Wow, I’ve now watched the long segment in a new Joe Rogan podcast with evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein about evolution and intelligent design. It runs from 01:51 to 2:36, turning in the end to the threat posed by AI’s evolution. I’ll get it cued up to the start for you. 

When Stephen Meyer was on the Rogan show, it was a landmark for reaching an enormous audience, and this is a fitting follow-up. They discuss ID’s critique of and alternative to Darwinism, exemplified by Meyer’s work — and the work of many other scientists in the ID sphere as well, I’d add. 

Another Darwinian Mechanism

Weinstein says he is “sympathetic” to ID but rejects it, which we knew. He says the current version of Darwinism, however, is “broken” and the evolutionary mainstream “lies” to itself, and to us. He alludes to another Darwinian mechanism operating on top of the standard one of random mutation and natural selection:

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. [I believe] that 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. [Emphasis added.]

In another words, I think he’s saying, the other information is in a “meta” relationship to the familiar material genome, the genetic information instantiated in DNA and other known physical epigenetic features in the cell. 

Dr. Weinstein is a deep thinker, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. But this other information, in his view, is also material in nature, not spiritual — which might be the difference between Weinstein’s thinking and, say, that of Platonist ID scientists like Richard Sternberg and Günter Bechly who posit an “immaterial genome,” occupying that meta role.

Remarkable Candor

In any event, the candor of Weinstein’s takedown of fellow evolutionists is remarkable:

[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. So 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.

More:

There are several different things that are wrong with [Darwinism]. 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.

Hence the need for his other Darwinian mechanism. As to the ID scientists:

I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they’re on the right track. I’m open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I’ve seen no evidence of that universe myself. I’m open to it. If it happens, I will look at it.

About Meyer, Weinstein says:

You’ve had Stephen Meyer on. He’s a scientist who’s quite good, and he’s spotted that the mechanism in question [the standard Darwinian one] isn’t powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains. And so he’s catching up, but that’s really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can’t yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing. 

A Tiger Designer

Weinstein’s critique of ID comes down to the contention that it isn’t parsimonious enough:

If you take the intelligent design folks and you extrapolate from what they seem to be suggesting, they do not escape a necessity for a Darwinian explanation. Even if the creatures of Earth were designed on a drawing board by a creature that wanted to make them, that creature has to have come from somewhere. And the only explanation that has ever been proposed for where such a creature could have come from is Darwinian evolution. So to me, the problem with intelligent design, the most fundamental one, is that even if it were true, you’ve solved the problem of explaining Earth’s creatures at a cost that is a million times worse in terms of parsimony. If it’s hard to explain a tiger through Darwinian processes, it is that much harder yet to explain a tiger designer. 

I’m afraid that sounds a bit like the “Who made God?” objection, which is not a model of philosophical sophistication. Regardless, this fascinating discussion is another milestone for intelligent design. As a bonus, the podcast starts with the USAID scandal, which is not unrelated to subjects covered here, as I’ve explained.

It’s a fresh airing of the ID/evolution debate on the most popular podcast in the world, with an evolutionary biologist who understands the case for design and states it fairly. As a colleague was saying at a staff meeting today, these milestones lately seem to come on an almost weekly basis.