Neil Tyson Intelligent Design

We're over laughing a little bit as things go on. We're still in the science versus religion section, but I wanted to cap that off with bring up Neil deGran's ties, Neil's director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Centre in New York, and you'll also recognise the new host of PBS's program Nova Science Now. Neil has something that I think will very nicely fit into what was came up earlier this morning, so. Lunch by the way is going to segue a little bit downtown, so I think it's going to be more like probably close to two, but we started late. Are you okay? Yeah, I flew in from New York City this morning, so it's dinner time actually, so I'm ready. You got dinner for me here. Thank you for this invitation to come present, and I'm familiar with many of your names and faces, and I'm even close friends with some of you out there. What I wanted to do was put some issues on the table that I have not seen commonly discussed, and that I think they ought to be front and center for these next several days. Unfortunately, I missed Professor Weinberg's talk, because I try to get here. I woke up at four o'clock this morning in New York City to get here, and the best I could do was halfway through. I missed your talk completely, but I got half of it. You're forgiven. But I learned from informants that in fact, we have some significant overlap in our discussion of Islam from a thousand years ago, so forgive me if I repeat some of what you might have already heard, but I'm going to bring it out anyway, because there's a context, there's a broader context that I want to share with you, and I'm told I have full control here. Let's see if this works. Okay, you're wondering, that's the eagle nebula. One of the few photos that you'll see that are this beautiful, they're not by the Hubble telescope. This is a one-meter telescope at Capee, Observatory, and Arizona, and the shape of the eagle is not discernible. It's barely discernible in this frame, because the eagle is about two or three times the size of this, and the head of the eagle would be up here, so up here, and the wings off to the left and off to the right. Perhaps the most famous image of Hubble is a close-up of this zone right here, which has been very slowly called the pillars of creation, gods, fingers, and all sorts of other sort of religious references. People feel that way when they look at images of the cosmos, of course. I was always curious though that in the same universe you have things like the underbelly of a tarantula, and when magnified no one thinks religious thoughts when they make those observations, it's part of the same universe, so but I'll get back to that in a few moments. So here what I want to do is, I want to highlight a few issues, and these are issues that came together for S.A.A.A. wrote that appeared in Natural History magazine, the Darwin issue, who was the opening of our Darwin exhibit that is now traveling. It's no longer there at the museum, but the Darwin issue collected together, stories, articles on the relevance of evolution not only as an important concept in biology, but an important concept in all of science. And I thought long and hard about how could I possibly contribute to this, because I don't know enough biology to be meaningful in that issue, and then I realized that there are elements of the intelligent design movement that clearly there's a lot of teeth that members people attending this workshop have put into that subject. And I asked myself, do I have anything to contribute to that? And I realized that I did, and so I want to sort of fill a niche that I think is left unfilled. So let's go through, let me first start off with our autonomy. I don't know if we know that he really looked like this, but, uh, tell me, you know, it was one of the greatest scientists ever, and most influential scientists, and his most important work is of course, Al Majest, which is, which is Arabic for the greatest. And, uh, in it he sort of codifies the geosentric universe, and this earth-centered universe prevailed for centuries, until Copernicus, and Galileo, turned that around. But what I want to call your attention to, are notes that he penned in the margin of the manuscript of his work. Uh, let me remind you that back then, you would look up at the night sky, and the planets would move against the background star. They would wander, because that's what the word means in Greek is wanderer. And there was seven of these objects, the sun and moon included, and they would just kind of move, they go to the left, and then they'd slow down and pause, and then he'd back up, and then they'd reverse again, and this was kind of- this was a mystery, complete mystery. And of course, the heavens were not earth, and so the fact that you didn't really understand what was going up there was kind of okay, and expected, because that was the work of the gods, and we being mortal down here on earth, with you can't understand it, don't lose sleep over that fact. You perhaps never will. Now, Tommy had sort of the best-going explanation anyone had put forth with the epicycles and the like, but nonetheless, this is the, this is the boundary between what is known and unknown about how the