Quest with Kirk Durston

Kirk and Sheldon take a look at Darwinism. Is modern Darwinism broken like Bret Weinstein says?

Joe Rogan Experience #2269 - Bret Weinstein

Creators and Guests

Host

Kirk Durston

Scientist, philosopher, clergyman, outdoorsman, husband to the Queen of Hearts and father to six young adults.

Host

Sheldon Kotyk 🇨🇦

Father and Husband. “Fantastic and terrible in equal measure.” Probably not being serious.

What is Quest with Kirk Durston?

Kirk is a philosopher, scientist, husband, and a legit Christian. His podcast is mostly about exploring assumptions and questions pertaining to God, philosophy, science and life that he ponders about, hence the name Quest with Kirk Durston.

Kirk wants you to join him on that Quest or perhaps you're on your own quest about such matters and you can explore together.

All right.

Good morning, Kirk.

How are you doing?

Oh, I think I'm doing wonderful, actually.

Sun's shining.

I feel good.

And the topic today is extra interesting.

Right up your alley.

Got a coffee here.

No, where's that?

Yeah, here it is.

Double espresso right there.

How could you not feel good?

Well, your camera, just so everybody knows,

we know that his real

camera isn't working right,

so he's not really going to

be looking at the camera all the time.

Not that there's much to see

when you're looking at me.

Yeah.

Yeah, so how's everything been?

Sorry, everyone,

for not doing last Thursday.

It ran away on me.

I was like triple booked.

And yeah,

and with me doing some traveling

over the next few weeks here,

I didn't want to just skip it.

So we're doing a Monday episode,

which it's Monday.

So who knows what could happen?

Yeah.

Well,

most of the people watch these after

the fact anyway,

so I don't think they'll be

complaining too loudly.

All right.

So we got Serpa here.

Good morning, Serpa.

Hi, Serpa.

All right, and yeah, so don't forget, like,

subscribe, hit the bell,

and then you can get these

last-minute notices that we

are going to be streaming.

And don't forget to also leave comments.

Yeah, if you want to talk to Kirk,

just head over to

KirkDurston.com and you can

read some of his content there.

So today,

we are going to be discussing a

stream that Joe Rogan did

with Brett Weinstein.

Maybe if you can give a bit

of an intro to Brett.

I think everybody knows who Joe Rogan is,

but...

Yeah, well,

Brett Weinstein is an

evolutionary biologist who

co-hosts a podcast called

Dark Horse Podcast,

and it usually focuses on

issues in the area of science.

All right,

and he would be known as an

evolutionary biologist.

Yeah,

he's an evolutionary biologist who

believes that Darwinism,

there's got to be a Darwinian explanation,

but he's really quite

honest about the state of

where it is right now,

and it's not that great.

All right, well,

let's get right into this.

We're going to sort of react

as it happens.

Kirk's seen a little bit of it,

but I caught a few things that I was like,

hey, this is really good,

and I don't think Kirk had seen it yet.

So we will do a little bit

of streaming here,

and don't forget to comment

if you have questions or if

you see something that we don't.

Yeah, leave us a comment.

All right.

So let's add Joe to the stage.

So this is a little bit

earlier in the conversation

than you had a link to for me, but I,

so just backing up a little bit, um,

Tucker had, uh,

somebody on and they were

discussing evolution and Tucker,

basically said, well,

there's no macro evolution going on.

It's all microevolutions,

no macro that we can see.

And so basically Joe Rogan's

asking Brett about that.

Leave an evolution as it's taught.

Yep.

I'm paraphrasing.

Yeah, I went back and listened to it.

What did he exactly say?

He said, well, he said a couple things.

It was a little confusing.

He said that, you know,

we see evidence of adaptation,

but we don't see evidence

of evolution and that we've

really gotten beyond the Darwinian model.

We've essentially come to

understand that it's not right.

This is essentially an

argument for creationism?

It's an argument for intelligent design.

Okay.

I think.

First of all,

I want to clean up a little

bit of what he said,

just so it's... That's an

argument of intelligent design.

It's not the argument.

No, it's not the main one.

I mean, there's intuitive,

there's ones that depends

on our intuitions, our ability to

see things and recognize, whoa,

that looks designed and that doesn't,

but it is subjective.

And because it's regard based on intuition,

it, uh, doesn't carry the same weight,

but, um, that weight has been growing.

I think he's not just

referring to an intuitive

argument for intelligent

design here though.

