intelligent design
On today's show we continue our wide-ranging discussion of the Holy Grail, cometary bombardments, and the role of intelligence in the universe. As we've discovered, understanding these three, seemingly unconnected, topics may be more critical than ever to understanding the origins of life and the extreme times the earth is once again going through.

While many proponents of intelligent design strive to illustrate the sheer impossibility of 'random' processes to account for the origins of life, they typically remain silent on the nature of the intelligence capable of doing so, and the means by which it implements its design. It's no wonder, since their scientific reputations are already on the line and the field of study that seeks to understand the mind's potential to interact with the universe in many mysterious ways - parapsychology - is itself verboten in modern scientific discourse.

But we here at MindMatters don't face such constraints. If intelligence accounts for the myriad designs of life, then it is in the science of the mind that we should seek our answers. So today we turn to the vilified field of parapsychology to tease out a mechanism that can explain how an intelligence could, without a trace, initiate and maintain the grand experiment of life on earth.


Running Time: 00:55:21

Download: MP3 — 50.7 MB


Previous shows in this series: Recommended reading: Here's the transcript of the show:

Corey: Hello everyone and welcome back to MindMatters. Over the past few weeks, we have been discussing intelligent design, the Holy Grail, cometary bombardments - all sorts of mysterious and interesting things that happen on this planet over millennia that are not discussed whatsoever in the mainstream. So we thought that since we're so interested in all of it, we would just start. We were just planning on doing one show and then after every show so far, we said 'Oh there's this topic, this subject, we could go into this."

So this week we're going to continue, based on some very interesting insights that Harrison and all of us have had, regarding the influence of parapsychology or Psi phenomenon and other related interesting esoteric phenomenon, on the potential role that they play in intelligent design, evolution and trying to get an idea - as Harrison calls it - of where the intelligence comes in and where the design comes in and how everything that we've been discussing from comets to being like furnaces for the creation of extraordinarily important genetic, pre-genetic and all different sorts of material and how that all works.

There are so many different theories out there and so many brilliant individuals who have different pieces of the puzzle. So we're just going to keep on putting those puzzle pieces together and having fun. We hope that you have fun with it as well.

Harrison did you have something in mind with where we wanted to go?

Harrison: I'll start out with a preface because you mentioned that a lot of these topics aren't talked about in the mainstream at all. Because we're not mainstream, that means we can talk about all of them. I read something today that brought this dynamic out for me. There's an academic philosopher who will be publishing a paper. I think it's out already, a critique of evolutionary psychology. Evolutionary psychology is big. It's an excepted thing, everyone likes it. She wrote a paper critiquing it at the very foundation, implying if not alright stating - but she might also do that - that it's just totally bunk from the bottom up.

Many scholars and academics can get away with something like that - with stepping out of the mainstream and either critiquing something or coming up with a wacky crazy theory, that might just happen to be true. But when you look at anyone who does have an established career, usually they won't go that far. They won't push any boundaries and they'll stay within the limits of their profession and the accepted bounds of the range of discourse possible within any kind of system like that.

Then you get the few that stray outside and will have one crazy, wacky idea, right? They've done the research. They are really convinced that there's something to it so that enables them to go forward and to risk the approbation of their peers, the hate and the smears that they will get as a result of it because they feel it's the truth so it's their job to go forward and do it.

In every field there is someone like that. It's easy to miss, it's easy not to realize that within every field there is a 'black sheep', there is a maverick or just a courageous individual that sees a problem and then points it out, or sees a problem with an entire field or something at the very foundation of some accepted world view or theory. You've got these people in every field, and oftentimes when you read things, even in this current climate when the idea of scientific authority is at the forefront of a lot of people's minds and you often see statements like 'the experts agree' or 'everyone agrees with this', it's never true. There is always a minority. It might be a tiny minority or a small minority or a substantial minority of experts who disagree.

