Winston Ewert

Winston Ewert is a software engineer and intelligent design researcher. He received his PhD from Baylor University in electrical and computer engineering. He specializes in computer simulations of evolution, genomic design patterns, and information theory. A Google alum, he is a Senior Research Scientist at Biologic Institute, a Senior Fellow of the Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, and a Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture.

Archives

Evolution of Biological Information: The Definition of Information

_{Winston Ewert
July 17, 2026}

Whether the driveway is wet provides information about whether it rained. If the driveway is dry, it certainly has not rained.

Technological Evolution: Accidentally Demonstrating the Limits of Evolution

_{Winston Ewert
July 16, 2026}

While economist Brian Arthur models the development of technology, he refers to it as the “evolution” of technology.

Modularity: Insufficient for and Unexplained by Evolution

_{Winston Ewert
July 15, 2026}

The fundamental problem with this analysis is that sexual reproduction does not make anything modular.

Can Formless Matter Exist? A Pitfall in Reading Biblical Texts

_{Winston Ewert
March 19, 2026}

The solution is to go back to the source and follow the text to see what it actually says.

Is Matter Conserved? Ancient and Modern Views

_{Winston Ewert
March 12, 2026}

Christians accepted that the principle, nothing comes from nothing, was true for processes in nature. God, however, was not bound by this limitation.

Using Historical Reasoning to Navigate Today’s Scientific Debates

_{Winston Ewert
March 11, 2026}

The relationship between Christianity and science is much older and richer than you might think. What can we learn about today’s scientific debates by studying that history? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid concludes a two-part conversation with software engineer and intelligent design researcher Winston Ewert about his new book The Heavens, The Waters, and the Partridge, an exploration of the interaction between Christianity and science before modern science. This half of the conversation dives into the rich history of how early Christian thinkers engaged with the scientific consensus of their time. By exploring historical case studies such as the supposed immutability of the heavens and the ancient belief that matter is eternally conserved, Ewert shows us how early Christian thinkers often pushed back against prevailing Greek philosophies to uphold biblical doctrines like creatio ex nihilo. The examples highlight that the dialogue between faith and science is a centuries-old tradition centered on understanding order, purpose, and the inherent limits of scientific inquiry. This is Part 2 of a two-part conversation.

Are the Heavens Immutable? An Ancient Scientific Question

_{Winston Ewert
March 11, 2026}

Modern theories postulate entities to account for differences between what we would expect from physics and our observations of distant space.

Winston Ewert: The Ancient Roots of Modern Materialism and Scientism

_{Winston Ewert
March 9, 2026}

What can we learn about science and faith from those who lived before the rise of modern science? On this ID The Future, host Andrew McDiarmid welcomes software engineer and intelligent design researcher Winston Ewert to the podcast to discuss his new book The Heavens, The Waters, and the Partridge, a closer look at the interaction between Christianity and science in the thousand years before modern science. Why pay attention to ancient scientific debates and specifically how early Christian thinkers responded to them? What could possibly be gained from going that far back? As Ewert points out, quite a lot. Tune in to learn more!

What’s Bothering Augustine?

_{Science and Faith Before Modern Science Was a Thing}_{Winston Ewert
August 12, 2025}

I began to understand that there was a rich history of the interaction between the Church and premodern science, but not one that is widely known.

Dr. Winston Ewert: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence

_{Pat Flynn and Winston Ewert
February 20, 2025}

On this episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn concludes a conversation with Dr. Winston Ewert about his contribution to the recent volume Minding the Brain. This segment explores the implications of the view that human cognition can be reduced to a sophisticated algorithm, as Ewert argues. Ewert contends that an algorithm can only construct an algorithm less sophisticated than itself, based on the limitations of the halting problem in computer science. This poses challenges for views like the “singularity” hypothesis that predict exponentially increasing artificial intelligence. Ewert’s argument suggests there are limits to how intelligent an artificial intelligence can become, and that something beyond an algorithm must be responsible for …