He's pointing out the failure,

what appears to be the failure of,

of a neo-Darwinian theory of

common descent,

that we've all descended

from a single cell sometime in the past.

He says we can't see it.

Now, immediately somebody might say, well,

of course we can't see it.

This takes tens of millions of years,

hundreds of millions to proceed.

But the reason that it would

take that long is because

it's not guided by an intelligence.

It's just a

is depending on things like genetic drift,

mutations, insertions, deletions,

just basically random processes.

And every once in a while,

those random processes hit

something that looks like, hey,

this would be an advantage.

And because it really is an advantage,

practically speaking,

you can produce more progeny,

more progeny versus

whatever we had before.

But the problem is,

is that when we accelerate this,

and we can,

once you get an intelligent

mind involved in your, say,

selective breeding program

at some university,

you can actually change the

evolutionary process from

what is essentially a random walk.

to something that is guided

and you can speed up that

process of macro evolution

by many orders of magnitude.

In other words,

you're limited only now by

the reproduction rate,

how long the generation is.

So for bacteria,

you might be able to get them,

say in half an hour,

you got your next generation.

And so it's limited only by that.

You're no longer dependent

on random chance anymore.

And you can take that

and run with it.

And every time we do, we hit a wall.

It's not that we ran out of

time for our experiment.

We just hit a wall beyond which it's,

this is going nowhere.

It's either further change will be lethal.

Can't change any further

because further change will

be lethal to the organism.

It just simply hits these

walls and stands there.

And this

is a serious problem for neo

Darwinian theory or let's

just call it Darwinism

because a fundamental

central core prediction of

Darwinism is that the

variation that we observe

within populations and

that's observable and we

observe natural selection

we observe mutation we

observe genetic drift so we

observe all the components

of what we might call

neo-darwinian theory today

we observe all those

components but at the same

time we hit the brick wall

And so this is the, oh yeah,

the fundamental prediction

is that this variation is not limited.

There's no limits to this variation,

which is kind of an obvious prediction.

If you're going to start

with just a simple single

cell with maybe.

Protein coding genes.

And then from that simple cell,

get everything you see in

plant and animal life here today.

Obviously there has to be a lot of, uh,

a real, a real lack of

for variation,

if you're going to get

everything you see today

out of single cells or simple cells.

So if it takes millions of

years to go from one species to the next,

and there's how many stages

of species to get to humans,

according to neo-Darwinism?

Well, first of all,

we have to be careful when we're,

the definition of a species is,

we just made it up.

How many jumps?

How many jumps are we talking here?

Oh, you're talking, like say to go from,

let's say a single cell to a human,

you'll be talking millions

of probably mutations.

I see.

I don't usually think in terms.

How old's the universe

according to humanism?

They would say you got to

start with the planet here

because that's quite a bit

younger than the universe.

But they would say the

planet would be roughly

four and a half billion with, you know,

you got to wait till it cools.

Maybe you got about four

billion years here.

So does even that little

math line up or do they say, well,

sometimes some of these

jumps were like really, really fast?

You would have to, no, it doesn't,

the more science advances,

the more we see that

Charles Darwin's nice quaint story,

and keep in mind he

published that before we

knew virtually anything about genetics.

There was a fellow named

Bendall doing some experiments,

and he became famous.

But that was just,

we didn't know anything about DNA, genes,

protein, nothing about that.

So when we knew nothing about the problem,

it didn't seem that

difficult to create a story

about how one species gradually changes.

now the word for species you

know you could usually

usually refers to something

that's reproductively kind

of isolated from other

organisms so that it'll

only reproduce with its own

kind so to speak

But that is, uh,

assumes a few things about

our knowledge of the limits

of species and so forth.

I wouldn't go so far as to

say one species could not evolve into an,

or vary into another

subspecies that

reproductively they're now isolated,

even though genetically

they might be identical.

I'm aware of one or two cases like that.

However, uh,

when you start getting to get

big changes.

We now know why we hit a wall.

We know why we're hitting that wall.

And every single experiment

to date that falsifies the

central prediction of Darwinism,

which is the variation is not limited.

We know why we're hitting a wall now.

And it's because if you want

to really move on to something different,

a different kind of

organism or one level up,

you're going to need

at the very least,

some novel protein coding genes.

That is a gene that codes

for a protein that has not

yet been used in other life forms.

Okay.

We'll get to this part later

because before we get there,

let's hear what he says

about the state of science

right now in terms of evolution.

Sure.

interpretable.

I don't really think he

means we see the evidence

for adaptation but not evolution.