Nothing is ever that simple. You'll only find consensus in a group of people, and it's usually around something very general like an overall theory. You'll get a general consensus among most biologists that Darwinism is the answer, that random mutation and natural selection answer all the questions. When you get into all of the details, most people disagree. You won't often find a total consensus on every scientific result. Scientific debate can be quite contentious and combative within those fields. Scientists themselves can be quite snippy at each other, backstabbing and petty. It's pretty common.

But coming back to the idea of these rogues in these fields, often times they're just rogue on one idea. When you add all of them together, then you've got like the anti-worldview of the mainstream scientific establishment because you've got 'this one over here that's opposite this idea', or 'that directly contradicts it', 'this one over here, this one over here'. What if we just got rid of that entire circle of the mainstream accepted academic view of the world and took all of the ones on the boundaries? What would that world look like? It's not like we plan to do that at the outset, but that's probably a picture of where we're at. When it comes to most mainstream things we have found ourselves taking 'the road less traveled', let's say.

So today we're just going to be mashing a bunch of those ideas together. To give a summary of some of the relevant ideas for last week so that you don't have to watch that show, if you haven't, but we encourage you...

Corey: But of course you should. [laughter] Why wouldn't you?

Harrison: We were talking about comets and the prebiotic and biological material found in various types of space matter. One idea that was briefly alluded to in the last show but never really got into in detail is an idea that has been presented by another 'black sheep', maverick - Jim McCanney - in some of his self published books on comets and his electrical universe type theory on the nature of comets. One of the ideas he presents, which I think is interesting - I don't know if it's the total answer yet. I'm not familiar with all of the evidence he uses to support it. I know from just recently listening to some Randall Carlson stuff that they've done various spectroscopic analyses of comet comas and the presence of certain organic chemistry in space rocks of these sorts.

What McCanney suggests is that the coma of a comet is actually electrically ignited, like burning plasma. Within that electrically charged environment that lights up the skies so dramatically, often to millions the size of the cometary body on the inside, the coma can be as big as the sun for a comet that's relatively tiny in comparison. That area right behind the comet is almost like a furnace, a chemical factory of some sort, where weird stuff happens. The way I see it, it's almost like a natural random number generator. There are random processes going on in this plasma mix of protons and electrons and all the other materials that become part the gas cloud of this comet.

I suspect weird stuff can happen in that kind of environment. The way I picture it - and this is totally unscientific - but the way I picture it is almost like in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. What's their spaceship called? Zaphod Beeblebrox's 'the improbability drive' of...?

Corey: Yeah.

Harrison: ...whatever the name of the spaceship is. Weird, improbable things can happen in a random environment. One of the things we were talking about last week is that in the history of evolution it seems like there are punctuation's in the evolutionary history where things are pretty boring and routine for a while, and then something amazing happens, either a mass extinction, or an explosion of new life forms like in the Cambrian. I don't think anyone has yet come up with a good explanation for why the history of all species of life on this planet is like that. According to basic Darwinism, it should be a relatively stable growth or evolution or devolution. We should be getting successively dumber and less evolved. You'd think it would be one or the other, but instead it's these rapid, catastrophic changes, one way or the other.

So it seems that if that's the case, that something special would have happened in these 'special' times to bring about these rapid and grand changes. As we were discussing last week, you need a specific context, you need materials and then you need the right specific momentary environment going on like. This might be the EM burst from a fireball or a cometary impact where the chemical nature of the environment changes so rapidly and to such a large degree and to something so out of the ordinary that something new is then possible, for whatever reason. So maybe there's something about the electromagnetic signature of these events that allows things to happen. I think we described that as like a 'window'.

When you change something to that degree, so out of the ordinary that then is when new stuff happens because that's the new environment, maybe that is the context necessary for this type of change to occur; something to do with electromagnetics perhaps and the new environment caused by these extreme events, these epic catastrophes or whatever the opposite of a catastrophe would be.

