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Intelligent Design the Future

Walter Bradley: The Origin Story of an Intelligent Design Classic

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4993 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2025

⏱️ 23 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We are grieving the recent loss of Walter Bradley, a longtime Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and namesake of the Institute’s Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence. Today, we bring you the second half of Robert J. Marks’s 2020 interview with Walter Bradley, co-author of the seminal 1984 intelligent design book The Mystery of Life’s Origin. In this half of the conversation, Bradley and Marks discuss the book’s first release, including the cultural context that made finding a non-religious publisher an uphill battle, and discussion of some of the endorsements and early reviews, including responses from distinguished scientists Robert Jastrow, Dean Kenyon, Robert Shapiro, and Fritz Schaefer. Bradley and Marks also discuss some scholars who more recently have testified to how the book, and Bradley, dramatically influenced their intellectual careers. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0

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

0:14.3

Greetings. This is Robert J. Marks, and I'm your guest host today on ID the Future.

0:20.0

We're going to be talking today with Dr. Walter Bradley about his very influential book,

0:24.4

The Mystery of Life's Origin, that he wrote in 1984 with Charles Thaxton and Roger Olson.

0:32.1

And the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence is really proud to announce that we are doing a reissue

0:38.9

of the book. Not only is the original text going to be there, but things have happened since

0:44.0

1984, and we also have chapters on updating the Mystery of Life's origins from such luminaries as

0:50.9

Jim Tor, Steve Meyer, Jonathan Wells, Guillermo Gonzalez, and physicist Brian Miller.

0:57.7

There's a great historical introduction from David Klinghoffer and a preface by John West and me.

1:04.2

Something I didn't think about, Walter.

1:06.3

When this book is issued, you will now have a Bacon Erdos number of six.

1:12.3

Well, I'm thrilled to hear that, Bob.

1:13.9

You might want to explain for the audience what that means.

1:16.3

Okay, I have a Bacon Erdos number of five, and your Bacon number is how many movies you are in that are displaced from a movie in which Kevin Bacon has appeared.

1:28.0

You were inexpelled with Ben Stein.

1:30.4

Ben Stein was in the movie Trains, Plains, and Automobiles with Kevin Bacon.

1:34.7

So you have a Bacon number of two.

1:37.4

And your Erdos number is how many papers you are removed from this wacky Hungarian mathematician named Paul Airdosh, who published

1:46.3

hundreds of papers.

1:48.3

And he is very influential.

1:50.6

Much of his work is very good.

1:52.0

So the question is, how many papers are you separated from Airdos?

...

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