That's not coherent.

I think what he means is we

see evidence for what we

would call microevolution,

but we don't see evidence

for what we would call macroevolution.

This is a commonly believed

thing in intelligent design circles.

And so microevolution,

we would talk about the way

a creature or a population

of creatures would change

relative to their environment.

If the environment gets drier,

those individuals who are

more drought tolerant will

outcompete the individuals

that require more water.

And so we'll see the

population change over time.

But he's saying we don't see

evidence for macroevolution,

which is the production of

new species from old species.

A monkey becoming a person.

Yeah.

We don't see big changes like that.

Now,

I don't want to bore your audience.

I am concerned that the

right way to address Tucker's challenge,

and as I said the last time

I was on your show,

when I heard him say it the first time,

I reached out to him and I said, you know,

you really ought to let me

talk to you about what's

actually going on here,

and he welcomed it.

We still haven't sat down to do it,

but nonetheless,

he's open to hearing that

he doesn't have it right, to his credit.

But here's the problem.

The correct response to

Tucker I do not believe

involves what most people

want me to do in response

to something like what Tucker said.

What do you think that is?

What do you think most people want?

I think people want the

career evolutionary

biologist to break out a

bunch of examples from

nature that make the case very,

very clear so that they can relax.

Tucker's concern isn't based in science,

and they can go back to

feeling comfortable that, you know,

the Darwinists have it well in hand.

I find this fascinating.

If you don't believe that

there is intelligence design,

if you believe that it's

what Darwin said it was,

And it's starting to crumble a little bit.

Um, what does that mean for your future?

Like I can assume that

people might be freaking

out that wait a second.

Like we need to solve this problem now.

Yeah.

And I'm what I want to point out.

One thing that's also

interesting here is that it, uh,

when you see people wanting, uh,

as Brett Weinstein is pointing out now,

keep in mind, I should clarify here,

Brett Weinstein does.

don't think believes that

intelligent design is the

way to go although we may

see that he's actually it's

it is gaining a lot of

ground so just to be just

to be honest representing

him but what I really

appreciate about him is

that he's he is honest he is

He talks about certain

things that he would not be

comfortable with doing where the average,

say, Darwinist is.

But when you want an answer

before science has delivered that answer,

what that tells you is that

there's some fundamental

underlying philosophical

reasons that are motivating you,

and it's not science.

When you want science to

comply with what you want so that you can,

as he says, remain comfortable...

then you have the

possibility of the corruption of science,

which he is pointing out to

some degree here in what

some of the more popular

Darwinists are doing online.

It's basically

misrepresenting science to

the audience so they can calm down,

remain comfortable in their

belief that everything

happened naturally here.

There's no ultimate, you know, whatever.

It's almost like they need a

lot of faith here, Kirk.

well it is it does boil down

when you start to talk

about philosophical um

philosophical goals and

philosophical beliefs you

faith you could it's almost

it's very difficult to

prove anything a hundred

percent so when you're

cannot prove something a

hundred percent faith

always steps in trust trust

that what you are the

direction you're going is

the right one and for many

people there's some

philosophical underpinnings

here driving them to want

to believe that there's a

natural explanation to this

And that does require that

they put their faith in something.

And in this case,

a lot of times it's science.

But really what they put

their faith in is the

underlying philosophical

viewpoints that they have

that want science to give

them the answer that they're looking for.

Well, it's not even science.

It's the theory that they're

basing their work on.

Because if it's not, like,

science is only a method.

It's not a religion.

It's a...

wait hold on important point

to make here when you said

it's not a religion

actually sheldon uh there

is something called

scientism and scientism is

you might not call it a

religion but you would

certainly call it a

philosophy it has all the

elements of yeah it has all

the elements of faith and

so forth but scientism is

the fundamental

presupposition that science

explains everything

And, you know,

you have to go deeper than

that if you want and say, well,

why would you,

what would motivate you to do this?

Because that itself is not a

scientific conclusion.

Rather, it's a philosophical perspective.

Science would never say we

explain everything.

That would be very bad science.

It's all settled, Kirk.

It's all settled.

Let's continue on this video.

Okay.

That's not where I am.

I could do that,

but I don't feel honorable doing that.

I think as a scientist,

I should not be in the

business of persuading people.

Uh, Kirk, can he do that?

Are there a lot of examples of revolution?

Uh, okay.

So, um,

Couple of things here.

Number one is when people attack evolution,

they need to be a little more specific.

And he kind of points this

out when he distinguished

between micro and macro.

