How to Celebrate Darwin Day When “Modern Darwinism is Broken”

Note: This transcript is auto-generated.

[00:00:12] Andrew McDiarmid: Welcome to Idea the Future. I’m your host, Andrew McDiarmid. Well, my guest today is Dr. Casey Luskin to discuss the phenomenon of Darwin Day and how the current status of neo Darwinism reflects on this annual celebration of Charles Darwin’s contributions to science.

For those who don’t yet know him, Dr. Luskin is Associate Director of Discovery Institute’s center for Science and Culture. He’s a scientist and an attorney with graduate degrees in science and law, giving him expertise in both the scientific and legal dimensions of the debate over evolution. He holds a PhD in geology from the University of Johannesburg and earned a law degree from the University of San Diego, where he focused on First Amendment law and education law and environmental law. His BS And Ms. Degrees in Earth Sciences are from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied evolution extensively at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Dr. Luskin has been a California licensed attorney since 2005, practicing primarily in the area of evolution education in public schools and defending academic freedom for scientists who face discrimination because of their support for intelligent design. Kasey, welcome back.

[00:01:25] Dr. Casey Luskin : Great to be with you, Andrew. It’s that time of the year again. It’s Darwin Day, February 12th. So it’s fun to talk about this with you.

[00:01:31] Andrew McDiarmid: Yes, yes. Happy Darwin Day. Hey, I figured we could just get together and have a conversation about this. I mean, we see it pop up on the calendar and, you know, we do all sorts of things related to it. But I just wanted to talk to you today about it in more detail. Every year, on the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, February 12, people put together events and projects that celebrate Darwin’s work and legacy. And this has been going on for a while now. Darwin died in 1882, but in 1909, these kinds of celebrations kicked into high gear when hundreds of scientists gathered in Cambridge to celebrate his achievements and discuss the implications of recent discoveries. That year also marked the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 50th anniversary of the publication of his landmark book, on the Origin of Species. And since then, these annual festivities have continued, with obviously a very big splash happening in 1959, the centennial marking 100 years since the publication of on the Origin of Species. In the modern era, the phrase Darwin Day caught on, along with all manner of creative ways of celebrating and promoting Darwin’s theory of evolution to new generations of scientists, students, and the general public.

So, Casey, what’s your earliest recollection of a Darwin Day?

[00:02:50] Dr. Casey Luskin : I don’t know my earliest recollection was I was two years old, my mother’s womb. I’m not sure if I remember my first time hearing about Darwin Day, but I can tell you when Darwin Day really started to grow popular and that was directly correlated with the rise of the New Atheist movement in the mid to late 2000s. I think that the first time that I really started to hear Darwin Day being talked about in the media, in the world, was probably the year 2006. And 2006 was the year that the New Atheist movement started to grow. John Brockman, who was the literary agent for Richard Dawkins after the Dover trial, I recall seeing him seeing something I read from him saying that he told Dawkins, after the Dover trial, now’s the time for you to publish your manuscript on the God Delusion. And the God Delusion, of course, was this really just caustic book that threw everything that every atheist had ever said at the wall, hoping something would stick against religion and just this toxic atheism, hatefully inspiring lots of nastiness towards religion. But that was the book that launched the New Atheist movement and kind of set the tone for what they were all about. And that was the same time that Darwin Day started to take off. It was right around 2006.

[00:04:05] Andrew McDiarmid: Okay, so heating up with the New Atheist movement. So you know, for those who are not familiar with Darwin Day on the calendar and what, what occurs, tell us what a typical Darwin Day celebration would look like.

