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Explore Intelligent Design in Molecular Biology with Douglas Axe at DiscoveryU

Photo source: Discovery Institute.

Dive deep into the wonders of molecular biology this spring with CSC Senior Fellow Dr. Douglas Axe as your guide. Starting today, Axe will be presenting a new on-demand video course at Discovery Institute’s DiscoveryU e-learning platform.

Tuition for the course is $100, but for a limited time only, you can get 30 percent off by using the discount code axesubscriber30. The code expires on April 30, 2021. (If you are a donor to Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, watch for an email that gives you an even steeper discount as our “thank you” for your support.)

“This is going to be a course on the case for intelligent design from molecular biology and from common sense,” says Axe, who serves as Maxwell Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University.

Undeniable Design

Axe’s self-paced course is titled “Douglas Axe Investigates Molecular Biology and Intelligent Design,” and it consists of 40 short video lectures plus quizzes. If you enjoyed Axe’s popular book Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition that Life is Designed, you will definitely enjoy his new course, especially if you want to delve deeper into the science through easy-to-understand lectures.

In his course, Axe investigates proteins and how they work, the genetic code, gene recruitment, population genetics, natural selection, and much more. Along the way, he explains why natural selection can’t explain the “arrival of the fittest”; what Twitter can teach us about evolution; and what paper airplanes have to do with evolution. Axe concludes his course by discussing the “universal design intuition” and his argument for intelligent design from “functional coherence.” 

“Stupid Design”?

Axe also devotes a lecture to scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson’s objection to intelligent design based on supposedly “stupid design” in nature. Tyson’s claim that nature is filled with examples of “stupid design” is perhaps one of the most often-repeated objections to intelligent design, but Axe thinks the objection itself is rather stupid. In fact, he think it reeks of desperation. He says it’s as though critics recognize that the evidence against accidental life is so overwhelming that they “desperately look for things they can throw up as counter examples,” no matter how weak.

Although he is now a faculty member at Biola University, Axe served as a research scientist at the University of Cambridge and the Cambridge Medical Research Council Centre for several years after earning his PhD from Caltech. His research, which examined the functional and structural constraints on the evolution of proteins and protein systems, has been featured in many scientific journals, including the Journal of Molecular Biology. His research was supported by funding from CSC donors while Axe was still “under cover” and not publicly identified as a supporter of intelligent design. 

Axe’s new course is the third installment of a series of DiscoveryU courses featuring top ID scientists presenting their best arguments. Previously released courses featured Michael Behe and Stephen Meyer