Studies
When Dr. Axe enrolled at U.C. Berkeley as a chemical engineering major, he wasn’t particularly interested in the life sciences. Engineering, with its strong connection to the physical sciences, seemed to have more mathematical rigor than anything he had encountered in biology. Physicists, chemists, and engineers ground their work in big principles, whereas practitioners of the life sciences seem, he thought, to be curators of little details. That perception changed when he began to study the molecular basis of life as a graduate student at Caltech. There, for the first time, he saw the deep connection between the inner processes of life and engineering—not the standard kind of engineering he had studied but an exquisite form of molecular engineering that made the most advanced human technology look like child’s play.
Early career
That realization raised a very weighty big-principle question: How could blind processes have produced a version of engineering that is so far beyond the accomplishments of humans? The science community seemed, for the most part, comfortable to chalk this up to the power of Darwinian evolution. But Dr. Axe wasn’t convinced. In pursuit of an answer well grounded in evidence, he took a postdoctoral position at the University of Cambridge, where he studied proteins—the highly versatile and complex molecules responsible for most of the sub-cellular processes that make life work. Continuing this work as a research scientist at the Medical Research Council Centre in Cambridge, he had the opportunity to interact with several luminaries, including Max Perutz, who received the Nobel Prize in 1962 for his pioneering work on the determination of protein structures.
Findings
The results of Dr. Axe’s studies present a serious problem for naturalistic explanations of life. His work on a bacterial enzyme called beta lactamase shows that even if all the bacterial cells that have ever existed can be viewed as opportunities for blind processes to build a new functional protein, it is virtually certain that nothing would come of it.
Today
While scientists can and should try to think of alternatives to the Darwinian account of life, Dr. Axe’s decades-long study of this problem, which goes well beyond protein science, has convinced him that the only plausible alternative is intelligent design. Dr. Axe gives a full account of the breadth and weight of the argument for design in his award-winning book Undeniable—How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed (HarperCollins, 2016). One strand of this argument is the implausibility of minds being physical things. And this strand has become crucially important in the unfolding discussion surrounding artificial intelligence. If Darwin was right, then humans are material things—the products of blind physical processes. In that case, human thought is likewise nothing more than a physical process, which would make it hard to argue that computers are categorically incapable of doing what we do. But Darwin was wrong, and so is the materialist conception of humanity. Dr. Axe is currently advancing these ideas—that life is extraordinarily well designed and that humans are far more extraordinary than anything they will ever invent—at Biola University. There he is the Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology, the Co-Director of the Stewart Science Honors Program, and a faculty advisor to the AI Lab.
Continue the conversation
For question, inquiries, and further engagements—connect with Dr. Axe through the contact page
