Episode Transcript
Welcome to evolution. Impossible. A production of Three ABN, Australia.
Television him. Our host is Dr. Sven Ostring with special guest Dr.
John Ashton. And our panel Hello, I'm Dr. Sven Ostring.
And welcome back to evolution impossible. Here with me to continue this fascinating journey is Dr. John Ashton, Ellie Turner, Jeandre Roux and Stephen Avleing-Rowe.
Thanks for joining me. Once again, as soon as I say the name Darwin, I'm sure that you'll instantly know who I'm talking about. And pictures of the voyage of the HMS Beagle, the Galapagos Islands, finch beaks and that very well known picture of a lineup of monkeys slowly standing up and gradually becoming a human being will come to mind.
But sometimes people really don't know what Darwin's theory actually was. So, John, can you clarify for us what was Darwin's theory? How did he explain how life came about? Yeah, sure. Well, Darwin grew up in the age when we had the mechanical worldview was being developed and in particular, machines were being developed.
Well, yes, but machines were evolving and there was talk about these changes and people were actually saying, well, did life actually change like this too? Because there was also a group of intellectuals that believed that the Earth was millions of years old. So James Hutton, back in the late 17 hundreds, had proposed this, that the biblical timeline was too short, that the rocks were millions of years old and that time was much longer. And the other thing was that Dharma, of course, was very interested in nature and he'd been interested in breeding and so forth.
He was very interested in beetles, if I remember rightly. Was that oh, well, that was among the many different types of animals he was interested in lots of animals. But part of his initial concept, though, came from studying, for example, just grass in the lawn, grass grow.
Well, yes, but what he noticed was that when he looked at a square yard of grass and they had yards back in those days, meters today, that there were all these different types of grass in there and they were essentially competing for the same space, the same nutrients, and this was, in his mind, developed. There was competition here. Now, at that time as well, he went on the voyage on the Beagle that we learn about, and he was given a copy of the book by Charles Lyle, the geologist.
Now, Lyle again was certainly enamored with long ages and long periods of time, so Darwin read this book. Now, in the meantime, Darwin was putting together his ideas of how perhaps mutations produce different types of organisms. And he drew a tree, a tree of life, and he proposed that he saw the species of grass and many of them were so similar.
So he thought, well, maybe there are mutations and they breed and they breed. And then over time, after enough generations, there's sufficient differences that they actually form a new species. So how many generations does it take for that tree to start branching? Well, Darwin didn't know, of course, but he proposed initially in his diagram and as he wrote, about about 1000 generations.
But he also made the proviso well, maybe it could be 10,000 generations. So he didn't really know, which was quite reasonable in terms of developing his theory. So essentially, when he read Lyle's book on the journey and saw that Lyle had noticed that in the fossil record, the fossils higher up in the strata, which was the most more recent strata, seemed to be more complex compared to the animals that were further down.
This sort of matched Darwin's little diagram of his tree of mutations. And essentially that's what he did. He put the two together.
And, of course, he'd noticed in that island off the west coast of Africa, Madeira, I think it is, that there were a couple of hundred species of wingless beetles and they had survived because a very windy island. And, of course, the beetles that had wings just got blown off the island. So they didn't stay around to mate and breed, but the ones that developed deformities had mutations.
And so their wings were smaller, they didn't get blown off, so they could breed. Beetles were evolving. Yes.
And so that led to this idea of survival of the fittest for the environment. So that eliminated the unnecessary mutation or the mutations that weren't suited. So the best mutations survived.
So it's a combination of those three factors, really, though the competition of species saw them there, but there were a lot of similarities with the grass. So maybe there was a common ancestor and they all sort of bred and solely developed differences, represented that little tree. And then Lyle's theory, well, hang on, we've got all these different layers in the rocks and they contain different types of fossils.
It would seem they're invarian complexity. And then this observation of many species competing for food or in the environment and so forth. And, I mean, it was a brilliant idea.
Right. He went through one of the things, of course, was he didn't know how life started. He said, whatever some primordial ancestry into which life was first breathed.
So that common ancestor going back in time through this tree of life. That's right, yes. And look, this tree of life, it's a brilliant teaching tool in terms of you just draw it out there on a notebook on a blackboard back then.
And I guess my question for our panel here is this does the Darwin's tree of life, does it make sense to you? Does it kind of explain? Do you get what Darwin was trying to say? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for me, the twigs on the branches, they make sense, but the branches in the trunk itself, that's where I struggle to see the right, right. So you start to doubt the history of this very tree of life, seeing the record there, I just haven't seen enough evidence for me to personally see that it makes sense.
Right. And what about you, John Ray? Yeah, yeah. For me it's very vague.
