I thoroughly enjoyed the Seattle-area premiere last night of The Story of Everything — especially my interactions with friends of Discovery Institute who attended, and the Q&A! The documentary is in theaters through May 6.
I met a family with three girls, ranging, I would guess, from 6 years old to 11. The youngest, with a gap in her smile where a tooth used to be, told me that she most enjoyed the fishes in the documentary, while the oldest said about the irreducibly complex outboard motor of the bacterial flagellum, “We just learned about bacteria in school, but we didn’t learn that!”
Thoughtful and Sophisticated
The questions from the audience were very thoughtful and sophisticated. One man, who has a PhD in galaxy formation from Harvard and works as a computational biologist modeling diseases, said the biology of nanomachines had been a revelation for him.
An agnostic with a biology background said she was turned off when people asked her to abandon scientific reasoning. She said, in effect, “What am I being asked to believe?” Casey Luskin explained that she definitely wasn’t being urged to abandon scientific rigor. On the contrary, mainstream evolutionary biology has shown a noteworthy shift: it’s becoming more and more acceptable to question, on a purely scientific basis, whether the traditional Darwinian mechanism can account for the wonders of life.
My Favorite Question
Perhaps my favorite question came from our colleague, the biologist Ann Gauger. She asked the three scientists on the Q&A panel — Casey Luskin, Brian Miller, and Walter Myers III — what moved them most about the film.
For Miller, a physicist, it was the documentary’s articulation of the argument for intelligent design from gratuitous beatify. Myers, a computer engineer, said it was insights from the engineering of biological systems — even the workings of a single cell are orders of magnitude more complex than anything human beings can devise. And Luskin, a geologist, said it was the historical montages of scientists who had reached ID-friendly conclusions far ahead of their time.
There were too many questions to answer during the event, but the panelists were kept busy with additional questions and when I left at 10:15, I was not even close to being the last one out!