.

because we all, as we grow, as we mature intellectually, come to a way of seeing things. And the idea of going all the way back to the drawing board and saying, no, all of this has been all wrong, I need to reconfigure the way I'm thinking about everything is a, that's a gulp moment for sure. So I would say, I've had this kind of discussion with people who think, you're a Christian, therefore you're biased. And that's laughable, I think. I'm a Christian. I'm biased. If you're not a Christian, you're also biased.

is just a different bias. So we all have a bias. And it is possible for all people to allow their bias to prevent them from giving fair consideration to an idea that they view to be in conflict with the way they're thinking. That's a possibility for me. It's a possibility for someone who's criticizing me as well.

So what I think is when you have, in the case of intelligent design, you have a minority view that is very much disliked by the powerful majority. The holder of the minority view does not have the luxury of ignoring the majority view. I do not have the luxury of ignoring the very best case that can be put forward for Darwinism, because that's the established view. I have to take that seriously.

Flip that around. Someone who is a Darwinist has the love. of giving the back of their hand to every critique of Darwinism. So here's what I would say. You could be an established life scientist at one of the top universities in the world and never have thought critically about Darwinism. You're the one who needs to step back and take this seriously. I cannot do what I have done.

I've been fired for criticizing Darwinism. I have to take the other. It's my job to take the other view seriously. The people who are giving sort of a back of the hand critique, they're the ones who are not taking the critique. Seriously, they don't have to. They still get a paycheck. We're going to talk about intelligence and design in a moment, but just briefly tell me about

getting fired. I was at the Medical Research Council Center as a independent research scientist. I had done a postdoc at the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge University. This was after a doctor at Caltech. I went there to look at this single gene problem. Allen first, now he became knighted, so Sir Alan First was the head of the MRC Center where I was working.

And in 2002-ish, I got fired in 2002, but there were events that led up to that. And they had to do with instructors at public schools in the UK, I think like what we would call middle school, high school age, teaching intelligent design along with Darwinism, and it became hugely controversial in the UK. Intelligent design was being discussed negatively, of course,

on BBC radio, and there were lots of, a lot of people talking about this, because they felt like, how are we letting this come into the schools here? It was being debated in that. House of Commons. Tony Blair was Prime Minister at the time. I was in the UK with my wife as Americans and I realized I've been able to do this work sort of quietly, but I'm being funded by the Discovery Institute, which is like a major funder of intelligent design work. I wasn't,

I wasn't keeping that a secret. First knew that I was being funded by Discovery, but I thought it feels very precarious to me right now because first was okay with money coming from discovery, but he wouldn't be okay with the huge controversy that's boiling over right now. And sure enough, he realized, yikes, this is a huge controversy right now and one of the people who is working under me, I was an independent research scientist working at the MRC center, and I had money to do the work, but he had the authority to remove me. And sure enough, I think he resisted the thought of removing me. That came out later in a new scientist article where he was interviewed and he said,

someone said that he should remove me because of this controversy and he resisted that. So that article comes out saying that I just left because I got in a huff, which is not true. I left because he removed me. He removed me, I think not because he thought intelligent design was wrong or that he was willing to defend Darwinism, simply because he didn't want a controversy on his doorstep. And there's, I think that's legit. I think if I were in his shoes, I would have done it differently, but it certainly was within his authority to remove me. I would have sat down with me and said, I'm not a big fan of this controversy. So I want you either to change your work or find a place that's okay with it and that would have been Totally legitimate for him to do what he did instead was had his assistant email me and say we've run out of space and you need to go That's how it worked. What has been the impact on your career of doing this controversial experiment and taking this controversial position so early on?

The experiment was wasn't controversial, but my reasons for wanting to look at this, I think, you could call that controversial or unpopular. And my take on it is definitely unpopular. You sometimes mentally, as you go through life, think, what if I had done this instead? But you never have a, it's not a scientific experiment because I can't redo, I can't replay things. What I can't say reasonably is my career was definitely impacted by not, I call it in the book, swimming against the stream. Okay, there's a stream going this way, get in the stream and go with the stream if you want to have a normal career. If you find yourself going against the stream, it's going to be a rough,

it's going to be a rough ride. But I also think I would have found it really unsatisfying and boring, I think, to just be a stream swimmer for my whole career. I would have had to stay away from evolution because I just would have found it pushing against my integrity. I never would have said, okay, I don't believe this. I think this is rubbish, but I'm going to publish papers and act as though I think it's true. I never would have done that because that would have violated my own sense of who I am and who I'm supposed to be. So I would have had to find some little niche where I just do work like everyone else. And I'm not knocking this. Some people are called to just, you know, advance this thing. That's how most science works. I felt called to something else. I felt called to take a stand on something that I think is very important. I think the whole Darwinian scaffold is a, it's worse than a lie because it's a dangerous lie, because it leads to the view that, that we are cosmic, we humans are cosmic accidents. There's no reason that we're here. And if you really believe that, then there's no reason we should do anything or not do anything. So the worst and most vile human behavior shouldn't shock

