 Thank you to the SMU administration for allowing this event and this discussion to happen. Thanks to the hackers for their attempt to shut down this conversation. We regard that type of activity as a compliment. There's a famous Darwinian philosopher named Daniel Dennett who's written a book called Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Apparently the critique of Darwinism is equally dangerous. So what we're going to do tonight is to amplify some of the key arguments that you were exposed to, especially in the last quarter or so of the film. In fact, we're going to present two of the arguments that you heard in the film and two additional arguments, but these will be arguments in critique of modern evolutionary biology, modern Neo-Darwinian theory. In particular, we are going to critique, in a little more detail than you heard in the film, the idea that the mechanism of mutation in natural selection has the creative power that has long been associated with it, power sufficient to produce fundamentally new forms of life. And we have tonight, in addition to me, four scientists, all of whom made at least cameo appearances in the film, who are specialists in different sub-disciplines of biology. And they will each share some of the research that they have been doing and or research which has been going on in their respective sub-discipline of biology, which bears on this question of the efficacy, the creative power, the alleged creative power of mutation in selection. We think that modern Neo-Darwinian theory is at a place of complete impacts, that it has failed, that it is failing dramatically, and we are going to present some arguments tonight that we think have an unparalleled analytical and mathematical rigor that can demonstrate inadequacy of the Darwinian mechanism of mutation selection. My role tonight will be a little different. Think of me as not so much a moderator, but as your scientific tour guide and translator. Each of these gentlemen have expertise in some very specialized areas of biology. And so I will introduce each one of the four talks that are to follow. And I will reserve to myself the prerogative of asking follow-up questions from each of them to clarify points if necessary and to summarize both before and after to help folks who may not have the same level of expertise in their particular areas follow everything. I think you will find each one of these guys, though, to be terrific communicators and they have really compelling scientific information to offer tonight. In fact, scientific arguments based on cutting-edge evidence. But before we get into those four talks, let me provide a few introductory concepts and clarifications as Darwinian theory or particularly modern Neo-Darwinism, the current evolutionary orthodoxy. There is a difference between the observation, that is a misspelled word. That's not a good start. When we talk about evolution, it can mean three different things. The first is simply... It's a mutation. It was a mutation. And it has not enhanced the function of that. When we talk about evolution, and we pull back together. When we talk about evolution, we typically use the word in three distinct ways. The first is simply the observation that living organisms have changed over time. You move up the stratigraphic column of sediments to find that life a very long time ago was different than it is today. One sense of the idea of change over time. Another idea of change... Now, that's not the theory of evolution, that's just an observation. But it's called common descent or common ancestry. It was represented by Darwin with his tree of life picture of the history of life. On the vertical axis, the tree of life represents time, time going forward. On the horizontal axis, what is being represented is change in form. The idea is that as you move forward in time, the very simplest organisms that were at the very beginning of the history of life, gradually morphed into more and more complex forms until finally when you get to the branches at the top of the tree, you have all the forms of life that we see today. But they all are related by common ancestry back to that original simple form. One of our very few simple forms that Darwin would put it. So that's the idea not just of change, but of continuous change. A gradual and continuous change, kind of morphic. Now, the third meaning of evolution doesn't refer just to change. It's actually referring to the cause of change, or to the mechanism by which change has occurred. So the distinctiveness of Darwinian theory, the idea that the mechanism of natural selection acting on random variation, or we would now say today in modern neo-Darwinian theory, random mutations, natural selection acting on random mutations is the cause for mechanism for all the change that has occurred in the history of life. And so when we talk about not just the observation of evolution or change, but the theory of evolutionary change, we're talking about mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection that are alleged to have the power to produce all the forms of life that we see today. What we want to address tonight is the question of whether or not the principle neo-Darwinian mechanism of mutation selection is sufficient to produce the forms of life that we see. In particular, we've used the example in the film of the Camry explosion. And so in addition, let me introduce one other introductory concept, just a few words about why the Camry explosion is important. The Camry explosion is important because it is one of many, but perhaps one of the most dramatic examples of the origin of new form in the history of life. And when we talk about the origin of new form, we're also talking about, as the film may clear, the origin of information. I used to ask my college students, if you want to build a new animal, if you want to give a computer a new function, what do you have to give it? And being techies, they would all say, code, information. Well, the same thing is true if we're talking about living forms. We want to build a new form of life that we have to provide information. And as the film may clear, some of that information is embedded in DNA and some of it resides in other places in the biological hierarchy. Now, that raises a critical question. When we talk about the Camry explosion, for example, or other examples of the sudden appearance of form in the history of life, we're not just raising a problem for Darwinian theory with respect to the