Cause if you're studying genetics,

for example,

evolution is just defined as

variation or the population over time.

And of course that happens,

but he said that he can

prove macro evolution and

there are examples.

He just doesn't want to go there.

Well, OK,

the reason he doesn't want to go

there is because I think

he's going to basically

admit that that constitutes data,

but the data itself is not

sufficient to meet the

expectations of what the people want.

it's kind of for example you

can write you can I've got

our examples of this

article evolutionary

biological articles let's

say in the origin of life

where a lot of what I call

lack of data words are used

like probably presumably is

conceivable and so forth so

that's one way of doing it

and those are rhetorical

methods to persuade people

not scientific the

rhetorical and that's part

of what he's referring to

here he does not want to

He said the data should be

strong enough to persuade

people without me getting

involved using rhetorical methods.

But there's another problem.

It's not just the data that

supports your theory.

even more problematic is the

data that falsifies your theory.

And this is almost never talked about.

Let's say I got a high

school textbook from a local high school.

Kirk,

I'm going to interrupt you because

we're going to finish this video,

but that might be a good future episode.

I want you to be persuaded.

I want you to be persuaded by the facts.

I want them to persuade you,

but I don't think I'm

allowed to persuade you.

I think that it's a, um,

that it's effectively PR when, um,

I attempt to bring people

over to team Darwin further,

as I'm sure I've mentioned to you before,

I'm not happy with the

state of Darwinism as it

has been managed.

Just so you know,

I did speed up his voice here.

I'm kind of annoyed by it.

And I,

Although Tucker, I do not believe,

is right in the end.

There is a reason that the

perspective that he was

giving voice to is catching

on in twenty twenty five.

And it has to do with the fact that,

in my opinion,

the mainstream Darwinists

are telling a kind of lie

about how much we know and

what remains to be understood.

So by reporting that, yes.

Darwinism is true,

and we know how it works,

and people who aren't

compelled by the story are

illiterate or ignorant or whatever,

they are pretending to know

more than they do.

All that being said, let me say,

I think modern Darwinism is broken.

Yes,

I do think I know more or less how to

fix it.

I'm annoyed at my colleagues for, I think,

lying to themselves about

the state of modern Darwinism.

I think I know why that happened.

I think they were concerned

that a creationist

worldview was always a threat,

that it would reassert itself.

And so they pretended that

Darwinism was a more

complete explanation.

Why is that such a concern?

That's a rhetorical question.

Okay.

As it was presented than it ever was.

What is wrong with Darwinism?

Like,

what do you think that Darwinism is

doing itself a disservice by saying?

There are several different

things that are wrong with it.

The key one that I think is

causing folks in

intelligent design circles

to begin to catch up...

is that the story we tell

about how it is that

mutation results in

morphological change is incorrect.

This is a very hard thing to convey,

and I want to point out

that if the explanation for

creatures is Darwinian,

that does not depend on

anybody understanding it,

and it does not depend on

anybody being able to

phrase it in a way that it's intuitive.

So that's important,

and he'll go into a little bit more here.

But I think,

and you can tell me if I'm wrong,

but that's just any fact or any truth.

You don't necessarily need

to be able to explain it or prove it.

If it's true,

it's true regardless of

whether you're able to

explain it or prove it.

yeah I mean like say for

example my laptop computer

here it's got some uh

electronics in here now

I've I've I've studied

electronics but what's in

my laptop here is I can't

explain it I like I would

just be you know I can't

but it does not resistors

yeah of all transistors and

their own microprocessors

all that kind of stuff and

when it gets down to

telling you how much

current is running through

this versus that and when

I, you know, forget it.

I found that bad enough when

I was sitting in a lecture,

trying to solve microprocessor current,

whatever.

However, uh,

that doesn't mean my computer still works,

whether I understand it or not,

it still works.

And I can demonstrate that

the problem with Darwinism is that.

It's looking like when we

try and demonstrate like large scale,

when we want to speed it up by orders,

it's not happening.

It's not working.

It's like saying coming up

with a pizza box,

which is shaped like a

laptop and claiming that

this thing can do, uh, you know,

you can type on it and you can make all,

and then opening the pizza

box because people want a

demonstration and oops, um,

this isn't working very well.

And that's the problem.

All right, back to the video.

I think I can probably do a

decent job on those fronts.

But if you happened onto the Earth,

A hundred million years ago,

you would have found lots

of animals running around,

lots of plants growing.

You would have recognized

where you were and more or

less what was going on.

