Günter Bechly on Fossils and Common Descent

Intelligent Design the Future

Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture

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

4 • 993 Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

We were shocked and grieved to learn of the death of our friend and colleague Günter Bechly this week. Gunter was a world-class paleontologist and an inspiration to many for his learned insight into the fossil record and his brave rejection of Darwinian dogma. Over the next two Fridays, we're sharing a two-part interview originally recorded in 2018 with host Sarah Chaffee. In this exchange, Gunter spotlights some problems the fossil record poses for Darwinism and, specifically, the theory’s idea of universal common ancestry. Bechly was a proponent of Darwinism until he discovered, well into his career, what he sees as significant scientific reasons to doubt the evolutionary story. This is Part 1 of a two-part conversation. Source

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to ID the Future, a podcast about intelligent design and evolution.
0:17.5	Welcome to ID the Future. This is Sarah Chaffee.
0:22.7	Today we're talking about a big new book from Crossway publisher, Theistic Evolution, a scientific, philosophical, and theological critique.
0:33.1	The anthology has contributions from several of our fellows, and I'll be talking with one
0:38.5	of those today, German paleontologist Gunter Beckley.
0:44.4	A quick point of clarification.
0:46.6	The particular kind of theistic evolution critiqued in the book is what we might call
0:51.0	theistic Darwinism, that is, the idea that God set up a fine-tuned universe
0:56.0	and the laws of nature. Then, when the first life emerges here on planet Earth,
1:02.0	random mutations and natural selection kick in and generate all the variety of life we see around us
1:08.0	without any intelligent guidance from a designer.
1:18.4	The book weighs in at over a thousand pages, but today we'll be zeroing in on just one slice from the science section, a chapter having to do with the fossil record and the notion of
1:24.0	universal common descent. And to help us unpack it, we have with us on the show, Gunter Beckley, who co-authored the chapter with Stephen Meyer.
1:34.5	Beckley is a German paleo entomologist who specializes in the fossil hickistry and systematics of insects, especially dragonflies.
1:51.0	He's a big player in the field, served as a curator for ambler and fossil insects in the Department of Paleontology at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany.
1:56.0	And I'm pleased to say that he is a senior fellow with Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture.
2:02.7	Welcome to the show, Dr. Beckley.
2:05.9	Hello, Sarah. I'm nice to be with you.
2:09.0	I should also mention that Dr. Beckley has the honor of being erased from Wikipedia
2:14.1	after he came out in favor of intelligent design.
2:23.1	One minute, there was a long-standing English-language Wikipedia page on this eminent scientist,
2:25.0	and the next minute it was gone.
	...

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