fossil records. The problem is not just that there are gaps in the fossil records. What we want to focus on tonight, in fact, is a different problem and that is, in a sense, you can think of it as an engineering problem. How do you build those fundamentally new forms of life, relying only on mutation in natural selection and other similarly undirected mechanisms? Can neo-Darwinism or any other theory of undirected evolutionary development explain how you build those new forms? Can it account for the new information that's necessary to build those new forms? So, it's not just a matter of, for example, the Camry explosion, we have all these new forms of life come into the fossil record at a critical point in time, and the absence of underlying precursors, but it's also the engineering question. How do you build those new forms of life? Now, one kind of clarification, we've had some questions raised about this, the Camry explosion is dated variously by different experts. The duration of it is dated variously. Dr. Sternberg and I were in the debate back in November with a geologist who claimed that the Camry explosion took 80 million years. But when we looked closely at his book, he acknowledged that there were a series of explosions and while all he had done is grouped them all in his little brackets around several explosions, and indeed that took 80 million years. But the key question is not how long, the key question is not so much the time of the various pulses of diversification, or the various radiations as they're called, it's the origin of what's called anatomical or evolutionary novelty. And to get a sense of just how difficult that problem is, but in a temporal sense, let me just zero in on one aspect. We're talking in the film about the trilobite, and it's lens focusing compound on it. Trilobites first arrived in the Cambrian in formation in southern China, in an around a place in southern China called Chengjiang. And they arise in a sequence of sedimentary rock that is then dated by Samuel Bowring, one of the leading geocrinologists at MIT, to encompass between three and six million years of geological history. So it's true that there are additional pulses of new animals coming online that were in the Cambrian era. But the real question is, again, getting back to that engineering question, how do you build something as complex as a trilobite, or the dozen or so other representatives of new filers that arose in that seam of rock within that three to six million year period? Now you'll see as we present some of this information, but even if we can see 20 to 25 million years, or 80 million years, or 100 million years of the Cambrian, it still, they say in fact, is not going to get her done. The mechanism does not have the creative powers to do that, and we're going to show that tonight mathematically. But I want to clarify just because we have questions about how we have dated the Cambrian explosion, and again the question is the question of the origin of evolutionary novelty. And that can be, we can zero in on that pretty tightly and say, you've got to build a trilobite, and a lens focusing eye on those other interesting features of trilobites, within three to six million. Now what we're going to do next is bring up Richard Sternberg, and he's going to present one of four critiques of the creative power natural selection. We call this critique the population genetics critique. And what population genetics, for those of you who may not take an evolutionary biology class, is the mathematical expression of neo-Darwinian theory. There are equations of population genetics that tell how much evolutionary change can occur in a given amount of time, based on some key factors. Based on mutation rate, for example, one of the factors. Based on generation time, how long are the generations in a given organism, and how large is the population size. If you know those three factors and you know the equations of population genetics, you can get a pretty good idea of how much evolutionary change can be expected within a given window of time. What Dr. Sternberg is going to do is apply those equations of population genetics, not to the Cambrian explosion, which is in the sense the worst-case scenario for neo-Darwinian genetics to establish it. In the sense what that means is he's going to use neo-Darwinism to show that neo-Darwinism is inadequate. And I'll hand it over to you. Good evening, everyone. Can you hear me okay? Yeah. All right. Let's see if I can... You get this out. I have chosen what is called... It was called 2001 Darwin's poster child. That is the best-case scenario for the gradual transformation of one type of organism into another. A supreme instance, if you will, of the engineering problem that Dr. Meyer just mentioned. Now, what you see here... If I can get the pointer to work... Anyway, what you see here is a textbook scenario of a nice gradual gradation from an initial wolf-like or cow-like hippopotamus-like ancestor. The actual ancestry of cetaceans is in question, but you start out with indeed a terrestrial mammal and you end up with a police aquatic quail in a period that is only nine million years. And this is remarkable because the anatomical changes that are involved, to go from a derish, mammal-like ancestor to a fully well, are indeed staggering. Now, we must keep a distinction in mind. Two different categories. On the one hand, we have a pattern that is indeed supported by the fossil record. That is, you can analyze different fossil forms. Some of them are terrestrial. Some of them have an intermediate aquatic-like appearance or they're amphibious. Others are indeed fully aquatic. That is, they were living 100% of the time, continued their life cycle, in an aquatic environment. And so the pattern is not something that I would dispute and you would dispute. However, a causal explanation for this pattern is a different matter. What the causal explanation does is it says, yes, I've got this pattern and what I want to do is I want to present a theory that explains it to some degree of satisfaction. And if you are a Darwinian, it is that you had relatively high mutation rates. You had natural selection come into play and what you get to get incremental genetic change over time. And this is manifested by going from some terrestrial mammal to a fully aquatic mammal. Now, this textbook example aside, what we find is that the window of time, as I just mentioned, for this transition to take place is extremely rapid.