Why This Virus is No Threat to Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2023

⏱️ 15 minutes

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Summary

On this episode of ID the Future from the archive, host and biologist Ray Bohlin interviews biophysicist Cornelius Hunter, author of Darwin’s God, about an article in the journal Science concerning a virus invasion of E. coli bacteria. The article subtitle announces “Natural Selection Caught in the Act,” and suggests that an impressive instance of unguided evolution has been directly witnessed. Not so fast, Hunter says. The results were intelligently designed (by the lab scientists), he notes, and the changes are less impressive than they may appear at first glance. Hunter also explains protein-protein binding and counters evolutionist Dennis Venema to argue that the way the vertebrate immune system drives change is not at all analogous to the evolutionary process of random mutations and natural selection. Moreover, Hunter says, the mammalian immune system is itself an enormous challenge for evolutionary theory. Unfortunately, it's common for studies such as this one to be hyped up by the scientific community and the establishment media. "Evolutionists are driven by non-scientific factors, non-scientific influences," says Hunter. "There is a desire for the theory to be true in spite of the science, not because of the science."

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0:00.0	Hello, this is Ray Boland, your host today for ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
0:14.0	Today our guest is Dr. Cornelius Hunter,
0:16.0	author of the book Darwin's God in a blog by the same name.
0:19.7	Dr Hunter has commented the last few weeks
0:21.7	on an article that appeared in science, the
0:23.8	Journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science or AAAS.
0:28.3	This article reported that a virus that infects the bacterium E. coli evolved the ability to use a new method to invade
0:35.8	the cell and that it needed four mutations to do so.
0:39.2	So Dr. Hunter, welcome to IDD the future.
0:41.0	Well, thank you, Ray.
0:42.0	I'm glad to be here. Well, thank you, Ray. Glad to be here.
0:43.9	Well, Dr. Hunter or Cornelius, can you give us a quick summary
0:47.2	of how a virus infects bacteria?
0:50.4	Well, it's a big topic, and there's different kinds of viruses and different kinds of bacteria, so we'll keep it simple here.
0:56.0	The basic idea that's important for this paper that we talked about is that a virus needs to find a place on the surface of the bacteria to attach.
1:06.9	And there are conveniently all sorts of receptor proteins or membrane proteins on the surface of the bacteria that the bacteria uses for good
1:16.6	purposes which the virus exploits and so it's able to invade the bacterium via these protein channels.
1:26.0	The key is that the virus has to find a protein to bind to.
1:31.0	And so it has a protein of its own that's already set up. bind to
1:35.0	achieve that binding. It's like it has a lock and a key sort of thing.
1:39.0	Okay, so the experiment published just a few years ago showed that the bacteria
1:43.7	fade, which is a virus that infects bacteria is called Lambda,
	...

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