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Evolution Revolution?

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist, science communicator and probably the world’s best-known, living atheist. In 2022, Dawkins sat on stage with renowned biologist and physiologist Denis Noble in a kind of ‘clash of the titans’ event. It was part of the ‘How The Light Gets In’ Festival at Hay-on-Wye in the UK (the biggest philosophy and music festival in the world). Dawkins and Noble were there to re-examine Dawkins’ landmark theory laid out 50 years ago this year, in his book ‘The Selfish Gene’. To explain evolution, Dawkins popularised a powerful metaphor: living things are like survival machines. We live only for the purpose of passing on genes to the next generation. Genes – or ‘replicators’ – make copies of each other and transmit themselves faithfully from one generation to the next. Their ‘vehicles’ are the organism – a plant or an animal… humans.  

Media – Dawkins interview

John Dickson (Studio)

Dawkins has spent his life talking about a gene-centric view of evolution. The ‘gene’ is the primary unit of evolution, and genes build organisms and compete to ensure their own survival. Life itself is an automatic and pitiless machine. Since Charles Darwin’s 1859 book, On the Origin of species, Evolution has been considered by many as the final nail in the coffin for religion. Because the mutations behind evolution are random, so the story goes, there is no plan. Because evolution is blind, there is no design. As Dawkins wrote in another of his famous books: “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” My guests today, though, are among the many others who raise a question about the ‘randomness’ of evolution and its alleged conflict with Christianity. They suggest that the latest research into mutation and selection – the evolutionary process – can just as easily indicate ‘intention’ built into the fabric of things. They point out that there’s a quiet revolution going on in the top-tier of evolutionary scientists and the revolution doesn’t have much time for the metaphor of “Blind Watchmaker”. The evidence is building – and Dawkins himself at least detects the serious challenge to his view – that ‘blind’ and ‘random’ are not the right words for evolution. We’ll be treading carefully in this episode. But here’s the punchline: scientists, including Dawkins’ own revered mentor Denis Noble, are starting to talk about patterns in evolution, algorithms, agency … and – shock horror – even ‘intention’. I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson (Studio)

In 2014, I was invited to appear on the Australian Broadcasting Network’s then-premier panel program, Q&A. They also invited Canadian-American theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Lawrence Krauss, who at the time was doing the rounds as a proponent of a strident anti-religious atheism. He’s the “we got the universe from nothing” guy. In that clip, Krauss had just been asked whether teaching a ‘creationist’ view of the world – specifically that the earth is only 6000 years old (and rejecting evolution) – was wrong. It was so wrong, Krauss said, it amounted to child abuse. Part of my response – which he didn’t like at all – was to point out that the comparison was an insult … not so much to Creationists (which, of course, it was) but to anyone who had experienced genuine child abuse. He didn’t like much of what I said. 

Media – Q&A

John Dickson (Studio)

I got some ‘love mail’ after that appearance—from Christians who hold the young-earth creationist view. I had suggested on national live TV that Creationist Christians should come to the Centre for Public Christianity for a reschooling program! A few days later, I wrote a follow-up to express my regret that I hadn’t been more gracious to my 6-day creationist friends. I publicly apologised. And I’ve tried to do better in the last decade. I still think young-earth creationism and the denial of evolution are mistaken, but I was an idiot to suggest that those who hold those views needed a re-education camp. I know a bunch of informed, faithful Christian young earth Creationists. And I hope they’ll put up with my conviction throughout the episode that Genesis 1 was never intended to be read concretely … that the universe is likely almost 14 billion years old … and that all of life, including humans, evolved. I reckon the great Billy Graham – one of the 20th century’s most influential Christians put it really well:  

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“I don’t think that there’s any conflict at all between science today and the scriptures. I think that we have misinterpreted the Scriptures many times and we’ve tried to make the Scriptures say things they weren’t meant to say, I think that we have made a mistake by thinking the Bible is a scientific book. The Bible is not a book of science. The Bible is a book of Redemption, and of course I accept the Creation story. I believe that God did create the universe. I believe that God created man, and whether it came by an evolutionary process and at a certain point He took this person or being and made him a living soul or not, does not change the fact that God did create man. … whichever way God did it makes no difference as to what man is and man’s relationship to God.” Billy Graham: Personal Thoughts of a Public Man

John Dickson (Studio)

The point that will become clear in this episode is that nothing in evolutionary theory is detrimental to a robust classical Christian faith. In fact, the new insights into evolution we’re exploring today ought to strengthen our impression that the universe looks intended.

Sy Garte:
That title pretty much says it all. And I mean, as you know, evolution is a real point of contention among Christians. 

John Dickson (Studio)

That’s Sy Garte, a biochemist who was a tenured professor at New York University, Rutgers University and the University of Pittsburgh before his semi-retirement. Sy has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, three scientific monographs, and several books, including his latest: Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God.

Sy Garte:
There are large groups of Christians who believe that evolution is really. Uh, you know, anti-biblical, anti-Christian, uh, some, some atheist biologists, for example, Richard Dawkins, who is uh, one of the major proponents of evolutionary theory, has said that, you know, evolution, the science of evolution makes it, uh, possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. The reality is that evolution has nothing to do with atheism. It, that’s just. False. Uh, and in fact, the other reality about evolution, which I stress in my book, is that it’s really doesn’t make any sense that Christians should be arguing about it. Uh, and the reason I say that is most of the arguments both pro and con evolution. Are not accurate. They’re being made by people who don’t really understand the science, especially not the modern science of evolution. The modern science of evolution, again, has nothing to do with atheism. It’s not anti-biblical. 