[00:04:18] Dr. Casey Luskin : Yeah, so I, I’ve been to some Darwin Day celebrations over the years. There’s some skeptic groups here in the Seattle area and I think I went to a Darwin Day celebration at least once here and had a really enjoyable time. Some nice folks there. We had a good time chatting. Also I’ve been speak, I’ve spoken at some universities on Darwin Day celebrations. These were organized by intelligent design friendly people. Last year, actually I spoke at North Dakota State University organized by an ID friendly group there. And I think I spoke at Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma years ago for a Darwin Day event. So sometimes ID groups will use this as an occasion to get their message out. But most, the vast majority of the time Darwin Day celebrations are organized by atheist groups. In fact, Simon Conway Morris, who’s a very prestigious paleoecologist I believe at Cambridge, he said, he wrote once that Darwin Day celebrations quote, conveniently serve as a love in with much mutual self congratulation for atheism. Okay, unquote. So that was how Simon Conway Mory described this. And then Tanner Edis, who is a, a well known skeptic and a, a, a PhD physicist. He said that Darwin Day vote events, quote, are supported largely by humanist free thought and atheist oriented groups using slogans of science and humanity, unquote. So this is, you know, basically coming from leading evolutionary scientists, leading proponents of evolution. Simon Con Morse, of course himself is a theist. He’s not an atheist, but he was commenting on the fact that usually Darwin Day celebrations are very closely associated with humanist free thought, atheist groups. Tanner Edis, who himself is a skeptic, he freely acknowledges that. So yeah, I think that the, the average typical Darwin Day celebration is probably being put on by some kind of an atheist free thought type group. Of course their mission in these Darwin Day celebrations they would say is trying to promote science, trying to promote awareness of the evidence for evolution of Darwin, of science. And you know, in that respect I don’t have any problem with it. It’s fine if people want to talk about science and use, you know, the birthday of a very famous scientist to try to advocate for, you know, aware public awareness of science. That’s a good thing. And that’s why I like going to Darwin Day events whether they’re hosted by an ID group or an evolution group. It often leads to good conversations about science.

[00:06:35] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And as you, you mentioned, the Intelligent design research community has used Darwin Day to raise awareness about the inadequacy of neo Darwinism.

Do you recall anything standing out as far as the way that we in the Intelligent Design movement have utilized the holiday?

[00:06:54] Dr. Casey Luskin : Yeah, we often talk about it as well. We will talk about the fact that, you know, Darwin, he actually was a really good scientist. I have a lot of respect for Darwin as a scientist. I think that he was very careful in terms of the way he framed his theory. He was very careful to make sure that people knew that his theory was not necessarily, you know, absolutely supported by the evidence. In all cases he was very honest about where we could test his theory, where it had weaknesses. So when I speak at Darwin Day events like the one I did last year at North Dakota State University and actually I’m doing a lecture next week on the day before Darwin Day at Azusa Pacific University. We’re recording this on February 6th today, just before Darwin Day, I’m giving a talk, I gave a talk last year, giving the same talk next week called Looking at the Predictions of Evolution and of Darwin’s Theory. And in those talks I really tried to emphasize what a careful scientist Darwin was. Of course I disagree with him on many of his conclusions, but I respect the fact that he was honest about where his theory had weaknesses and he talked about how it could be tested. I think that if many latter day supporters of Darwin would behave more like Darwin, we would have a more open conversation and a frank conversation about where some of the weaknesses are in his theory.

[00:08:06] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, I agree. One of my favorite quotes from Darwin is, is if it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed that could not possibly have been formed by numerous slight successive variations, my theory would absolutely break down. I really appreciate his, you know, his candor and his intellectual honesty there.

So, yeah, let’s get into some of those things.

[00:08:31] Dr. Casey Luskin : Just to add to that, I mean, you asked about, you know, how do we raise awareness? One of the things I like to make people aware of is exactly what you just said, Andrew. The fact that Darwin was very willing to test his theory and put it to the test and acknowledge what would falsify it. And I think that for us in the ID community gives us an opportunity to talk about those things which I think Darwin would have supported. And so I welcome that.

[00:08:53] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, totally. Well, when it comes to assessing the modern version of Darwin’s theory, one place to start is by looking at some of the predictions of Darwinism and comparing that with the predictions of intelligent design. One area we can do this is the idea of junk DNA and junk organs. For decades, evolutionists have claimed that our bodies and our genomes are full of useless parts and genetic material, vestigial organs showing life as the result of eons of unguided evolution over time. However, these predictions of vestigial body parts and useless DNA have not held true. We’ve talked about this quite a bit on the program, so we, we don’t need to spend a lot of time on junk DNA. But Casey, can you tell us some of the other predictions where intelligent design gets it right and neo Darwinism is struggling?