machinery of the universe works, and he pens these words, which for me, one of the most beautiful and poetic references to the state of one's knowledge ever written. I know that I am mortal by nature and a femoral, but when I trace at my pleasure, the windings too and fro of the heavenly bodies, a no-order touch earth with my feet. I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of Ambrosia. And so therein is this emotional, he's got this sort of religious feeling at the limits of his knowledge, and this is a trend that will continue for thousands of years to follow this, at least two thousand years to follow this. And you don't have, and this whole notion of intelligent design, this is intelligent design, this quote that I just read to you, is tolemy invoking intelligent design. No, he's not trying to get it, get that into the classroom. He's not, you know, there's the politics of intelligent design in modern times, but what I think has been swept under the rug that we have to contend with as a community of people who are sort of truth seekers is the fact that some of the greatest minds that have preceded us have done just this. Okay, that's tallamy, but we can go on, who else do we have? Oh, Galileo, interesting case, Galileo, was kind of an exception to this. We all know, he was a deeply religious man, a lot of the trouble he got into was because he was just kind of obnoxious. All right, he could have made nice with the pope and he did not. And of course, I'm paraphrasing. I mean, I'm dumb, that's the reader's digest version of what happened over that period. But let me share with you some lines that he wrote to Christina, who is the grand Duchess of Tuscany, some of these quotes you've heard before, but I think they're worth taking to heart. But Bible tells you how to go to heaven and not how the heavens go. That's one of the famous quotes attributed to Galileo. Another one is, I don't feel obliged to believe that the same God who was endowed with senses, reasoned in intellect, has intended us to forego their use. And so he was kind of, I see him as one of the first to say, all right, if religion has a, if there's any point in purpose to it, it's not to be served as a science textbook. Okay, so he was kind of the first to suggest this division, not to get rid of religion, of course, like I said, he was a religious fellow himself. But it gets interesting when we get sort of philosophically interesting when we get to this gentleman, I can back up here, sir Isaac Newton. Now, I don't know what you know of Isaac Newton, but everything I've read of his tells me that there's no greater genius to ever walk the surface of this earth. I'm just, I don't know if you've ever felt that about anybody, I didn't feel that about anybody, but you just read what this man wrote. Okay, line by line by line, this guy was plugged into the machinery of the universe. I think there's, he's unimpeachably brilliant, unimpeachably brilliant. And let me read again what we heard from Mike Schermer earlier in Isaac Newton's writings. By the way, in his Principia, here's the page one, a page zero of Principia, in it he like discovers the laws of motion, f equals M. A, discover the laws of gravity. It's you know, it's all there and he did this all before he turned 26. And in this, when he talks about motion, there's no reference to God. When he talks about his, his two body force that he deduced this universal log gravitation, there's no mention of God. It's just not anywhere there because he understood it. He was on top of it. He was there. Even though the understanding of the motions of the planets before he came along was given unto God because nobody understood it. Nobody understood well enough to really believe that they had a full predictive handle on it in the way the universal log gravitation supplied. And so what you have is Isaac Newton abandoning reference to God until he realizes that if all you do is calculated to two body problem, he would have like the moon and earth. Yes, he's got that calculated. Now you have the sun and the earth. You got that. Wait a minute, now the earth and the moon go around the sun and sometimes we're close to Mars and sometimes we're not. And when it comes near Mars, there's a tug that's stronger there than in any other part in the orbit. And then it comes over here and then Jupiter tugs and there's all these mini tugs. And so he's got to do this two body problem for earth and moon, earth and the sun, earth, moon and Mars, earth, moon, Mars and Jupiter. And it becomes a rapidly complex problem. And he realizes that in fact applying this simple sort of approach to calculating the stability of the solar system he finds he can't stabilize the solar system. He can't account for how we have stayed this way for as long as what was possibly necessary from the beginning of the universe. And so what does he say? He's he's he's at his limits. He's at his limits. And so you're re-precabbing God is nowhere until you get to the general show him. And then he says the six primary planets. Back then there were six planets. Okay. Now there's eight in case you haven't been keeping track. Even if you thought they were nine, they were now eight. The six primary planets are revolved about the