Something like that might be happening in comet tails where they might actually generate certain of these materials to form amino acids or some other type of prebiotic material for the formation of life. It might not be that it was just on some planet, gets picked up, gets ejected from some bombardment there into space and hitches a ride to another solar system. It might be that some of these are actually generated in space, in comet comas similar to how the formation of stars generate the first 26 elements of the periodic table. Something similar might be going on, on a higher level of chemistry actually putting those building blocks together in pretty basic forms. Maybe, maybe not. That's just an idea that pops into head after reading some of Jim McCanney's stuff and tying it into a few other things.

So it's one idea to add into the mix. It doesn't necessarily have to be the source but it may be at least a possible source for some of the material needed for the origins of life.

Corey: I seem to remember you mentioning that McCanney theorized that there was some quantum process that was occurring due to the sheer energy and all of the randomness and craziness going on, that that is where that window that we were talking about could open within that comet coma. Is that accurate?

Harrison: Well it might be. It's been several years since I've read McCanney and I'm no physicist or chemist so I can't remember. If that was it, I can't remember the details and wouldn't be able to reproduce it but I think that might be right. There's going to be quantum stuff going on just like there is everywhere at all times, but there might be a special environment in that case in this kind of plasma so that there is something on that level going on.

But if we go outside of the realm of strict quantum mechanics to a bit more of the popularized version of it, you could have a quantum effect that's similar to some of the actual quantum effects on that subatomic level that you see on a macro level, a quantum effect as in an instantaneous shift in levels that's discontinuous, that doesn't go through the space in between. You jump from one state to another state like a phase shift, but a phase shift not in terms of solid, liquid and gas or plasma but a shift in order, perhaps because that's essentially what you see in a lot of atomic or subatomic processes like electron orbitals. You see jumps. You see discontinuous phenomena where things aren't smooth and going from one to the other like Darwinian evolution. Things come in jumps, in leaps.

So that would be a good way of describing this hypothesized or theorized mechanism going on in comet tails, as a place where quantum leaps are generated in the organization of basic chemistry. You might have a jump from the collection of raw materials into all of these amino acids, for instance. It might look instantaneous when you observe it but there's some weird stuff going on.

That actually relates to the question you asked that we were puzzling over. As we discussed last week in terms of intelligent design, one of the things we brought up is that the intelligent design people only go so far because they've got their own agenda or their own purpose. I don't say 'agenda' in a mean way. They've got their purpose, what they want to do. They want to present a good scientific theory for intelligent design, 'this is what the science suggests', 'we're not going any further than the science suggests, where we hypothesize that intelligence is necessary for the creation of information, whether that be genetic information or body form, body plan information, or just any form of biological information.'

So that's as far as they go, but they stop at the level of how that actually happened. What are some possibilities for how that might have actually occurred? Was it literally some physical being that had a lab and brewed up these life forms in their lab? Was it so similar to our environment? Are there lab technicians that are brewing up life forms? Or, for some of the more religious ones, was it God Himself or Jesus that did this, and if so, how?

They don't go there because that's an unscientific question. It's something that they don't really want to speculate on because again, these are often times scientists, biologists, biochemists, that are within their field coming out with their one radical idea. And one radical idea is enough for anyone whose professional because the more radical ideas you tag onto that, the less credibility you get, the more haters you have and the more attacks you have to fend off. So they'll just stick to one. "Okay, this is our crazy idea. We're going to limit our craziness to this" and just bracket it off everything else.

So I've never really seen anyone try to put some more ideas together and say: 'How would this actually happen?', because the intelligent design people would have a good response to the idea of some alien lab technician brewing up life. Well that really doesn't really answer the question because where did the alien lab technician come from? Well fair enough. So, it just pushes the question further back. But, if there's something weirder going on, what would actually happen? Let's say you've got the planet earth before any life forms are on it. What would it look like when the first single-celled organism appeared? Where does it come from? Did it drop from space? When observing that situation, what would appear? Would it just appear to come out of nowhere? Does it transmit or transfer from some other dimension - what's going on there?

