Steve: Professor Richard Buggs, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us at Solas today.
Richard: Thanks for having me.
Steve: Before we get into the nitty-gritty science side of our chat about faith and science, could you tell me a bit more about yourself, your family, and what you do?
Richard: Well, I’m married to Hannah. We have four children, the youngest of whom is just six weeks old!
I live in Kent, just south of London, and work at Kew Gardens four days a week and at Queen Mary, University of London, one day a week. And for both of them, I mainly do research on evolutionary genetics.
Steve: Wow, congratulations on the new addition! Reading your bio, it says that you are an evolutionary biologist and molecular ecologist. Can you tell me a bit more about that, and for those who aren’t familiar with those terms, can you explain what that means and what the day-to-day work actually looks like?
Richard: Yeah, so evolution is simply changes in allele frequencies in populations over time – alleles being variations of genes – and that’s what my research is studying. Basically, I study how genetic information changes over time, mainly in broadleaf tree species. I try to understand how they’ve adapted to the climate of the UK and how well suited they are to possible future climates, and also how they adapt to pests and pathogens, particularly new, invasive pests and pathogens that humans have moved around the world.
One of my focuses is something called ash dieback, which is a fungal pathogen that was found in the UK in 2012 and has spread throughout the whole of Britain and is killing millions of ash trees. I’ve been doing research to understand if there’s any genetically based resistance to this fungus. And the good news is there is, to some extent. Natural selection is selecting for it in natural woodlands at the moment. So my research has sort of led to a slightly more positive view of the future of ash than perhaps we had back in 2012, when the fungus first came in and we just thought all of the ash trees might die and we would need to plant different species.
Steve: I assume you’ve got a research team that you oversee to help with all this work.
Richard: I do! I have a group of PhD students and postdoctoral researchers who work with me, doing all of this work. I mainly write the grant proposals, write the papers at the end, and manage the work that happens between, so I don’t spend a lot of time in the field or in the lab or on the supercomputer.
Steve: Don’t you miss being out in the field doing more hands-on stuff?
Richard: I miss it a bit, and I really love the sense of making the first discovery of something and looking at the data and saying, ‘Oh, this is telling me this.’ And so now it’s my postdocs who get that first thrill of discovery, and then they come and tell me about it. And so, I have it slightly second-hand, so I miss that, although it’s still exciting, even when someone else has done it for you. But I’ve always enjoyed writing, so my current situation suits me really well. I used to get a bit bored sometimes in the lab, so to be able to be mainly writing about science and writing up results and deciding what to do next – that’s good fun.
Steve: I can relate. Research design is something that I do have a real heart for and often miss. You mentioned being out there discovering things for the first time – I believe there’s a tree named after you, is that right?
Richard: Yeah, that’s true. It’s a species of birch tree that grows in China.
Steve: Nice. What’s the name?
Richard: Well, Betula is Latin for the genus, the birch genus, and so this one is Betula buggsii.
Steve: That’s when you know you’ve arrived in life…when you have something’s scientific name being your name! Very cool. Tell me a bit more about your background in the sciences? What led you to pursue the sciences? Where did you study? What is it about the sciences that you love to really pursue it as a full-time career?
Richard: Sure. It was a slightly roundabout route, really. I was brought up on a farm, which means I’ve always had a real connectedness to nature, to the countryside, and to plants and animals through that. During my A levels I became pretty committed to the science route, so I ended up doing natural sciences at Cambridge, specializing in my final year in plant sciences, and I loved it.
I had a very inspirational teacher who was a Professor and also the director of the Botanic Garden at Cambridge, who taught us about plant genetics and something called polyploidy, which is whole genome duplication, and it just blew my mind that plants can have massive changes in their genomes and still basically look the same and be indistinguishable from something without that massive change – that fascinated me. I went to Oxford and did a PhD on this topic of polyploidy, which I had this very inspirational professor teach me about as an undergraduate, and so I did my PhD there in evolutionary ecology of plants, with some genetics.
After a little while I realized that it was the genetics that really interested me and was the bit of science that was really progressing fast at the time, because the cost of sequencing genomes was coming down, making it possible to do genomics on plants that weren’t particularly economically valuable. I spent some time at the University of Florida doing postdoctoral research with some leading plant geneticists and worked with them for a while before coming back to Britain for a fellowship that took me to Queen Mary University of London, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council. I’ve been at Queen Mary ever since, gradually working up the ranks there, getting a lectureship, senior lectureship, and then finally a professorship there. Also, in 2016 I started to work four days a week for Kew, which meant I could do more research on tree genetics.
Steve: As I was reading up on your work, did I see you did the first full sequencing of, was it the Ash or the Birch?