sun and circles concentric with the sun. And with motions directed towards the same parts and almost in the same plane. He's got the whole picture now and he's trying to sort of account for that. But he can't just simply doing two body calculations. Certainly not without a computer without a new kind of mathematics. He says, but it is not to be conceived. But is it not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions? This most beautiful system of the sun planets and comments could only proceed from the council and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. This is Isaac Newton invoking a intelligent design at the limits of his knowledge. And I want to put on the table the fact that you have school systems wanting to put intelligent design into the classroom, but you also have the most brilliant people who ever walk this earth doing the same thing. And so it's a deeper challenge than simply educating the public. It's deeper than as you know by the books written by our scientific colleagues that do take these these deeply resonant and charitable positions towards their religious beliefs. Maybe the real question here. Let me back up from a moment. You know, we've all seen the data. 40 percent there's 90, whatever percent of the West or the American public believes in a personal God that responds to their prayers. And then you ask, what does that percentage for scientists? Average over disciplines. It's about 40 percent. And then you say, how about the elite scientists? Members of the National Academy of Sciences in article on those data recently in nature, it said 85 percent of the National Academy reject a personal God. And then they compare to 90 percent of the public. You know, that's not the story there. They missed the story. What that article should have said is, how come this number isn't zero? That's the story. Okay. So my steam colleague here, craft. I'm the big man. Oh, my, professor, Krause. Professor Krause here says, all we have to do is make a scientifically literate public. Well, when you do, how can they do better than the scientists themselves in their percentages of who is religious and who isn't? That's kind of unrealistic, I think. So there's something else going on that nobody seems to be talking about, that as you become more scientific, yes, the religiosity drops off, but it asymptotes. It asymptote not at zero. It asymptotes at some other level. So they should be the subject of everybody's investigation. Not the public. I'm telling. So it's not 85 percent reject is at 15 percent of the most brilliant minds the nation has except it. And that's something that we can't just sweep under the rug. Otherwise, we're being disingenuous to our to the efforts here. And I'll go, I know I'm staying between you and lunch here. So let me try to go quickly. If you don't say, I mean, I think Newton is one of the most brilliant, the most brilliant evidence sort of walk the earth. And I'm not alone in feeling this. This is a statue in Trinity Church in Cambridge. And he's through the open doorway there. And so you get close to the statue. He's without his curls here. I was deeply upset by that. I thought he was like really trendy with his long hair. But apparently that was probably just a wig at all times. You look at the base of the statue loosely translated of the genus of all who have ever been human, there is no greater intellect than this man. And so I'm not alone in the sentiment. And this man wrote those words. So let's move on because there's more to talk about here. We don't have to stop at Newton. Let's go to Christian Huygens. Brilliant. I mean, he was great at chemistry biology, physics, math, Dutch scientist. And he died the year that this work was published one of my favorite works of science writing. And it's Cosmo Theros, which is an exploration on the likelihood of there being life on the known planets using the available knowledge of the day. So for example, they knew that Huygens was the first to identify Saturn's ring as a ring. If I got that right Carol and is that correct? Oh no, I thought he was the first to calculate that it would be a ring. He was the then Huygens would be the first to observe it. Okay. We have madam Saturn here in the room. In case you don't know. Okay. My colleague, Carol and Porco, who will be hearing from later. I've just been told. But anyhow, so Huygens brilliant fellow. And one of the probes on the Cassini spacecraft was called Huygens, a European probe that descended to the surface of Titan. And so he's in, he's an important figure in the history of science. So what does he say in his writings? Well, you look at the year, 1696, gravity was well known. Laws of motion were well known. Newton was quite influential well before the turn of the century there. And so when he talks about the orbits of the planets, it's done. Talks about the moons of Jupiter. Done. Talks about the new rings around Saturn. Done. It's all fine. But when he talks about biology and life, something that's not well understood then or today, boom, there goes his references to God. But references God would nowhere else in those writings. nowhere else he says. I suppose nobody would deny, but that there's somewhat more of contrivens, somewhat more of