For the 30th anniversary of the Center for Science and Culture, I have been reviewing developments in science that confirm the vision that animated the founding of the CSC. See also here and here.
In 2009, for the 150th anniversary of Darwin’s Origin of Species, German paleontologist Günter Bechly was tasked with creating an exhibit at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, where he served as a curator. The purpose was to review the debate over Darwinian evolution and intelligent design, weighing one against the other. An outsized scale was even provided as a prop for the exhibit, with books supporting evolution on one side and books supporting ID on the other.
Of course, it was a foregone conclusion which idea would win out — or that’s what Bechly’s colleagues thought. He started reading ID literature, including Darwin’s Black Box by biochemist Michael Behe, and became convinced that ID was right. As recounted here as well as in the documentary Revolutionary: Michael Behe and the Mystery of Molecular Machines, Bechly publicly came out in 2015 as an ID supporter. He subsequently faced a hostile work environment. Viewed as a “threat to the credibility and reputation of the museum,” he was “no longer welcome,” and was forced to resign.
Their loss was ID’s gain. From 2016 onward until his tragic death in 2025, Bechly made many important contributions to ID literature on the topic of fossil explosions in the history of life. In 2017, he lead-authored a review in the book Theistic Evolution with Stephen Meyer that summarized 19 fossil explosions of new types of organisms in the history of life. A great summary of these explosions can be found in a 2024 article he wrote, “Discontinuities in the Fossil Record — A Problem for Neo-Darwinism.” The most famous of these discontinuities is the Cambrian explosion where most of the major animal phyla body plans appear abruptly in a geologically short period (see Erwin and Valentine, 2013). This gives another occasion for explaining where an ID theorist was vindicated.
In his 2013 book Darwin’s Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design, Stephen Meyer predicted that the numerous new genes and proteins needed for building animal body plans would be a major challenge to Darwinian evolution to produce in the 10 or so million years available for the Cambrian explosion. Meyer’s book received a negative though serious review in the journal Science by UC Berkeley paleontologist Charles Marshall. While Marshall disagreed with Meyer’s overall thesis, his response wasn’t what one might expect: He basically said that he assumed that all the genes necessary for building an animal were present in an early animal ancestor, and that the Cambrian phyla “were not made by new genes.” It turns out Meyer was right. A 2018 paper in Nature Communications used comparative genomics to infer that thousands of new genes would have been necessary to build the new diverse types of animals that appear in the Cambrian period (Paps and Holland, 2018).
The point is important, because it shows that much new genetic information would have been necessary to build new types of organisms. And as I mentioned, the Cambrian explosion is not the only example where new information would need to arise in the history of life. According to Bechly, other explosions of new types of organisms across life’s history include the Great Ordovician Biodiversification Event where many types of marine invertebrates appear (Etter, 2015), a land plant explosion (Bateman et al., 1998),an insect explosion (Menon, 1995),a bird explosion (Feduccia, 1995),an explosion of major orders of mammals (O’Leary, et al., 2013), and even the abrupt appearance of our genus Homo (Luskin, 2022). These patterns persist: a 2025 Springer book on evolutionary biology cited Bechly’s work and stated, “Numerous paleontological studies support the notion of abrupt origin.”
Intelligent design can explain and predict these patterns. Intelligent agents may rapidly infuse large amounts of information into a system and create blueprints that are “fully formed” when they’re first introduced into the world. This pattern of the explosive appearance of new forms of life is thus another area where the evidence continues to support design.
Breaking New Ground: The Nature and Origin of the Mind
Of course the ultimate feature that must be explained is the human mind and brain. Here, too, ID is breaking new ground and making major contributions. Last year, neurosurgery professor Michael Egnor along with science writer Denyse O’Leary published The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul which cites multiple lines of evidence for the immaterial nature of the mind. Split-brain surgeries show that even when connections across brain hemispheres are cut, one side can still access abstract thoughts being processed by the other. The reason? The mind isn’t physical.
At the same time, physical processes like seizures or surgeries can stimulate all kinds of movement, sensations, memories, and emotions, but never abstract thought. The reason? The mind isn’t physical.
And then there’s the ultimate proof of the immaterial nature of the human mind: ID theorists have studied with great interest a recent flood of data coming in about near-death experiences. Watch Egnor’s debate with “skeptic” Michael Shermer on Piers Morgan’s program and you’ll see that materialists struggle to explain how people can have conscious experiences when completely brain dead. The reason? Once again, the mind is immaterial — a powerful confirmation of intelligent design.