Richard: That’s right, it was the Ash genome. My group were the first group to sequence it. We got funding for that after the ash dieback fungus came into Britain, and there was a lot of focus on Ash, and I was really the only person in Britain at the time working on the genomics of broadleaf trees. And so, it was quite easy for me to then move into Ash and build a research program there.
Steve: Let’s change gears slightly: as well as being a highly accomplished scientist – as you are – you’re also a Christian. How did you come to faith as a Christian, and what does that look like for you today?
Richard: Yes, that’s right. I was brought up in a Christian home, so I always knew the Bible well from a young age, but my parents always emphasized to us that we weren’t Christians just because they were, but that it had to be a personal faith of our own – we had to investigate it and make our own decision.
For a long time, the simple idea of trusting in Jesus and throwing yourself on his grace and to depend entirely on him and his work and his sacrifice – the simplicity of that – just eluded me.
But eventually I understood it and realised it’s not about me earning God’s love – it’s a gift. So, I was baptized just before I went to university, and that was a huge help to me, because it meant I went to university as someone who was confident that he was a Christian and had made a public profession of that, and that meant I could get stuck into Christian Union and local church, and I grew a huge amount as a Christian in my three years at Cambridge. It was just such a vibrant atmosphere to be in. I’d grown up in quite a small church, didn’t really understand the wider landscape of Christianity beyond my small denomination, and just being mixed with lots of other Christians from different backgrounds really helped me to figure out what was important and what wasn’t.
Steve: You highlight the emphasis that this needs to be your own faith that you hold for yourself – that’s so important. Let’s talk about faith and science then: if you look at the popular media, the idea that God and science are at war is something that is still proliferated so much. How do you generally respond to that idea as someone who is a scientist and also a Christian?
Richard: I certainly don’t think there’s a war between science and Christian faith. I think science actually came out of Christianity. It’s no accident that after the Reformation, as people started to read the Bible for themselves, realising very individual can read it and think about it for themselves, that soon after that they turned to the natural world as well and said, ‘Well, we can read this for ourselves too’. We don’t have to be constrained by what Aristotle said. They all believed there must be a God’. They believed in a lawgiver and that regularities reflected that lawgiver, and therefore it was possible to study the natural world and do science and make discoveries. And that’s what they did. And so, I see science very much as a product of Christianity and of the Reformation. It all fits together extremely well in that if you believe that there is one God who’s all-powerful and is the Creator, then you expect to be able to do science. Especially if we’re made in his image, as the Bible claims.
Interestingly, Christian ethics is also core to that. In science you need honesty, you need integrity. You need people to be able to admit when they’re wrong. You need people not to make up the results of their experiments. One thing that worries me a little about science – sorry, this is going slightly beyond your question – is that without that Christian ethic, we are seeing a proliferation of people faking results and manipulating data, and the incentives are just so strong. People know that if they get a high-profile paper, then they can get a job, get more money, and so on. So, we need that fundamental commitment to truth and honesty in order for science to progress. And one of my worries is that science itself is actually becoming endangered by the loss of a Christian worldview and Christian ethics within science.
We’ve had period where these values have hung around despite a wider rejection of Christianity. But I think now we are sadly getting to the point where you just can’t take for granted some of those shared values, and it’s a real problem for the sciences.
So, yeah, I don’t see a conflict between science and Christianity at all. Personally, I’ve always found that my science has bolstered my conviction that God exists.
Steve: Those are some really important points. More particularly then, to the idea that evolution has just disproved God—you still hear that idea thrown around. When I was at university I studied some evolutionary biology and sometimes when people found out I was a theist they said that we don’t need God anymore because we have evolution. How do you personally respond?
Richard: It’s really a bit sad. I look at the world around me, the complexity of biological things, the amazing software that’s encoded in genomes – it’s just amazing! I’m looking at a birch tree in my garden right now. That tree has got trillions of cells, and every one of them has got millions and millions of base pairs of DNA that are coding for it to be the tree that it is. And the expression of genes is being triggered by different environmental effects. The complexity of what’s going on is just staggering, and knowing about that – and having the privilege of being able to work on that every day – just reminds me that there must be a powerful, intelligent God who is behind all of this.
Steve: It fascinates me that people can look at that same data and essentially throw their hands up and say it’s really all just an accident.