miracle in the production and growth of plants and animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate bodies. For the finger of God and the wisdom of divine providence is in them much more clearly manifested than in the other. He doesn't say that about the orbits. We're done with the orbits as Mike Schermer had noted. We're done. He's in a place where nobody really knows has the answer. So he invokes, this is intelligent design once again. Pure out flattened simple. So you know this story, I have to read through telecos, it's just great. All right, so Laplace, but P. H. Stem on the little Place at the end of the 18th century wrote a five-volume tone on celestial mechanics, a brilliant piece of work. It's there, it weighs a lot on the shelf, and what it does is it takes Newton's laws of gravity and brings them into the into a full expression with the hammer of calculus. He brings all the armaments of mathematics to bear on the laws of physics that were put forth by Isaac Newton. As a Newton only touched on them, they were not fully developed. And in this work, he demonstrates he further developed something that had been percolating in the mathematical community, but he developed and one might even say perfects a branch of math we would call perturbation theory, where instead of pulling your hair out saying, well how do you calculate this pair of forces in this pair and this pair and all the equations go to hell in perturbation theory, it allows you to systematically and reliably calculate the effect of a small tug in the present series of small tugs in the presence of singular big tugs. And that's kind of what's most of the soul what's going on in most of the solar system. And when you do that and you do that properly, you can demonstrate not with standing effects of chaos, which have other time scales related to them, you can demonstrate that in fact the solar system was stable beyond the predictions of Isaac Newton. So he figures this out, does not invoke God, because he figured it out. And in a story that may be apocryphal, but I see more in support of it than against it, this is this time coincides of course with the era of Napoleon and Napoleon being French and the plasping French. Do no translation necessary. Napoleon, if you visit his library, it's not just sort of books of world history and battles, it's engineering books, it's physics books. This man wanted to know where his cannibals would land. All right, he was much more than just sort of a lucky general. He was into the physics, the engineering, and the material science of war. And so immediately summed up the five volume production of Laplace, read it through, cover to cover, called in Laplace and said, Sir, I have the exact quote here. Hang on. Napoleon asked him, what role God played in the construction and regulation of the heavens? This is kind of like that's what Newton would ask, right? Laplace replies, Sir, I had no need for that hypothesis. And so what concerns me now is even if your is brilliant as Newton, you reach a point where you start basking in the majesty of God and then you're discovery stops. It just stops. You kind of know good anymore for advancing that frontier, waiting for somebody else to come behind you who doesn't have God on the brain and who says, that's a really cool problem. I want to solve it. They come in and solve it. But look at the time delay. This was a hundred-year time delay. And the math that's in perturbation theory is like crumbs for Newton. He could have come up with that. The guy invented calculus just on a dare practically. When someone asks him, what, what, you know, I, how come planets orbit in ellipses and not some other shape? And he couldn't answer that. He goes home for two months, comes back out, comes integral differential calculus because he needed that to answer that question. And so this is, this is the kind of mind we were dealing with with Newton. He could have gone there but he didn't. He didn't. His religiosity stopped him. And so we're left with the realization of course that intelligent design while real in the history of science. While real in the presence of sort of philosophical drivers is nonetheless a philosophy of ignorance. And so regardless of what our political agenda is, all you have to say is science is a philosophy of discovery, intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. That's all. I don't need to see whether I don't, if you discovered anything lately, if not get out of the science classroom. But I'm not going to say don't teach this because it's real. It happened. So I don't want people to sweep it under the rug because if you do, you're neglecting something fundamental. It's going on in people's minds when they confront things they don't understand. And it happens to the greatest of the minds as it happens to everyone else, many, if not most other people in the public. So let me blow through some last set of slides here. I want to call something to your attention that we all know, we all know intuitively, whether or not you've thought about it explicitly. You go around the world and you find times in places where nations have excelled in one subject or another. There's a birth of that period of where they excel and then there's