Douglas Axe: Science as a Human Enterprise

On a classic episode of ID the Future, host Eric Metaxas interviews biologist Douglas Axe. Axe is the Maxwell Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University, the founding Director of Biologic Institute, the founding Editor of BIO-Complexity, and the author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life is Designed. Dr. Axe discusses how he lost his research position in Cambridge during a season of political controversy over Darwinian evolution in the UK. Axe’s research led him to cast doubt on the prevailing ideas about protein evolution, showing that proteins are actually more fragile and less flexible than many claim. In talking about his book Undeniable, Axe explains that science is a human enterprise: “Science is not the dispassionate, purely rational, perfect discipline that some people still seem to think it is,” says Axe. “The human part of science brings all the baggage and complexity that humans bring to every other discipline in science, and how could it be otherwise?” This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Download the podcast or listen to it here.