ID the Future Intelligent Design, Evolution, and Science Podcast
Topic

Biologic

coral reef tropical fish
Tropical fishes on the coral reef

Ann Gauger: A Scientist’s Journey into the Intelligent Design Movement

On today’s ID the Future, biologist and intelligent design researcher Ann Gauger tells host Eric Anderson the rest of her story about how she was drawn into the intelligent design movement. The two discuss everything from the challenges she faced making it in a male-dominated field to the evidential power of beauty in the natural world. But how did she end up in the ID movement? After stepping out of a promising career as a research scientist to focus on her family and meeting the needs of an autistic child, she assumed that her life as a scientist was behind her. But then several years later she began reading the work of Darwin skeptics and intelligent design trailblazers—Phillip Johnson, Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe, and others—and then she realized they were all associated with a think tank, Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture, just down the street from where she lived. She eventually signed DI’s Dissent from Darwin list, then a year or so after that she signed up for a regular ID newsletter, Nota Bene, signing her name “Ann Gauger, PhD.” She got a phone call from someone at Discovery Institute twenty minutes later. The rest of the story is by turns comical, inspiring, and touching. Before wrapping up her story she urges young women scientists to not let themselves get pressured out of contributing just because STEM fields tend to be male dominated. And she shares a story of being accused at a public university event of lying and suppressing research evidence that supposedly supported evolutionary theory. Not true, she explains.

DarwinsTree

Dependency Graph, Pt. 2: Winston Ewert Defends His Groundbreaking New ID Model

On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Winston Ewert continues unpacking his new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s tree of life. Ewert is a software engineer, and his new model is inspired by the coder strategy of repurposing existing code, called modules, for different projects. Moreover, some of these modules depend on other modules, meaning you can generate a dependency graph to better understand the similarities and differences among software programs that share modules. Ewert argues that a dependency graph model better explains the pattern of similarities and differences in the history of life, better than a model of common descent by unguided evolution. As he also explains, the new model is testable in multiple ways.

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DarwinsTree

Winston Ewert Unpacks his New ID Model, the Dependency Graph–Pt. 1

On this episode of ID the Future, guest host Robert J. Marks talks with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s groundbreaking new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s common descent tree of life. The new model is based on the well-established technique of repurposing software code in different software projects. Ewert, a senior researcher at Biologic and the Evolutionary Informatics Lab, describes the nested hierarchical pattern of life and how any credible theory of life’s origin and diversity must explain it. He then describes how Darwin’s basic theory fits, and doesn’t fit, the pattern, and the various ancillary mechanisms invoked to close the gaps. These patches include horizontal gene transfer, convergent evolution, and incomplete lineage sorting. Ewert then cues up what he argues is a better, more elegant hypothesis, the common design hypothesis laid out in his peer-reviewed technical paper available here.

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