a peak and sometimes it drops off and sometimes they hang on. And so you can ask the culture of that. What was going on in that nation to support those discoveries? And then what happened when they ended? And so I call that sort of naming rights. If you were there first and you did it best, you named things. Particle physics in this country in the United States was like going gangbusters after the Second World War and in the discovery of atomic elements, look at the periodic table. It's Berkeley in California you know, we got half the United States up there in the upper heavier elements of the periodic table. Am I right there? That's not because the world liked California or Berkeley. It's because the work was done here. It's because there was an effort to excel in just those subjects and it shows up in other ways. Well, give you just briefly. Part of the naming rights is that you don't have to name it. So for example, while we didn't invent the internet, we certainly exploited it here in America, we did that sort of first and best. And so your email address does not end in dot u.s. Everybody else is in the world, they got to say what country they came from. We don't. It's simple, but it's the consequence of being there first and doing it better than anyone had done it before. Do you know that the British Post-It stamp is the only Post-It stamp in the world that does not identify the country of origin because they invented Post-It stamps. So I should they have to say what country it is. It's their invention. Check them out. It's just the facts of this. The constellations are the night sky. We can roam in and it's lasted to this time because they did a really good job thinking that stuff up. All the mythologies of the heavens that really stuck with us. All right. So I'm going to make a larger point not to get gratuitous on you here, but September 11, 2001 as we all know this was going on in New York City. This is the view outside of my window. I live four blocks from ground zero. Excuse me, this is the corner of the building in which I live. I went outside to get this view. I was at the time judging whether I should go collect my daughter who was in an elementary school two blocks north of the north tower north is to the right in this picture. So I want to get a closer view with a highly magnified zoom lens to see what while that was happening the plane flew into the South tower. No one was thinking terrorism until the second one was hit. The first one was a bad tragedy. And so these are just three frames from my camcorder. This is at T equals zero. This is one second like actually a fraction of a second. The plane was moving probably 500 miles an hour. And just to understand the block building that blocks what a monolithic building that is 50 stories tall. This is New York City people. So tall buildings are kind of just all over the place. And that's just a hotel of 50 story hotel. And it's the towers of four shorten because they're at the angle at which this is shown. I put these up because a few days after this President Bush, I don't remember where he said this on the steps of the White House in the Rose Garden or the Capitol. And it attempted to distinguish we from they, the terrorists who flew these planes into the buildings and into the water went down in Pennsylvania and in Washington to distinguish we from they, he loosely caught quotes of phrase out of the Bible by saying our God is the God who named the stars. Now this is before I was on his rollo decks, okay? Because I could have helped him out there. The fact is of all the stars that have names, two-thirds of them have Arabic names. So this was not I don't think his intent. With that message. Okay? Well the constellations are Greek and Roman. The names are Arabic. All right? And the list just goes on and on and on and on. And so where does this come from? How do you get us, how does this happen? How do you get stars named with Arabic names? How does this happen? And it happens because of course because Hang on, just catching up with myself here. Okay? It happens because there was this particularly fertile period that Professor Weinberg Dueli discussed. And around that period, that's 300 year period. The intellectual center of the world was Baghdad. Baghdad was completely open to all visitors, all travelers, Jews, Christians, doubters, which today we might call atheists. They were all there exchanging ideas. All of them. And it was that period. We had the advances in engineering and biology and medicine and mathematics. All right? Our numerals are called what? Arabic numerals, they have a stop and think about that. You know, who's to who? As an American, do we pause? Take pause at this. Why they call Arabic numerals? Okay? They fully exploit the discovery of the zero. Create a whole field called algebra. It's self-an Arabic word. Algorithm is an Arabic word. All this is going on and it's all traceable not to some long thousand year tradition in Islam is traceable to this 300 year period. This 200 year period. And then so they had naming rights. The most expensive, beautifully carved astral aves come out of this period. There's a great collection of these at the Adler Planet Terraman Chicago if you ever want to check them out. So navigation, celestial navigation, all of this is traceable to this period. And so something happened. And what happened as was previously described. I would told it and I'd give forgive me for repeating from what you might have heard. 