transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] Many of the examples that Darwinists point to to demonstrate the power of evolution, like dog breeds, for example, it turns out that the mutations behind them are degradative. That is, they are mutations that degrade or break genes that were already there.

Speaker 2:
[00:24] ID The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Speaker 3:
[00:31] If life is built on complex molecular machines and information that is both complex and specified, can unguided evolution actually get the credit? Welcome to ID The Future. Thanks for joining us. I'm Andrew McDiarmid, your host. Now today I conclude my conversation with two awesome gentlemen, Molecular Biologist, Dr. Douglas Axe and Biochemist, Dr. Michael Behe, two experts featured in the new movie, The Story of Everything. Over two episodes, we're discussing their participation in the movie and unpacking some of the insights they share in it. I've got a few more exclusive clips to share with you to make our conversation more fruitful. Well, to get started, let me share with you the one-minute trailer for the movie, The Story of Everything.

Speaker 4:
[01:18] Today, I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange to you.

Speaker 5:
[01:22] How in the world did this start?

Speaker 6:
[01:24] Has the universe always been here or is it finite?

Speaker 7:
[01:27] We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to.

Speaker 8:
[01:32] Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event.

Speaker 6:
[01:39] Turned out to be the tip of the iceberg. Without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe.

Speaker 8:
[01:45] We're dealing with a system of manifold complex design.

Speaker 5:
[01:50] We associate information with a rational intelligence behind it.

Speaker 7:
[01:56] The universe, it bears everywhere the fingerprints of its creator.

Speaker 4:
[02:01] The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences. The question then was what does one do about it?

Speaker 3:
[02:16] That was the short trailer for The Story of Everything, which opens April 30th, 2026. We'll tell you where to go to learn more about the movie and get tickets at the end of this show. Well, my two guests today are very well known in the Intelligent Design research community and beyond. But for those not as familiar, let me briefly introduce them. Douglas Axe is the Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology at Biola University, the Founding Director of Biologic Institute, the Founding Editor of Biocomplexity, and the author of Undeniable, How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed. His research, which examines the functional and structural constraints on the evolution of proteins and protein systems, has been featured in many scientific journals. Michael Behe is Professor of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, as well as a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture. He has authored over 40 technical papers and three books, Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves, which all argue that living systems at the molecular level are best explained as being the result of a deliberate intelligent design. Gentlemen, welcome back.

Speaker 9:
[03:26] Good to be back. Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[03:27] Terrific to be with you, Andrew.

Speaker 3:
[03:29] Yeah. Well, in part one of this conversation, we talked about your participation in The Story of Everything. We talked about the stunning level of complexity and design on display in the living cell, including some of our favorite molecular machines, like the bacterial flagellum. We also discussed proteins, the drivers of cellular processes, and how the information in DNA directs the construction of proteins. Now, let's start with a word or two about The Story of Everything. How did this movie project come across your radar, and what was it like to participate? Let's start with Doug.

Speaker 9:
[04:03] I can't remember who first reached out to me, but there had been projects like this that I participated in previously, and sometimes they've been a documentary that doesn't make it to theaters. I wasn't sure where this one was going, but when I actually got there on set in Bellevue near Seattle, I thought, well, they've spent some time building a set mood here, and that was unlike sometimes you just sit in a chair and someone asks you questions. So, I thought, there's some filmmaking that's happening here. I wasn't sure where it would end up. We certainly didn't have a title, The Story of Everything at that point. So, I was very pleased to hear that it came together and really love what I've seen about it.

Speaker 3:
[04:50] Mike, what did you make of the experience?

Speaker 1:
[04:53] Well, yeah, I'm kind of low down on the totem pole here. I'm not a mover and shaker. So, I learned things on a need-to-know basis. So, like Doug, it was a number of years ago that I was invited to come and talk before the cameras at this very nice set in Washington. I heard that a project was developing, but nobody asked me my opinion about it. I was just there to gab about the stuff that I usually gab about. And I was delighted to hear then, not too long ago. I learned probably with the rest of the population that the movie was all set and that it's going to cover everything that modern science has shown that point so strongly to design from the fact that the universe has a beginning down to the fact that cells are run by machines. And I'm privileged to see a reviewer's cut, a reviewer's copy of the movie, and it's terrific.

