Atheists will say, well, humans are the universe knowing itself, right,
It's like, yeah, humans are the universe knowing itself. It means that
the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent. I don't know what to say.
It's like, we are part of the universe, and we're the place where
intelligence finds its highest form that we know of in the created world, and
therefore the universe is intelligent because it's like it's like if I take your body
and I say, well, you're not intelligent because your fingernails not intelligent,
and your thumb's not intelligent, and you're you know, your your ears not
intelligent, but Stephen Meyer is intelligent. That's the same with the universe.
It's like, the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent. I know that that
might I know that that might have convinced a bunch of atheists, but it
just seems like there's a way in which often I've noticed that atheists tend to
abstract themselves from the from the reality and not consider the place of man in
the cosmos, Whereas in the Biblical cosmology, you know, the human is
placed in a very particular place in the middle of the whole system, and
is given to name the animals, like is given to continue that process of
information that happens in creation. The place of knowledge in the world is the
human person. This is Jonathan Pejo. Welcome to the Symbolic World. So
hello everyone, I'm here with Stephen Meyer. Many of you will know Stephen
Meyer. He is a scientist involved in the question of intelligent design. He's
written several books, The Signature in the Cell, Darwin's Doubt. But he's
come on my let's say, closer to my attention recently, because I've noticed
that he's been getting more and more attention. You know, I saw a
few years ago talk between himself and Berlinsky and and another mathematician talking about,
you know, kind of opposition to Darwin or questions about Darwin on the Hoober
Institution and millions of views on that, and then recently Joe Rogan and then
Piers Morgan, and so it seems to me that there's an interesting shift in
the willingness of people to engage with the question of intelligent design. And so
that's what I want to talk to Steve about. And so thanks for thanks
for coming on, Thanks for having me Jonathan and so I mean, first
of all, maybe you can lay out for people who don't know your work.
You know, what is the basic argument that you're proposing in terms of
intelligent design. It's different from the Young Earth creationists approach. It's a it
tends to take the questions of evolution and of those types of proof seriously,
but then see them in a in a different frame. Yeah. Yeah,
well that's a great place to start. Quick definition. The theory of intelligent
design firms that that life and the universe are best explained by designing intelligence rather
than by undirected material processes such as in biological realm natural selection acting on random
variation. And it's it's quite different from Young Earth creationism, and that it
is making no claims about the age of the Earth. Most proponents of intelligent
design think, I do that the Earth is very old, but it's an
age neutral proposition. It's saying that life is designed, as opposed to merely
giving the appearance of design, which is what many Darwinian biologists say. In
fact, that is classic darwinianism. Richard Dawkins has said that biology is a
study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.
But the claim that the Darwins make is that the appearance is an illusion.
That and it's an illusion because even though life looks as though it was
designed, the appearance of design is a product of an unguided, undirected mechanism,
namely natural selection and acting on random variation. So our challenge to the
evolutionary establishment is not about the idea of change over time, or about the
idea of microevolution or adaptation. It's not even necessarily about the idea of universal
common descent, the idea that all organisms are related by common ancestry, although
I personally and other ID proponents are skeptical about that, others are not.
But what we're really challenging is this idea that there's no evidence of actual design
in life, the claim that life is the product of undirected processes, such
that the appearance of design is just an appearance, just an illusion. So
are we named our theory intelligent designed to contrast it with that idea of Darwinian
apparent design. So back to creationism. Creationism and intelligent design are differ and
in two ways. One Creationism is committed to a particular age of the Earth
and a particular reading of the Days of Genesis in the Bible. Our theory
is neutral about that, but most of us as scientists hold that the earth
is very old. And secondly, the creationism is derivative from, or in
a sense of kind of a deduction or interpretation of a bit of the Biblical
text, whereas the theory of intelligent design is an inference from biological and astronomical
and physical and cosmological data. It starts with the evidence and in ferst to
the activity of a designing mind behind the evidence as a matter of scientific and
philosophical reasoning. And so my understanding is also that one of the biggest arguments
you have is that in some ways the level of complexity that the world is
actually made of was not available to Darwin at the time. He didn't understand
just how many levels of complexity existed, even within the cell and within you
know, DNA and the constituents of life, and every level that you add
acts and adds an exponential level of randomness or of possibility. And therefore it's
just the possibility of like the capacity for something to be simply the things you
know bumping into each other over millions of years is just mathematically impossible. Well,
yeah, you've said a lot there. That's all very relevant if we
move from our definition that of the theory of intelligent design. The intelligent design
firms that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained
by a designing mind or intelligence rather than undirected processes. That leads naturally to
the question, well, what kinds of features are you talking about? And
in the realm of physics, one of those features is something that many physicists
talk about today, and that is the evidence that the universe was in some
way fine tuned to allow for the possibility of life. We have the basic
parameters of physics, the laws of physics, the constants of physics, the
initial conditions of the universe. All of these things have been discovered to fall
within very narrow ranges or tolerances outside of which life and even basic chemistry would
be impossible. And so there's this high degree of fine tuning, this incredibly
improbable degree of fine tuning that has led many physicists, even physicists like Sir
Fred Hoyle, who was a very prominent scientific atheist early in his career to
reverse field. Oile discovered some of these fine tuning parameters and then later realized
there must be a fine tuner behind the fine tuning, and he was quoted
as saying that a common sense interpretation of the data suggests that a super intellect
has monkeyed with physics to make life possible. So that's one of those classes
of evidence, the evidence of fine tuning that we find in physics and cosmology.
But within the biological realm, you're right. The discovery of the extraordinary
complexity of even and what we used to think of as the simple cell has
led more and more biologists to doubt theories about the first of all, the
chemical evolutionary origin of life, the idea that you could have a series of
chemical reactions over a long period of time and move from chemicals in some sort
of pre biotic soup to the first living cell. And it has also led
many scientists to doubt the full on biological evolutionary theory, the Darwinian part of
the story that you can get from the first cell to all the new forms
of life again through an undirected, unguided process such as natural selection acting on
random variation. So what types of complexity are we seeing inside life? The
most extraordinary discoveries started in the nineteen fifties and sixties, and these were the
discoveries of the information bearing properties of the large what are called biomacromolecules, things
like DNA, RNA and proteins. Watson and Crik elucidate the structure of DNA
in nineteen fifty three. It's a pretty big discovery, very big breakthrough.