There's not a single

creature on the planet that

would have any idea what an

abstract thought was.

There would be no creature

that had any inkling that

there was even a question

about where all this had come from.

And Darwinism would still be the answer.

So somehow,

whether Darwinism is the answer

does not depend on anybody

knowing it or being able to explain it.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Here's the problem.

Let's say that we went into

the parking lot.

And in one parking space,

there's an excavator.

And in the next parking

space over is a Maserati.

Now,

let's say we took those two machines

and we tore them apart so

that we just had a stack of

the compounds that they were made out of,

right?

The rubber, the vinyl, the various metals,

all that stuff.

There would be differences

between the excavator and the Maserati,

right?

They would just be made of

some different stuff.

And then there'd be a lot of

stuff that they had in common.

And you could look at the

differences in the

materials that they're made out of,

and you could say, well,

the excavator is really

good at lifting materials

and moving them around,

and the Maserati is really

good at going fast on a paved surface.

And those differences are

due to the differences in

materials that they're made out of.

That would be wrong.

Probably,

you could take the list of

materials that an excavator

is made out of,

and you could give it to a

bunch of engineers, and you could say,

I want you to make a Maserati,

but you're limited to these materials.

And they could do it.

Wouldn't be quite as good,

because there'd be some

places where the ideal

material wasn't available

to them anymore.

But there's no reason you

couldn't make a Maserati

out of the stuff.

Or a sports car.

Right.

Yeah.

What that means is there are

chemical differences

between an excavator and a sports car,

but they're not the story

of the differences in what

those two creatures do.

The chemistry differences are incidental.

Now,

when we tell you that the differences

that a bat became a flying

mammal because it had a

shrew-like ancestor,

And that shrew-like ancestor

had a genome spelled out in

three-letter codons.

Those three-letter codons

specify amino acids,

of which there are twenty.

And the difference between

the bat and the shrew is

based in the differences in

the proteins that are

described by the genome.

We talked a lot about this in our...

or was there Rock Rockets

episode a few weeks ago?

Those of you who didn't see that,

go watch that.

Kirk basically shows that I

think what he's talking

about now is pretty much impossible.

But it's nice to hear an

evolutionary biologist from

the other side of the fence

explaining the same thing.

We are essentially saying

the difference between...

You were going to say?

Yeah, except the question is, well,

let's just finish here in a

moment before I say anything.

And the shrew is a chemical difference.

It's not a simple chemical

difference the way it was

when we were talking about

excavators and sports cars.

But nonetheless,

it's a biochemical difference, right?

The difference in the

spelling of its proteins

and structural proteins and

enzymes and all that stuff.

I don't believe that

mechanism is nearly

powerful enough to explain

how a shrew-like ancestor became a bat.

So what do you think is missing?

There's a whole layer.

Okay, is this something, like,

as he goes into this layer, I don't know,

did you see this part yet, Kirk?

I didn't see that part,

but you told me a little

bit about it ahead of time,

and I really like what you said.

Going up to this part where

he's saying he doesn't

think it's powerful enough.

No.

Is that a science?

Is that commonly understood in science?

This is not powerful enough.

There needs to be something more?

Or is this what his issue is

with the modern Darwinists?

That's part of his issue

with the modern Darwinists.

And I wouldn't say it's such

a big issue in biology

departments because most of

the time they're not really

doing experiments and

focusing on common descent or Darwinism.

But it is a problem that an

engineer picks up very rapidly.

And his example of an

excavator versus a Maserati

is an engineer grasps that, hey,

they've got the same raw materials here.

But we're going to have to reconstitute,

restructure.

We're going to have a plan.

That's the problem.

We've got to have a plan so

that we wind up with a

Maserati instead of an excavator.

And there's this higher

layer of design space where

you need some sort of an advanced plan.

But it gets way worse than this.

We'll just see what else he says here.

That is missing.

That allows...

evolution to explore design

space much more efficiently

than the mechanism that we invoke.

And the mechanism we invoke

is natural selection, adaptation,

mutation?

That's the one.

The mechanism that we invoke

is random mutation, which I believe in.

Random mutation happens.

Selection,

which chooses those variants

that are produced by

mutation and collects the

ones that give the creature an advantage.

There's nothing wrong with that story.

That story is true.

Okay.

Random mutations happen.

Selection collects the ones that are good.

And those collected

advantageous mutations

accumulate in the genome.

All of that is true.

What I'm arguing against is

the idea that that

transforms a shrew into a bat.