Sy Garte
There are people who are Christian, uh, evolutionary creationists, who get very angry at the Young Earth creationists and say they’re denying science and, and, uh, my view is, let’s agree to disagree. This is not a life and death issue. This is not something of huge importance compared to what else is going on in the world.

John Dickson (Studio)

Part of the problem is that the term ‘evolution’ means something different depending on who you speak to, even among scientists working in the various fields that contribute to evolutionary theory. So, right up front, let’s try to define our terms. And to do that, I asked my friend, Ard Louis, who’s beloved here at Undeceptions. Ard is Professor of Theoretical Physics at the University of Oxford, where he is working on a broad, interdisciplinary set of problems: self-assembling DNA, theories of evolution, the dynamics of soft matter, machine learning, and applications of algorithmic information theory. I talked to him recently in his office next to the beautiful University Parks in Oxford. Sitting in the corner of the office were my daughter Josie (hi, darling) and one of my students from Wheaton (g’day James), trying to stay still and silent … 

Ard Louis:
Evolution has two steps. The first is that you’ve got some kind of random mutations that generate new phenotypes, which is a fancy word for, you know, some difference from the offspring to the parents. And then there’s natural selection, which selects on phenotypes that generate more offspring. So very roughly speaking, natural selection means, you know, if the “Louis Genes” make, I mean that each of us, my children have two children, they have two children. Whereas “Dickson Genes”, you have four and four. Then, you know, after one generation you’re twice as big. After two generations, you’re four times as big. And after not too many generations, there’s only Dicksons and no more Louis left. So that’s natural selection basically. So most of evolutionary theorizing is about that second step, and you can think of lots of complicated ways that might work, but I’m interested in that first step.

John Dickson (Studio)

Evolution is just ‘change over time’. And scientists have identified two basic parts in the process. Part 1 is ‘mutation’ – which gives us the variation – the differences – we see in individuals. Part 2 is natural selection … That’s where the mutations more conducive to survival get to … well … survive and be passed on to offspring. 

Ard Louis:
And so what I think is, that although many mutations are random, their outcomes are not random at all. They’re highly… or maybe I, I’ll qualify that and say. If you, if mutations, any mutations can happen added to things of what they can make. Only a small number of things can happen and many things can’t. And so the question, the big question is how much of what we see in nature can we explain without needing to invoke selection at all, but just by saying some things are easier to evolve than others. That’s the big picture question. And then I’m using ideas from physics to try to make these. predictions. So these predictions are hard to make. But then we are finding systems where we think we can do it, and then we can use math and computers to make predictions. And then we look at biological organisms and see, can we explain something about them? So one example would be we predict that leaf shapes are easier to make if they’re simple than if they’re complicated leaf shapes. And so what we’ve done is we’ve done looked at a lot of data of leaves and we’ve looked at a lot of data, evolutionary data on leaves. So like what they call phylogenetic trees, which is a fancy word for you try to figure out how all the leaves are linked to each other, and it’s known from there that complex leaves, so leaves with complicated shapes, are much more likely to mutate to simple leaves than the other way around. And so then we have a model that says, can we explain that and explain how often it happens, how frequently it happens by ignoring natural selection entirely? So we think we can and that’s exciting for us. Obviously.

John Dickson:
Physics is normally seen as the discipline that, that sees orderly patterns in fundamental realities, more than biology. Is that a fair statement?

Ard Louis:
So I would, maybe it’s not, I would say it’s something slightly different because biologists see a lot of order all through the biological world as well, but physicists are much more likely to believe that some relatively simple rules or laws govern a lot of very general things. Biologists tend to think that every single organism is different in some very special way. That’s actually true that there’s a difference in a special way, but physicists are much more likely to think that there’s gonna be some general uniform rule. So for, I’ll give you so why this is actually quite important in my own move into working on evolution because I used to talk to my biology friends and they would say, you know, evolution is just random. In other words, what you see today is a product of historical contingency. If you were to rewind the tape of life back to where it was, you know, a few hundred million years ago, and we run it again, you get nothing like what we see today. And then I thought, well that’s kind of, that’s fine, but it’s hard for a physicist to study because there’s no pattern there. There’s no rules. It’s just what happened in contingent history. And then when I started talking to a friend of mine, Simon Conway Morris, who’s a Paleontologist who’s been emphasising that actually certain things evolve again and again and again. And it’s extraordinary. And for your Australians, right, you’ve got a, you, our marsupial wolf, a whole bunch of animals that are very similar to animals that are placental, which basically means animals that have their, their young inside versus marsupials who have their young and a pouch, but these evolved in completely independently. So the wolf-like animal has evolved with no common ancestor except a very, very distant one to the other wolves that we see. And that’s, that was when I realized that was true all through biology

John Dickson:
… so unconnected to each other. They found the similar solutions?

Ard Louis:
Very similar, yeah.