But in nineteen fifty eight, Francis Crick working on his own. It's interesting
he'd been a codebreaker in World War Two. He's working on his own and
he realizes that along the spine of the DNA molecule and the interior of that
famed double helix, there are a series of chemical subunits, and he realizes
that those chemical sub units, they're called bases or nucleotide bases, are functioning
like alphabetic characters in a written language, or like digital characters like the zeros
and ones in a section of machine code. And he's making these discoveries about
the same time that you're having the information revolution taking place in engineering and math
and physics, and so you have the concepts of information coming into the sciences.
And George Gamma, very famous physicists, realizes that Krick's description of the
DNA molecule can be rendered that what he's describing with the function of the nucleotide
bases. He says, a series of those bas This can be rendered as
a digital bitstring. This is a string of information for directing, and this
was Krick's hypothesis for directing the construction of proteins and protein machines that keep cells
alive. So by the mid nineteen sixties, when this sequence hypothesis that wants
Francis Krik is confirmed, biology enters an information age and people realize that inside
the cell, we don't just have chemical reactions going on. It's not just
metabolism. Even it's an information storage, transmission, and processing system. And
there's two different processing systems inside the cell, one for replicating DNA and one
for using the information in DNA to direct the construction of proteins. And so
the sophistication of the informational system that's at work inside even the simplest cell,
even one cell, bacteria have information processing and storage capacity of the type I'm
describing. This completely changes the terms of debate about the origin of life and
even even evolutionary biology, because we now realize that in order to build the
first living cell and in order to build new life from pre existing life,
in each case you have to have information. Just as in our computer world
you need code to produce if you wanted to give your computer a new function,
if you want to have a new app or a new program, or
a new operating system, you've got to provide information. Same thing turns out
to be true in life. If you want to build a new form of
life from a simpler pre existing form, or if you want to build life
in the first place, you've got to have information to build the proteins and
the molecular machines and the other structures inside the cell. And so that creates
a shift. It puts all evolutionary theories under pressure. I would say that
that both chemical and biological evolutionary theory have reached a state of impasts because they
cannot explain the origin of information. And yet we know from experience that information
always arises from a known source, and that source is intelligence. Yeah,
and in some ways we also have the experience of in the world of seeing
constraint go beyond the natural like just things banging against each other, and that
is exactly the same thing. It's things like mind, things like will,
things like purpose, all of these invisible patterns that constrain reality, the ones
that go beyond the way you're talking, Jonathan, that's that's you're talking like
an engineer. But to understand life today you have to think like a design
engineer. To understand the universe, you have to those fine tuning parameters I
was talking about in physics, those are nothing more than highly improbable constraints on
what matter is allowed to do by the fundamental laws of nature. And we
find in order to move from all the possible ways of arranging matter that there
are to the ways that manifest themselves in life, one constraint after another has
to be applied to those that those huge ensembles of possibilities have to be narrowed
to get something that we would recognize as life, and that is that well,
that makes life possible. Let's just say that. So the engineering constraints
that are necessary to produce a cell are immense and highly improbable, and they
also represent inputs of information. This was the basic insight of the early information
scientists like like Weaver and others, The idea that information involves the restriction of
possibilities. In fact, we measure information today that way. If I flip
a coin and it comes up head, well let's do it with zeros and
ones in the computer world. If I if I get a one, I've
eliminated a zero. So there are two possibilities. I've constrained the possibilities and
elected one and eliminated another. And that's one bit of information. And so
we now have a way of quantifying this idea of informational constraint. And the
DNA is nothing more. Well, it's a lot, it's a lot of
different things, but it is also a series of restrictions. You've got four
possibilities at each site along the DNA molecule, so not a binary code,
but a quaternary code. And so at each point, one of the four
options is elected and three are eliminated, and therefore a quantifiable amount of information
is imparted or stored at that point. And it turns out that that information
is also importantly functional because it's directing the construction of the proteins and protein machines.
Yeah, and I mean, what's fascinating to me is that even when
I hear the Darwinian argument to say that it's it's just random mutation and then
natural selection. It's like what even the term natural selection? What exactly?
So you're saying, so being has a tendency to persist, and being as
a tendency to be autopoetic and to constrain reality is in a manner that non
living beings do not have. And that type of constraint even though we don't
even necessarily have mind at the outset, like at the lowest forms, but
that type of constraint already looks like what mind does at a higher levels.
And so you know, like you said, like the idea of saying that
we can notice that this type of constraint, even in the world of biology,
is already there in the structures themselves. And and then but then at
some point thinking well, then we can't go any further than that, like
we we noticed that that actually does what it what we need, what we
need for it to happen, for it to constrain reality in a way that
goes beyond random just randomness. Uh that that analog analogically you would be able
to infer that then mind is an aspect of the universe that constrains matter like
it already is in lights like why does it body? The insight you have
that I'm thinking back on on Shannon Chan and Weaver who developed information theory in
the first place, and the idea was that any reduction of uncertainty results in
a corresponding input of information. And so that's what we can think of.
