“Do You Believe in Evolution?” Stephen Meyer Responds to Joe Rogan

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

Science, Philosophy, Astronomy, Society & Culture, Life Sciences

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2025

⏱️ 20 minutes

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Summary

Do you believe in evolution? That’s a good question that could start a very productive conversation about the origin and development of life on Earth. But the first steps are clarifying what the word “evolution” actually means and why unguided evolutionary processes are limited in power and scope. Today, host Andrew McDiarmid invites you to revisit a segment from Dr. Stephen Meyer's 2023 interview with Joe Rogan. Meyer answers Rogan's probing question comprehensively. Yes, he tells Rogan, he believes in “real evolutionary processes,” but he also believes in the limitation of those evolutionary processes, and he takes several minutes to unpack and explain some of the challenges the standard neo-Darwinian account of life faces today. McDiarmid follows up by summarizing Meyer's response and sharing excerpts from Meyer's book Darwin's Doubt to explain the importance of Meyer's arguments to the debate over evolution. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	All right, on this clip we're about to watch, Joe Rogan asks philosopher of science Dr. Stephen
0:05.3	Meyer, a very good question. Do you believe in evolution? Now, Rogan has had several
0:11.4	scientists on his show, but never one that proposes intelligent design as the explanation for
0:16.9	the origin and development of life on earth until Meyer.
0:22.8	Let's watch how Dr. Meyer responds.
0:28.4	After the second, I'll be back to discuss why his answers are so important to the debate over evolution.
0:29.6	Okay, let's dive in.
0:31.4	Do you believe in evolution?
0:33.1	I believe in, well, that's a, I believe in microevolution.
0:38.2	I believe that there are real evolutionary processes.
0:41.3	I'm skeptical about what's called universal common descent, the idea that all living forms have
0:46.3	evolved from one single common ancestor.
0:49.3	I'm profoundly skeptical about chemical evolution, the idea that the non-living chemicals in a prebiotic
0:57.3	ocean or prebiotic soup arranged themselves to form the first living cell.
1:02.2	And I'm also skeptical about the creative power of the mutation selection mechanism,
1:07.1	which as it happens, so are many leading evolutionary biologists today.
1:12.6	I attended a conference in 2016, convened by the Royal Society in London,
1:19.6	Royal Society being the oldest and most august scientific body in the world.
1:23.6	And it was convened by a group of evolutionary biologists who were essentially dissatisfied with
1:29.3	Neo-Darwinism, the standard textbook theory that we learn in all high school and college textbooks.
1:36.3	And many of them were saying we need a new theory of evolution.
1:38.3	The first talk at that conference was given by Gerd Mueller, a prominent Austrian evolutionary biologist, and he simply
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