John Dickson (Studio)

We’ve talked to Ard briefly about this before, way back in Episode 6. And in my work at Australia’s Centre for Public Christianity, we spoke to Professor of Evolutionary Paleobiology Simon Conway Morris from the University of Cambridge. He’s one of the leaders of what scientists call ‘convergence theory’. Contrary to the typical claim about evolution … as random and directionless … it turns out that unrelated species independently evolve similar traits when faced with similar environmental pressures. We might think of mutations, in theory, as a massive smorgasbord of options, and there’s no rhyme or reason why one dish might be served up over another. In truth, it’s more like a narrow menu. The number of dishes – of viable solutions to environmental pressures – is surprisingly small. 

 

Ard Louis:
So one, my favorite example is the camera eye. Okay. So we’ve got a lens. And a retina. Octopuses also have a lens in a retina. And you may ask yourself, okay, so maybe our common ancestor had an eye, but that’s definitely not true. So we’ve independently evolved the eyes. And you know, a camera eye is a very odd, odd thing. You know, it kind of doesn’t really work until you have a lens and a retina and everything together. How does it, how does that evolve? And yet it’s evolved at least twice. We think many more times. So there’s worms that have camera eyes and all these animals evolve camera eyes independently of each other. And you, if you look very carefully, so the, for example, the octopus camera eye has this optic nerve on the back of the retina, so they don’t have a blind spot like we do because ours connects to the front of the retina. So we have a blind spot. So those are like little, there’s differences, but basically they’re two camera eyes. Now. That’s extraordinary. So when I first learned about that, I thought, okay. Now there’s a pattern. Okay. Something’s repeated multiple times. How that, how did that happen is really hard to understand. It seems extraordinary, but it tells me there’s something much more ordered in the evolutionary process.

John Dickson (Studio)

“Something much more ordered in the evolutionary process.” It’s a remarkable statement from someone at the forefront of the mathematics of mutation. The standard Neo-Darwinian model combines Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Gregor Mendel’s work on genetic inheritance. Completely random mutations happen. Nature allows just a few to survive. And those changes are passed on to the next generation. Simple. Well, it’s not so simple. 

John Dickson:
But randomness seems to be like a key doctrine in the Neo Darwinian model. And as a result, people think that that’s, um, an indicator against God. Right. That it’s contrary to God. That random… and this is a view that atheists would propose. ‘Look, it’s all just random’, but it’s also a reason it some Christians are against evolution because of randomness. Yeah. Before we talk about whether randomness is a good idea or not. Do you think if evolution was completely random, it would be a tell against the existence of a mind behind things?

Ard Louis:
So I think you could run that argument both ways. So I’ve got Christian theology friends who say they would prefer it to be, I wouldn’t use the word random, but contingent. In other words, if it’s rerun it again, a different outcome would happen because then it means that God doesn’t have to do much. A little tweak here that’s imperceptible, and something like humans appears. And the feeling is that you wouldn’t want God to be intervening too much in nature because God creates nature. You want nature to be running on its own. So this gives God, uh, easy access to agency. My physicist brain says, oh no, you know, it should be ordered because we see all this beautiful order in the physical order, which we understand there must be some deep order underlying the biology. So I’m by that side much less likely to believe in the contingent story. And surely the, you know, the convergence gives very strong counter evidence to it. Where this thing gets very tricky is that the word random means something very specific in the scientific context. But it has all kinds of overtones for the general public. Random means purposeless. And so if you look at some of the, you know, great fathers of modern, the modern synthesists, they would often, they conflate these words as well. So James Gaylord Simpson, a famous paleontologist, says that “man is a product of a process, which did not have him in mind. He was not planned.” They basically mean it’s random. Therefore there’s no plan, there’s no, there’s no order to it. You know, Christians with a high doctrine of God’s sovereignty would take issue with that, and they would take issue with that on the basis of our own lives have all kinds of things that happen to us that seem random,  right? And you could interpret ’em as random, you know, you. I happen to get into Oxford University, right? Because somebody looked favourably on my application. If not, I would’ve gone somewhere else. Many, many things like that happened in our lives that seem not to be in our control. And yet we believe that God is in control and God is guiding us in one way or the other. And so that same theological view could be held towards a more contingent evolutionary theory and be just fine. So that actually that when I, when I suddenly explain to people that think about your life and if you’re a Christian, how you think God is involved in that, in that world that you have, even though it seems random at the surface, you can make the same analogy to biological evolution. Similarly, just because biological evolution has these random elements doesn’t mean that it’s therefore God is not involved. But I think there that I would, I, I think I said this to you before, which is I would prefer it’s, if we would use a different word for the kind of randomness we mean in Biology, and that’s the word stochastic. It’s a fancy word, basically means processes for which, you know, you don’t, don’t, don’t have any memory in them or processes that are, that are effectively random. But the reason I like that word is that the general public doesn’t have another meaning for, except for what it means, technically. And so that kind of idea that random means purposeless means no meaning, that is not there. And then there’s a really interesting way of thinking about this, which is we use these stochastic processes all the time in engineering, in physics, in finance, because when you’ve got a complicated problem you’re trying to optimise, it turns out that these random processes are by far the most effective way of optimising them. So we call it something called Monte Carlo methods. So if you go to a bank and you get a mortgage, that interest rate is partially determined by somebody who’s modelling the stock market with a stochastic process. Okay. It’s not, we don’t think the stock market is genuinely random, we just think it’s a good approximation to what’s happening. And if you go and drive across a bridge, an engineer will have used a Montecarlo stochastic process to calculate all kinds of properties of that bridge because they’re the most efficient way of calculating things. So you see this in our own bodies. So we have an immune system that uses exactly this random mutation model and selection to allow a small number of proteins that generate the antibodies for us. To generate a really wide range of antibodies, and when you know, a pathogen comes into your body, like I’ve got a cold right now, so my immune system then starts quickly creating these new molecules that will bind to whatever this cold virus is, is creating. And that is a very efficient way of a small number of elements, making a really wide range of different possible antibodies. And it’s very efficient and very quick. And, um, and probably if I were a God and we’re going to devise an immune system, I would use this random process. But I could say this, basically, your immune system uses a random process very similar to the evolutionary process, to generate a wide range of diversity that’s needed for your body. And it’s the most efficient way of doing it.