The idea of imparting information is also a way of constraining things. But what
we also know from our experience, our uniform and repeated experience, which is
the basis of all scientific reasoning, is that if we have a big input
of information into a system, it's always come from a mind, whether we're
talking about a computer program or a paragraph in a book or a hieroglyphic conscription,
or we're transmitting information now across the internet. And so but where does
that information come from? It comes from a mind, And that kind of
makes sense when you think of or from intelligence. Well, what is the
Latin root for intelligence is interlego. It's to choose between. That's what minds
do they choose between. And in the most base sense, information is choosing
between between zero and a one, between a A or a C, or
a G or a T. And so what we find in life is stored
information in DNA, suggesting a prior the prior activity of a mind in choosing
between the options to elect the one that's there present. And so there's a
lot of deep concepts here. But I think that from the standpoint of evolutionary
theory, there, and you brought up the whole question of Brandom mutations,
the evolutionary mechanisms do not and are not providing adequate explanations for the origin of
information. Let's just look at the mutation selection idea for a minute. If
if, in fact, the a section of DNA containing information for building a
protein is alphabetic or digital in character, and it is Leroy Hood, our
famous biotech expert out here in the Seattle area, just says DNA is contains
digital code. Richard Dawkins says it's like a machine code. Francis crick Uh
made very clear that it's stored information, and not just information in a mathematical
sense, but information that was also functional like that. Yeah, it's a
constraining factor. It's it's it's a it's commanding. It's exactly. Bill Gates,
are also other local hero in the Seattle area, says DNA is like
a software program, but much more complex any we've devised. So what,
well, what do we know about software information in the digital form? Well,
if it's functional, we know that you can't change it very much without
degrading its function and very quickly causing it to lose function altogether. But what
what do do the Darwinians propose as the mechanism by which new form is is
generated. Well, they proposed that you will have random changes in the section
of a gene, the acs, gs and T in a gene, and
that some that many of those random changes will be degradative, but occasionally you
get lucky and you'll get a good one, and then that that one will
be will result in a new protein, and that new protein will result in,
uh, we'll combine with other proteins and form some sort of anatomic new
anatomical structure. And as those those those changes accumulate, you'll eventually get new
new form, new biological form and function. But there's a problem, and
that's the problem, a problem we know well from our computer world, and
that is that the functional sequences are so rare that if you begin to change
the bit strings, you're inevitably, after very few changes, going to destroy
the function long before you ever get to something new or functional. If I've
got a section of code for building an app and I I want to evolve
it by random changes to generate a new app, I'm going to degrade and
destroy the existing app long before I find a new series of characters that will
give me a new app or a new operating system or something. And the
reason for that is that the functional sequences are so rare among all the possible
ways of arranging the zeros and ones in computer code, or we can think
of we can do the same thought experiment with English text. If we've got
a line of poetry time and Tide wait for no Man, and we want
to evolve it into line from the Principia by Newton, we can. We'll
start to change the time and tide, and pretty soon we'll get in undecipherable
gibberish, long before we get a line from Newton or Hawking or or anybody
else. So, and what's going on here. What's going on is that
in all linguistic systems, our systems for conveying information digitally or alphabetically, the
islands or the arrangements that are functional can be represented as little, tiny islands
separated from other little tiny islands by vast spaces of non functional gibberish, just
the kind of an abyss between them. Now does that same kind of problem
apply in biology? Well, it turns out it does. We have strong
experience empirical evidence now that the sequences that form functional genes capable of building proteins
are extremely rare among all the possible ways there are of arranging the acsgs and
t's and DNA, or arranging the amino acids, the twenty amino acids and
the proteins. I have a colleague, Douglas Acts, who worked fourteen years
at Cambridge University to investigate the question, well, how rare or common are
these functional sequences? And for in studying a protein of modest length, of
about one hundred and fifty amino acids in length, he discovered that for every
sequence that will fold into a structure that's capable of doing a protein, a
structure called a fold, there were ten to the seventy four power non functional
combinations. Well, what that means is that inevitably, then if you start
changing the functional ones very much, you're going to fall into the non functional
abyss. Because there's just so many more of them in comparison to the ones
you want now. In addition to that, since Acts has done this work,
there have been other scientists have gotten similar numbers, but there have been
a scientist at the Weismann Institute named Dan Taufik. Acts did his work at
Cambridge University. Tafic has studied what are called He's studied proteins and he mutates
them intentionally but randomly, and he's found that after a very few number of
mutations that the stable structure called a fold will unravel. And if it unravels,
there's it can't perform a function, there's nothing there to select, so
and the number of changes that are necessary to cause it to unravel are far
smwer are far fewer than the number of changes that need to accumulate to build
a new fold, So that can't get there from here a problem. Not
only are the functional genes and proteins very rare, they're highly isolated in what's
called sequence space, in the in the space of all the possible ways there
are of arranging the parts. So it's very much like the computer analogy.
You start changing the zeros and ones, you're going to destroy your computer program
or your app long before you generate a new one by random changes. The
same problem applies at the genetic level in biology, and that leaves a big
unanswered question. How do you explain the origin of new information? The new
information you would need to build a new protein, which is kind of the
scene of quan non of biological innovation. You've got to have new proteins and
new protein folds in particular, if you're going to build anything. So,
Mike, I'm not a scientist, it's important to understand that is there a
way to understand top down constraint, you know, like a computer program at
every level. So in some ways, the zeros and ones, the reason
why they ordered that way necessarily is constrained by a level of programming that is
constrained by you know, like a constrained by by a human will at the
top. And so that when you look at the difference between the zeros and
ones and the program, you see a form of constraint. But you how
can I say this that it has to layer itself so that you find the
will because the will is much higher the employee organized exactly thet there's constraint.
You can think of constraint in two ways. There's a functional requirement that you
want the computer program to achieve or to meet, and then the engineer constrains
the possibilities to produce a program that will produce the outcome that's desired, the
functional requirement or the functional outcome or end. And in living systems you have
highly constrained information rich molecules that are part of a larger information rich hierarchy and
information rich system for storing and transmitting, storing, processing, and transmitting information.
But that ends up being that DNA producing proteins system is part of an
even greater hierarchy of information. There's information that turns out beyond the DNA stored
in other places in the cell and in the organism. And so the best
way to think of life today is as a hierarchically organized information storage, transmission
and processing system. Well, that may not be the whole of what life
is, but life certainly contains all that. And if you want to explain
the origin of life, you've got to explain that because that's what's present.
Yeah, And I mean that seems to be because in the description in Genesis
one, that seems to be the way that God creates the world as a
hierarchy of identities that are laid out in purpose. Sometimes we don't realize the
reason why the categories in Genesis are used. They are actually all categories of
place in an ontological hierarchy and purpose. Right, So like when you think
of when God creates the mammals, the categories he uses are wild animals,
tame animals, and creepy crawlers. Like those are not scientific categories, folks.
Those are categories of let's say, constraint towards purpose within the human with
a human experience. And so you see that It's like the reason why I
identify these animals is related to me. Right. They're the animals that that
I can use and that ultimately maybe I can eat. They're the ones that
eat me, right, And they're the ones that are kind of hidden on
the ground and that you know, are akin to the chaos and weakly stuff
underneath. And so you can see that that the way that it's described is
as related to you know, because the reason why I'm saying that is because
I don't know if you tried or attempted to make the connection between a lot
of your work and what some of the let's say leading edge cog size stuff
that is coming out. I've had a lot of conversation with John Raveaki,
and obviously Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, which is that even our
category, our category structure, right, even the way in which we recognize
beings in the world is related to constrained purpose. Right, So why we
even identify beings is related at the first level to the reason why we're identifying
it. Right. So I don't see a cup, I see something to
drink from, right, And so I don't see a chair, I see
something to sit on. And that all identities are actually constrained by purpose,
because the border between identities is not is not that obvious right without intelligence,
even the actual identities themselves. And our argument and is that is the entities
that manifest purposive function or behavior are invariably the product of mind in our experience.