So that's one of the questions that we want to look at today. What is at least one possible factor that might be involved in that process? And that's where the idea of psi or parapsychology comes into play. It might seem like a leap [chuckles] if you're not familiar with a lot of these ideas. But to give a little background, one of the good arguments that Steven Meyer - one of the intelligent design guys - puts forward is what he calls 'the inference to the best explanation'. He was looking for a way to formulate the arguments he was making and the perhaps vague, unarticulated arguments he had at the time or unarticulated way of just framing those arguments, trying to figure out the best way to do that within known scientific practice. This is what he came up with because even Darwin himself and a lot of the geologists at the time and currently today too, had the idea of scientific naturalism and one of the ways of arguing within that limited world view is what he calls 'the inference to the best explanation'.

If you're going to explain a phenomenon, that is current in the present time, then the only real options you have are the causes that can bring that about in the present. Scientists can't very well hypothesize some strange new causal phenomenon going on in the past that we are unaware of today because don't see it, we don't have any evidence that it actually exists. So what are the causal processes that we can see today that can explain what happened in the past?

One example he gives, just for how this works on a mundane level, is fingerprint analyses. If you find a fingerprint and it matches some other guy's fingerprint from something that happened in the past, if you find this fingerprint at a crime scene, the 'inference to the best explanation' is that that fingerprint belongs to this guy and either his thumb touched it, or his thumb touched something that was then copied and planted on there, in order to frame him. Those are the two basic explanations. There's no other explanation for how that specific fingerprint got there. It didn't just appear out of nowhere, or maybe it did but that's a whole other question.

So you use the known causes which is that guy's fingerprint and the fact that fingers leave fingerprints, to explain that thing that happened in the past. So in terms of the creation and origin of information, Steven Meyer argues that the only known cause that we have for the creation of new information is intelligence. Therefore, the origin of life and the origin of genetic and biological information must have been intelligence. That's as far as he goes.

Coming back to our mystery, as if that isn't a big enough mystery, 'okay, let's now assume that it is intelligence'. Well how does that intelligence operate on the matter in existence, the raw material, the stuff from comets or the stuff that's just present on a planet that happens to have a lot of 'luck' in its component parts in order to have all of the material necessary for that quantum leap from the level of basic chemistry to biochemistry? So we can phrase the question: what is the only known cause or means of organizing matter, of bringing order to matter, of injecting information into matter, that we know of? What is the only known cause that does that, that we know of, in the absence of a physical being actually doing so? That's kind of a tricky question because you have to...

Corey: It's controversial...

Harrison: Yeah. To just blurt it out there, the only known cause that we know of, that does that, is psychokinesis. What is psychokinesis? It's the action of a mind on matter, without any physical means of affecting that matter, of having an effect on that matter. This is why we said we'll just take a whole bunch of controversial ideas not accepted by the mainstream and mash them all together because, arguably psychokinesis is a real phenomenon. I think that any serious scientist that has looked at it, that didn't have an agenda or an extreme bias, has come to the conclusion, or does come to the conclusion that there is something real going on here.

Corey: And let me just interrupt you to take a quick break from that and just let the audience know that I think one of the best books that I've ever read on parapsychology was by Dr. James Carpenter's First Sight, because he goes through and he critically analyzes decades worth of scientific studies, from telekinesis to psychokinesis and he attempts to lay out in an elaborate theory that's grounded in all of the available data that takes into account all of the data.

So for anyone out there who is wondering 'well that seems like kind of a leap', I would highly recommend getting that book, ordering that book and reading it and by the time that you're done with that, I think that the pieces of the puzzle will have clicked into place and you'll really begin to see that one of the controversial aspects of intelligent design is the nature of intelligence. Is intelligence only embodied in physical forms that are the ones like you and your neighbor, and that the highest form of intelligence is basically getting your PhD in whatever...