John Dickson:
Which sounds very strange. That’s something that’s “Random” is also highly efficient.

Ard Louis:
Exactly. And that’s, that’s, that’s why I think I, if I use the word stochastic, then suddenly, then you’re not surprised. You think, well, it’s some sciencey thing. Right? But if I use the word random, then suddenly go, well, that can’t be true because random means purposeless. How could your immune system use a purposeless method system? And that’s because you’re just not thinking about it right. Yeah. So I think that, you know, the fact that God created if one wants, creates things with over a long period of time, which God seems to want to do in redemption history as well. Then using this stochastic process that something like evolution is the, is the probably the most efficient and best way of generating all the endless forms of beautiful that we see.

John Dickson (Studio)

“Endless forms most beautiful” – that’s a quote from Darwin himself, by the way. It’s part of the last line of On the Origin of Species. After the break, we’ll dig deeper into how these ‘endless forms most beautiful’ came to be. 

Break 1

Media – Giraffe documentary

John Dickson (Studio)

Fifty years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck offered his own theory of evolution. Within it, he proposed that an organism could somehow acquire characteristics and then pass those characteristics to its offspring. To illustrate his point, Lemark wrote:

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“This animal, the largest of the mammals, is known to live in the interior of Africa in places where the earth is nearly always arid and without herbage, obliging it to browse on the leaves of trees and to continually strive to reach up to them. It has resulted from this habit, maintained for a long time by all the individuals of the race, that the forelegs have become longer than the hind legs and its neck has so lengthened itself that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, raises its head and reaches a height of six meters (nearly twenty feet).” –  Lamarck, Philosophie Zoologique

John Dickson (Studio)

Lamarck suggested that in order for giraffes to reach the best leaves, they had to constantly strengthen and gradually lengthen their necks, and as a result, their offspring would also have slightly longer necks. In another case, a blacksmith who used and developed his arm muscles in his work would have sons with similar muscular development. It was a ‘use it or lose it’ idea. If the giraffes stopped having to reach for those leaves, over time and many generations, their necks would get shorter. Lemark got plenty of things right, including the idea that we pass on characteristics through inheritance. But he was wrong about what type of characteristics were inheritable. Things you acquired during your life – muscles you worked hard for at the gym …  or being a good piano player – are not passed to our offspring. It might sound laughable today, and Lemarck has been the butt of scientific jokes for the last hundred years or more. The entrenched view now is that it’s not possible for an organism to have any effect on its genes. The genes are the things in the driver’s seat. The organism is just along for the ride. But this is exactly what some leading experts are questioning. 

 

Ard Louis:
So that was pretty much a hardcore dogma. And so people like Dennis Noble are saying, “Actually, that’s not really true.We see that there are things that can happen in your lifetime that can affect your offspring.” This is through something called epigenetic changes where it changes to your genes. And there’s many examples of this that are now pretty well established. What’s not well established is, you know how pervasive this is.

John Dickson (Studio)

Epigenetics is a relatively new field of study. “Epi” is Greek for upon or around. So epigenetics is about what happens around and on top of our genes. For a long time, we thought DNA was basically the whole story — a fixed code inherited from your parents. And in one sense, that’s true. The sequence itself doesn’t change. The letters stay the same. But scientists have discovered that chemical tags can attach to DNA — and to the structures that hold DNA in place. These tags don’t rewrite the code — they regulate it. They can turn genes up, turn them down, or switch them off. We know that the environment shapes the body. Toxins raise cancer risk. Exercise strengthens the heart. What epigenetics shows is that environment and behaviour can also leave molecular marks that affect how genes are expressed. Think of DNA as the book of you. Epigenetics is like the highlighting, the sticky notes, the bits underlined in red. The text doesn’t change — but how it’s read can change. This doesn’t overthrow evolutionary theory. It doesn’t vindicate old Lemarck! But it does add nuance. Evolution isn’t just about changes in DNA sequences across generations. It’s also about how genes are regulated and expressed. And that makes the picture richer — and more interesting.

John Dickson:
James Shapiro, who’s one of these.  He, and I’m gonna quote him, “The capacity of living organisms to alter their own heredity is undeniable”. I mean, is it?

Ard Louis:
I think it is. Yeah. So this, to some extent it is. I think, I think so. James might be on the, on the more enthusiastic side at that spectrum.

John Dickson (Studio)

This is one of the things Richard Dawkins and his mentor Denis Noble disagreed about—at the top of the show. Dawkins clings to the idea that random mutations are the only way to introduce variation. Newer research suggests that might not be right. Back to Sy Garte.