And that's especially true when we're talking about information. The argument I make
in a book called Signature in the Cell is that whenever we see information in
a digital or alphabetic form, as we do at the foundation of life,
and we trace that information back to its source, we always come to a
mind, not a material process, and then I ask people to, well,
what are some examples. Well, a hieroglyphic inscription, you see that
on the Rosetta stone in the British Museum. You're not going to infer wind
in erosion. You're going to realize there was a suscribe there. A computer
program comes from a programmer, A paragraph in a book comes from a writer.
Information embedded in a radio signal or being transmitted across the internet ultimately goes
back to a speaker, a broadcaster information if we trace information back to source.
The one thing we know very very confidently is that information always arises from
a mind or an intelligence, and that relates to some of things we were
talking about at the beginning of the interview that if information is related to electing
some options and eliminating others, in other words, constraining possibilities, that information
is imparted as possibilities are constrained, and so a constraint represents a choice,
a choosing between an interlego. Well, then interlego is actually what we mean
by intelligence. That intelligence is choosing between the options. There are things that
do happen randomly, but there are limits to what are called the probabilistic resources
of the universe, and the amount of information in the linguistic transmission that we're
participating in right now, and the amount of information in a computer program and
the amount of information in a DNA molecule all exceed what you can reasonably expect
to occur by random random processes or stochastic processes, even if you take into
account the entire history of the universe. So we're with DNA, we're well
beyond that probabilistic threshold into it both an amount of information and a kind of
information which is indicative of intelligence. Yeah, and I mean it seems to
me too that you know, even taking you know, the the idea of
random mutation and the notion of constraint, right, so you can you can
use the word patterning right to talk about constraint. It's like, basically,
you have a bunch of stuff, and then that stuff is actually ordered in
a manner that makes it into some turns it into something else. Right,
So you have a bunch of stuff, you order it together, and now
it's not just a bunch of stuff. It's an actual animal, or it's
a chair, it's you know, whatever it is that I can identify as
being because it's made of stuff, right, It's made of all these different
levels of things. But that that patterning itself, it seems like it has
to It just has to has to pre exist to some extent for the for
the patterns to be, like to come into to the pattern. Right.
So it's like, even if you have a bunch of stuff and it comes
into a pattern, that pattern makes sense and it makes sense to form a
new being that is a higher level of being, you could say, a
more complex level of being. It's like, what is calling that into being?
Like? What is? What is? The pattern has to at least
in some manner pre exists. This is something a connection I explore in some
of my work, the connection between form and information. And the medieval philosophers
like Thomas Aquinas talked a lot about formal causes and they were drawing on an
Aristotelian background, and Thomas himself had a notion called exemplar causation, which was
the idea that there's form in matter that results first in an idea, an
exemplar in the mind of a creator. So we have a we have a
chair that we're sitting on, there's a we can we can describe that as
a form a structure, but we know that that came from an idea in
the mind of a carpenter, so that the form we see in matter issues
from a different kind of form, an idea or pattern in the mind of
a creator. And so there's a connection between form and if you can think
of an idea as informing information, and I think in modern in modern engineering,
with the idea of information theory, and within other informational concepts, we
see there's a similar connection in biology between form and information. That the three
dimensional structure of an organism depends upon information that's encoded in DNA, but also
information that's encoded three dimensionally in other parts of the organism. That's why we
get back to that idea of a hierarchical organization of of information generated biological form.
But even in the recognition of the being so right, so you have
apples, so say you have to go in to apples, like every single
one of those apples different. None of those apples are exactly the same.
So how do I recognize identity across variation because they're all different, and so
there there has to be a pattern that links them together that makes it possible
for me to recognize the the the fact that they all participated in this right
exactly. And so that's a very pristmologies. Well, how do we recognize
universals among all the different particular manifestations of those universals? But and that seems
to be something. Yeah, I mean humans seem to be particularly good at
that, and you know, and that seems to place them in a particular
position, you know. And sometimes I'll hear It's interesting because sometimes I'll hear
something people say something like atheists will say, well, humans are the universe
knowing itself, right, It's like, yeah, humans are the universe knowing
itself. It means that the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent. I don't
know what to say. It's like, we are part of the universe and
we're the place where intelligence, you know, let's say, uh, intelligence
finds its highest form that we know of, that we know of in the
created world, and therefore the universe is intelligent. Because it's like it's like
if I take your body and I say, well, you're not intelligent because
your fingernails not intelligent and your thumb's not intelligent, and you're you know,
your your ears not intelligent, but Stephen Meyer is intelligent, and so that's
the same with the universe. It's like the universe is intelligent because we're intelligent.
I know that that might I know that that might have convinced a bunch
of atheists, but yeah, it just seems like there's a way in which
often I've noticed that atheists tend to abstract themselves from the from the reality and
not consider the place of man in the cosmos, whereas, like in the
Biblical cosmology, you know, the human is placed in a very particular place
in the middle of the whole system and is given to name the animals,
like is given to continue that process of information that happens in creation. And
therefore it is in some ways the place of knowledge in the world is the
human person. Anyways, that's a bit taking you off track there. It
reminds me of the book that was published a few years ago by Thomas Nagel,
very famous atheist philosopher of science who had come to be very skeptical of
Darwinian evolution and also origin of life research. Origin of life the chemical evolutionary
theory of the origin of the first life, and he wrote a book called
Mind and Cosmos titled how the Neo Darwinian materialist view of reality is almost certainly
false, and so he was a big part of his argument was that any
theory of origins that can't account for mine, yeah, is missing something really
big. And the neo Darwinian theory of biological origins cannot account for mind,
and therefore it's missing something really big, especially because it's because of mind that
we even have those evolutionary theories in the first place. It's like there's a
meta question that no one is looking at, which is that without mind,
you don't even have your evolutionary theory. Folks. Well, and there's an
there's another cut on this, and I think is relevant to argument that we've
developed, and that is that that the evolutionary explanation for the origin of animal
body plans the origin of new forms of life, the origin of the first
life is always rendered as a strictly materialistic theory that does not have any place
for it, no place in it for mind. And that's that is not
because there's no evidence of mind in the natural world, or no evidence of
mind having acted in the past in the natural world, but rather it's a
methodological choice. It's a choice of method from the outset. And there's actually
a principle that evolutionary biologists affirm, as do many scientists today, and they
say that if you're going to be a scientist, you must limit yourself to
strictly materialistic explanations for everything, even the origin of life, the origin of
the universe, the origin of consciousness, the nature of consciousness. They write
it in a book. Well, and there's the principle is so common that
it has a name. It's called methodological naturalism or methodological materialism. And part
of what we're challenging in our work on intelligent design is that principle, the
idea that that should be normative for science. It wasn't normative during the period
of the scientific Revolution. You found that Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and
many others made design arguments right in the context of their scientific work. They
saw evidence of design and nature, and they talked about it, and they
made arguments about why what they saw was best explained by a designing intelligence.