[00:09:40] Dr. Casey Luskin : Yeah, I think that you just mentioned a really good one there, Andrew, where Darwin said in Origin of Species that if it could be demonstrated that any complex feature existed which could not be produced by numerous successive slight modifications, that his theory would absolutely break down. And this really gets to the mechanism of Darwin’s theory and whether or not we can build complex features that we see in living systems through these stepwise evolutionary processes one little mutation at a time, as is required by Darwin’s theory. And that was the requirement of Darwin’s theory when he proposed it in 1859. And I think it’s safe to say that even modern supporters of evolution would say, yes, you have to build things one little mutation at a time. Yes. Sometimes folks who support Evo Diva will say that you can have mutations that might have profound effects when you’re looking at early developmental mutations, but still, you’ve got to be able to build it one little mutation at a time, or the standard theory of evolution doesn’t work. Okay, so the question then becomes, when we look at biology, do we see features that cannot be built one little mutation at a time? And from the ID movements perspective, the answer is definitely yes. And I would say there are two main examples of where we see features. Are there many examples, but two sort of main categories of features that can’t be built one mutation at a time? The first would be specified complexity. Where we see that basically in biology, there are sequences, whether it’s a DNA sequence or an amino acid sequence, where you have to have, you know, your nucleotides, your amino acids in a protein in just the right order in order for that part to function. Okay? So, for example, you look at the amino acid sequence of a protein, which, of course, is determined by the nucleotide sequence in the DNA, and you ask the question, could we build this functional protein one little mutation at a time? What you find when you look at the research being done both by folks like Doug Axe, Ann Gager, Marcy Reeves in the ID community, or when you look at other folks who are in the field of protein origins and who are doing mutagenesis experiments on proteins, what we find is that they find that only very rare sequences of amino acids yield functional proteins. In that respect, you can’t basically get a functional protein just by chance, okay? You can’t just hopefully wishfully think that one little mutation at a time, you know, is going to give you a functional protein. You have to have a lot of mutations right, all at once in order to get your average functional enzyme. Okay? And that is what the research is showing. We’ve talked about this before. Doug Axe’s research showed that for the beta lactamase enzyme, only one at every 10 to the 77th amino acid sequences is going to give you a functional protein. Okay, what does that mean? That means that you’ve got to get a lot of mutations just right, not one little, you know, one little successive mutation at a time. You got to get a lot of mutations, have to get you the right amino acids before you get a functional protein. So this is a problem for Darwin’s theory right off the bat. But then you get what we call, you know, multi protein complexes that are basically these Molecular machines that we find in living systems where they need multiple functioning proteins to be present all at once, they provide basically different parts that are functioning different ways in that machine before you can even get the machine to function and give you some functional advantage that could be preserved by natural selection. Of course, the archetypal example of this is the bacterial flagellum, right, where we have to have about 35 or so different protein parts which contribute to the flagellar swimming function that it gives to a bacterium, allowing it to swim along. Basically, this flagellar propeller type filament will spin around and will allow a bacterium to be able to swim around and find food. And if you don’t have all those protein parts present, you don’t get a functional flagellum. And so we know from genetic knockout experiments that the flagellum is in fact irreducibly complex. But there are many other examples of irreducible complexity in biology. Michael Behe gives the examples of the blood clotting cascade and also some of the biochemical cascades involved in vision. I think there’s good arguments to make that other molecular machines like ATP synthase and the ribosome are probably also irreversibly complex. I think that irreducible complexity is probably very common in biology. So you get these systems that require many parts to be present, or they don’t give you a functional advantage. They don’t work basically to provide some function. These again, cannot be built up one little mutation at a time because you have to have many parts present all at once in order for those systems to be able to function, or they don’t give you any advantage that can be preserved. So specified complexity and irreducible complexity are both very good examples of, I think, the kind of systems that can’t be built through the numerous successive, slight modifications that Darwin said his theory requires.