What you need to get a shrew

turned into a bat is a much

less crude mechanism.

Okay.

So what he's saying there is

microevolution can depend

on the random mutations.

Yep.

Yeah,

and I think it's unfortunate that

even the term evolution is

used for variation.

To me, it's just a rhetorical move,

but it's been made for

decades and decades to support Darwinism,

when in fact variation

would have been a more

accurate word to use there.

But there was an assumption

that variation led to macroevolution,

and therefore they thought

it was legit to use that

Now we're saying, wait a sec,

it doesn't seem legit at

all to call that evolution,

which is just horizontal variation,

when in fact there's the

vertical problem that

doesn't seem to be reproducible at all.

Whereby selection,

which is ancient at the

point that you have shrews,

explores design space

looking for ways to be that

are yet undiscovered more

systematically than random chance.

Okay, so there's nothing.

Tell me if I'm wrong.

I'm probably wrong.

There's nothing in the tests

and the research that's

been done to say that there

is a design space, is there?

Well,

you've got to kind of define design

space because it really

depends what it is.

There's different levels of design space.

So there'd be a design space of, let's say,

what sort of

three-dimensional proteins

are there out there that we can use?

They're kind of like very

complex Lego blocks to build stuff with.

That's one level.

And that might be the level

of the excavator when

you're looking at

standardized parts between

the Maserati and the excavator,

like nuts and bolts.

But there's another higher

level of design space,

and that is we want an

excavator or we want a Maserati.

We don't want an excavator.

So how do we go from this to that?

And you have to have some sort of normally,

in fact,

all the empirical evidence

supports the idea that

you're going to have to

have a team of engineers on this problem,

intelligent engineers, very intelligent.

to go from an excavator to

Maserati or vice versa.

And this is the, this is this, this,

what he called design space, this plan.

We have to know where we're going.

We can't just randomly start

assembling parts.

If we just randomly throw

parts together and raw

materials and stuff,

you will never get a

Maserati or anything resembling even,

you probably won't even get

the excavator back out of

that pile of stuff.

So that's the problem.

But let me just give you one

specific example.

Explain my garage.

Yeah,

your garage and mine is an example of

what happens when you don't have a

you know, a plan in force that's made fun,

but let me give you one example here.

So, uh,

we're all built out of what we call

proteins and there's

thousands of different protein families,

and you can essentially

define a protein family as some,

as a group of proteins that

all basically have the three same,

same three-dimensional structure.

And that structure is

determined by the sequence

of the amino acids that he

mentioned there.

And that sequence is, in turn,

determined by the

information encoded in the

genome or the DNA for that

particular gene.

Now, let's back up a bit.

This isn't a matter of fortuitously,

after the fact, say, hey,

we got these proteins.

But if we started there,

we'd have different proteins.

We still have something that works.

Amazing.

No, that's not how it works.

this keep in mind that this

three-dimensional structure

is determined by the

sequence and that is

determined the structure is

determined by physics the

laws of physics so the

moment the universe comes

into existence that moment

you also have the laws of

physics coming into

existence and at that

moment long before from an

evolutionary perspective

here long before you ever

have the first life form

all the sequences that will

code for stable

three-dimensional proteins are determined

And so you have this design

space of three-dimensional proteins.

Just imagine an ocean with

islands sticking up here and there.

And that's determined the

instant the universe and

the laws of physics come into existence.

Would Brett argue that too?

or would he yeah okay oh

yeah it's a it's one of the

um uh doc what did you call

it dogmas of our central

teachings of protein

science is that sequence

determines structure uh

anthonson was the scientist

who basically discovered

that that's your

fundamental sequence

determined structure and

the sequence there's only

twenty different uh let's

call them symbols twenty

different amino acids

So basically it's,

this is what you got to work with.

Twenty different amino acids,

special kind.

They, they all,

but we don't get too technical here,

but twenty and it's

depending on how they're organized.

that'll determine the

physical forces between them,

which in turn determine

their stable three-dimensional structure.

And most sequences will not give you that.

To be an example here, you will find,

and this was my area of

specialty when I did my PhD

in biophysics.

I looked at protein structure.

How do we measure the information?

How do we estimate that?

What does it do in

terms of three-dimensional

structure here's the here's

the with the numbers I was

getting and since then

that's been confirmed by

two other scientific teams

using different methods

we're all converging on the

same rough ballpark figure

here but by and large these

physics determines which

sequences will give you

these three-dimensional

structures on on average

for an average protein

When he talks about searching design space,

if you're going to do an

evolutionary search,

you've got to find an island that,

let's say, was one meter square.