That move that inference has been ruled out of court since the late nineteenth century,
but in post Darwinian evolutionary biology, but that means and This was part
of the Nagel concern. That means we're putting blinders on ourselves as scientists and
philosophers. We're saying, here, no design, see no design, even
if there's very evident, if there's powerful evidence of design. And so the
question I think for the scientific atheist is is what best explains? Open ended
question? What best explains, Not what materialistic explanation best explains, but what
explanation best explains. Things like the fine tuning, things like the circuitry and
cells, things like the digital code in DNA, things like the whole information
processing system them in life, things like the circuitry that we find controlling animal
development. These are features which in any other realm of experience would immediately awaken
an awareness of the activity of a mind antecedentally in the past. So if
you find I could show you a wonderful picture of the circuitry that controls animal
development. It's called a developmental gene regulatory network. When the scientists at Caltech
map this out, the way that genes and gene products interacted to control the
way cell division occurred, and the way different gene products were expressed at different
times as the organism was going through cell division from one to two to four
to eight to sixteen, et cetera. They mapped out these relationships between the
genes and the gene products, controlling the expression of genes at just the right
time, in just the right place and just the right cells and cell types.
They mapped it out, and it looked like a circuit I an integrated
circuit, only it wasn't a circuit controlling the flow of electricity as much as
it was controlling the flow of information. Look at that, and you look
at that, and then they discovered something else that the circuits, the systems,
the molecules that are part of this system are the system cannot be perturbed
without shutting down animal development. The developmental gene regulator networks are immutable, essentially
immutable. A little bit of around the margin is but very little, which
means that if you want to get a new animal form from an old animal
form, you've got to change the developmental gene regulatoratory network. But those are
that's the one thing we know empirically you can't do. And so this presents
a fundamental challenge to all forms of evolutionary theory, as theories of the origin
of new body plans, what has to be explaining the orison of life.
And yet we look at that circuit and we say, wait, I've seen
that before. I've seen systems that have that characteristic and they're always the product
of engineers. So we're looking at a feature which, in any end of
the other realm of experience would be would immediately trigger the awareness of an activity
of a mind. We're also looking at a system that poses a fundamental impediment
to the adequacy of evolutionary theories for the origin of major innovation in the history
of life, the origin of body plans. So you've got one one paradigm
failing, and we've got evidence that very powerfully points in a design direction.
Time is time to consider that maybe mind ought to be part of our theories
of origin again. Yeah, have you dealt with some of the panpsychist ideas,
you know, because that seems to also be a way to answer you
know, I had a discussion with Bernardo castrop and a few other people that
posit the notion of mind as you know, he you know, even being
all close to even being idealist, where basically he encapsulates all of all of
materiality within mind in order to account for that that problem. But what's interesting
about people like Castrop and a lot of the panpsychis is that they don't necessarily
attribute mind in the way that let's say, a Christian or a Monotheist would,
as a transcended absolute origin of all patterns, I'd say, but rather
as this kind of amorphous you know, this amorphous thing that is there,
that is part of the material world and is extend it's co extensive with matter
and all matter, even what Newton called brute matter, you know, atoms
and molecules, and yeah, and so there are a number of things to
say about that. I address it in my most recent book, Return of
the God Hypothesis. Pan Psychism, first of all, doesn't do a very
good job of explaining the evidence of design we have from the very beginning of
the universe. Those fine tuning parameters are set right from the beginning, and
they seem to require a causal, an antecedent cause, which is not the
universe, but which can explain the structure of the universe as a whole from
the beginning. So that if the if, the if, the mind that
the panpsychis affirm is co extensive with matter, you find this also in pan
pantheism. You've got a little bit of a problem because you need a cause
that's that is sufficient to produce the effect in question, and the cause must
be in some way separate from the effect. And that they want to invest
all of mind in the materiality of the of the physical universe. And yet
the nature of the evidence of design, the evidence of mind we have is
present from the beginning and seems to require something outside the system to explain in
its origin. Secondly, I would say that that investing mind in in inanimate
objects does not really pass the test of experience. We know of minds because
of our internal, self conscious awareness of our own powers as agents we have.
We have introspective awareness of our minds, and we therefore know something about
what they can do. To impute that same those same powers to to a
table or to a rock seems to be a stretch. I don't think we
have good reason to to believe that that those entities have have minds. Now,
you might want to say that there's a mind behind quantum mechanical phenomena.
Uh, But I again, I think that takes you in the direction of
a transcendent mind, not in the direction of saying that there's there's a mind
in every particle or in every every immaterial object. There's something. When we
think of mind and we want to invoke mind, we're invoking it based on
our own introspective awareness of what it means to have a mind. We we
have an awareness of what a mind is because of our our being, our
being minds and using minds, and that's what we really mean by mind.
So we end up equivocating when we want to say a rock or a planet
as a mind as well. I mean, that's intuitively obviously that that makes
sense to me. Also because we we kind of understand mind as a as
an active constraint over over materiality. It's like that's how we actually experience mind
as being. And so, for example, Bernardo Castrop's theory is wild,
but it's it's an interesting provocation to that idea, is that his idea is
that all of the world is actually a form of dissociation shit. He almost
sees it as a kind of disease. It's almost like a gnostic way of
thinking, where you know, there's this unitary mind and then it starts to
break apart, and that all the aspects of the world are actually a form
of dissociation and lack of memory, you could say, of being part of
the original mind, and that's why they perceive themselves or they exist independently from
from the original mind. And so it's a it's a I find it to
be a very good I'd say the panpsychists are getting warm. Yeah, yeah,
that's right from they moved from the simplistic materialism that has dominated science,
philosophy, and the academy and much of culture for the last one hundred years,
and they're saying, no, there's there's a third fundamental reality. There's
matter, there's er. What in science I think people are coming to is
there's a third fundamental reality in the sense that there's mind. Sorry, there's
there's there's there's matter, there's energy, and there's information information. Yeah,
I've heard that. What do we know from our experience, which is the
basis of all signific reasoning, is that information always comes from a mind.