[00:14:38] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, go on.

[00:14:39] Dr. Casey Luskin : There’s many other examples. I mean, in the talk that I give on my Darwin Day presentation goes through first the mechanism of Darwin’s theory. You know, talking about how the Darwinian mechanism cannot produce these features that require many parts to be present. But then another important part of Darwin’s theory is also common ancestry. And so we can see many of Darwin’s predictions or the predictions of common ancestry. I should say, even in modern Darwinian theory, Neo Darwinism, those also do not hold up. So whether you’re talking about biogeography, paleontology, DNA and anatomical similarities that are used to build phylogenetic trees or embryology, in each of these cases we see sort of the predictions that are put out there by latter day defenders of evolutionary theory do not match what the evidence says. In biogeography, we have a wildly, you know, organisms that are separated by huge amounts of time and space that are supposedly related and yet they’re appearing on Earth in different places. And there’s no way that we can find some sort of evolutionary bridge between those organisms. So, for example, if you want to talk about South American monkeys that are supposedly descended from African monkeys, okay, South American monkeys appear in South America about 30 million years ago. Yet at that time, South America was an isolated island continent that was separated from Africa by, by hundreds of kilometers of open ocean. Okay, so how did the African monkeys then evolve into and basically colonized South America to create these groups of South American monkeys? And the answer that we’re told, we’re supposed to believe is that they rafted there. They rafted there across the proto Atlantic Ocean, across hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands of kilometers of basically open ocean, and somehow they were able to survive that journey. Am I saying it’s absolutely impossible? No. But am I saying that it is a compelling model, a compelling theory to say that, you know, South American monkeys are descended from African monkeys and they rafted there across the proto Atlantic Ocean? No, I don’t think that’s a very good model. I think this is a good example of how evolutionary theory works. You find data that really should be falsifying modern evolutionary theory or common ancestry, and then instead of getting a falsification, what you get is some ad hoc auxiliary hypothesis which is brought in to save the theory from falsification. Another classic example is with the fossil record, with paleontology, okay? We see throughout the history of life this pattern of explosions where many new forms of life will appear abruptly in the fossil record with no clear and direct evolutionary precursors. Of course, the most famous example would be the Cambridge explosion. But then you’ve got other explosions in the history of life. You got the great Ordovician biodiversification event. You’ve got an explosion of bird fossils in the fossil record. You’ve got an explosion of mammal orders in the fossil record. You’ve got an explosion of plant fossils in the fossil record. You’ve got the angiosperm big bloom where many groups of flowering plants appear abruptly with no direct evolutionary precursors. These are just some of other examples as well. So this repeating pattern that we see is that organisms appear without clear direct evolutionary ancestors. Where do they come from? If you are treating, I think, evolution fairly, and you’re not, you know, sort of absolutely wedded to that theory and unwilling to give it up. The answer should be, well, I don’t think that the Darwinian model is explaining the fossil record very, very well. But instead, we see people coming up with all kinds of auxiliary hypotheses, ad hoc excuses. And as to why evolution is not refuted, Darwin’s favorite excuse in his day, of course, was that the fossil record was incomplete. We now know that, yeah, the fossil record is not perfectly complete, but it’s complete enough to give us a good enough picture of the history of life to know that these explosions in the history of life, they’re real. They’re not just artifacts of an incomplete fossil record. And then we’re told, okay, fine, maybe these gaps and these jumps are real, but evolution happened so quickly that we do not. It did not have time to. To leave transitional forms that showed how all these complex forms of life evolved. This, of course, is the model called punctuated equilibrium, which was put forth by Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldridge, and other paleontologists in the 70s and 80s. And this model is supposed to explain away the lack of transitional forms in the fossil record. But of course, it itself has problems. You know, we’re basically expected to believe this model of evolution that predicts we will find no confirming evidence. Okay, so that’s not. Doesn’t make for a very good theory that predicts you’ll find no confirming evidence, at least as regards the fossils. And then, of course, you know, it is requiring so much evolutionary change so quickly that I think some biologists have had problems with punctual equilibrium. Then