You would have to sift

through an ocean that's the

size of ten with

thirty-four zeros after it,

number of universes before

you found another island.

That's how rare sequences

that give you a stable

three-dimensional fold are.

In other words, most sequences, almost

Almost all of them will be junk.

They won't give you any fitness advantage.

They'll be lethal, actually,

because you'll get

misfolded proteins clumping together.

They're so rare that you will never, ever,

ever find a protein by the

best supercomputers we have today,

unless you cheat, of course.

And that is you start

feeding the supercomputers

information about the laws

of physics and chemistry.

and then they can start

building their own.

But that's an example of

intelligent design in action.

So the design space is enormous.

The evolutionary processes

are far too slow.

It's kind of like a computer

that only does one process,

let's say in the case of E. coli bacteria,

every thirty minutes.

Can you imagine if you had a

computer running so you

don't measure it in

megahertz or gigahertz or tera,

you're measuring it in

terms of one operation

every thirty minutes.

And that's basically a

generation of bacteria.

You're talking about like

sending a bunch of

chimpanzees with and saying

and hoping they find they

play around in that pile of

rubble and build a Maserati

That's not a,

that actually is an overly

optimistic scenario,

vastly over optimistic.

So this design space,

this plan for how to put

together the amino acids.

That's the lower level design space.

And then what you've got

these three-dimensional Lego blocks,

so to speak,

how to build yourself a

Maserati or an excavator.

That's even a higher level plan.

And as an engineer who was

involved in experimental test engine,

aircraft engines.

There's an enormous amount.

There's millions of dollars spent.

And dozens of engineers

spent just to get the plan figured out,

the bugs ironed out.

And a part of the problem,

which we haven't really looked at it.

Here's these mutations,

which he says basically is

the driving force to help for change.

But most mutations,

at least in the protein

coding areas are going to be damaging.

They're going to be negative.

They're going to be deleterious.

In fact, I got some numbers here.

What was it?

Roughly what?

And the estimates vary,

but for the protein coding regions here,

let me just take a wee peek.

It's going to be something

like seventy five to eighty

five percent of mutations

will be harmful.

That's in protein coding genes.

Ten to fifty percent.

You'll see there's overlap

here and these estimates will be neutral.

and less than one percent

are beneficial so somehow

you've got to go from an

excavator to a maserati and

you got this plan you want

to build the maserati but

there's somebody messing

things up and they mess it

up let's say seventy

percent of the time they

just randomly do something

that messes you back but

only less than one percent

of the time are you able to

catch that mistake and so

the the percentage of

errors building up to get

that maserati or anything

else at use is is

is increasing by at least

one order of magnitude.

So what I'm hearing is this

explains politics.

It's just a mess.

I think for politics,

you've got to start

bringing in human nature,

not intelligence necessarily.

Well, that's what I mean.

It's the negative part of

all the problems.

Okay,

let's go back to Brett here for a

little bit more.

And what would be that?

What is that force?

It's not a force.

What is that desire?

I believe there's a kind of

information stored in

genomes that is not in triplet codon form,

that is much more of a type

that would be familiar to a designer,

either of machines or a programmer.

What we did was we took the

random mutation model and

We recognized that it was Darwinian,

which it is,

and we therefore assumed that

it would explain anything

that we could see that was

clearly the product of

Darwinian forces on the

basis of those random mutations,

and we skipped the layer in

between in which selection

has a different kind of

information stored in the

genome that is not triplet

codon in nature.

So there's an information

stored in the genome that

is motivating it to seek new forms?

Nope, not motivating, allowing it.

Allowing it.

So what's the motivation to

seek new forms?

Oh, the motivation was there.

It's primordial.

So the point is, let me try by analogy.

Okay.

Darwinists will tell you

that evolution cannot look forward.

It can only look backward.

And there's a way in which

that's just simply true.

On the other hand,

a Darwinist will also tell

you that you are a product

of evolution and you can look forward.

right?

So if evolution can't look forward,

but it can build a creature that can,

then can evolution look forward?

I think it effectively can.

So my point is that random

mutation mechanism is in a

race to produce new forms

that are better adapted to

the world than their ancestors.

Um,

Is there a brain behind or

mind behind this?

Like he's saying it's in a race.

It's like, well,

why what's assuming what

he's saying is true.

Why would there be a race?

Well, I can't hear you to Kirk.