He draws this tree of life and he explains it, but he doesn't really know anything. It could be a thousand years, it could be a thousand generations. He's just vague.
And I guess the big question, John, is this was this the only theory around? And Ali just wanted to know, did you have any questions for John on that topic? Yeah, I was specifically wondering what other theories in the western world existed at the time of Darwin in terms of the origin of life. Obviously there were lots of religions around the world that believed different things about how life originated. But was it widely believed in Darwin's time that god created the world and the things that we see, or was there other theories that were circulating? No.
Certainly in Darwin's time, at leading European universities, most leading scientists and philosophers would have believed in god and creation. And in fact, flood theory to explain the origin of structures was probably taught at Oxford university up at least until the early 18 hundreds. So these scientists certainly believed in that.
And many of the leading scientists were in fact creationists people like Newton. And even after Darwin's time, there were scientists that recognized hang on, there are major problems with his theory. And one of those scientists, James Clark Maxwell, and Maxwell was the physicist that proposed that light was a combination of electric and magnetic fields and developed field theory.
Brilliant physicist. Matter of fact, Einstein simply applied his theories to gravity and built on Maxwell. So Maxwell is one of the great scientists, along with Einstein and Newton.
And Maxwell was a very strong anti Darwinist, and he said, well, how did molecules evolve and how did atoms evolve? He raised a lot of very interesting questions. But in actual fact, the theory of evolution goes back to the ancient Greek, Greek times. So you've got Greek philosophers living about 500 BC.
That's a very Democritus and so forth. They believed that they didn't believe in gods. I wrote this.
And so they believed that originally the matter was there was just all these little particles of matter, and they float around, they clumped together, and they became the animals and the trees and this sort of thing. And those theories were recorded, as I recall, in a poem by Lucretius, a Roman poet wrote in the round the first century, I think, or thereabouts, and his poem was essentially lost and rediscovered and again, boy, you're testing me, my theory of history now. But I think round about the one three hundreds, a copy of Lucretia's poem was discovered that encapsulated these earlier theories of democrities and so forth in terms of atoms and so forth.
And that really led to an explosion of thinking along these particular lines and laid the foundations later for evolutionary theory. Of course, in the meantime, there'd been these theories of that life was spontaneously generated, and people had noted, well, hang on, if you leave a bag of wheat out or something, you find mice there. But pasteur again was able to show that, hang on, if you boiled a liquid and sterilized it, no, you didn't separate it from air.
You didn't get anything coming to life or grow. And even today, of course, we still don't know how the first life started. But that was Darwin's theory, really provided a mechanical theory based on a mechanical model, because at that time, Newton had published his principle of mechanics and the laws of motion, the laws of physics have been discovered, but biology was out there by itself.
So now, if you had the tree of life, you had your mutation mechanisms, your natural selection, you had this mechanical mechanism now that could be applied to biology. So that's why it really, really took off. Plus, Lyle was a brilliant geologist, and he did a lot of mapping.
He developed this concept of the geological column over time, and that was embraced, too. The only issue was that a lot of the measurements that he did were based on estimates and so forth that we know now are wrong. And so, from what I understand, Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, actually believed in a form of evolution as well.
And he had a colleague, Wallace, if I recall correctly, who was also developing these ideas. So there was this real fascination with machines, but also this real emphasis on how do we kind of eliminate or push the supernatural out of the developmental process for life as well. So it's very interesting, this whole era in which these theories were developing.
But, of course, Darwin had a friend, a colleague, Thomas Huxley. And can you tell us a little bit more about Thomas Huxley and his involvement with Darwin and the promotion of theory of evolution, which followed from Darwin's book? Yeah, so Huxley wrote a book three or four years after Darwin. It would have been published 1864, I think, something like The Ascent of man, something like that.
And essentially, his claim was that man had ascended from the apes. And so he applied Darwin's theory of evolution, particularly in the concept of The Origin of man, and that man had essentially evolved from apes. And that's, of course, why anthropologists and paleontologists began looking for the earliest remains of human like species in Africa.
That was the whole basis of that, because apes were found in Africa there. So that was a very important aspect. And my understanding from the reading literature is that that whole mid 1800 area was so enamored with this mechanical view of things.
And they were certainly talking about, in academic circles, machines, and they saw the gradual evolution of the steam engine and people with better valves and better safety valves. And so forth develop better machines. But at the same time, we also, with the Industrial Revolution, saw people moved off their little cottage industries into the cities, and there wasn't there enough work now there wasn't enough food.