And then I think you get into a more philosophical discussion with panentheists, pan
psychists and others. I want to say that mind is fundamental or a fundamental
reality, or straight up idealists who want to deny the materiality of the world.
And I think there the Judeo Christian worldview has the balance right. The
matter and energy are real, space and time are real, but so is
information. In the beginning, after all, was the word this idea biblically,
even when you were talking about the Genesis account again stipulating theory of intelligent
design is not based on a reading of Genesis. But it is interesting to
me as a person who's both an intelligent design theorist and also a religious believer,
that the biblical text in the Creation account repeatedly says affirms that, and
God said, the agent of creation is the word. It is information,
not just that, it's more than that, because God says, God's God
sees and God evaluates. That's what he does during all of Genesis one.
And so that's what mind is. Mind is basically giving a pattern of constraint,
right, and then let's calling that the multiplicity into that constraint and evaluating
the distance between the participation and the constraint. Like that's how we live,
that's how all our lives. Yeah, he's taking he's taking stock of information,
or he's taking in information to take stock of a situation. And then
acts accordingly by imparting and for new by evaluating saying that it is good.
It's like you know, naming, evaluating, and then judging. It's like
that's actually that is the greatest way of understanding mine. And I think,
like you said, you know, very simplistic story that can be read at
a very simple level, but there's some very profound things going on there from
the standpoint of oh yeah, philosophy, engineering, science, epistemology, Yeah,
very interesting. I definitely think the genesis one is the best account of
the origin of the world. It just happens to not be a scientific account.
It's it's an account of the origin of the world in meaning and how
mind and meaning are the source of reality, and then everything else is downstream
from that from that description. But I was wanted to say, based on
what you said of the the kind of materials scientists, when I hear them
saying something like there's energy, matter and information, it's like, my mind
is just flaring up, because, like you said, information is active constraint.
Yes, you know, and so if you don't, if you don't
like mind, that strainth come from it begs Yeah, you're right there,
Like you're right next to it if you don't like question right, and see,
in the nineteenth century, late nineteenth century, there was something you could
understand everything by reference to matter and operating within space and time. And we've
realized late twentieth century, neither in biology, nor in physics, nor in
other fields can you understand what's going on, but especially not in biology can
you understand what's going on apart from a third fundamental entity, and that is
information. And you're right, information implies logically, it implies a constraining agent.
But empirically we know from our experience that information always comes from an intelligence
source. Even by the way, Jonathan, in these origin of life experiments,
I don't know if you've seen any of the videos online of James Tour,
organic chemist from Rice University, and critiquing these guys who do what are
called prebiotic simulation experiments are trying to simulate how the first cell could have arisen
from some kind of pre biotic environment through a series of of chemical undirected chemical
interactions or reactions. And what Tour shows and which many people working in origin
of life research actually know but don't want to lead with, is that at
each step along the way to get the chemicals, the simple chemicals to move
in the direction of more complex and biologically relevant chemistry, constraints have to be
applied from outside the system by the prebiotic simulator himself. No, even if
they get to it, like even if they would actually do it, it
means that they've completely constrained everything to be exactly in the right place for it
to happen. So here's a big question. Okay, if these experiments are
simulation experiments, what's being simulated? If at every step along the way you
need an intelligent agent to restrict degrees of chemical freedom to move in a life
relevant direction, what are you simulating? Must have occurred on the early Earth
the same thing, right, There must have been an intelligence playing a role.
So even the prebiotic simulation experiments of the chemical evolutionary theorists are inadvertently reaffirming
the principle that it takes intelligence to generate information, because every one of those
constraints can be rendered as a quantifiable input of information. And in fact,
it even gets more specific than that. There are experiments called riebozime engineering experiments
where there's a particular origin of life theory called the RNA world, where the
idea is that the first molecule was an RNA world that stored information and could
also act as a catalyst of some kind kind of like but not really like
a protein. That's the theory. And so there are experiments trying to develop
RNA molecules that have the capacity to copy themselves, but to build RNA molecules
that have even a limited capacity to copy themselves. And the best we've been
able to do in the lab is get about a molecule that could copy about
ten percent of itself. The rie azime engineer has to literally engineer the sequence
of letters on the RNA molecule the nucleotide bases in a very specific way to
get a molecule that has this limited self replicating capability. So, yes,
now you have a molecule that can partially replicate itself, which is therefore a
little bit more possibly life relevant down the road. It's just one step along
the way, along the way of many that will be needed. But at
least it's going in the right direction. But how did you get that?
How did you accomplish that step? An intelligent ribozyme engineer, And I kid
you not that's what they're called input information into the RNA molecule in order to
move it in that life friendly, life tropic direction. So what are you
simulating. You're simulating the need for intelligence to generate information. The very thing
that intelligent design advocates have been saying is the basis of our design inference that
we know, you need to get information, you need a mind. Since
there is information present in the cell, there must have been a mind active.
Yeah, I think that that your example is an amazing example of what
I've often seem to be the problem at the outset, which is the scientists
ignoring their place in the system and acting as if they're just transparent, these
weird transparent you know, I don't know what exactly or like kind of these
disincarnated gods that are that are just doing these experiments, when in fact,
the very even even the very act of looking and constraining even the experiment itself
is already an active constraint, like the limiting of phenomena to one phenomena that
I will isolate and identify and analyze, then the capacity to write that in
a book and to tell other people about it, and to then you know,
like educate others, like everything you're doing is in mind, and you're
telling me that mine is an illusion, as you're using mind to do all
the things that you're doing. This happens in the simulation of the origin of
the or the modeling of the origin of the universe by physicists called quantum cosmologists.
Uh. They end up postulating a pre existing mathematical state out of which
matters somehow arose. But even with the equations that they postulate, they have
to manipulate them to get an answer that will indicate that our universe is possible.