12th century kicks in and then you get the influence of this scholar, Algizali. All right? And so out of his work, you get the philosophy that mathematics is the work of the devil. And nothing good can come of that philosophy. That combined with other sort of codification, philosophical codifications of what Islam would was and would become the entire intellectual foundation that Enterprise Collapse and it is not recovered since. Over that period, all these books were translated into Arabic on a scale not seen since then. And so, so why am I even going here? Because I'm trying to explain to you that the you fast forward, the dangerous here, is that you fast forward to 21st century America and ask, what influences do we are refealing now? Because that that naming period in Islam stopped and would never recover it. Because the way of thinking about the natural world, revelation replaced investigation. So I fast forward to 21st century and what do you find? You get things like this. This is in America. So now, what I find interesting is it's a level of passion that it requires to actually do that you have to pay for this. And it means a lot of you'll pissed off at the big bang. The pissed off at the big bang. At my art museum in New York, the American Museum of Natural History, they come to the big bang exhibit and sometimes I don't feel like having that conversation. I say, why don't you go to our whole of human biology first and then come to us? And this is what we have sort of monkeys holding hands with people in skeleton forms and then they never make it back to the big bang. The gone forever. Okay, so however it reaches the big bang is monkeys and people is a worse transgression apparently. So there's that but there's also a little bit of intelligent design here. Here's one that is wants to accept the science but then is like what's before the big bang? We don't quite know yet so God was there. So of course intelligent design is basically a God of the gaps but my favorite way to end this then is to just reflect on I want to do it just a fast tirade on stupid design and this will be fast. Look at all the things that just want to kill us. Okay, most planet orbits are unstable, star formation is completely inefficient. Most places in the universe will kill life instantly. Instantly. The people say, all the forces of nature are just right for life. Excuse me. Look at the volume of the universe where you can't live. You will die instantly. That's not, that's not what I call the Garden of Eden. All right. Galaxy orbits the wee orbit once every couple hundred million years you're bound to come close to a supernova that will wipe out your ozone layer and kill everybody on the surface who doesn't otherwise have dark skin because your high energy rays will give you skin cancer. We're on a collision course with the drama to Galaxy. Gone is this beautiful spiral that we have and of course we're on a one-way expanding universe as we wind down to oblivion as the temperature of the universe asymptotically approaches. Absolutely. That's the universe. Then Earth, volcanoes. Sonami just killed you know, I think that numbers higher. Up 200,000 people, floods 28. None of this is any sign that there's a benevolent anything out there and this 90% is should be 99% as was earlier noted that's a of all life that has ever lived is now extinct. Interstellar systems are shooting gallery, comets, asteroids, duck, and look how long it took to make multi-cellular life. Not from the beginning of the Earth. Life happened quickly but not multi-cellular life. You needed your cyanobacteria to sort of crank on the oxygen, get the oxygen budget going. Then you could have sort of, that's sort of rocket fuel for multi-cellular creatures but that's took three and a half billion years that's hardly an efficient plan with us in mind. And in human beings, this is like the most tragic of them. I don't even include here the expression of free will where people want to kill each other. I'm talking about nature killing us without the help of human beings. Aggressive childhood leukemia, human failure, all of this, all of this and we so much praise about the human eye but anyone who's seen the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum will recognize how blind we are. Okay and part of that blind this means we can't see we can't detect magnetic fields, ionizing radiation, rate on, we are like sitting ducks for for ionizing radiation. We have to eat constantly because we're warm-bladed. Crocodile eat a chicken a month, it's fine. Okay? So we're always looking for food. These gases at the bottom, you can't smell them, taste them, you breathe them in, you're dead. Okay? So I'm almost done, I'm sorry, I'm taking up your time here. So, and with the birth defects, most, look at this. All this, it's like abuse and infection and stuff that human beings had something to do with, here's we have no idea. Oops, I pushed about my accident, sorry. No idea, no idea. And you know, and birth defects are