you want to talk about phylogenetic trees, and people will say, well, no, no, no. The evidence for evolution, it’s not to be found in the fossil record. It’s really supposed to be found in DNA evidence. Okay. And when you compare the DNA sequences of different organisms, you can ARR in phylogenetic trees that shows how they’re all related. And this shows that evolutionary theory is true, the evolutionary model is correct because we can construct these phylogenetic trees. Well, that was a good thought initially. But then as they started to sequence the genomes of more and more organisms, they found that one genome will give you of an organism, will give you one version of the tree of life. And then when you sequence, you know, the genome of other species, you get completely different and conflicting versions of the tree of life. So you get all these conflicting evolutionary trees. And basically the bottom line is what you see is that common descent is not predicting the distribution of traits and genes that are found in different organisms. Okay, there’s an ID theorist, a computer scientist named Winston Ewert a few years ago who asked whether you could. Basically he compared the standard Darwinian model of a phylogenetic tree looking at the distribution of nine different families of genesis across nine different types of animals. And then he also compared it to a different model which he called the dependency graph model, where basically you could have common design, you could have a designer that could reuse similar parts in different organisms. Finding similarity between different species is no problem for intelligent design because you can have designers will regularly reuse different parts that work in different designs. So he compared basically the common descent model versus his common design based dependency graph model to see which explained the distribution of different gene families better. He found that the common descent model was 10 to the 3,000th times power worse at explaining the data than was a common design based dependency graph. Okay, what this talent is telling you is that there are many traits among living organisms that are simply not distributed according to the kind of tree like pattern you would expect from common ascent. Okay, and then lastly embryology. We’re told by evolutionary scientists that the similarities in vertebrate embryos show how organisms are related and how vertebrates are very similar in their earliest stages. And this is supposed to show us how organisms are related. And a number of years ago, PZ Myers, we got into sort of an online debate with him. He’s an evolutionary embryologist and a very well known atheist blogger. So what Dr. Meyers said is he acknowledged actually that when you look at vertebrate embryos, yes, sometimes they can be very similar, but he also acknowledged that sometimes they can vary greatly. And he said that, quote, there is wide variation in the status of the embryo. And so basically you can have wide variation in the earliest stages of vertebrate embryos. Well then how then can you cite similarities in vertebrate embryos as evidence for their common ancestry? Well, here was his response, and I think this is really, really important to hear what his response was. He said, I wish I could get that one thought into these guys heads. Evolutionary theory predicts differences as well as similarities. Okay, so fine, Dr. Myers, fine, that’s okay. You can propose whatever theory you want. But if your theory predicts both differences and similarities, then how can you cite the similarities between vertebrate embryos in their earliest stages as evidence for common ancestry? What about those differences? Doesn’t that then somehow count against your theory? And so what we’re, again, what we’re dealing with here is that as soon as you Find evidence that challenges the evolutionary model instead. What you end up getting is instead of people saying that, okay, my model is being falsified, my model is being challenged by the evidence. What they do is they come up with auxiliary hypotheses and they try to change the predictions of what you should expect so their theory will not be falsified. So I would say that in many respects, yes, it is possible to test Darwin’s theory on Darwin’s day, and we should do that. But be aware that as soon as you find evidence that goes against the predictions of Darwin’s model goes to whether we’re talking about the mechanism of evolution, you know, natural selection, random mutation, or whether we’re talking about the pattern of evolution, common ancestry. As soon as we start to cite evidence that directly counters the predictions of evolutionary theory today, we’re going to be told actually that no evolutionary theory is not refuted because they basically try to change the predictions and find reasons to explain away the data that contradicts their predictions, and then they save their theory from falsification. So this is sort of how the debate goes today. It’s not really a true. I think, I don’t think that Darwin’s theory is being treated in a scientific manner. They’re treating it as if it should be unfalsifiable, and they’re not letting us actually cite evidence that goes against Darwin’s theory.

