ID the future

future a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

They say disruption is radical change to an existing environment. I'm sure I did this a lot in my high school science class, but in science today it seems we have not so much

disruption at all what's going on that's what we're going to grapple with on this

episode of ID the future and doing that grappling alongside me is Dr. Paul

Nelson. He's a philosopher of science on adjunct faculty at Biola University and he's someone who does a good job of explaining these sorts of issues for people like me.

Welcome, Paul, to ID the future.

Thanks, I'm always glad to be here.

Yes, it's always always good to have you here to help with these things.

I'm going to sort of quickly set this up for listeners, what we're talking about, and then we can dig into some of the more juicy details and what they all mean about this recent news there's been a lot of news at least in the science world about some I would say groundbreaking

researcher at least lots of research about research and it's been pretty

disruptive itself surprisingly. The researchers examined 45 million

manuscripts in over 4 million patents issued since the 1940s and they found a decrease, a 90% decrease in disruption in the sciences.

And for me, disruption might be more generally what you'd call you know groundbreaking research and discoveries that

inspire new and different research and leads to profound changes

innovation in the world and so on. Interestingly, one science writer pointed out that despite a more

than tenfold inflation adjusted increase in US government spending since 1955, quote,

it feels like we're doing a lot more research

and getting a lot less out of it.

If you think about since the 20th century,

we, you know, even before that, steam engine, first airplane, first personal

commuters, DNA's double helix, maybe the human genome project, all these things were happening. And if you imagine we've had a 90% decrease in breakthroughs like this since the mid 20th century, it's a bit hard to comprehend. So I guess we start Paul with what is disruptive science and then we get into why that matters because life goes on working for me, but shouldn't it be getting better as well?

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