tragic, they're tragic, particularly if they happen to the family afflicted by it and you just look at images of these aborted feces because of the, and most of these are still born, others are born with heart outside the body. And so this is all simply stupid design and the problem is if you look for what is intelligent and you can find some things that are just really beautiful and really hey, that's a clever, you know, the ball socket of the children. A lot of things you can point to, but then you stop looking at all the things that confound that revelation. And so if I came upon a frozen waterfall and it just struck me for all its beauty, I would then turn over the rock and try to find a millipede. Okay, we're some kind of deadly, nute. And then put that in context and realize of course the universe is not here for us for any singular purpose. My favorite of all is of course you breathe the end drink through the same hole in your body, guaranteeing that some percent of us will choke to death every year. Okay, imagine if you had a separate hole for breathing and eating and talking, that would be just really cool, right? That could drink breathe and just talk and you would never choke. All right, and it's not, it's not a hard request. Dolphins breathe and eat through different holes in their body. And that's a mammal. So I'm not asking, I'm not, you know, this is like Santa Claus could bring this one. And this one of course, my favorite of all, like, what's this going on between our legs, right? As you heard, it's, we have, you heard if like it entertainment complex in the middle of a sewage system, no engineer would design that at all, ever. It's like the wrong just to construct the position of elements. So what I want to put on the table is the fact that I don't want the religious person in the lab telling me that God is responsible for what it is they cannot discover because look at the hubris of that. You're in the lab and you say, I don't know how this works and not only that, no one alive on earth knows how this works and not only that no one who will ever be born will know how this works. That's kind of audacious when you think about it and then you put it down and go on to the next problem. This problem is a cure for Alzheimer or cancer or whatever else. I don't want them in the science classroom. And so the issue is simply about progress and discovery and in my recent four days into Washington, why have been closer to a community of Republicans than I have ever been in my life because I grew up in New York City and in New York City it's I think that person is Republican back there. You see the no not that one behind that person. Yeah that's a Republican. There's another one that's in New York that's so you grow up this way and I get sort of baptized into a Republican administration. I had two consecutive appointments in the Bush administration, one on aerospace industry, one on space exploration, the NASA's future at basically and I realize something, it's been in that much time in the community of powerful Republicans that Republicans above all else do not want to die poor. So there's a limit to how far this will go and I bet most people in this room even those assemblies this table were highly concerned about the dovertrial wondering how that would turn and I looked at that and I said I'm not worried because it's a Republican judge. And in the end if you put people who are not making discoveries in the science classroom that is the end of the foundation of your future economy. And so I had a little more confidence than others did because of this sensitivity to the the money aspect of it. But we all know tomorrow's economies will be founded on on innovations and science and technology and of course that gives cut short if we lose our civilization as what happened in Islam in 1100 and the last thought I'll leave you with the concerns me greatly if you do the math okay you know just look you look at all the Nobel prize winners that ever were some even in this room and ask how many were Muslim and it's like one maybe two okay I think a second one was in economics and the one we refer to was described earlier the co-winner of the Nobel Prize with Professor Weinberg Abdul Salam and he's not Middle Eastern Muslim he's Pakistani Muslim okay now how many Nobel Prize are one by Jews it's like the fourth of the Nobel prizes okay some high fraction of the total and they know how many Muslims are there in the world it's like a billion Muslims how many Jews 15 million tops okay so you to ratio these numbers had Islam not collapsed in its intellectual standing in the year 1100 and he just do the ratios they would have every single Nobel prize today so the fact that it's not only just a few it's mere zero it is deeply worrying I'm concerned about what lost what what what what what what brilliance may have expressed itself and did not in that community over the past thousand years and so what I want to put on the table is why so that's that's the end of my talk I want to say I want to put on the table not why 85% of the National Academy rejects God I want to know why 15% don't and that's really what we got address here otherwise the public is is secondary to this thank you for your attention here