And so there was intense competition for survival in the cities and to get enough food. So there was all this social change that you talk about taking place where you saw that in society, people were fighting over limited resources in the city. And at the same time, there were all these machines evolving the powering, the cotton mills, people with better governors on their machines and better horsepower could produce more.
And so those factories did better, and the other ones sort of went broke and this sort of thing. So it was a whole environment at that time. At the same time, the power of the Church was very strong, and there were a lot of academics that didn't want were looking for ways to challenge the power of the Church.
And Darwin's theory was seen it this way hang on, we can explain the origin of life outside the story or the account in Genesis. And this had really gripped that group of academics that didn't want God in the picture. And that would explain the debate between the Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, Thomas Huxley and also Charles Darwin as well.
And one of the comments that they made is whether they evolved from a monkey or an ape, whether their grandmother was an ape or not. And I guess the question for us today is this how do you feel about this concept of us evolving from some kind of ape like creature in the past? How does that strike you? I've always struggled with the idea that my great great great grandfather was a monkey. But I actually had a specific question for Dr.
Ashton on that. In chapter two of your book, you mentioned a find of a skeleton that they called Lucy, and that was supposed to be a transitional fossil between humans and apes. And you noted that since then there's been more recent finds that Lucy was actually more different from humans and apes than humans and apes are from each other.
And I was just wondering what that find exactly was based on. Was it based on the skeleton structure, or was it based on DNA evidence? Or how did they come to that conclusion? Yeah, so it was certainly based on anatomical evidence. So it was based on the physical bone structure, so forth, when that was examined.
It's interesting in museums, they sometimes have models of Lucy, and one of the ones that I saw would have been like a typical human model, where they've put hair all over her and put a sort of an ape like face. But humans stand very different to apes. We have a very different pelvic structure, the way the bones enter there and so forth, and it's very different.
And so what happens is sometimes in these museum and in these reconstructions that are portrayed in books they're portrayed, it would seem more human like than in actual fact they are. If we actually portrayed them as they are correctly anatomically, they wouldn't look as human like as they're portrayed. And of course, this all helps confirm this concept that we did evolve from apes, where in actual fact, when we look at the actual physiology, when we examine the bones, when we examine how they would have stood, it would have been very different to those images that are created.
So to carry on from that, then think of living fossils. I mean, how within evolutionary millions of years would we still have fossilized remains of things like I mean, there's whales, there's so many different species that we have exact conformity to what we see in the natural world today. And yet, if we look know there are also fossil records, how does that fit in with the evolutionary perspective? Well, of course, yes, darwin claimed that we would find the fossils of the intermediate species.
This was a major problem. And so what we find in the fossil record is that the species essentially don't change. They appear, they stay the same, and then they might become extinct.
Or we find fossils, like you say, of whales, and they're the same today. What we're not finding is the intermediate. So we should have seen slowly, say, the development of turtles.
We should have seen slowly a creature changing into a turtle or the development of horns, say, on different species, whether it's dinosaurs. We should have seen the gradual development of these. But we don't.
We don't find these evolutionary intermediates. And a classic one is sort of from dinosaurs to birds looking for the intermediates there, and they're often desperate to find a fossil. But the point is that if Darwin's theory really happened and we find trillions of fossils, just about, there should also be millions of intermediate fossils, millions of fossils showing this gradual transition.
But we don't find those changes. This is a major, major problem. And leading paleontologists recognize this, too, that the geologic column doesn't actually show the gradual progression that originally, Lyle thought that it did.
And secondly, in actual fact, the fossils are all mixed up. Like, for example, when I was in Hawaii recently, I saw in the museum there a fossil of a mammal with the remains of a dinosaur in its stomach. So people ought to think the mammals came later.
No, they coexisted with dinosaurs. Now, that's not the picture that we often get. So the fossils in actual fact are a lot more mixed up than we would have us believe in the geological column, in actual fact out there.
And the other thing is the lack of these intermediates. We haven't found the intermediate fossils. So the geologic record, the paleontological record does not actually provide evidence for evolution.
And this is a major problem. But again, this isn't really enforced to the young people, dr. Ashton.
For me, it's always been, if evolution teaches that we evolve from apes, why is there still apes? So how does evolution explain that? Well, I guess from the tree, they would say some continue the same, but you have these mutations that come off and they've accumulated and so forth. But another question that follows from that as well. Is it's well known that human beings, chimpanzees, apes, we're about 96% the same in terms of our genome.
So that sounds really suspiciously like the fact that we evolved. How would we address that, that sort of genetic piece of information? Yeah, sure. Okay, well, look, that's pretty subjective.
That 96%, I guess, looks at the number of genes and biochemical that is responsible for biochemical pathways that we have. So we are very complex. Our biochemistry is extremely complex.