Sy Garte:
Well, here’s the thing. Let’s say you are. You’re a happy bacteria. You’re an e coli, and you’re living in, in the gut of me. Say, okay, you’re in my gut along with all your friends, and you’re happily chomping on all the sugar you can get because sugar is the best thing for you. You love to metabolise it. All of a sudden, I go on a real diet, and I decide no more sugar. I’m, you know, it’s not good for me. And I start eating other stuff. Well, that’s not good. That’s not good for, well, you, who are you? Okay? You are the e-coli. That’s not good for you, right? Because you have no sugar to eat. You and your friends start getting sick and some of them die. So what do you do as a group? Here’s what you do. Not you alone, but the whole group of bacteria that are living in that gut change the way they replicate, and on purpose, especially in the area that has to do with, in the genes that have to do with metabolising various foods, they begin to mutate at a high rate. And since most mutations are bad, most of your friends die. But you and a few others got lucky. You ended up with a mutation that allows you to metabolise something completely different. Let’s say I don’t know, alcohol, and I’m still drinking. Okay, so that’s good. So now you survive, and so do your three or four other friends who got the same or similar mutation and you begin to reproduce and you the whole colony grow back. This happens. This is a real event. I’m not making it up. Hypermutation is something that occurs, and the way it happens – remember all the members of the colony have to do it at the same time for it to work, and most of them will die, but the few that survive because if they got a good mutation, that saves the whole colony. So that implies several things. First, mutations can be really beneficial in times of stress because they give you the chance to be a whole new person or a whole new bacterium. And second, it shows the cooperation between different members of that colony. There has to be a signal out to everybody saying, Hey, times are bad. Let’s mutate and do it now altogether. And the other thing that this talk shows is that there is something called targeted mutation or stress-directed mutations, SDM, which are what you said, they’re mutations that occur at a specific time, at a specific location of the genome where it counts. So it’s no longer true, and there’s so much evidence for this. Susan Rosenberg is one of the leaders in that field – it started with some work by John Cairns, uh, back in the eighties, and it was very controversial, but it’s now established that at various times you get directed mutations to a specific area of the genome where there are genes that can actually help the organism. So the random story, it’s often the case. It’s not the whole case, that’s why the book is Beyond Evolution becasue we’re are now way ahead of that whole, uh, Neo-Darwinian, uh, paradigm.

Ard Louis:
And so there are a bunch of biologists who think that we’ve gone down too narrow of a tunnel by not looking at these outside of the box ideas and that these outside of box ideas have been suppressed by a minority of biologists who want to be ideologically pure. He’s a, he’s a field, he, he’s a very famous physiologist. He’s not reall So every biologist would, everything thought well would say, we think very differently now than we thought 50 years ago about evolution. Epigenetic change might play a big role on all kinds of new things that happened that are very interesting. What they kind of disagree about is whether the neo-darwinian synthesis should just be expanded. Right. Or whether it should be extended. And some of that is turf wars about language. Some of that is turf wars about funding and prestige and jobs. And some of it’s just genuine intellectual differences about whether these new ideas are important or not. But we will know, you know, in 10 years, come back in 10 years and we’ll be able to give a much cleaner answer to that. Okay. So I think what you’re watching right now is a kind of turbulent period where a lot of different voices are yelling quite loudly and um. The question would be, will there be some kind of paradigm shift on this or not? And I think that the jury is out.

John Dickson (Studio)

About 10 years ago, Ard Louis spoke to Denis Noble for a documentary, ‘Why Are We Here?’. Noble explained part of his frustration with those who hold to the narrow – or what is now sometimes ‘reductionist’ – Neo-Darwinian model of evolution. Here’s part of that conversation. 

Media – ‘Why Are We Here?’

John Dickson:
And someone like Richard Dawkins, uh, is unsettled by … dislikes this approach. What’s his disagreement or what’s his problem with it?

Ard Louis:
I think that he thinks that Dennis overstates the problem. So he thinks Dennis is overstating how important these new mechanisms are. Dennis thinks that Richard is stuck in the early 20, the mid 20th century and hasn’t moved on and, and they’re both interesting thinkers. But Richard Dawkins has not done research really for a long time. He’s a popularizer and so he is maybe a little bit behind on some of these more recent developments.

John Dickson:
They call themselves ‘A Third Way’.  So this, this group of scientists, I guess the first way is, uh, you know, intelligent design. Yeah. There’s a purpose outside drawing everything. They’re not that way. The other is everything’s just completely random. They reject that as well. Their third way, I mean, you correct me if I’m wrong, is that there’s something within. Genes within physical structures that pushes, uh, genetic change within a a narrow band.

Ard Louis:
Yeah. I, I, that’s part of what they say. They, I think it’s, it’s quite a, that third way is quite a broad coalition of different ideas that may not always be consistent with each other. I think it’s, I think what I would say. It’s interesting, um, and, and very kind of stimulating, probably we would, now I’m sounding like a biologist by the physicist. I would, I would want to wait until we see some more experimental evidence for some of these ideas, um, before I would, you know, say that revolution is upon us.

John Dickson:
How does your work relate to them or how, how would these third way-ers view your work?