a true Darwinist who thinks that there is no purpose. And we are cosmic accidents. Why not slaughter people? As David Wood said when he was not a believer, he became a believer. Why not? If you like torture, who's to tell you it's wrong? All they can do say they don't like torture. And David Wood could say, okay, then don't torture. I like it, so I'm going to torture. So it's nobody is consistent with the view that the academy props up as being true, and that is that we are material things that came out of a natural process. Because everyone wants to say that this is despicable behavior and it's horrible and it's evil. And you'll even get atheists who say Christianity and religion are evil.

I don't know how they help themselves to those categories. So I can't say what my career would have been like had I not done what I felt I was called to do. I can say that me doing what I felt called to do definitely had an impact. and 2002 was a big step of that, where I was removed from the Medical Research Council Center. But was it worth it? Totally worth it. Totally worth it.

I've had conversations with a lot of people, and I think I've hopefully had an impact on a lot of people, particularly younger people who fall prey to a toxic view of humanity, and at anything that I can do, even at cost to myself, to oppose that, I'm very willing to do. Now one way that I've described by view is just that humans are meat. Yeah. That your brain is a computer made of meat, that we're like robots walking around, but we're meat robots instead of...

And that's a sick and sickening view of humanity. I'm concerned about AI. I think AI is a great invention and it can be used in great ways. I use it myself. but AI lends a little bit of weight to the idea that if a machine, a very large machine can converse with you or apparently converse with you, then that lends a little bit of weight to the idea that we're machines. Now, I think it's false, but it's a dangerous idea that has gained a little bit of credibility because of what computers are doing now.

Well, a topic to discuss perhaps another time. I would love you. Yeah. Yeah. But I want to go to intelligence design because this, when this term is mentioned, you know, perhaps because some of these controversies in the UK and other places in the past, a lot of people get up at arms. I've seen that happen in real time.

When you say intelligence design, what do you exactly mean? Intelligent design is the part of this should be not controversial. It's the idea that in certain situations it is possible to detect the actions of an intelligence. So intelligences can produce outcomes, can leave signals that enable other intelligence, intelligent agents to look at those signals, look at those outcomes, and say, oh, somebody must have done this. It's like the four-year-old in the back garden seeing the dragonfly or the butterfly. They're detecting intelligent design, and you can say, well, they did it in a false way, and that's something we can debate. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence. SETI, I think it's still a thing,

where they're pointing telescopes out to the sky and trying to see if we can find a signal for some extraterrestrial intelligence, that's predicated on the notion that in fact you can detect the signals, the signatures, the physical outcome of an intelligence having action. Some cognitive org to use going back to organized information that is going to be coming from some sort of intelligence and not random pulsars.

So in a sense, it's not controversy at all. Because I think people who don't like the modern intelligent design theory, they probably like SETI and they know that this is true. They just don't like that it's true. Where it becomes... Wait, wait, wait, they know that what's true? That you can't, I think the people who don't like intelligent design, for the most part, probably have no problem with SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. But I just said it's the same thing. It's the same logic.

They just don't like the fact that if you apply that logic to biological systems, you come to the conclusion that there's an intelligence behind in biological systems. They don't like that, but they don't have any problem with the general logic. Spell out to me why this is exactly the same logic, just simply. Why is it the same logic? Well, just in very high-level terms, what we're saying with SETI is it's possible to detect physical outcomes, physical signals that we think, could only be produced if an intelligence produced them.

But you can expand that and say, well, physical systems. Is it possible to look at a physical system and say that could only be there if an intelligence put it in it? The signatures of the design of the intelligence are within the biological system. Can we detect that? Yes, for sure. And you're saying, of course, yes.

Of course you can. But I'm also saying that the general claim is not controversial everyone knows this and you do it all the time. Or that it's possible, basically, the time. They just don't like it if you apply that to biology. And then I'll say, well, but there's billions of years. Do the math. Billions of years do not give you the products of brilliance.

It just doesn't. You just raise an interesting point here. It's just simply that people are just simply saying, that's just not the case. That's not possible. It's sort of, it's an outright just rejection of the whole concept that we're looking at. saying that design of life is not possible.