So the manipulation of the mathematical apparatus involves an imparting of information that's coming
from the minds of the physicists. The chemical evolutionary theorists do it and forget
that they are the man behind the curtain doing all the important constraints of the
chemistry to get things to move in the in the right direction. So every
attempt to explain the origin of interesting aspects of our physical universe apart from intelligence,
ends up inadvertently reaffirming the importance of intelligence in the origin of those features.
And so you you've seen I mean, I've seen this this shift in
perception, this this shift in the capacity for people to consider this theory.
You know, you see that in the amount of attention that you've been able
to get, you know, in the the past few years, which I
imagined to some ways is like to be on Dree Rogan must have been a
surprise, Like I imagine that was a surprise very much. So. It's
kind of funny in the aftermath of it, though, Jonathan, I you
know, I did do a PhD at a well known university, and I've
written three books, and I've been part of this. Yeah, I've accomplished
a few things in my life. Yeah, but when I get introduced now
on the podium for a talk, the only thing that gets mentioned is that
and he was on the Joe Rogan experience. That's hilarious. Like everything else
I've done in my life is of Noah was all leading up to Joe Rogan.
You know that. And now soon you'll be like weightlifting and UFC fighting
or something, right, Right, So what's happened, Like, what do
you think has happened in the culture. I think the media interest is really
just a symptom, if you will. It's a manifestation of something deeper that's
going on, and that is that the kind of arguments that we've been discussing
are starting to percolate, and there's a number of I had another media encounter
that illustrates this a little bit. I was I did a conversation with Peter
Robinson, who at the Hoover Institute, who has that wonderful program Uncommon Knowledge.
Peter wrote the famous mister Gorbachev Tear down this Wall speech Reagan in nineteen
eighty seven, and he did an interview with David Berlinski, David Galeran,
the chairman of the Ale Computer Science Department, and me about the mathematical problems
facing neo Darwinian theory. And it's a pretty heady topic, you know,
because we got into the math and we describe the problem of combinatorial sequence space
and the rarity of genes and proteins in sequence space and why this poses a
problem for neo Darwinism. We got three and a half million views, and
so, you know, kind of words getting out. Something's wrong in the
House of Darwin. People are getting the message. At the same time.
That was twenty nineteen, and there were a lot of angry comments. Three
years later I did another three way interview with Peter Robinson, this time with
John Lennox, the Oxford mathematician, Michael Bhe one of the most most important
advocates of the theory of intelligent design, and me, And after the interview
dropped, we've had I don't know, two and a half million views of
that so far. After the interview dropped, Peter Robinson called me on the
phone and he said, is something changing the dynamics of your debate? He
said, three years ago we got a huge number of views, huge interests,
but a lot of people are really angry and there was a lot of
angry comments. I had people calling me up warning me off in association with
you guys. He said, have you seen the comments this time? He
said, they're off the chart, positive people saying why haven't I heard these
arguments before? This is really compelling stuff. This makes this looks like it
sounds like sweet reason to me. What's the problem. And so that's just
one little snapshot. But we've had high level conversions to intelligent design from people
in the science establishment. You may have heard of Gunter Beckley, the very
prominent German paleontologist who was the curator of the bi centennial exhibit of the celebrating
the Origin of Species and Darwin's birth in two thousand and nine, he set
up an exhibit with scales of justice where he had on one side the book
The Origin of Species and on the other side a stack of books about the
theory of intelligent design. And then he made the scale contra orry to the
law of gravity tip in this direction, with the Origin of Species on the
downside, and then he had a little caption that said the one book that
outweighs them all. And apparently some of Gunter's colleagues of Gunter, if you're
going to mox intelligent design people, you better read their books, and he
said that was my mistake. And about two months later I got an email
from him asking if we could have a phone conversation, but please not to
call him at the office, to only call him at home. And he
said, I want to come out and talk to you guys, because I
realized you've been very unfairly maligned. There's a lot of solid science in your
work, and your arguments are very compelling. And he set out to have
a deep think about the whole issue, and seven years later, in twenty
sixteen, he announces that he now also he had already begun to express skepticism
about neo Darwinism in the immediate wake of reading our stuff, but he had
a deep think about all this, and in sixteen, seven years later,
he announced that he was now a proponent of the theory of intelligent design.
He's doing active research on a problem in paleontology called the waiting times problem,
and is advancing intelligent design with his actively with his scientific research. Galeran,
the chairman of the Yale Computer Science Department, who sat in that interview about
the mathematical challenges to neo Darwinism, wrote an essay a year or two before,
in a long review essay in the Claremont Review of Books called Darwin vont
Farewell that he wrote as a consequence of having read David Berlinski's book The Deniable
Darwin and my book Darwin's Doubt, which both of which outlined this mathematical problem
for neo Darwinism. So, you know, chairman of the Computer science apartment,
paleontologists, who's the curator of the Darwin exhibition at the largest natural history
museum in Europe. These sorts of people are not supposed to be changing their
point of view, but that's what's happening. So when that's taking place at
the high level of science, then inevitably things in the culture will start to
follow. And I think that's part of the reason we're getting some of the
media attention that we happened. Yeah. There. I think there's also a
more existential aspect to this, because you know, it's nice and fun to
say that the world is meaningless and that you know that there's no intelligence and
no mind behind the world when everything's going nice and dandy. But I think
that COVID put a lot of people into a vice and and force them to
face the problem of meaninglessness in their own life, or a sense of things
falling apart and things not going the way that they thought. Yeah, that's
my perception as well, because we've seen quite a bit of even like in
terms of in the Orthodox tradition in the US, we've seen this huge wave
of converts of young men that are that are coming to church and they're all
of one single type, very intelligent, highly educated people that you know,
are realizing that meaninglessness is is no joke. Like it's not that we we
need we need an anchor and that and I think that some of that is
probably leaking out also. I mean, I think everything you said is right,
but there's also a culture of of a sense that that that that we
need meaning for for our lives to to to have. I think that's been
a huge factor in the unraveling of the New atheism. Atheism has unraveled for
a bunch of reasons. There was do you know of the author Justin Brierley
in the UK. Yeah, there's a terrific book, the The Surprising Rediscovery
of Belief in God, And it's just story of the way in which of
the demise of the new atheism, which was all the rage in two thousand
and seven, eight and up until about fifteen twenty sixteen. Then there was
a lot of infighting, disagreement about moral and political issues, that sort of
thing. But also I think this the scientific and philosophical argument started to wear
very thin. The new atheists didn't really do a good job of engaging any
of the arguments that we've been talking about, you know, the rich because
they don't actually don't have an answer argument. They don't have Richard Dawkins,
Yeah, Richard Dawkins himself has acknowledged that nobody knows how life first began.
