Cspan2. Youre watching book tv, next, steven meyer said down with book tv and freedom fest in las vegas to talk about his latest book. In the book he discusses the mysteries surrounding the origins of the animals that appeared during the cambrian explosion. Over 5 billion years ago. This is about half an hour. Steven meyer of the Discovery Institute, author of darwins death, the explosive origin of animal life, the case for intelligent design. Dr. Meyer, what was darwins death . A great place to start the conversation because that is what i do in the book and my toes story about his own theory and what has become of it, the way has drawn up to become illustrative of a major crisis. The doubt that he had was about something called the cambrian explosion which is the geological appearance of most of the major groups of animals in ag logical time called the cambrian period 530 million years ago. Antar when was aware of this problem, and in the origin of species he invested and a knowledge that it was a problem. Basically the problem is, he understood that life should unfold in a slow and gradual weight. He depicted the history of life as accidental, a branching tree in which the base of the tree, the track of the tree represented the first symbol, onecelled organisms. All the terminals represented all the branches of life that we see today. Of the connecting branches represented all the intermediate forms should have arisen throughout the times. He also thought that that process should occur very slowly because is mechanism of Natural Selection acting on random variation also had to act very slowly. The variation to would be small, minute, incremental. If there were huge or big that weve result in the form of animals that could not survive, and therefore the process of Natural Selection and variation had to work slowly and gradually and yet what he witnessed and assigned to set the time new was that the first major group of complex animals came on the scene fully formed, very abruptly in the sedimentary layers. This is contrary to what he thought the picture of life should be and also contrary to the way his mechanism of Natural Selection as he conceived it, as it should act. So it was a puzzle to him. Therefore, the cambrian explosion was a valid objection to that new theory entertained. That was is doubt. What i do in the book is still what has become of that. Right in the origin of species, it was one of the things that he expressed very modestly as far as the limitations of the theory. I open the book by saying, his masterpiece, he thought he had explained every clue but one. The cambrian explosion was the one big thing that he thought he knew it he had not yet explained. He had an idea about what might later explain it. He thought that eventually there would find that sequence of intervening forms in a lower per cambrian strata, as i explained in the book, subsequently they find it intensified the mystery rather than alleviate it. Where did the name cambrian come from . One of the names of the geological layers. A place in wales. Came refines, falsifies all around the world, the most famous, one in southern china. I wanted to ask you why you included pictures. Welcome im telling the story of what happened. And there are really two mysteries that address in the buck. One is the mystery of the industrial fossils, and that mystery has become more acute because of the subsequent fossil finds that have been made since darwins time. He is expected to find the missing ancestral lower precambrian layers, but what has been found instead is more cambrian, new forms that were not known in no ones time, each of which in turn or most of which in turn lacked any ancestral or discernible connection to those presumed ancestors. So the mysteries become more acute for that reason but also more acute for a couple of other reasons. One, the amount of time and with the most explosive time of the cambrian explosion has gradually strunt down to about five to 6 million years. There is scene in one of the stages of the cambrian periods between 13 and 16 new animal files come into the rock record very suddenly which makes it more difficult to explain the origin of all the new form a structure. In the other thing that is making history more acute is that for a long time people thought, maybe were not finding the missing ancestral forms because there were too soft, soft body creatures rather than hard bodied creatures that are easier to fossilize. Maybe there were too small. There was this idea that the missing industrials or artifacts of our incomplete sampling of the fossil record, but in that same southern chinese fossil location, paleontologists have found in the lower procambium strata, beneath the strata that documents the sudden appearance of the major animal forms, they found a strange small microscopic and soft tissue and all. And that really is a mystery because if shows that the environment was suited to preserving the ancestral forms of the other forms of relaxing. And yet they were not found. And so that really puts to rest the idea that we did not find them because we were either not looking hard enough or because the environment in which the fossils were fossilized was not suitable. So therefore, steven meyer, we have the big mystery. Yes. How do you explain it. One other thing that i should say because it has two parts. The first part is the mystery of the fossils. But the book addresses is really the deeper mystery. That is the mystery of essentially an engineering problem. How would you build an animal for any of these, 20, 23 some odd fellows the first arrive in the fossil record, one of the most famous, the arthur class including critters like trilobites, little fossils, it is i will hold it up to the camera. It is really, one of the Amazing Things is that they have compound eyes. And in this particular fossil you can actually see the compound structure in the eyes. And paleontologists are where the explicit functional immigration, function complexity by from the very dawn of them live. And that raises the question quite independent of all the missing ancestors, what mechanism could build something as complex, in particular