Ard Louis:
Well, I think it depends on the third way, right? So what I, the work I’m doing. It falls on a, on a, on a slightly different, um, fault line. And that’s the fault line between structuralism, which is the idea that what you see in the natural world is there because there’s certain structures the natural world easily makes versus others. And there, that’s a long history in biology of people that have looked at this. So a famous example that that’s very old and more or less everybody agrees on is if you look at the shell of a snail, then the ones that have like c you know, round circles, and you’ll find that the ra, the, the ratios of the radii follow the Fibonacci sequence, which is, you know, one mm-hmm. One, two. My, my kids love this. And that’s, that’s not because of natural selection. It’s because if you, in terms of if you make these shells, then this is a natural thing that emerges. So it’s a structural. The structural, you can only make shell in a certain number of ways. And so you get these patterns that come out. And so the question is how much of what we see in nature can you describe by these mathematical patterns? Like is you have to do it this way, there’s no other way of doing it, and structuralism is that way. Adaptationism is the other side, and neo-Darwinians are typically adaptation and they would say no.The reason why you see that particular form is because that was what natural selection optimized or that’s what that selection drove you towards that particular case. It’s more complicated than that because natural selection is always acting with a lot of random, um, other things happening at the same time. But this would be the, the origin of it. So one of the arguments in an example I gave you of these leaf shapes is: Is the reason why we’ve got this bias towards simple leaf shapes natural selection? Natural selection likes once these, they’ve got, they make a, they give a reproductive fitness advantage. That would be an adaptationist view. The structuralist view would be my view that, at least the one that I’m now promoting, which is that no, it just is easier to make that simple shape than the complex shape. And so you just make what’s easier and it’s due to the physics of the making of leaves that prop that, that you see that.

John Dickson:
Can you put your finger on that for me? Because you’re saying that there’s a. Maybe this isn’t the language you’d use a bias in physical reality. Simplicity and symmetry.

Ard Louis:
That’s right. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things I’ve been looking a lot at is, so I’m, I’m pretty sure that we’ve shown that there is a bias, which works as follows, random mutations that are basically completely uniformly random. So anything can happen with equal likelihood. Have very non, very, have outcomes that are really highly biased towards shapes that are are simple. And one of the examples of simple shapes are symmetric shapes. Because something symmetric, you don’t have to describe half of it, for example, and then the other half you can just say, repeat that again. And so you see a lot of symmetry in nature or even things that are close to symmetry. And we’re basically saying that’s because it’s much easier to make symmetric things than non-symmetric things.

John Dickson:
Is a snowflake an example?

Ard Louis:
Snowflake’s an example. So snowflake are not technically always symmetric, but they have a very simple algorithm to make them, and they make a lot of variation with them. But they, but they’re, they, um, the reason why they, they have that beautiful shape is not because there’s some kind of, um, physical, um, blueprint that remembers it, but it’s because a little pa, little pattern forming a really simple little pattern forming mechanism that generates those shapes. And so what I’m saying is these pattern-forming mechanisms, like the ones that make snowflakes are also happening in our body all the time. And so the reason why we have certain, certain characteristics, because those are the ones that, that are like snowflake, easy to make. And so that’s a, that that fault line is how much of, of what you see can you explain by this just how nature works? It’s part of the physical law like snowflakes and how much of it is, no, it’s because natural selection drove you towards this particular outcome?

John Dickson:
Yeah. But you are, you are suggesting that actually the outcomes are in a sense, predetermined by this very simple algorithm in nature.

Ard Louis:
Exactly. Yeah. So I’m saying there’s in nature. In nature, exactly. So I’m saying there’s this algorithmic, I, um, principles in nature that generate this. This is not quite what, you know, the, the third grade people are saying, but it’s very akin to it. But this is actually a much, so this, this particular, um, take and I’m giving you is a much longer and older tradition and in the modern biology, there’s a subset called Evo Devo, I love that word, Evo Devo. It’s evolution and development. So that development is the, basically the idea that’s, um, you start from the fertilised cell, then out comes, you know, at some point John Dickson. Right? And that’s many, many steps happen along that way. And evolution can act on those different steps. And so how you get from that cell to somebody that looks like you is affected by all those different developmental steps. So evolution can work on these different developmental steps to change what you look like. And some of this, maybe a small tweak to developmental steps makes you completely different. And so that’s also actually a part of evolutionary biology that has a lot of structuralism in it. They just, people will say, well, the reason why you see this particular animal shape is because it’s easy to develop that shape. Does that make sense?

John Dickson:
It does.

Ard Louis:
Yeah. So, so interestingly, the reason why I’m saying this is because Evo Devo is very clearly not like the modern synthesis. And in the early days of Evo Devo, there was a lot of fighting between classic modern synthesis people and the Evo Devo people. Now, Evo Devo has become just part of the, of the landscape. Everybody think it’s. It’s, you know, highly respected and there’s, there are conferences and books, et cetera, and, you know, jobs in that particular fields. And then the question would be for the third way people would be, is that outside the modern synthesis because it’s different from the modern synthesis, or has the modern synthesis expanded and allowed this, all this Evo Devo thinking into it, and this is a very interesting scientific, actually, also philosophical question. 

