Evolution theory has its famed icons — peppered moths, Darwin’s finches, Haeckel’s embryos, Miller-Urey… (See Jonathan Wells’s book Icons of Evolution for more.) Joshua Swamidass is a Washington University computational biologist, theistic evolutionist, and ID critic who has strained to add a new icon to the list: cancer.

He’s got four arguments for why the dreaded disease demonstrates the innovative powers of Darwinian evolution, powers that advocates of intelligent design question. In a previous ID the Future podcast, biologist Ann Gauger talked with Sarah Chaffee about the first two of Dr. Swamidass’s arguments. In a new episode they discuss the final two, focusing on convergence and neutral theory.

Download the episode by clicking here:

No, really, Swamidass is serious. Cancer the destroyer shows the creative potency of unguided evolutionary mechanisms. This has actually been the subject of intense discussion over at the BioLogos website for a month now, with a 183 posts in a thread on their Open Forum page. Quite remarkable.