We don't have a good chemical, evolutionary theory of the origin of life.
Well, then how do you square that with your claim that biology is the
study of complicated things that only give the appearance of having been designed for a
purpose. If you have a system which clearly is evidencing purposive behavior and namely
even the simplest living cell, and you haven't given given an evolutionary explanation for
that, maybe you don't have the goods, and maybe maybe your statement that
life only appears to be designed is ungrounded. And so I think that the
scientific arguments that the new atheists made uh or thin. I think that was
part of the reason. But another facet of this is that the new atheists
have nothing to offer by way of personal meaning. That's just inherent in the
worldview, and it's not. If it's true that God does not exist and
that science shows that, well then we have to face that like good existential
troopers. But yeah, and you can did downstream because now you have some
of the really prominent neu atheists arguing for female penises, and it's like what
happened, Like Okay, how did we get? How did we get?
You know, there's a sense in which a lot of the crazy political stuff
became the place where people put their meaning and then like a kind of fervor
towards purpose in the political sphere. But that is not particularly that's interesting.
You can say, well, we don't need meaning. Well, we may
need it, we may want it, but we just have to face the
fact that the universe doesn't have any meaning because there's no person behind the universe
to give it meaning after all. In this is I think both the New
atheists and I agree, meaning is derivative of personhood. Nothing can mean anything
to a rock or a planet or an atom. Things only mean things to
persons. And if the universe does not have a personal source, and at
the end of the universe we're going to have a heat death and there will
be no more persons, then there is no possibility of ultimate meaning for human
existence. And I think that prospect actually has as that has settled in for
many people. It's had a kind of jarring impact metaphysically. So you have
a figure like Ian Herciali, who was one of the leading New atheists,
who has now announced her conversion to Christianity, and one of the factors that
she cites is that the new atheism had absolutely nothing to offer in uh for
those or for what Victor Frankel called man's search for meaning, there was there's
nothing there. So I think it's a combination of factors as to why it's
unraveling. I think the theistic worldview makes better sense intellectually. It provides a
better explanation for the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the
nature of human consciousness. I think it provides the only real grounding for epistemology,
our ability to know, and but it also it also provides a basis
for meaning. Yeah, I mean because you need you also need of like
a vertical integration. And this is I think this is one of the problems
that all these theories of complexity are struggling with, is that they just want
to talk about emergent qualities and emergent phenomena, but they just have no way
to account for the jumps in qualities between the different levels of a beam.
That's really well said. Emergentism is is is word salad. You just you
just name the effect its own cause yeah, dividently hard said, just put
the word matter. We have, we have mind? Did mind come from?
It? Came from emergent mental properties? You know? Okay, well,
there's something qualitatively different between the mental experience that you and I are having,
the mental experiences that we're having right now. My seeing that that gold
medallion behind you, and the chemistry that's going on in my in my synapses,
those are qualitatively different. And saying that there's the mind is emergent off
of that just renames the mystery. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. David of
the Art said, just put the word magic. Just use magic, because
that's what it is. Just basically think, I don't know what this is.
I'm going to give it a name so I don't have to deal with
it. And then and then and then pretend like you're actually to be fair,
to be fair, we theists don't know what mind is either, but
we have experience of it as possessors of minds. But what we know and
do not discount is that mind is a reality. This was Thomas Nagel's huge
point. You cannot simply right mind out of the cosmos. It's a reality.
And we also know that there are some things that minds can do that
matter cannot do, and what we see in the physical universe and in the
biological realm in particular, are features of those systems that we know from experience
only minds produce. And so if you reason that back to the beginning,
you realize there must have been a mind at the beginning to give rise to
those features that we see in the physical world and in the biological realm.
And therefore, if you go back to that basic metaphysical choice between mentalism or
mind first versus matter first, the mind first view makes a lot more sense.
There's one of the great nineteenth century scientists, and probably often ranked as
the third greatest physicist of all time. James Clark Maxwell, turns out,
was a staunch critic of Darwin. He's eighteen seventies, in the heyday of
his powers as a physicist. He helps to found the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge.
He gets it, he has it inscribed with a verse from the Psalms
greater the works to the Lord, sought out by all who take pleasure therein.
He is a devout Presbyterian physicist, but he's deeply skeptical about the whole
Darwinian Revolution, and he says the conclusion of design follows inevitably from an application
of the laws of logic to the uh to the observations of the senses.
And what does he mean, Well, a law of logic is that we
have to have a cause that's sufficient to the effect. So what do we
see in from our through our senses? We see effects that we know only
arise from the activity of minds. Therefore, and since some of those effects
go right back to the beginning of the universe witness the fine tuning discoveries that
we were talking about. We see evidence of mind from the very beginning of
the universe, and thus we must invoke a transcendent mind to make to explain
what we see around us. It's some level, it's not that hard.
It's not that hard. The big metaphysical questions can be resolved by careful thinking
and apply the laws of logic to the observations of the senses. I think
that's a great way to end a conversation. Stephen, Thank you so much
much for thanks for your work, and thanks for all the you know,
and I'm really I'm happy to see that people are paying attention and that,
you know, the arguments are kind of breaking through the secular the world and
I and I hope to see more of that as as the time continues.
Hey, that's awesome. And one other, one other indicator I think of
this shift intellectually is the the the amazing amount of young talent we're attracting to
our larger movement of scientists and philosophers and historians of science, but also to
our summer programs. And so if you have young listeners out there who have
aspirations for careers in science or philosophy or related fields, have them direct them
to the Discovery Institute website and find out about some of the summer programs.
It's an amazing amount of energy where you have a program this summer we're doing
in Cambridge for the first time England, and that to me is one of
the most exciting indicators of an intellct shift. Thomas Cohone, the great historian
of science, said that scientific revolutions occur one funeral at a time. The
older generation, well, we will just encourage retirements, not funerals. But
you know, as one generation passes from the scene and a younger generation arises,
oftentimes that's when you see people becoming open to new ideas and I think
that's absolutely happening. That's great. Well, thank you and everybody, Yeah,
check out the check out the summer programs and also look into Steven's books.
And thanks and hopefully maybe one day we'll have another conversation. This is
great, Jonathan, thanks for having me.