Speaker 9:
[06:05] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[06:06] Well, Doug, discoveries in molecular biology during the last century have revolutionized our understanding of the cell. Why are these discoveries such a game changer? And why do they require a fresh evaluation of the processes and mechanisms that some say can account for life?

Speaker 9:
[06:24] Well, what's happened in the last century and even in the last half century or roughly, is we have got a peek into what is inside the inventory of things that are inside a cell, that are essential for it to work, including DNA and RNA and proteins. But we've also gained the technology and a lot of this actually borrowed from living things, to manipulate these things. And we can perform experiments now to find out how fragile are these things. And when I say fragile, I don't mean primarily like you break a glass. I mean more like putting typos in a paragraph. You can find out how fragile a paragraph is by messing it up. And there's a point where someone can't read it anymore. And you'd be surprised how quickly that happens. You don't have to change 9% of the letters if you change like 35% of the letters, you'll have an unreadable text if you do that randomly. So we reached a point where technology allowed us to do that kind of thing on these components of a living cell and to put numbers on how tightly constrained they are or how intolerant of change they are. And another way to look at it is how hard would it be to get one of these things if you didn't know you were doing. If something accidental is going to produce components and has no idea what it's doing, how likely is it that it would produce components that work? And we had no answer to that 100 years ago. We had some description of what is inside a cell, but we didn't have any answer to that. In the last 40 years or so, a lot has happened that has enabled us to do rigorous experiments that answer that kind of question.

Speaker 3:
[08:15] Yeah, it's a really exciting time. We have the technology and the methods now to take a closer look. Now, Mike, in the movie and indeed in your books, articles and video series, you famously argued that some biological systems are irreducibly complex. Now, for the millionth time, I know you've covered this, but some might be new to it still. Remind us what it means to be irreducibly complex.

Speaker 1:
[08:39] Well, irreducibly complex, that's a fancy phrase, but it stands for a simple concept. It just means that you've got some sort of machine or a system or something that has a number of different parts and components, and they all act upon each other to produce some function that the individual parts cannot do so. And if you take one of them away, the thing is broken. And I have explained this whenever anybody asks, I pull up a mouse trap, a mechanical mouse trap. Most people are familiar with them because it's got a number of components, got a spring, a holding bar, a little hammer that strikes the mouse and so on. And it's easy to see that you need all those things. Without any of them, it doesn't work. And the relevance to evolution is that, well, Darwin said if there were any system in life that could not be produced by numerous successive slight modifications, then his theory would not work. And these days, we have discovered, especially at the foundation of life, that such things are all over the place because the cell is run by molecular machines. And if you look in the dictionary at the definition of a machine, you'll see that it's something like, it's described as a complex device that uses a number of parts to produce a function. And so it's exactly what you would not expect a Darwinian process to produce. So irreducible complexity is a big roadblock to Darwinian evolution, and it's also a pointer to Intelligent Design. Because when you arrange things for a purpose, you can see the purpose. You can only... Minds have purposes. So a mousetrap, if you see a mousetrap, everybody knows that was put or arranged by a mind. And now that we find machines in the cell, we are justified in thinking that they were arranged by a mind as well.

Speaker 9:
[10:52] Right.

Speaker 3:
[10:53] And in the movie, you unpack irreducible complexity quite a bit, and you also connected to that acknowledgement you just mentioned, that Darwin himself made in his famous book On the Origin of Species. I want to show that clip to our audience now.