And so we have a lot of DNA in us to provide those biochemical pathways and all these little molecule machines that are very similar in a lot of mammals and particularly in apes that have slightly similar to us. But that claim of similarity doesn't include a lot of the junk DNA which they didn't know. So there's a lot of questions over that.
And when you actually look at the code, when I look at the code and read it, man, it doesn't look similar to me. It doesn't look like 96% similarity. It looks totally different.
What they're saying is there are sections of code that switch on similar genes and so forth. But again, to me, if we use the example of Porsche and VW cars, they have the same designer, they're quite different, but they have a lot of common properties, horizontally opposed engines and rear engines and so forth, because they have the same designers, father and son team. So what you're saying is similarities in terms of anatomy and genetics, or the genome could also be explained by the common designer rather than just a common ancestor.
That's the reasoning. And look, one of the fascinating things is that Darwin's tree and the original evolutionary trees that were proposed after Darwin, based on the fossil records and the geologic column and the shape of animals, their anatomy and physiology, which we call the Homologous series of sort, that's based on their anatomy and physiology. When we started analyzing the DNA, when we got that capability, we found, whoa, hang on, it's a totally different picture.
And so when we do what we call phylogenic trees now, based on the similarities in DNA, they go really wild. Like, I think the ones for humans, we related to dogs and fungi and E. Coli.
It goes really weird. And I think one of the things that people don't realize is that the same piece of code in a different environment will produce different outcomes. And this is one of the fascinating things that you can have a code that might produce an eye in one organism and in another organism it doesn't produce an eye.
This is one of the fascinating things yes. And one of the diagrams that you probably would have seen in your science textbooks would have been this series of embryos. So not only the similarities between chimpanzees and apes and human beings, but also embryos following the development.
And you start to see, hang on, it looks like evolution. You can watch evolution in action. So I just wanted to know, did you have any sort of thoughts or comments or questions on that aspect of evolution? Jumping in on that one.
I mean, Heckle's drawing that we see was done quite a while ago, has still been in textbooks right into the 2000s. What is the evidence to support that? And have there been further photographic studies done to document? Certainly so, yes. Heckel, the German embryologist, proposed that that the embryos went through stages that represented the evolutionary ancestor of the species.
And this has certainly been in textbooks up until fairly recently, as you say in the mid two thousand s. I remember seeing that purported or written up in a textbook at a university in a university library, which I thought was really wrong. Because back in the mid 1990s, dr.
Richardson, with a team of college, did a major study photographing embryos from a number of different creatures, putting together. And that was published in Science in 1998. It was published in a journal of embryology, I think, earlier, but got into Science.
Now Science, the journal Science, is one of the top science journals in the world with Nature. So you get published in that journal, you get a lot of brownie points. So that has definitely been shown to be incorrect.
Now he showed that that does not occur. No human fetuses have gills at any stage. None of these scenarios claimed by Heckl actually occur.
And really, it's morally wrong that those textbooks that should really be up to date are publishing that now because that was a major study to investigate, that there were multiple authors. It was published in major science journals in 1997 98. And Dr.
Ash, it sounds like such an emotive story and it's so convincing on the surface. But I'm wondering, am I correct in understanding that if our DNA is fully human, right from conception, that it wouldn't be scientific anyway for us to reflect all the different evolutionary stages of the past? Is that correct? Yes, spot on. And that's a very interesting characteristic.
But what makes our DNA fully human is the big picture of the DNA. And I guess what upsets me is that today authors are producing books for young children. I saw one titled recently, I think, Grandmother Fish, something like that.
And it's teaching young children that they evolve from fish. And I think this is just so morally wrong. We don't have any mechanism for that.
We don't have any geological palantological evidence for that. And yet this is being put into young minds, and that really upsets know, we really appreciate you just being able to journey with us through darwin's theory to have a better understanding, to understand some of the sociological but also the scientific aspects. As you know you might have been thinking you wished you were here with us to have this discussion together.
Well, the good news is this you can actually join us. Just go to any online bookstore right around the world and get dr. John Ashton's book evolution impossible.
You can go chapter by chapter. You can be one step ahead of us. Wouldn't that be? You know, it's been really good to gain a very clear understanding of what darwin's theory of evolution actually was.
Now that we have a much better grasp of his theory, we can start asking the question is evolution impossible or is it possible? Next time we'll be diving to the smallest living thing, the living cell. Join us on this exciting journey of scientific discovery. Thank you for joining us on evolution impossible, a production of three ABN Australia television.
If you have any comments or questions, send an email to radio at threeABN australia.org au or call us within Australia on 024-973-3456. We'd love to hear from you.
