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

paleontology

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Panda bear eating bamboo and wave
Image Credit: Photobookroom - Adobe Stock

Evolved or Engineered? A Geneticist Evaluates the Panda’s Thumb

In 1980, influential paleontologist and evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote that “we can know that evolution has happened by the imperfections and oddities that life shows.” But is that true? And what if we take a closer look at those assumed evolutionary oddities and see instead evidence of engineered elegance? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes retired geneticist Dr. Wolf-Ekkehard Lönnig to the podcast to discuss his new paper reviewing the debate over the panda’s thumb. Giant pandas have an elongated wrist bone, the radial sesamoid, that allows them to handle and eat bamboo with great dexterity. Some claim it’s an imperfectly and inefficiently formed structure that is clear evidence of evolutionary processes at work. Others Read More ›

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Image courtesy Discovery Institute.

Paul Nelson: My Adventures with Jonathan Wells

On this episode of ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes philosopher of biology Paul Nelson to share some of his remembrances of our longtime colleague Dr. Jonathan Wells, who passed away in 2024 at 82 years old. Dr. Wells was one of the first fellows at Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture, and his contributions to the intelligent design movement over the last quarter century have been monumental. In the first half of the conversation, Dr. Nelson takes listeners back to a famous meeting in the history of the modern intelligent design movement. He also shares some humorous stories of his adventures with Jonathan Wells at events in the United States and China. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Read More ›
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Stephen Meyer and Ben Shapiro Talk Intelligent Design

On this ID The Future, we bring you the first half of Daily Wire host Ben Shapiro’s 2019 interview with philosopher of science Dr. Stephen Meyer on The Ben Shapiro Sunday Special. This exchange happened five years ago now, and we thought it was a good time to put it out there again for those who may not have heard it yet or don’t remember it. Dr. Meyer considers this one of the best interviews he’s done on the subject of his second solo book Darwin’s Doubt. Shapiro was very well-prepared and asked great questions, resulting in a thought-provoking and thoroughly engaging hour-long conversation. We’ve got the first half of it for you today, followed by the concluding half in Read More ›

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Lighted caves of Cradle of Humankind, a World Heritage Site in Gauteng Province, South Africa, the site of 2.8 million year old early hominid fossil and Mrs. Ples
Image Credit: spiritofamerica - Adobe Stock

New South Africa Book Explores Evidence of Design

Today’s ID the Future spotlights a new free online ID book from South Africa, Science and Faith in Dialogue, with contributions from Stephen Meyer, Hugh Ross, Guillermo Gonzalez, James Tour, Fazale Rana, Marcos Eberlin, and others. Geologist Casey Luskin joins host Eric Anderson to tell how the new peer-reviewed book came together and to describe the chapter he contributed, “Evolutionary Models of Palaeoanthropology, Genetics, and Psychology Fail to Account for Human Origins: A Review.” Luskin did his PhD in South Africa and had many opportunities to study various hominid fossils. Here he explains why he is convinced that intelligent design far better explains the fossil evidence than does Darwinian evolution.

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Image Credit: Photocreo Bednarek - Adobe Stock

Debunked Transitional Fossils Just the Tip of the Iceberg

On today’s ID the Future Casey Luskin hosts distinguished German paleontologist Günter Bechly to discuss Bechly’s essay in the recent Harvest House anthology, The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith: Exploring the Ultimate Questions About Life and the Cosmos. Darwinian evolution predicts a gradually branching tree of living forms, with one form shading into another over long periods of evolution, with each transitional step almost too modest to notice. Does the fossil record suggest such a pattern? Quite the opposite, Bechly says. Instead the pattern of the fossil record is consistently one of sudden appearance, and evolutionists have yet to successfully construct a single robustly populated series of gradually transitioning fossils that move chronologically from one form to a distinctly different Read More ›

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Wikipedia Throws Günter Bechly Down the Orwellian Memory Hole

On this episode of ID The Future, Robert Crowther talks with paleontologist Dr. Günter Bechly about his entry on Wikipedia which was created in 2012 and suspiciously disappeared in 2015 when he started supporting Intelligent Design. An eminent paleontologist, Bechly was curator of the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany and had numerous species as well as even a family named after him, a high honor in the field. Crowther and Bechly go over the specious reasons given by Wikipedia for Bechly’s deletion, revealing the ideological and authoritarian nature of some the editors at Wikipedia.

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Does Science Show “There Was No First Human”?

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin talks with Dr. Ann Gauger about her criticisms of the PBS video, “There Was No First Human,” that attempts to show how evolutionary change happens. The video makes the claim that evolution has been a continuous and gradual process — a claim that many evolutionary biologists would disagree with, and that is not supported by evidence from the fossil record. Listen in as Dr. Gauger explains.