John Dickson (Studio)

Every few years, another article is published with a title like “Does evolutionary theory need a rethink?”, from the pre-eminent science journal Nature in 2014, or  ‘Do we need a new theory of evolution?’ (that’s from The Guardian in 2022), or ‘Evolution may be purposeful, and it’s freaking scientists out’ (that’s from Forbes, in 2024). But both Ard Louis and Sy Garte are at pains to say that the overarching idea of evolution is not in crisis. The scientists questioning the modern synthesis – including Third Way-ers like Denis Noble – aren’t saying evolution isn’t real. They’re arguing that there’s more to know about how evolution works. 

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John Dickson:
I wanna run something by you. When I read your work, and listen to you, um, it chimes with Aristotle’s view, which was different from his teacher, Plato. Plato thought that there were ideals in the heavens, and they impose themselves on creation. Aristotle said, no, no, no. The logos is in the things. So it’s not, they’re not being drawn out from the external. There’s, let’s say an algorithm – a ‘logos’ in nature. And the Hebrew Bible says something similar actually, that God put his wisdom in things. Those things have their own powers that are a reflection of his wisdom. I guess my, my question to you is, um, does that feel a better way to you to feel a better way to think about natural order than the completely random idea? Or even the sometimes Christian idea that God is like poking and intervening, shaping.

Ard Louis:
So I think, you know, that’s, I think yes, of course I like it better because I think it’s, um, it’s a third way between the two extremes, right? I don’t think many biologists really think that everything is random. Even Richard Dawkins was famously said, you know, the mutations might be random, but the natural selection is the one that pushes you one way or the other. What that would imply is that it’s the environment that does the work, right? The environment imposes itself on the organism. And so if you see the, um, marsupial wolf evolve in Australia and a placental wolf in North America, the argument be there’s a niche in that environment that wolf kinds just want to be in, and natural selections driving it that way. And there may be some truth to that story. I think the idea that ‘God would create a world that makes itself’ is just much more aesthetically beautiful than a world where God has to continuously intervene in nature. So I’ll give you two analogies, one analogy and one short historical story that I think helps illustrate this. So the analogy would be if I take Lego blocks and I make a train, for example, you know, my children would be impressed because I made a train. If I could invent Lego blocks that I put them into a box, with little bit of glue, and I shake the box for a little while and then I open it and it spontaneously forms a train. That would be very spectacular. I’d become very rich selling that as a toy, right? But that’s what nature does all the time. And so I might see that train and see a few scratches on it, because I was shaking it right, but it would be infinitely more impressive and infinitely cooler. So I think God has done it that way. That’s how God has. God has made things that make themselves. And that seems to me much more interesting, more exciting and more beautiful than just plunking these things down fully made.

John Dickson:
But it’s also what Aristotle said. And what the Hebrew scripture said before s said before, before Aristotle.

Ard Louis:
Exactly. So I think it, it, it fits very much with biblical story and I think it’s much more beautiful now. The, the intervention story has another angle to it, which you probably have covered at some point in your podcast. But there’s a famous. Um, exchange with Newton and effectively Leibnitz or Clark. He was speaking for Leibnitz and Newton when he came up with gravity worked out how the planets move in these elliptical orbits around the sun. But there’s a problem there because the, the gravity, his gravitational law explains why the earth has an elliptical orbit and why Jupiter has an elliptical orbit. But of course, Jupiter also pulls on the earth because gravity pulls on everybody. And if you do the calculations, Jupiter pulling on the earth would make the earth unstable after a certain amount of time. And so the earth would be ejected from the solar system. That would be bad. Therefore, Newton says at some point God sends a comet through, okay? And he uses that comet to kind of realign the planets when they’re about to go wrong. So God intervenes every so often, he pokes it. And so Leibnitz pushed back on that on two grounds. One is that God intervenes for, um, so he, I’m making on the exact words, but basically God intervenes in redemptive history for redemptive reasons. And when we say that God intervenes in the history of Israel or the history of God’s people, we often need God’s revelation to show that to us. Or we might see something very obvious, but God’s doing that for a purpose. Right? So like the word miracle in the New Testament is never just a, a, something amazing, a sign in the sky. It’s always used with the words work of power or sending a sign. It’s always, it has a purpose to it. It’s never just God do something magical in the sky. So on that basis, he says, God doesn’t do this for want of nature, but one… He said, God does not do this for wants of nature, but wants of grace. That was Leibniz’s words. So why would God, God doesn’t do these miracles to solve things in nature?

John Dickson (Studio)

Leibniz, by the way, is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German polymath, mathematician and scientist who (along with Isaac Newton) created calculus.

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Sir Isaac Newton and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning the Work of God. According to their doctrine, God Almighty wants to wind up his watch from time to time: Otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. Nay, the machine of God’s making, is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen; that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work; who must consequently be so much the more unskilful a workman, as he is oftener obliged to mend his work and to set it right. According to my opinion, the same force and vigour remains always in the world, and only passes from one part of matter to another, agreeably to the Laws of Nature, and the beautiful pre-established Order. And I hold, that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the Wants of Nature, but those of Grace. Whoever thinks otherwise, must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God.

Ard Louis:
But the second thing he says, you know, it’s much more beautiful if God were to make planets that are stable than if God has to intervene in it. And I think we …  soon to think that that that would be somehow demeaning to God that he couldn’t make a planetary system that has a stable orbit for the Earth, and he’s gotta keep fixing something that he hasn’t done. So God doesn’t fix mistakes in his creation by poking in every so often. And so why would God create the world? And then having to poke in all the time doesn’t make any sense.