ID has made other recent forays into the nature of the mind. A much more detailed investigation of the nature of consciousness is contained in Minding the Brain: Models of the Mind, Information, and Empirical Science, published in 2023 by Discovery Institute Press’s academic division. That book included contributions by computer scientists, neuroscientists, philosophers, and other experts bringing their unique perspectives on why the mind must be immaterial, beyond the reach of evolution, and distinct from the brain.
And then there’s Animal Algorithms: Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts, also from Discovery Institute Press, which explores the astounding complexity and diversity of animal behaviors. This book shows that many “complex programmed behaviors” (CPBs) in animals require multiple components — navigation systems, sensors, information processing and calculation, and outputs — in order to work. Many examples show that irreducible complexity and the case for design extend deep into neural modules that control animal instincts.
Improved Methods of Design Detection
With all the data pouring in, a strong theory of design is needed to make sense of it. Recent years have seen innovations in ID theory to improve our methods of detecting design.
Early in ID’s history, William Dembski published The Design Inference with Cambridge University Press, which proposed detecting design using an explanatory filter to identify complex and specified information (CSI). It soon became apparent that other definitions of information — such as functional information, Kolmogorov complexity, algorithmic specified complexity, and irreducible complexity — are all special cases of CSI. These various types of information were united by Montañez (2018) into a form of “canonical specified complexity,” further demonstrating that design detection is possible using standard methods used for testing hypotheses in statistics, where design is treated as a hypothesis which can be statistically accepted or rejected based upon statistical criteria.
Another area where important improvements have been made is in the definition of “specification.” While specialness is easily determined in a game of poker with well-defined winning outcomes, it can also be measured in contexts where definitions of “special” may be less obvious. In an updated version of The Design Inference published in 2023, Dembski and Ewert developed a linguistic method of measuring specification based upon description length, drawing from the insight that objects, events, or scenarios with short linguistic descriptions tend to be significant, special, and/or convey large amounts of meaningful information. Thus, under their method, the shorter the specification needed to describe an outcome, the greater the specialness. Miller (2026) demonstrated that when natural languages are used for specifications, the methods of Montañez (2018) and Dembski and Ewert (2023) are mathematically equivalent, as the value of the specification function can be directly determined by the number of words in the description.
Another method for detecting design, developed largely by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, is making an inference to design as the “best explanation” by comparing multiple hypotheses and demonstrating that the design hypothesis explains more data than other known competing hypotheses. Meyer’s method is highly compatible with other methods, in that it requires that design is a superior explanation to chance/law-based explanations. It also incorporates insights from other methods that only intelligent agency can produce high CSI. While various methods of detecting design have been developed, each seeks to detect design by finding reliable indicators that an intelligent agent was at work — in particular, the presence of high CSI. ID’s foundational ideas from thirty years ago continue to bear good fruit.
A Research Program and Full-Fledged Theory of ID
Intelligent design now has a full-fledged theory complete with methods of detecting design and applications in a variety of fields from molecular biology to protein science to genomics and genetics to paleontology. And we haven’t even talked about ID in physics and cosmology, treated extensively by Stephen Meyer in Return of the God Hypothesis, or about chemistry or anatomy or cosmic fitness or geology or… the list goes on. A 2026 paper that I co-wrote with my colleagues Jonathan McLatchie, Emily Reeves, and Brian Miller supports “The Broad Utility of the Theory of Intelligent Design to Guide Scientific Research.” The paper explains how scientists can use the theory of intelligent design to guide research, and reviews the ID research program, concluding:
Collectively, this research demonstrates that the possibility of a “design science” is becoming and has already become a reality in these and other scientific fields. Intelligent design can thus broadly be applied in a variety of scientific subdisciplines to guide research and make new discoveries.
The past 30 years have witnessed evidence from a myriad of fields continually pouring in to vindicate ID predictions about irreducible complexity, protein rarity, information in biology, limits to evolution, junk DNA, orphan genes, phylogenetic trees, the history of life, and many other examples. In many cases this data comes directly from ID theorists, who are doing research and publishing peer-reviewed scientific papers building the case for intelligent design.
ID still is not the dominant paradigm in biology, and it’s impossible to know when the scientific consensus will embrace it. However, if the ascendency of the Third Way evolutionary model (discussed earlier in this series) means anything, then teleology, purpose, function, and goal-directedness are all increasingly recognized by mainstream science. It may be some time before ID becomes the dominant paradigm, but it’s clear that over the past thirty years, the scientific evidence has moved consistently in that direction. I predict that when future historians of science look back on these three decades, they will conclude that on the merits, the debate was already largely won.
Editor’s note: For more on the fossil pictured at the top, see Bechly’s 2024 article here, “Fossil Friday: The Sudden Appearance of Crocs in the Triassic Fossil Record,” among many other sudden appearances in the fossil record.