in the amount of time all of the fossil record. What i do in the book is examine not just the darwinian mechanism, but the modern new darwinian, it does not emphasize National Selection and variation. Emphasizes mutations in genetic material the way that modern evolutionary theories would understand the mechanism that generates large scale change. And what i show in the book is there are a bunch of reasons to doubt that that mechanism as the Creative Power that has long been a charity to it, one of which is what we now know about the importance of information, a genetic and other forms of biological information to the maintenance and to the construction of animal forms. I used to teach a lot of freshmen as a college professor. What did you teach . The philosophy of science. Would ask them, if you want to give a new function on your computer. We were talking a lot about the information. And they would immediately give up the techie generation. A program, construction, software, all of which are correct answers. Well, it turns out that the same thing is true in life. If you want to generate life in the first place, you have to have affirmation in the form of dna, proteins that make life bible. You want to build a new form of life, and this is the darling is trying to do, try to explain, you also have to have actually been some digital code. You need tissues, organs, their for new types of cells. Each new type of cell, new protein, the proteins require information. So the cambrian explosion is not just an explosion of new forms of structure, new animals but an explosion of affirmation, of digital code and other forms of biological information. And what i show in the book is that Natural Selection and random mutation is a singularly inept mechanism for generating new information. Mutation cameron and changes in code, we know from our own experience tests of the great information, not generate new Software Programs are operating systems. And you know, we start mutating is genetic text. You will degrade that information and mathematically turns out to be extremely improbable the you would never be able to find new genes are proteins in the time allowed by the evolutionary process. Rated you teach . Went with university in washington state. What kind of colleges that . Liberal arts college, christian oriented. Yes. Where you get your ph. D. . Cambridge university. The philosophy of science, particularly biology. Did my dissertation on the origin of life and on our wednesday at the of scientific reasoning which is allied get to the idea of intelligent design, oddly enough. And your subtitle includes the words intelligent design. How do you define intelligent design . Great question. Intelligent design is the idea that there are certain features of a biological system that are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an a process such as random selection of mutation. Maybe the best way to understand , saying what it is it is my understanding the contrast to that particular meeting of evolution that it was formulated to challenge. Different meanings of evolution. One of them is the idea of change over time. Knowing these challenges, the idea that life now is different than what it was a long time ago a book, cambrian explosion is all about that. Another is the idea of common and just to have common ancestry. The third meeting is the idea that and im directed, guided process, mainly Natural Selection, acting on random variations of mutations is sufficient to produce both a new form and structure that we see a rising, but also the appearance of design that almost all bylaws is recognized. Their modern spokesman the great spokesman for modern near darwinism said this, biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose. And for dawkins antonio darwinian some classical darwinian is, the key word is here appearing. Many systems look designed, but are not really designed because there is not guided, and directed mechanism. Random mutations that can mimic the powers of the designing intelligence, but which is not itself designed are guided in any way. We have designed. So intelligent design is challenging that idea. The appearance of design in many cases is real. The best explanation for that based on what we know about the cause and effect structure of the bull, the evidence we see in biology is the actual designing of intelligence. The purpose of intelligence behind the process that gave rise to life. So is intelligent design in ideological terms . Is the scientific term, but it may have larger deal multiplications. Based on science and Scientific Evidence and the scientific reasoning, even if it has larger implications. The debate yesterday, one of the issues, you are going to be giving an answer that has larger world you implications are challenging somebody elses world you. Ostensive a question of what is called the prime reality of a benefit to thought metaphysical question. The thing from which Everything Else comes of the process from which Everything Else comes. Darwinian evolution of done it. Underacted, and guided material process. The idea of intelligent design, the purpose of a telescope. Supports, for a sample, monotheistic interpretations of the natural world, but it is not proof of that demand is not based on the logical proposition, for example creation. Pace 391, reasons to regard intelligent design as scientific theory. You write, many scientists and philosophers regard to stability as an important feature of scientific inquiry and intelligent design is testable in three specific and into related. Let me back up on that one as well. The first thing that is important to understand, and looking at these two ministries, ancestral fossils and the mystery of how you build an animal to my show particularly in the second part of the book that the neo darwinian mechanism maxed lacks the Creative Power necessary to generate these complex animals. Guest look at the clues that are left behind and then infer from those clues back to the causes of the events youre trying to explain. And the method of reasoning that darwin used is as a name, its called the method of multiple competing hypotheses or the