John Dickson (Studio)

We’ve talked before on the show about the “God of the gaps” criticism often thrown at believers. According to this criticism, theists need mysteries in science — gaps in our knowledge of how things work — so they can insert the explanation: God did it! And as science eventually discovers how those things work, the gaps get smaller. There’s less and less space — less and less need — for any reference to God. God becomes merely a “God of the gaps.” Now, that criticism certainly sticks to some kinds of Christian arguments. But it doesn’t come close to touching the classical Christian approach to natural knowledge. The classical view — going all the way back to Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century, and Augustine of Hippo in the fourth — is almost the opposite of the “God of the gaps.” According to these thinkers, it’s the bits we do understand — not the gaps in understanding — that point to God. Because every time we discover how something in the universe works, we find that it can be described in deeply mathematical and rational ways. Scientific discoveries don’t empty the universe of order and rationality; they reveal just how saturated with order and rationality it is. And this is exactly what you’d expect on the assumption of theism. The only way scientific discoveries would seriously call into question the idea of a Mind behind the cosmos is if science began to prove that everything is utterly random — that there are no equations that accurately describe the movement of the heavens or the behaviour of the atom. That, I suppose, would challenge the notion of Divine Intelligence. (It would also discredit the very practice of science itself, which depends on the orderliness of nature — but that’s for another day.) My point is simple: every step forward in science gives us more, not less, natural order and intelligibility. Rationality seems woven into the very fabric of matter. It’s not the “gaps” in knowledge that suggest this. It’s the knowledge itself. Long before Augustine — before Christianity — pagan philosophers spoke of this orderliness in nature as the logos: the rational principle, the operating system behind the machine. For Plato, the logos was located in the heavens, in the realm of Ideas — what he called the Forms. For Aristotle, the logos was not merely “out there,” in some distant realm, but in natural things themselves. An acorn becomes an oak tree not because of an ethereal idea floating in the heavens, but because the principle of oak-ness — we might even say the “algorithm” — is built into the acorn itself. In a sense, the acorn is programmed to become an oak. What fascinates me is that something similar was already being said by the ancient Hebrews. In the book of Proverbs — chapter 3, chapter 8, and elsewhere — Israel’s sages spoke of God’s wisdom as embedded in creation itself, in much the same way that we might say the genius of those clever Swedes is built into every IKEA product. And Genesis 1 has its own way of saying something similar. In an often-overlooked paragraph, the Hebrew writer doesn’t describe God individually crafting every plant by direct intervention. Instead, God commands the earth to bring forth vegetation — and the earth does so. The vegetation then produces “according to its kind.” It’s as if the logos is placed within the things themselves. Here’s the passage:

Then God said, “Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.” And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.

The genius of God is built into the fabric of the material cosmos, so that, in a certain sense, it makes itself. So when scientists discover explanations for how things work, they are not explaining away God. They are uncovering the deep rational structure of reality. They are, in a very real sense, peering into the Mind of the Maker. That’s the classical Christian view of natural knowledge.

John Dickson:
A final question. I I, I know you, you always avoid any sense that science demonstrates Christian theism. That’s obvious that, I guess I wanna ask it the other way around. In your day-to-day work as a physicist here, um. Do you see God intellectually speaking in your work?

Ard Louis:
So I, I definitely do. Yes. I think, you know, when I, I think I told you I… when I made that discovery about the emergence of symmetry, I cried. I thought it was so beautiful. I thought I was so beautiful. I couldn’t believe that. I couldn’t believe that I was the one. Who was privileged to see this. You know, I thought, I walked around looking and thinking, man, I’m the one, you know, and you’re

John Dickson:
And you’re tearing up now!

Ard Louis:
I’m tearing up now. I’m tearing up now. Exactly. And I remember thinking, I thank God, I thank God, thank you, God, for the privilege in my life that I was able to see this. This thing that you’ve made, that you’ve known since the beginning of time. And I was able to see it and it’s beautiful and I thank you that I saw it. And that’s, uh, a natural kind of responsive worship that a scientist would have. Right now mine, you know, on that particular project, I had students who were atheists and students who had, was a student who was a Muslim. They might have had different experiences looking at that. And so I’m not going to say their experiences were wrong, but I do think that this is something for a Christian that’s, that’s very natural and I think that that experience of seeing some beauty in the natural world, in its intricacy, in its order is not something that only scientists see. I think the general public see that many people who don’t believe in God. Nevertheless, we’ll look at the natural world and say that it points to something bigger than ourselves. It’s a very, very common intuition across cultures and across time, and I think a valid one. And so I think all that our microscopes and our telescopes do is enhance that sense of wonder and holds that sense of amazement. So I think, you know, by and large science points to God. It’s not a proof for God, but it points to God. And one of the ways you can think about that as well is it could do the counterfactual. You know, maybe the universe would have no beautiful rules, just it’ll all be chaos and disorder. On atheism that’s could be just equally likely or possible. On theism you might expect there to be some kind of order. Historically, that played a big role in the, the kind of birth of modern science was that expectation that we should find order. And so I think on the fact that we see so much orders, so much beauty isappointed towards God

John Dickson:
Ard Louis, thank you so much.

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