Harrison: Correct... [laughter]

Corey: It's still controversial but intelligence in and of itself seems to have a much broader and more fundamental existence in this universe, and there are aspects to ourselves that we pick up on, in daily human life. You get gut instincts, you get gut feelings, your gut tells you to do this. You're picking up information from places and you're processing it in ways that are not just 'nuts and bolts' cause and effect, logical and it's not just emotional limbic system based drives that are more or less animal in nature, but that there are higher intelligent drives as well. So I would highly recommend reading that book, getting that book... I'll hand that back to Harrison.

Harrison: The first two shows on our channel were on that book, on James Carpenter's show. So if you go to our videos on our channel and just scroll to the very bottom, those first two videos are on First Sight. If you don't want to get the book, then watch the videos and then get the book because you'll want to after that.

There are a couple different approaches. James Carpenter is a psychologist so he is focusing on the parapsychological research, and like Corey said, he's got all of it in there. He probably sites every major and minor study that's been done on all these various phenomena over the decades and research like this has been going on for over a 100 years, maybe 150 years by now, from serious scientists. Then you get philosophers like Stephen Braude, another contemporary writer, who has several books, one specifically on psychokinesis. If you just 'search' Stephen Braude - he's got good work on that too. Then there's guys like Dean Radin, who is pretty good as far as he goes. One of his first couple of books is called The Conscious Universe. Then there's another book by Richard Broughton. I believe it's called Parapsychology: The Controversial Science. You can look to those for more introductions to all these phenomena.

Carpenter's is the best synthesis of them because he actually comes up with a theory that puts all of the results together in something that makes sense, that coheres together in one whole, whereas none of the other writers tend to do that. It's pretty much different bits of evidence but with no overarching theory that puts them all together. One of the bits of research that has come out from this endeavor, specifically in psychokinesis, is this idea of the mind affecting random processes, bringing order to random processes. Oftentimes in this kind of research they will use random number generators. It's essentially a high tech coin flip.

One of the principles of information and probability is that if you flip a coin, the more times you flip a coin, the less and less probable it is that you're going to continue to get 'heads'. You're not going to flip a million heads in a row, it's just not going to happen. At a certain point, I don't know what the number is, I can't remember off the top of my head, but at a certain point there's a number of flips where if you were flipping that coin for the entire duration or the hypothesized duration of the entire universe, where you wouldn't get past that number of flips. If you had billions of years of flipping 10 times a second, then you might get randomly a stretch of however many heads in a row, but any more than that it's beyond the probabilistic resources of the entire universe.

So what psychokinesis is, or demonstrates, is the ability of the mind to affect probabilities and to bring an order to randomness or perceived randomness that is out of the ordinary. For instance, in a digital coin flip in a random number generator or in variations of these types of experiments, you would expect a 50-50 probability. With a good subject or even all subjects combined and then analyzed from a meta-analytic perspective, or in a meta analyses, then you see that a whole bunch of people or one individual gets 51 percent, 52 percent, or 53 percent. And at a certain point the deviation from the expected 50-50 percent is way beyond chance - like billions to one, or millions to one - where you wouldn't expect to see these results if nothing was going on, that there does seem to be something going on.

Because of the use of these random number generators - and I think some of these random number generators operate on quantum principals - that makes more clear perhaps what is actually going on in psychokinesis, that it is a transfer of information, or a non-physical, remote, non-local effect on random processes, or like I said before, bringing order to chaos. On that non physical level there is an effect. That is essentially what people trying to understand the origin of life and the origin of DNA are looking for - something that can take a random mixture of chemical components and put them together in an organized form that will then be life, essentially. What the origin of life is, I suspect, is a vastly improbable instantaneous quantum leap collection, amalgamation and ordering of the necessary raw materials, essentially.

So the hypothesis is that, just like intelligence is the only known cause of information, that psychokinesis would be the only known means of a mind creating that in the absence of a preexisting physical form. Like I just said earlier, you can't just keep pushing the problem back to the physical form creating a physical form because eventually you have to try to explain where the first physical form came from.