Dr. Winston Ewert: The Human Mind’s Sophisticated Algorithm And Its Implications

_{Pat Flynn and Winston Ewert
February 13, 2025}

On this episode of Mind Matters News, guest host Pat Flynn begins a conversation with Dr. Winston Ewert about Ewert’s chapter in the recent volume Minding the Brain. In his contribution, titled “The Human Mind’s Sophisticated Algorithm and Its Implications,” Dr. Ewert argues that the human mind’s problem-solving cognition can be modeled as a sophisticated algorithm. Ewert explains that any cognitive task can be expressed as a version of the halting problem from computer science, where an algorithm either halts or continues infinitely. He suggests that humans are able to solve a large and sophisticated subset of these problems, but are limited in the same way that no algorithm can solve all halting problems. Ewert contends that this algorithmic view of …

Mendel’s Peas and More: Inferring Data Falsification in Science

_{William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert
November 28, 2023}

What keeps scientific fraud in check is our ability to detect it, and it’s the design inference that does the detecting.

Natural Selection as the Great Designer Substitute

_{William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert
November 27, 2023}

In this way, the majority of evolutionary biologists, insofar as they understand the design inference at all, rationalize it away.

An Argument from Ignorance?

_{William A. Dembski and Winston Ewert
November 17, 2023}

Richard Dawkins, better than anyone, has publicly championed the dogma that Darwinian pathways can and must always exist for any biological system.

Jonathan Wells and Winston Ewert at the CSC Summer Seminar

_{Winston Ewert
August 28, 2019}

This episode of ID the Future features biologist Jonathan Wells and computer scientist Winston Ewert. Dr. Wells speaks on embryo development and the current mystery of ontogenetic development, which relies on continually updating information not found in DNA. Dr. Ewert describes his research on the “dependency graph of life.” This is an alternate explanation for the tree of life, which he says fits the data better than the usual answer, common descent. …

Is the Human Mind a Computer?

_{As a software engineer, I'd say we need to be clear what the question is before answering it}_{Winston Ewert
July 24, 2019}

Once we understand clearly what a computer is, we will see why consciousness is not a form of computation.

Remember the Luddites!

_{The Luddites became famous for breaking machinery during the Industrial Revolution. Were they entirely wrong?}_{Winston Ewert
January 25, 2019}

People often think that the Luddites were merely anti-technology because they opposed automation during the Industrial Revolution (1760–1840). The story is more complex. As we face increasing automation today, we might want to see what we can learn from their history.

Will the Free Market Help or Hurt Us in an AI-Empowered World?

_{We may need new institutions, such as insurance against job obsolescence}_{Winston Ewert
January 18, 2019}

If humans are free to experiment with new institutions, I believe we will find an excellent solution. However, there is a great danger that those who benefit from the status quo will use their influence to prevent the adoption of new institutions.

Is Technology Neutral?

_{Or does it change our world whether we like it or not?}_{Winston Ewert
October 30, 2018}

People tend to be one of two minds when it comes to technology. One group views technology as directional—altering those cultures it reaches. They construct plausible narratives about how this or that technology has changed our culture. The second group views technology as neutral. They dismiss the narrative put forward by the first group, explaining that such changes are due to forces within the culture, not to technology.

Dependency Graph, Pt. 2: Winston Ewert Defends His Groundbreaking New ID Model

_{Winston Ewert
October 15, 2018}

On this episode of ID the Future, Dr. Winston Ewert continues unpacking his new hypothesis challenging Darwin’s tree of life. Ewert is a software engineer, and his new model is inspired by the coder strategy of repurposing existing code, called modules, for different projects. Moreover, some of these modules depend on other modules, meaning you can generate a dependency graph to better understand the similarities and differences among software programs that share modules. Ewert argues that a dependency graph model better explains the pattern of similarities and differences in the history of life, better than a model of common descent by unguided evolution. As he also explains, the new model is testable in multiple ways. …