Right. Right. Like that's kind of the problem. If we say it's possible, then we've been discussing this whole time, then you are actually seeing that. Yeah. So I think you've hit the nail on the head that people aren't rejecting intelligent design because they think it applied an idea incorrectly and it doesn't apply to life.

They're rejecting it because they're terrified of where it would go. we admitted that it does apply to life. They don't like the idea of letting God in the door of biology. And, you know, God's there and he's never left, is what I would say. So I think there's a caricature here, and Dawkins is great at caricatures, that the sort of God of the Gaps mentality, that if we admitted that God has acted, I think that the Dawkins caricature would say that a Christian who is a bioccurts, biologists should never go to experiments or never try to discover everything because they just

throw his or her hands up and say, God did it. And that's the fact is, a great many of the finest biologists and chemists and physicists and astronomers have been Christians and they have never acted that way. So I don't know where, this is an odd caricature. But the fact is we could have a very healthy, robust science that is discovering things and it actually, actually would be less handicapped in some respects if it said, we're fine with saying that God invented life. Now we want to go understand how it works and what we can do to help human disease and all these things. So there's a sort of a deliberate confusion, I think. And presumably ID intelligent design proponents aren't saying it's a particular God.

You're just saying there's a super intelligent, oh no, I'm using the terminology now. a super intelligence of some sort or there's an intelligence that led to this design but you know we're not identity we're not we're not identifying that intelligence so in the most sort of raw setty parallel uh seti we see a signal remember the film what was it called cosmos or something yeah uh yeah i know contact contact yeah yeah contact yes absolutely so we see a signal that doesn't tell us who sent the signal we just know some intelligence sent the signal we can't like profile the intelligence or say much about it. If you apply that mentality to life, you'd say,

well, we can infer that an intelligence has made life, but just in a raw sense, that's all we can say. I don't believe you could say that, but it's like looking at the works of an artist or a sculptor. Nobody thinks that you can look at the works of Van Gogh and say nothing about Van Gogh. How is it possible that the works of Van Gogh say nothing about Van Gogh.

How is it possible that the works of God say nothing about God? So you can step back and say, let's apply this at the most raw level and then I would agree with you. It says definitely intelligence is here, but then you can say we don't want to know anything more about that. I think once you know that God has acted, then the way he's acted tells you something more. And in particular,

look at us. What are we like? and we are not just, we are not like the animals. And I know biologically we are animals, but we're not like anything else. We're entirely different. Not entirely different, we're profoundly different, okay? And those profound differences in us, comparing us to whomever you want, chimpanzees, dolphins, whatever,

we have differences that point to the fact that a personal creator, made us. Not just an intelligence, but an intelligence that imbued in us the sorts of things that we have, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose, an intellect, a passion for the truth. These are things that chimpanzees don't have it all. And we have them in spades. And yes, we mar all of these things and we misuse and abuse these things. The Bible tells, if you want to read the Bible, there's a story about that. But the fact is, just looking at humanity as one of the species, you see aspects of us that are truly remarkable. We're the one species that changes the

entire planet. And some people say, we're ruining the planet. Okay, you're not saying that about chimpanzees. You're saying about one species that we have the power to go to other planets. We have the power to slaughter and maim on massive scales, but also to help and to heal on massive scales. And we also have a being that cares. And that's not true of any other species. Even the ones the biologists say are our closest cousins. They're nothing like us. Chimpanzees are more like crickets than humans in that respect. You as a Christian are not saying that it is obviously based on biology the Christian God

that is the designer. You're just saying there's a designer and there's intelligence that, you know, I think you're saying that created people in its own image. Yes, I think I'd want to, there's the U plural and the U, as a community I wouldn't want to say intelligent design as a community says this but the things that I say that I wouldn't say the community says so the community tends to be the very sort of non-committal you can detect I would say the community would say not just an intelligent agent but a remarkably intelligent agent I would go beyond that and say that just as if you're

looking at the works of Picasso, you can see more about Picasso. So too, you look at the works of God, you can see more about God. And I mean, I think that's the, that indeed was some of the work that was done by early scientists, right? They were trying to understand this. It's very, it's very interesting. You know, I can't help but think, as we keep talking about this, about this ancient astronauts theory, you know, hypothesis, right, that it was actually, you know, extraterrestrial beings that ceded life here on Earth. For some reason, I see that coming up periodically. Your thoughts?