If we go back to our last show where I read that bit from Rumi, if you take a more metaphysical approach or an approach adopted by more and more philosophers these days, a variation of one sort or another of panpsychism, then you can start with the idea that matter itself isn't the fundamental constituent of the universe. Consciousness is at the root. Information is at the root. Information is at a level below the expression of information in the form of physics and chemistry. And, to adopt the more mystical expression of it, consciousness is at the root of everything, that mind is fundamental.

So if mind is fundamental, then the means of ordering that basic raw chemistry would be an effect of the mind on the chemistry, on the raw materials - a direct influence, but a non-local influence. What you would essentially be seeing in the formation of the first life is a psychokinetic effect on raw materials that then brings them into a vastly improbable form. This is why I like the image of the improbability drive from Hitchhiker's Guide because it's silly and funny, but there's an idea there and there's something to that idea.

The improbability drive is in itself almost like a random process and that's why it's funny because it randomly creates vastly improbable things that would require intelligence in order to bring about. But because it's in the form of this inert improbability drive, it just makes the gag work. A way of having that actually work would be to just have a super intelligence doing it - a super intelligence with a very refined psychokinetic ability.

Corey: And that's a...

Harrison: Does that make sense?

Corey: It does. It makes sense in analogous to our own personal experience in life. You can see that there are exponential differences in intelligence between different species. You're out on the farm and you're domesticating cattle, and you have cattle that have an intelligence and a form of sentience, but the human farmer has vastly more intelligence and so they can engineer them and alter them in ways that are beneficial for humanity's survival. It's theoretically plausible, just based on common sense and just deductions based on your own observations, that there's an intelligence exponentially greater than humanity that is capable of potentially seeding life within that furnace, as you said, and directing the growth and in some way, potentially through massive die offs and massive changes just like a conveyor belt. You've got a team engineering all of the different acids like 'Okay we want this. We want to create something that's like this'. 'Okay, it's this kind of gravity, it's this temperature, this and that...'

I'm thinking that how it's working is that there's some sort of psychokinetic inner dimensional transfer of organizing information that is injected into places like a comet's tail, or something like that, through that window of opportunity that's inherent within that vastly random electromagnetic extremely volatile environment. Then you can direct things and create things within that, and then whatever law, whatever mechanism directs that towards a planet, it delivers the payload. Then from there you get to see how well you designed all of this stuff. It 'hits' and now these organisms are able to take off. They're going to start doing their thing, and they do their thing, do their thing, do their thing, and then another payload drops off and now you see the emergence of what we could call the first life forms that we would recognize as being of life. It can go on and on, and then it can keep going and keep going, and then there's massive die offs. It's like 'Well this one didn't work because it's egotistical' [laughter] and it creates radically horrible living situations for all of its fellow beings and then destroys itself. So now we'll have to try again, try again.

But as you articulated on last week's show, in the mind that this intelligence is this ideal and the entire process of life that we see working its way up from very simple plants and animal to human, there's some ideal that's being striven for, and it might be to gain that kind of intelligence, that quantum jump that you were talking about, in order for that species to be able to do that itself. And then to also get to join in on the fun and the games of being caretakers or stewards of different life forms.

Harrison: That reminds me of a couple of things that were brought up last week. I summarized a bit from John Bennett, his book The Masters of Wisdom, and what you're talking about is the evidence of a kind of grand experimentation that's going on, that we are the experiment, that life on this planet is the experiment. It is the most complex, wonderful, frightening, horrible - the most wonderful experiment imaginable going on billions of years.

For Bennett, it was just plain common sense. It was immediately evident upon looking at life and what we know of it that there are signs of experimentation. What we see as the evolution of organisms, of species and these great die offs and these explosions of new body plans and of what the Darwinist sees as a random emergence of these new forms and the die offs of them, is actually an experiment. It's actually a sign of experimentation, injecting new forms, new ideas and new life, in order to see not only how it works but if it achieves a certain goal. 'Life needs this now' or 'What would life be like with this new element involved?'