Richard: Yes, that’s a big leap of faith. Of course, people would say, “Well, it’s not pure chance. It’s chance and natural selection, and natural selection is not chance.” But when it really comes down to it, you have to have the origin of life. And now it’s where we’re really coming onto your question about evolution. For evolution to happen, you have to have life. You have to have replicating biological entities. And we know that for replicating entities to exist, they have to be quite complex. The minimal cell has a lot of genes and a lot of nanotechnology to mean that it can replicate itself and keep a record of itself in either DNA or RNA. And you can’t have natural selection before you have that ‘thing’. You have to have massive, massive doses of luck to have any view of how we could have gotten here without God being behind it.
The well-known atheist biologist Richard Dawkins, for instance, admits that in his book The God Delusion. He basically says we need massive doses of luck, probably more than many people have ever realized, both for the origin of life and the origin of the eukaryotic cell, and for the origin of human consciousness – and maybe for some other steps along the way. So at the end of the day, chance is, at root, the only alternative to God, and we’re talking about such low probabilities that it’s just, to my mind, completely unbelievable and a massive leap of faith to think that there could not be a God.
Steve: In referencing Richard Dawkins there you also highlight that scientists are aware of the improbability issue. I think back to Charles Darwin in his time too, something I know that you have an interest in. There’s something termed ‘Darwin’s abominable mystery’ and the explosive origin of higher plants. Can you double-click on that briefly and explain what that ‘abominable mystery’ is? What did Darwin see that gave cause for concern?
Richard: Good question. I found as a plant geneticist and plant evolutionary biologist, I kept hearing this term banded around within the field: ‘Darwin’s abominable mystery,’ and I was struggling to work out if people actually think this is solved or not. It’s a term that’s nice to use when you’re writing a grant proposal or a paper. But what did Darwin actually mean by it? Well, the way Darwin’s ‘abominable mystery’ is normally understood today is that it’s about the origin of the angiosperms, which are the largest group of plants. There are over 300,000 species of angiosperm in the world—we refer to them as the flowering plants.
Basically every plant that we eat is an angiosperm. Wheat, barley, apples, oranges…all angiosperms. Things we have in the garden: chrysanthemums, daffodils, and tulips—they’re angiosperms. Cotton, tobacco, and cannabis are also angiosperms.
The world we live in would not be habitable for humans without angiosperms. So, they’re a big, big deal. The thing is, they appear suddenly in the fossil record! In the Cretaceous they appear suddenly and with great diversity, and this doesn’t fit with Darwinian gradualism. And so famously, Charles Darwin, in 1879, wrote a letter to the then director of Kew Gardens, his friend, Joseph Hooker, saying that the origin of the higher plants in recent geological times is an abominable mystery.
I dug into that a bit to work out exactly what was meant by ‘the higher plants’ back then. It turns out that the way people used to classify plants then was a bit different than today, and Darwin was actually referring to the dicotyledons, not the angiosperms, which is actually a smaller group of plants. The dicotyledons are flowering plants that don’t include things like wheat, barley, and grass—the monocotyledons. Darwin thought the monocotyledons had a long fossil record, and it was just the dicotyledons that appeared suddenly in the Cretaceous period, while today we now believe it was all flowering plants.
So, in that sense, the mystery has actually become bigger. The group of plants that seems to defy a Darwinian explanation has got bigger than it was in Darwin’s time. If it was an abominable mystery for him, it’s even more abominable now for us. And this is a problem people have worked on for over 150 years, and it’s still an unsolved problem.
Steve: Thanks so much for your insights, Richard. This has been really interesting. One last question: thinking of younger people who are looking to go into the sciences, especially maybe Christians, what would you say to them? And for scientists who are maybe interested in God but don’t think they can explore that further, what would you say to them?
Well, I think we don’t have enough Christians working in research biology, and I wish there were more, because there’s just so much Christian motivation for studying biology. Here are just two of those. One is that we are, in a way, thinking God’s thoughts after him when we come to do science. The other is to care for His creation. And I think both of these are mandates that the Bible gives to us, and that’s what I’m trying to do as a scientist. I think there’s good Christian motivation to be a scientist and to care for the natural world.
There is also a lot to think through though, because the majority of scientists are atheists, or at least exclude God from their science, and there are a lot of topics that you have to think really hard about. Something like the origin of life: do I actually believe that could have happened purely naturally or not? A lot of my colleagues would just assume it must have happened purely naturally. But as Christians, of course, that’s not a presumption we come with. We view the data in a more open-minded way. There are lots of things like that that you have to think really hard about, and we need Christians to be doing that with specializations in lots of different areas. You have to be prepared to think hard, but that makes you a better scientist and a stronger Christian. I would just really encourage young people to consider doing science and that that’s a valuable thing and a very legitimate thing for a Christian to do.
Steve: Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us at Solas.
Richard: My pleasure!
To find out more about Richard Buggs and follow his work, why not visit his webpage at https://richardbuggs.com/