Speaker 1:
[11:08] Darwin knew nothing of these sophisticated multi-part machines in the 19th century, and his theory is not equipped to explain them. Darwin himself said if it could be demonstrated that there was any system that could not be put together by numerous successive slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. In the bacterial flagellar motor, if you take away the drive shaft or if you take away the propeller or the U-joint, it's broken. If any key component of the flagellar motor is removed, it stops functioning. This means simpler evolutionary precursors wouldn't have worked. So natural selection wouldn't have preserved them, halting evolution before the fully functional motor could develop. On the flip side, when you see a system that's put together with a number of components matched to each other, you recognize that's the product of a mind.

Speaker 6:
[12:13] The Darwinian mechanism of mutation and selection, which has long been posed as a kind of designer substitute mechanism, cannot build those systems. Then, perhaps they look designed because they really were designed.

Speaker 3:
[12:28] Mike, we can now point to a number of complex organs that exhibit properties of irreducible complexity. Has Darwin's own litmus test been satisfied then?

Speaker 1:
[12:39] Well, yes, it has.

Speaker 3:
[12:42] We can all go home.

Speaker 1:
[12:44] Well, with a couple of caveats. First, Darwin's mechanism can work by tiny little changes and do tiny little effects. So it's not that Darwin's mechanism can't explain anything. It's that it can't explain everything, especially these more complex systems that we've discovered in the cell. It turns out Darwin threw a rhetorical monkey wrench into the argument. He said that if it could be demonstrated that biological systems couldn't be produced slowly and gradually, as his system required, then his theory would break down. But essentially, he's asking opponents of his theory to demonstrate a negative, that something could not possibly happen. And science cannot prove a negative. Only mathematics can prove a negative. Science can't because it deals with empirical facts. So in my travels, people throw that up to you all the time. You can't prove that something couldn't happen. But effectively, I think his theory has indeed been falsified.

Speaker 3:
[13:56] Okay. I'm glad you point out that caveat. Because it would appear that Darwin's being very humble there, and very willing to acknowledge the frailties of his theory. But it might also just be a little arrogance there saying, you know, prove me wrong. Well, so Mike, you know, you talk about things breaking down, or at least Darwin's theory. There's another aspect of breaking down. I just want to touch on briefly. In your work, you have, you know, pointed out that Darwinian processes tend to break things to bring about change, in many cases, rather than build new things. Can you just briefly explain what that means?

Speaker 1:
[14:37] Sure. It's interesting that for the longest time, for 130 years or so after Darwin's book came out, we couldn't test his theory because changes, mutations happen at the molecular level of life, and the technology did not exist to follow such changes at that level. But recently, in the past 25-ish years or so, we have developed that technology, and it turns out that many of the examples that Darwinists point to to demonstrate the power of evolution, like dog breeds, for example, it turns out that the mutations behind them are degradative. That is, they are mutations that degrade or break genes that were already there. And it turns out that it's easy to get an improvement by breaking something. If you think of, you know, your car, suppose you want to get better gas mileage in your car, how could you do that? One way is to take a door and throw it away, and take the trunk lid and throw it away, and you're reducing the weight, and that will help you get better gas mileage. But that doesn't tell you how a car is built. And it turns out that that's what Darwin's mechanism is doing the great majority of the time. It's taking things, breaking them, and for specific circumstances, that can help.

Speaker 3:
[16:13] Wow. Yeah, that's such an important insight to have gained. Well, Doug, I want to play another clip from the film. This is you and Steve unpacking the concept of specified complexity, the type of information that is found in living cells. Let's watch that now.

Speaker 6:
[16:29] In classical information theory, there isn't a way to distinguish a series of symbols that are merely improbable from a series of symbols that are improbable and also functional. The difference between the monkey typing out random gibberish, which would be a highly complex arrangement of characters, but not one that conveys any meaning or performs a communication function and say a line of poetry, like time and tide wait for no man. If you compare those two symbol strings side by side, you'll see that they both are highly improbable. But something is present in the one string of characters that's not present in the other, and that's what we call specificity, or sometimes it's called specified complexity. The arrangement of the characters is specific to perform a function.