The second idea that it reminds me of is that for this to happen, it requires a super intelligence. This isn't something that any of the brightest minds of humanity could engage in because, again like Bennett pointed out, the systems are too complex. The system of interrelationships is extremely intricate and the relationships go down to all levels. The only reason your body is able to function is because of this intricate interaction between all of these systems in your body, all of these cells. And when you get down progressively through all these levels of the body, to the very bottom, the amount of complexity and the amount of stuff we don't even know about which makes it even more complex, is just staggering.

So there are signs that the only cause of this must have been, first of all a super intelligence and that it is experimenting. That word itself might conjure up nefarious ideas in listeners' minds. 'Oh we're just an experiment?' Well no, an experiment doesn't have to be just sinister. Experiments can be for the purposes of discovery or of achieving great ends, or just of curiosity on it's highest level. It's the play of creation and the play of intelligence.

But there are both aspects to it. There is a terrible aspect to it, of life itself, and there may even be a sinister aspect to the experimentation. We don't know who all of these super intelligences are, or if there are competing super intelligences with different agendas.

Corey: That's a really good way of putting it. I'm thinking of another analogy as you're discussing all of the different forms that life takes and all of these different attempts to create new life forms. I think there's something really remarkable about the different systems that are kept. I don't know how many systems have been abandoned in the history of life on earth, but in order to have an eyeball, a brain, to be able to receive light waves and information, decode them and be able to read them and understand them, and to be able to automatically react to them to have stomachs, and then from the very first stomach the brain was engineered, and it just kept going and going, there's all these different systems that you can see. Some are maybe haphazardly built on older systems but it's because of just the sheer volatility of life and all of these different things that are working together, almost like too marvelously. We are completely blind to the small miracles. I guess you could say engineering marvels of the simplest things - like the flagellum on the bacteria.

All of these different systems are kept and in humanity you see who knows how many different codes from different species - just like a little splice of that, a little splice of this, a splice of that, and voila - now you have a hairless [laughter] bipedal, loud obnoxious, whatever, that's capable of grasping and manipulating, and creating for itself.

I just can't help but think of the evolution of the automobile, from the old old days even before the model T's and all of those. You had to work the windshield with your hand. You had to start it with a crank, or whatever. There's just this ingenuity to create an engine that's based on this combustion engine, and then you take that and add some wheels onto it. We'll take the wagon design, we'll add some wheels onto this and see how that works. And then just flash forward through time and now we're living in a world where cars are going to be driving us pretty soon, because of the sheer ingenuity of a vast number of researchers and engineers who have designed these things for some people. I don't need a car that can drive itself.

I can't think of anybody who in their right mind would now want a car that drives itself, but I've seen how people drive and I might be tempted [laughter] to say that I would trust lots of cars more than most human drivers. So you can see the evolution. You take these systems. 'Okay, these things work and now we can improve on this and improve on that', and then more information comes in from related fields, from different minds who see the problem in new ways. 'Okay so now we can put a computer in there and now the computer could actually tell the engine when to fire so that now we can save gas and actually increase the power of an engine because the computer is going to tell the spark plug that at this precise millisecond 'you should fire and then that will increase the power of the engine'.

You see this intelligence being put into the vehicle and you see the change to the vehicle is made. Then you look at my car and you see what random mutation [laughter] has done to it. And you're like 'Okay I'm completely done with that whole random mutation kind of stuff'. It so clearly and obviously was a fad. It was respectable to be a Darwinist because you'd say 'I don't believe in God' and this and that, and I understand why so many countless biologists have taken it and run with it, because it was respectable, it was fashionable at the time. But people, let's just be done with it. The science is in. Read up on the material and just get with the program. Let's put that beast to bed.