[00:24:27] Andrew McDiarmid: Wow. Well, you can take a breath now. That was a great answer.

[00:24:31] Dr. Casey Luskin : Sorry for the long answer there, but.

[00:24:33] Andrew McDiarmid: That was a great summary of all the different lines of evidence where Darwinian math really struggles, you know, and the possibility of the numerous slight successive modifications, you know, works against Darwin’s theory. That was awesome. Yeah. And I was going to ask you, Casey, you know, even mainstream evolutionary biologists today acknowledge that there are major problems with the prevailing theory of biological origins. So what are they proposing in its place? Are they. Are their proposals adequate? Are they good?

[00:25:06] Dr. Casey Luskin : Yeah. So there’s sort of a new camp of evolution that’s developed over the last 10 or 15 years. They call themselves the Third Way Evolution Camp. They still believe, you know, that there is sort of strictly natural material mechanisms that are responsible for the evolutionary process. They’re not going to allow for intelligent design. They almost always will still support common ancestry and, you know, these sort of support aspects of neo Darwinism, you know, that there is no cosmic teleology guiding evolution. Okay. That there’s sort of just blind and unguided processes. At the end of the day, however, they are aware of the fact that that standard neo Darwinian evolution has a lot of problems. In fact, some of them will officially disavow the numerous successive slide modifications that Darwin required in favor of more evo devo models where they will say, oh, maybe we could have mutations of great effect early in development. Maybe you can have these sort of massive major chromosomal rearrangements that could radically change an organism’s body plan. Maybe sometimes through epigenetic changes you can have rapid changes in organisms. And these are all really cool mechanisms that they’re citing. The problem is that either the mechanism they’re citing, either they don’t give you the kind of viable evolutionary changes that they would like to hope you would, you would get. Like for example, many early body plan mutations that evo devo proponents like to cite. They will end up killing the organism. They’re not going to give you a radically new body plan. And if they don’t kill the organism, they’re going to give you just a very slight modification that’s not going to give you the kind of change that you need to get a new organism. So the mutations you need, you don’t get. And the mutations that you get, you don’t, you don’t need. So I think that, you know, there’s, there they’re coming up with interesting ideas, but they haven’t really come up with a new model to solve the fundamental problem that neo Darwinism faces. And that is how do you explain the origin of new complex biological features. They’ve got some interesting ideas that can explain some things, but that still that fundamental problem remains unresolved. And so I like talking to third wave evolution folks. I think they’re very open minded. I had a great dialogue actually last year with Dennis Noble, who I respect hugely. He’s a third way evolution guy, one of the founders of that movement. I think he’s got some really interesting ideas. I don’t think they have solved sort of that fundamental question of where new complex biological features come from. But I think that the third way evolution folks are worth listening to. Many of them actually think that intelligent design is onto some good ideas too. James Shapiro had an article that he published last year. He’s a third way evolution guy from the University of Chicago, not an ID proponent, but he wrote in an article last year, in 2024, that intelligent designs critiques of neo Darwinism hold merit. Okay, so we think they, they don’t think that we’re crazy. We don’t think that they’re crazy. We just, I think we would disagree as to whether or not the, the third way model is really solving the problems.

[00:28:00] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, yeah, that’s very interesting.

[00:28:02] Dr. Casey Luskin : The big problems.

[00:28:02] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, sure. Well, Darwin Day has figured quite dramatically into the career trajectory of Dr. Gunther Bechli, a world class paleontologist. We very sadly lost Gunther recently after a tragic car crash and still very much, you know, mourning his loss. Can you tell us how Darwin Day impacted Dr. Beckley during his tenure at the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History?