Speaker 9:
[17:27] Now, what's interesting in life, you have things that are not just complex and that there's lots of parts, it's that they're arranged in a particular way that allows them to do something remarkable. That is the thing that makes the complexity, not just ordinary complexity, but specified complexity. DNA is a great example of specified complexity.

Speaker 3:
[17:53] Doug, you've done important work on the rarity of functional proteins. What did your research show and how does it help us understand the information that's running the show in biology?

Speaker 9:
[18:04] Yeah. I started working on this when I was in Cambridge, in various labs in Cambridge. Did some work that showed at the time, it was common to think that the inside of a protein, it's called the hydrophobic core, the interior part is what gave it its shape and the exterior was highly flexible, it didn't matter what was on the exterior in terms of amino acids. So if that's true, a sequence would not have to be very accurate in order to fold to perform a functional protein. You'd have to get the interior bits right, the things that end up being on the interior, and the exterior you could have whatever you want, as long as it likes water on the exterior. I did some early experiments that showed that that was not true. In fact, almost the reverse, you can get away with quite a bit of wiggle room on the interior, but the exterior is exquisitely sensitive to changes to amino acid sequences. So it was at a time when these ideas were at play, and no one was sure exactly where they would land, I had an opportunity that was given to me to start to tease out, what does this really look like? It ended up my time in Cambridge, culminated with a paper that was posted in Journal of Molecular Biology in 2004, that was deliberately messing up chunks of a protein, a folded protein that does chemistry, and putting millions of these in bacterial cells to see what fraction of them work after you mess them up. So that's a way of finding out how tolerant or intolerant to messing up are these things. And you can actually get a number. You can actually measure it and do a calculation. And when I did that, the published figure for how rare are the sequences that work for a particular function is 1 in 10 to the 77th power, 1 in 100,000 trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion. I can say that, and you can write the number down, but nobody can get their head around that. It's a very, very low probability that a chance process would hit a target like that. It's comparable to, if you imagine being blindfolded and throwing a dart, how big is the wall and how big is the bullseye? The smaller the bullseye and the bigger the wall, and the more you've been spun around, the harder it's going to be to hit. Well, this ends up being a wall the size of a sphere enclosing the visible universe and a bullseye the size of a hydrogen atom. So when you put it in those terms, people realize that's not going to happen by chance. And that's true.

Speaker 3:
[20:54] And so even when you throw lots of time in, the supporter of a neo-Darwinian process loves time, but even when you throw all the time in the history of the universe, it doesn't equate, does it?

Speaker 9:
[21:08] Yeah, a billion years sounds like a long time until you look at numbers like this. A billion years is nothing if you have to solve a problem like that. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[21:17] Well, I'm going to wrap up today's conversation. It's been great having you gentlemen, but I just want to touch on one more thing, and that is another thing that was brought up in the film, this idea of the beauty principle, the observation that nature displays gratuitous beauty. Here's a clip of Doug starting a sequence of the film that explores this idea.

Speaker 9:
[21:43] Let's take a look at what's around us on planet Earth. Do we see what looks like the bare bones, minimalistic, cobbling together of something by accident for the sheer purpose of ruthless survival? Or do we see something much more extravagant, beautiful in its expression?

Speaker 3:
[22:31] Now, Doug, you describe it as extravagant in its expression. I like that way of putting it. Tell us more about the beauty principle at work and living things and what that suggests.

Speaker 9:
[22:43] I think it's a very powerful way to contrast what we should see if a Darwinian mechanism, which is breakage of DNA, mistakes in DNA, and a ruthless survival mechanism, which is natural selection. If that is the explanation for life, then on planet Earth, we should see nothing but brute force clumsy survival machines. They get better and better at surviving, but they aren't good at anything else. Better and better at leaving their DNA, but not good at anything else. You wouldn't see the extraordinary beauty, exquisite beauty that we see in living things in all domains of life. You wouldn't see something that looks like art. You'd see something that looks like, for my students, I do a architectural comparison and I use brutalist architecture. That's what Darwinism would give you. Then I use perpendicular Gothic. I showed the chapel at King's College in Cambridge. They're both buildings and if all you want is a space to get out of the rain, then brutalist does fine. But the King's College chapel in Cambridge delivers way beyond that. Yes, you get out of the rain, but it's glorious. And I think in life, you see the glorious thing. And I think everybody has to know this. Even biologists who deny a creator, they see this. I think you can't not see this. And it's a powerful argument in that sense that if I were an atheist trying to explain life in Darwinian terms, I would be made very uncomfortable by the vast majority of what I see in the living world, because it's not just brute force survival. It's something much more exquisite than that.