Dawkins said something like this. He said, well, there's a possibility that life here comes from an intelligence, and this is what it would look like, like an extraterrestrial intelligence, seeded life. I think that people who say that, and certainly this would be true of Dawkins, are thinking that some intellectual intelligence, life elsewhere could like send spores to planet Earth and this is a planet that was formerly lifeless but it has water and an atmosphere and if you put spores in there and they start to produce bacterial life then that life would evolve

eventually and produce intelligent life the problem with the with this version of it that I've heard Dawkins articulate and others have articulated I think Sir Fred Hoyle actually articulated this. The problem with the idea that simple sort of spores could have produced all of the life that we see on us on planet Earth, around us on planet Earth, is that that idea believes the idea that bacteria can evolve to be us. Sure. And I'm just saying that's not true.

Right. So you can't send babies down on parachutes. You'd have to do a whole lot more than spores if you wanted life to come. You'd have to kind of bring a whole variation of life. Yeah, you'd have to have a Noah's Ark version of a spaceship land on Earth and then... So going back and looking at it in the opposite direction, what about the fossil record? Yeah, and I'm not an expert on that, but... But we'll know the idea is, right, people that are Darwinian evolution,

evolutionists would say the fossil record shows that there's these, you know, primitive forms, and then later in the fossil record, as you date things, there are more advanced forms, and you can kind of see the process. Of course, we're missing some of these intermediate species, right? This is one of the arguments against it, but largely it shows that. Another one, another argument is that when you look at these, you know, sort of different types of body plans or things that look similar based on morphology, you look at, you know, DNA sequence homologies, and they say, well, that's, you know,

kind of approximate that. So that's an argument. Darwin himself was embarrassed by the fossil record and said so in his origin of species book. So he took that, he took the overall picture of the fossil record to be an argument against his theory, not an argument for his theory.

So, and people would say, well, we found fossils since then. I think what you're actually seeing is Darwin wrote in a time, and he said this. in the first editions, first several editions of his book, most naturalists reject my theory. Okay, so Darwin, this is kind of healthy in science.

Darwin was putting forward an idea that was not popular, and therefore he had to take the opposing view, he had to take the criticisms into account. You don't have the luxury of assuming everyone's gonna love this, if they don't. Several years later, suddenly people started to fall in love with it. And before his death, he, revised his last version and said, now suddenly everybody accepts this, this theory. But,

yeah, so that's the position that an intelligent design proponent finds himself or herself in today is, I'm speaking in a world where this is not the popular thing to say, therefore I have to take the opposing view seriously, where that is not always the case otherwise. certain people have argued to me that there's some correspondence between what we say are evolutionarily related organisms and DNA variation. I mean, the simplest example would be, you know, the DNA similarity of a chimpanzee or a monkey or a lemur more distant and you just go away is much more similar to human beings than other things like a dolphin or a bacteria.

or much more distant. So that is true at some level. I don't know at how fine-tuned a level it's true, but it's certainly true at a broader level. How does one explain that? Well, I would take two approaches there. One would be I would distinguish between the claim that there is a tree of life.

So Darwin's Tree of Life was the idea that all living things have a literal family tree where it starts off with simple bacterial life on planet Earth and then diverge, diverge, diverge, until you get modern life. So we all literally share a family tree. That's one hypothesis. And we could set that aside and distinguish it from a hypothesis

that is there is a natural mechanism that produced all life on planet Earth. Those are two different claims. One is that the tree is real. The other is that a natural mechanism can explain the tree. And I don't believe either of those hypotheses, but it's, and I do know of intelligent design proponents like Michael Behe,

who say, I believe in the tree, but I don't believe the mechanism works. So these are separable things. So the other thing, so that's one way we could go with this. I reject both the tree and the mechanism, but emphatically the mechanism, in some sense you can imagine that if, once you've rejected it, the mechanism and if you reject all natural mechanisms, which I do, then you're saying, well, God had to be behind life. And you could say, well, could God have made life so that it's got this tree-like, it had this tree-like relationship. And I would say to that, sure, he could have.

I think you get into problems with Christianity once you get to humans. But that's a matter probably for another discussion. All of this, we could bracket and say, do you really get when you, when you analyze genes, do you really get a consistent phylogenetic tree? And the answer to that is no. Depends on what gene you look at. So you get these, it's known as gene tree discordance. Depending on what gene you examine, the software will always give you a tree. So the thing is.