method of inferring to the best explanation. Where the best explanation, according to darwin, is one in which youre citing a cause which is known to have the power to produce the effect in question, the effect youre trying to exb plain. Now, when i realized that was how daughterwomen was reasoning, i realized that was this critical question of the origin of information. Evolutionary theory has, i believe, come to an impasse, and i show why in the book. But its not the case that there isnt, that there is a cause of which we know that is capable of generating information. In other words, there is a cause that meets darwins key criterion of a best explanation, a cause which is known from our uniformlyrepeated experience in the present to produce the crucial thing were trying to explain. If the thing were trying to explain is information, what is it we know from the basis of all scientific reasoning about what it takes to generate information . One information scientist said the creation of new information is habitually associated with conscious activity. We know from experience that minds generate information. If we look at a piece of software or a section of a book, a paragraph in a book or headline in a newspaper or even information embedded in a radio signal and we trace it back to its ultimate source, we always come to a mind, not a material process. So whenever we see information, we immediately infer that a mind played a role. Now, it isnt just an explosion of form and structure, its an explosion of information. We should be looking for a cause that is intelligent design. Intelligent design explains that because it provides a causeally adequate explanation for the phenomenon in question which is an explosion of functional information in the cambrian period. Host how has intelligent design been portrayed in the media . Guest well, we advocates have been portrayed as a form of creationism, as a religiouslymotivated idea. I remember doing an interview on nightline, and the nightline people came out and told us how interested they were in the scientific basis of the work we were doing, and i waxed eloquent about digital code and molecular machines and the circuit try thats involved in the development of animals, and after about an hour and a half then a voice from new york chimed in and wanted to know, well, who is the resigner . Designer . Who is the designer . And i said, well, we cant tell that from the theory of intelligent design, we can just tell from the evidence that some mind of some kind was responsible. Thats what you can tell by analyzing the evidence on the basis of our uniform and repeated experience. But he kept pressing, and he wanted to know what i thought from my personal religious beliefs. I said, well, sure, i think, ultimately, that god is the explanation, because i happen to be a threist, and not all intelligent design advocates are. The nightline person had three words for me, i think its god. They had a take on this, a way they wanted to portray in this from the beginning, so the media has often tried to portray this as a religiouslymotivated idea, and i understand why the media sometimes portrayed it that way. But it misses a crucial distinction. Its the distinction between the basis of the idea and its possible implications. Intelligent design is based on Scientific Evidence, the presence of digital code in cells, the presence of circuitry in the programs that are responsible for animal development, the presence of molecular machines, and its based on a standard method of historical scientific reasoning which darwin himself used. Having concluded using that evidence and that method that there is evidence of design in nature, that then raises a larger question, philosophical question, and that is about the identity of the designer. People may answer that different ways. So the theory of intelligence design is based on science, but it raises these larger philosophical and theological questions that may even have theological implications, but thats separate from the theory itself. And the media typically try to conflate those or maybe have inadvertently conflated those, and that has portrayed to the public the idea of a kind of, of an idea of something, a kind of biblical fundamentalism or something behind intelligent design. Thats really not what it is. An inference from bioroj call evidence biological evidence. Host now, stephen meyer, here on booktv weve talked with professors, religious professors, science professors who when we asked how long has man kind been on the earth, the answer was literally 6,000 years. Is that an Accurate Answer . No. And its also not with the theory of intelligent design. Youre asking about the difference between intelligent design and creationism. There are two main differences. Creationism is based system logically on its belief in the bible. Its starting point is an interpretation of the genesis text, and then theres some kind of deduction from that to what we ought to see in the natural world. Its also an idea about the age of the earth, the particular interpretation of the genesis text that says that the earth is very recent, the universe is very young, and the theory of intelligent design is not a neary about the age of the theory about the age of the earth, its about whether the design is real or marrily a merely apparent, and its not the biblical text or any religious document, its the evidence we find in biology and in related fields. So its an inference from biological evidence, not a deduction or interpretation of scripture. Host is intelligent design, as youve portrayed it, taught in Public Schools . Guest not very often. I think we have actually discouraged people from trying to bring intelligent design into Public Schools at the secondary level, High School Level and below for the simple reason it just immediately becomes enmeshed in these complicated churchstate jurisprudence issues. There was a train wreck of a case in dover, 2005. We were you urging the School District not to try to get intelligent design into the schools, and we got blamed for what they did. We were actually asking them not to do it. I declined the opportunity to testify as an Ex