Speaker 3:
[24:35] You can't not see it, but you can ignore it. Now, Mike, do we see this gratuitous beauty at the molecular level as well?

Speaker 1:
[24:43] Well, it's interesting. I'm put in mind of a man named Max Perutz, who helped solve the structure of hemoglobin way back in the 1960s or so. He was talking about a collaborator of his who had solved the structure of a protein called myoglobin, which was the first protein whose structure was determined by a process called X-ray crystallography. And Perutz wrote that when he saw it, he said, how could this search for ultimate truth really reveal so hideous and visceral looking a structure? He thought it was his stone ugly. So I think at the molecular level of life, the beauty principle isn't the one that dominates. That's at levels that we can see and appreciate. At the molecular level of life is the machinery of life. And if you look at a nice lawnmower, sometimes it's covered up with a pretty colored plastic and stuff. But when you take off the top, you see the wires and you see the gears and motors that make it run. That has its own attraction because it's intellectually satisfying to see how it works and all the craftsmanship. But it's not aesthetically pleasing, I think, in the same way. Maybe Doug has a different view on it. But I think when you are talking about the beauty principle, you have to go to mathematics perhaps, or you have to go to higher levels of life. But at the nuts and bolts level of life, I think you are looking at other factors.

Speaker 9:
[26:29] I think when you work with protein structures, and now we have access to these structures in numbers that we have never had before. And when you rotate these things in your computer, I think there is a beauty to them. So I am going to disagree slightly. But I also think, I got to know Max Perutz when I was in Cambridge when he was still alive. And part of what he was talking about, I think, was their crude model. Because it was like, it looked like bowels or something. Because at that point, they didn't have molecular refinement. They were working from x-ray crystallography. It was the very first resolved structure. And their model was kind of like this tube thing that showed the gross path of the chain. When you start to get details in and you start to see the distinction between an alpha helix and a beta sheet and the way that sheets can make barrels and stuff like that, I think there's a geometric beauty, but it's not simple geometry. It's not like in chemistry, you have geometry of how atoms connect, and it's much more complex than that. But it does have sort of a geometric beauty combined with a functional beauty. And things become beautiful like the ATPase. When you see how the thing works, you go, oh my gosh, that's brilliant. And there's beauty to brilliance as well. And as an engineer, I was trained as an engineer, I can look at something that's engineering, and some of them say, well, that is exquisite how that was done. And there can be that level of beauty, but it won't necessarily be the beauty of a butterfly that everyone looks at and goes, wow. That's a butterfly. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[28:15] Yeah, there's more to beauty than just, oh, it's easy on the eye, right? It also has to do with its function and its completeness, its wholeness, and other factors. Well, final question for the both of you. Obviously, we have a ton of resources, the Intelligent Design community has produced over the years. But if we have somebody who enjoys The Story of Everything, they go see the movie, they're jazzed about it, they're excited about some of the things they did not know. What would you say is a good resource to turn to next? Other than your books, of course.

Speaker 9:
[28:51] Well, I'll say they should turn to Mike's books, and Mike will say, yeah, we're not looking like vain book promotion.

Speaker 3:
[29:02] Yeah, well, your books are awesome, and they do a great job of unpacking all this. Let's say somebody doesn't even want to read a book. What would they do next after watching this movie and realizing that there's intelligent design in aspects of life?