[00:28:26] Dr. Casey Luskin : Yeah, Andrew, I’m really glad you raised that. And I think that Darwin Day is a great day to once again remember our friend Gunter Beckley, because it was actually a Darwin Day celebration that helped set him on his path towards ultimately rejecting the Darwinian viewpoint and embracing intelligent design and played a big role in his whole metaphysical conversion that he underwent. And so with the story that I’m about to tell, this is the way that I’ve heard Gunter tell the story. This is not my story. This is his story. I hope I will do it a little bit of justice here. But he would always say that, you know, in 2009, which was the bicentennial anniversary of Darwin’s birth, 2009 was 200 years after Darwin was born. In 1809, Gunter was the. Was one of the curators at a major natural history museum in Germany. And he was asked to put together a Darwin Day exhibit. And so what he wanted to do as he told the story was he was going to have sort of like the scale. And on one side of the scale was going to be Darwin’s book, and on the other side of the scale was going to be a bunch of Darwin critic books, like, you know, books by proponents of intelligent design.

And so he was going to obviously have Darwin’s book outweighing all of the intelligent design books on the scale to show that Darwin’s one book was so much more powerful than all the books of these critics. And then Gunter thought, well, he was very intellectually honest. And he said, you know what, if I’m going to put this, this exhibit together, I better at least read the books of some of these critics before I say that, you know, Darwin’s book outweighs all the books by the Darwin critics. And so he read Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe. He read other books as well. And to his great surprise, he found that the critics of Darwinism were actually making a lot of sense. And so again, that’s another story for another day, Gunter’s personal story. But ultimately it was then reading the books of intelligent design proponents like Michael Behe like Stephen Meyer and others that led him to reject Darwinism and support intelligent design. Of course, you know, there’s a lot of folks that have a similar story, I think, just not all of them quite as prominent as Gunther was, you know, being a very eminent scientist at a major, you know, natural history museum in Germany. So I think that Gunther, though, is emblematic of the kind of impact that this work has had on people. And Gunther was honest enough to not just change his mind, but also to face the sacrifices to his career because, you know, he was ultimately hounded out of his position at that museum, and he ultimately, you know, basically had to leave academia because he publicly embraced intelligent design. And ultimately that cost him the prestige of his career in the scientific community. He then came to work for us, and we loved working with him, and I think he loved working with us until his tragic death earlier this year. But at the end of the day, you know, he found new friends after he changed his mind, but it cost him a lot.

[00:31:20] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah. And that intellectual curiosity was satisfied in the end.

[00:31:24] Dr. Casey Luskin : It was, But I respect him hugely. You know, a lot of folks, I mean, how many of us can say we’re willing to lose everything for the truth? Gunter was. And I think that that. That really says a lot about the man that he was. Yeah.

[00:31:36] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah, absolutely. Well, going forward, then, what do you think is the most appropriate way to mark Darwin Day?

[00:31:42] Dr. Casey Luskin : I think we’re doing it right now. Andrew, it was your idea to do this podcast, and I really appreciated that. I think that we can honor the good of Darwin Day. You know, we don’t have to use Darwin Day as an occasion to. To bash religion or whatever, like a lot of these atheist groups do. We’re going to use Darwin Day to honor Darwin, the scientist who is very honest about the problems with this theory, and also to honor those who maybe have lost and sacrificed because of their views on Darwin’s theory. I think Darwin would support what we’re doing right now, and I think he would also support, you know, the quote that you mentioned earlier. Darwin had this famous quote of following the evidence where it leads. You know, a fair result can only be found if we fully state the evidence and arguments on both sides of each question. And I think that we’re. We’re trying to do that with Darwin Day. We’re trying to, I think, honor the way Darwin would have celebrated his birthday. And I think that we’re doing that.

[00:32:33] Andrew McDiarmid: Yeah. What better way to do it? Right.

Well, Casey, I appreciate your time. I know you’re very busy you’re headed down to Dallas to speak at our annual conference there.

So thank you for taking the time out to chat about Darwin Day with me.

[00:32:47] Dr. Casey Luskin : Thank you, Andrew. It’s a lot of fun, folks.

[00:32:49] Andrew McDiarmid: Casey writes, speaks and interviews regularly on the inadequacy of Neo Darwinian processes and the positive case for Intelligent Design. You can keep up with this work at his website, Casey luskin.com for ID the Future, I’m Andrew McDiarmid. Thanks for listening.