Paul Nelson’s presentation from the Dallas Conference on Science and Faith is up. His subject is butterflies and metamorphosis. It’s wonderful and can be viewed below. I highly recommend it!

The caterpillar dissolves itself into what looks like undifferentiated goo and then rebuilds itself as a butterfly. It’s hard to see how materialist science could ever hope to explain what is directing metamorphosis, and how. After all, what is the “it” (in “itself”) that carries through from beginning to end in the process? The creature’s “self” seems to be lost along the way, in the goo, only to be reconstituted in this new form. I can see how Richard Sternberg’s way of thinking, summarized in my book Plato’s Revenge, could explain this. It appears to be a demonstration case for the immaterial genome.

In the book, I cite Alfred Russel Wallace who held a view similar to Sternberg’s, though without the structure of the latter’s technical and mathematical argument. In the 2011 book Metamorphosis, which I edited, we include an excellent essay by Michael Flannery clarifying that Wallace, co-discoverer with Darwin of the theory of natural selection, indeed held that the teleology in butterfly metamorphosis defies materialist explanations. He collected 23,000 butterflies, as Flannery reminds us, in his lifetime as a naturalist and thus knew something about them.