Speaker 1:
[29:16] I have a website and it's called michaelbehe.com. I don't know anything about the Internet. I didn't set it up. Somebody has set it up for me. And on that, there are a number of videos called The Secrets of the Cell. And I did not make the videos, but a wonderful videographer named Cal Covert, who is a medical videographer, got interested in ID and he did all this stuff. He gave me a script to talk and they're really nice light videos that get across the ideas pretty well. So if you want something that's easy to watch and not too long, go to michaelbehe.com and look for those videos.

Speaker 3:
[30:05] Yeah, Secrets of the Cell. How about you, Doug? Where would you point people next?

Speaker 9:
[30:09] Well, he said michaelbehe.com, douglasaxe.com is coming in a matter of a week or two. We're working on it right now. I like to see these videos that you're talking about, though. It's interesting that people are not promoting design. You remember, Mike, the inner life of the cell? That was done by Harvard many years ago, quite 15 years ago. It's exquisite. These are people who are not trying to promote design. If you're viewing this, go look up Inner Life of the Cell. It was done by Harvard team, and there's a beautiful version of it that's done to music. They're not trying to teach you molecular biology, just listen to the music and watch. It's stunning the level of complexity. You'll see a lot of these things like the, Bill Denske calls it the UPS truck, walking along the track carrying a parcel, and it's hard to believe that these things can happen at the molecular level, but they do, and that's quite stunning. That'd be one place to go. I feel like there's a need for more resources that are middle school level, you might know some of these. Andrew, Casey Laskin is kind of a resource for, we've got a lot of material that's kind of college, high school. I feel like we should be reaching down to seven, eight, nine, 10-year-olds and getting them to think about these things and not be pushed around when you... I love to quote Alison Goffnick, who she and she wasn't promoting design. In the Wall Street Journal, she said, By elementary school age, children start to invoke an ultimate godlike designer, even children who are being brought up as atheists. What she's saying is, mom and dad are atheist, they never told you about God, they never told you anything. You go out in the back garden and you see a butterfly, you suddenly intuit that this was made by a godlike designer. So there might be a need that is not being well met for speaking to people at young ages and showing them, you think of it this way and it's right for you to think of it this way. Right.

Speaker 3:
[32:17] Yeah, I think we do need board books, we need chapter books, we need videos that are geared for kids. I know my own kids love to watch the molecular animation videos that we've put together, including the one that's walking along, that's the kinesin, isn't it?

Speaker 9:
[32:36] Yeah, but those aren't made for kids, obviously, but they're fun. They can appreciate them, but they're not. Maybe a need for, and maybe I'm just missing some things. I'm sure there are people who have written, I have seen someone who's written something for young kids, like four or five-year-olds. But these are ideas that are in play in people's minds from the beginning. And I think there's a need for people to say, don't think that those ideas are wrong just because you had them early on. They could actually be right. And the things that people are telling you, teachers and professors, they might be wrong. But it takes a little bit of courage sometimes to hold on to an idea that your gut tells you is right, even though somebody with a PhD is telling you it's wrong.

Speaker 3:
[33:25] Yeah, that design intuition that you say is in all of us, that can be conditioned out, can be taught out of us, but it's there nevertheless. Well, Doug, Mike, I really appreciate your time today. Thanks for joining us for this two-part discussion about your involvement in The Story of Everything, as well as some of the great insights you bring to the film.

Speaker 9:
[33:47] Thank you.

Speaker 1:
[33:48] Great to be with you.

Speaker 3:
[33:50] Well, one more resource I'll mention, that is the film website. Remember, the movie is hitting theaters April 30th of 2026. Get together with your family, coworkers, friends, and the place you can learn more about the movie and get tickets is thestoryofeverything.film. That's the website, thestoryofeverything.film. If you want to bring a group or buy out a whole theater and support our work that way, please do so. There's a special website to learn more about that. It's discovery.org/story. Well, for ID The Future, I'm Andrew McDiarmid. Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 2:
[34:29] Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org. This program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by Center for Science and Culture.