But the trees are not all the same, right? But you would expect that because different genes would evolve at different rates and so forth. No, I mean, no, because you can get a species tree from examining one gene. and then you get a different species tree examining another gene, and they're not the same tree. So the idea sounds great, and when we first started getting genomic sequences, everyone thought, well, this will resolve all these thorny issues in phylogenetics, because they used to use morphology. Pre-DNA, you would just line the things up. Linnaeus classified into groups, but he didn't assume the tree, and then post-Darwin, everyone assumed that you can do cladistics and get a tree

by looking at morphology. And then when DNA came along, we thought, well, this will resolve all the ambiguity in these, or the disagreements in these morphologically based trees, and it turned out it didn't resolve them. First of all, there was a clash where the DNA trees don't even always agree

with the morphological trees. And then there's classes within the DNA trees. It just depends on what DNA you're looking at. I see. Okay, let's kind of bring us back to the key, I guess I think the key point that you make. You're saying that one experiment that was done that you did, basically closed the door on evolution as the engine of the diversity of life. No, I don't want to say that. I did do an experiment. I think it says that. But I was placing

way too much weight on my own contribution at the time and not realizing how many other people had done things. So I would say there is a constellation of experiments and observations that all agree that there's no way that this Darwinian theory can work. So I don't want to say that my one experience. That's putting too much weight on one experiment. But there are lots and lots of observations now that I think absolutely contradict the Darwinian account of life. And some of them have come from people who have not at all claimed to not be Darwinists. They've done and now, I mean, I'm thinking of Durit and Schmidt, who did a, analysis of the waiting time for two mutations.

If an adaptation requires more than one mutation, like two, that's the smallest, simplest one, that's more than one, in a primate human line. So the Great Ape line, they showed that it would take over 100 million years for such an adaptation to become fixed, to evolve. Okay. And the, the, it's believed,

the evolutionary account of our own evolution is that we share a common ancestors with chimps that was about seven million years ago. So right there you have from people who are not favoring intelligent design, a result that's in the peer-viewed scientific literature that says, this can't work.

You can't get in seven million years a radical change a form and a radical change of ability if two mutation adaptations take more time than that. So there's lots and lots of these results. Of course, if there's not a willingness to go where the results lead, then people ignore all these that push them to the side and they say, let's keep the bus going where the bus is going. And so the second part, I think of what you're arguing is that people do accept this, you know, intelligent diet as a possibility that opens up a whole new series of opportunities for research

and understanding the diversity of life, which we're kind of handicapped right now. Yeah. If I understood correctly. Yes, but the people who oppose intelligent design would say it's a God of the Gaps argument. It's a science stopper as though once you believe in God and believe that God is behind life, you stop doing science, which is just nuts. look at the history of science. Newton believed in God, that was in, he was not a science stopper.

So people who trot that out, I always want to ask them, show me who's actually thinking this way, because I don't see the people thinking this way. Maybe there are people thinking that way, but it is certainly not generally the case that people who attribute the wonders around us to God are not interested in teasing out the scientific principles behind their operation.

That's not at all the case. But basically your hope is, that if I understood you correctly, you want to see a development of science with that understanding because you feel it would open up all sorts of possibilities. So I see the opposite of, there's sort of a Darwin of the gaps,

that if your mentality is that all living things were cobbled together by natural processes and there is no purpose, there is no brilliance behind them, then you're gonna not look for certain things that you're gonna miss. And junk DNA is a classic example of this. When we entered into the human genomic era and we found out that a very small,

a large majority of our genome is not coding sequence. So it's not apparently sequences that are giving the information for cells to make proteins. And people very quickly said, well, that's just evolutionary junk because what do you expect? We're the products of a mindless process. So most of what you're seeing here must be

chunk. Well, that's now an embarrassment. Nobody believes that anymore because we see that there's very, very complex processes that are being carried out often at the RNA level. So it's not the DNA is jumping around, but RNA is jumping around and doing all kinds of calculations that are essential for life. And those are involving the parts of our genome that are not directly coding. So most people do not use the term junk DNA anymore, they're recognizing that it was not junk that there's design here. But that's an example where if we had not been wearing the Darwinian glasses, we never would have said it was junk.

We never would have expected most of our genomes to be junk. And we would have, from the outset, been saying, well, what is this part of the genome doing? So just says very briefly, what is your hope for the future? I would love to see a new generation of scientists, life science, scientists and physical scientists occupy positions in the academy, not necessarily that they're all agreeing. I think it's healthy for there to be disagreement and different viewpoints among scientists that's a great part of the scientific enterprise, but open in a new era to welcoming colleagues that have a robust view of intelligent design and think that design is the best

way to understand life. I think science would go forward in leaps and bounds if everybody in the life sciences agreed that that's a position, that intelligent design is a position that should be at the table, even if a lot of people say, ultimately I think it's not going to be right, but I want my position to be duking it out with the best of the best, and that's one of the best. Well, Doug Axe, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Great to be here. Thank you. Thank you all for joining Douglas Sacks and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.

I'm your host, Janja Kellick.