ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.

Welcome to ID the Future. I'm Andrew McDermid.

Today, philosopher of science and best-selling author Stephen Meyer invites us to join him for an intimate conversation

with one of his dearest friends and longest-standing colleagues, Dr. David Berlinski.

The occasion for the exchange was a recent insider's briefing held in Cambridge, England.

Dr. Berlinski is a senior fellow at Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.

He has taught philosophy, mathematics, and English at such universities as Stanford, Rutgers, the City University of New York, and the Universite de Paris.

He is author of numerous books, including A Tour of the Calculus, The Advent of the Algorithm, Newton's

Gift, The Deniable Darwin, and Signs After Babel. In this first half of the conversation,

Meyer begins by recounting a dinner meeting he had with Berlinski in 2004. That wasn't long after

Richard Sternberg had been hounded out of his job at the Smithsonian Institution

for daring to publish a paper by Meyer supportive of intelligent design.

Meyer and Berlinski had some doubts about the momentum of the ID movement, but by the end of the

evening, Berlinsky had managed to encourage Meyer that the future indeed looked bright.

At Meyer's beckoning, Berlinski also walks us through the harrowing story

of how his parents survived the Nazi threat during World War II

and immigrated to New York, where Berlinski was born and grew up.

He shares how he learned mathematics,

and when he began to take interest in the mathematical challenges

to evolutionary theory.

When he finally got around to reading on the origin of species in college, he was underwhelmed,

calling the book long-winded, digressive, and unpersuasive.

...