Adam: I was just thinking about what you were talking about Corey, and just the sheer complexity of all that is within an ecosystem. There's the sheer amount of complexity within one system within itself, but then when you look around you, you're not just looking at just one system or just one individual thing. And even then, there is no thing that is a thing unto itself. Each organism is dependent upon all of these other different organisms in a very real way such as the bacteria in your gut.

So you can't even think of it in the way of 'one man being on the moon' or something like that, it's totally impossible. So again, trying to come at it from that angle of a random mutation, you're not talking about just one creature, or one thing. This is so infinitely complex that it's utterly absurd. And then also what you were saying earlier Harrison, about the 'inference to the best explanation', I think that's a great approach - to just look at what's going on around you and try to infer from then based on that, what potential possibilities there are for why things are the way that they are. The only logical conclusion then, is that there's some kind of intelligence at work here. It could be nefarious. It could be beneficial, just like within the scientific communities as they exist today. [laughter]

Harrison: ...And mad scientists.

Corey: And then take a look at your car and as soon as you drove it off the lot, did it start to gain in value because of all the random mutations that started to happen to it? [laughter] No, it's breaking down and it's going to be in a junk heap within ten years. But you look at the life forms that you see all around us and you think, like you were saying Harrison, this has been going on for billions and billions of years. This is not just random, haphazard stuff going on.

Harrison: I like the example of the car, the vehicle, because there's a principal there too. There seems to be universal laws or principles of creation, of intelligent design, or design itself because all design is intelligent. And that is, that if you look at the car, the car developed as almost like an accretion and intelligent mutation of the existing model. So you have your first car, the first guy who managed to put together a working vehicle and then everything else is kind of based on that. No one totally reinvented the car. If they did it's a different vehicle. It's not known as a car. But every car we know of today and that we experience today, traces its lineage back to those first cars that were developed, that first car and to the idea of that car in the first car inventor's imagination.

You see a similar thing in life as you were describing all these components and splicing in a little bit of this species and that species. Each new creation is built on the model of the previous ones with some new stuff. 'Okay we've got this model. How can we change it? Let's take a little bit of that.' Or 'I've got this new idea that isn't present in any of the other ones. What if I do that? But I was inspired by all these things because I realized that all of these suggest a third possibility that doesn't exist yet, so let's try that third possibility.

So you get all of this new stuff coming in too. And that's how we have the cars that we have today. It's all the new stuff that was added on to the old stuff, but using that first basic body plan, the schematic of that first car, everything kind of comes from that. You were talking about the systems that have been preserved throughout time and one of them is the cell itself. Every organism is cell-based. It's kind of circular. Every cell-based organism is cell based but that is one component that is preserved entirely. The cell shape itself, the cell form, is not transmitted genetically. It's also a form of information because if you think about it, you've got the cell with the genetic material in it. When you get a new organism, the cell splits. The cell shape itself is a direct descendant of the previous cell.

It's not like the DNA creates a new cell from nothing. You have this line of cells that goes back to the first cell. That's one of the most fundamental shared characteristics among life - the cell body. And there are other systems like that too that get preserved. So in every species too you have genes that never change. You have certain body forms and body parts and body systems that never change. It's that necessary basic schematic that everything needs to be built on top of because if you mess with any of the basic code, then the whole thing goes to hell.

Some research experiments have shown this when they try to manipulate or mutate a certain gene, it always leads to disaster because that's one of those most basic units that allows the organism to function at all. You can't change it. That in itself is a weird thing in Darwinism because you'd think that anything could change, but there are some things that, no, they can't change at all. They're very basic, very fundamental to the organism. They're like certain parts of the car that have come down through the ages - the first prehistoric Ford.

Corey: I think that's going to do it for us. We all hope that you enjoyed the show. We'll put a link to all the relevant reading material below in the show description. Other than that, please join us again next week and if you haven't already, please hit 'like' and 'subscribe', share wherever you share your social media stuff and have a fantastic week and design intelligently. Bye-bye.