You're oh, you're muted.

uh okay I found my cursor

that's the problem with

having too many screens you

forget where what screen is

my cursor on um yeah there

essentially there there are

different types of racist

going on here one simple

example to understand would

be a scientist in the us

that will knock out a gene

uh with maybe just one

mutation and then see how

long it takes to just by

random mutation selection to

get back into operation

again they don't knock two

out in the same gene and so

forth but what he finds is

that when I when I

mentioned there's damaging

mutations so let's say you

knock out two you you you

take two amino acids in a

particular gene remember

that's what you've done is

you've changed the

information note that he's

using the term information here

Just as an aside,

there is only one thing

that science has ever

observed in a repeatable,

reproducible way that can

create significant levels of information.

and that is intelligence.

That's all science has,

that's actually

reproducible and testable and so forth.

But in this case, in the experiment,

we're not using

intelligence when that

scientist mutates one amino acid,

the gene no longer works,

and he finds that after a

certain number of generations,

it's back up running again,

because that one there,

where the mistake was,

accidentally got mutated

back to what it should be.

And that happened before the

damaging mutations damaged

the gene so badly that even

if you mutated that one back,

there's now three other errors to fix.

So what he found is that you get two,

virtually impossible for it

to get fixed before the

damage incurred elsewhere

is so great that even if

you do fix those two mutations,

there's now five or six

other ones that are now, in other words,

the rate of damages is increasing faster

than the repairs.

And the only way around that

is have enough going on

that one accidentally gets

repaired before it gets so

badly damaged it won't work anymore.

And the moment it works,

it cuts in and it confers a

real good fitness advantage

to the organism because it

really needed that gene

that got temporarily shut down.

And then it can replenish the population.

So there is a race in that sense.

I am not sure that's the kind...

Well, let's,

I'm not sure what else you'd

be talking about a race.

There's basically damage

that's happening faster

than re than beneficial

mutations way faster.

Probably fifty to sixty times faster.

It can enhance its own ability to search,

right?

If you lose your keys,

you don't search randomly, right?

You go through a systematic

process of search,

and that systematic process

of search results in you

finding your keys sooner

than you would otherwise.

Okay, so I'm sorry to stop it on this one,

but it's like, because my mind is logic.

That's an intelligent way to

find your keys.

You don't do it randomly.

You do it systematically.

The only like the main

resource that Darwinists

would appeal to for a

non-random process here.

is when is basically natural

selection or the fitness advantage.

That's so strong that it

begins to occupy more than

its share of the population

and therefore pass its

genes on more often than

the other competitors

within the population.

So that's where it becomes the, the, the,

the direction it's going to

go is non-random.

In other words,

if there is a real fitness

advantage over here,

let's say you repair that gene.

then it's definitely going

to go in that direction.

That's not going to be.

But the problem is the mutation itself,

the methodology there is random.

You're just going to have to

wait until that gene is

repaired accidentally

before the damage where

it's getting destroyed

accidentally is too far

gone to actual repair.

It's kind of like trying to

repair a Maserati.

while three other guys are

working on it with sledgehammers.

And you've got to hurry up

with your repair because

they don't stop the

sledgehammers until you've

got the repair done.

But thank goodness if you

have a hundred million

Maseratis and you've got

teams working on all of them,

one of them might get

repaired before the

three-team sledgehammer

crew renders the thing so badly damaged,

even the repair is not

going to help anymore.

And then obviously that

Maserati will take over all

of the other millions that

have... It'll beat them in a race,

that's for sure.

And if that's the defining factor,

the other ones are just

going to keep sitting there.

So the one that gets

repaired... There's all

these other ones in the way.

All right, let's keep going.

We should expect evolution

to find every trick it can

access to increase the rate

at which it discovers forms

that would be useful in the habitat.

Why?

Why can we expect that?

well I mean one thing I

don't like about what he's

saying here what it's in

its best interest like well

you see he's using design

language here and that is a

problem in darwinism is

that it appears so

obviously designed and some

darwinists will say yeah we

use this design language

way too much and it

actually confuses the

discussion here like when

he says evolution will find

basically uh you just gotta

look at evolution let's call it variation

and selection and mutation

stuff you just got to look

at as a physical system

that's mindless and it's

not going to necessarily

find every trick in the

book it's not and

especially if those tricks

are so rare that you need

ten to the thirty-fifth

power of universes to find

one just one so I I think

Basically,

you can model it using a genetic

algorithm where there might

be a lot of solutions.

And in a simple problem,

you might find all of the

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