Episode Transcript
Welcome to Evolution Impossible, a production of three ABN Australia television. Our host is Dr. Sven Ostring with special guest Dr.
John Ashton. And our panel welcome back to our series Evolution Impossible where we are currently exploring whether the fossil record supports evolution. My name is Dr.
Sven Ostring and we're privileged to have Dr. John Ashton joining us again, thanks for being here. And we also have Justin Torossian good to have you here.
My good friend Morgan Vincent and also Stephen Aveling-Rowe. We love hearing your infectious know it's an all male team, guys, but that's fine. One of the things that we have in evolution is that there's a fairly smooth transition from one species of an animal to another.
So there should have been a whole lot of animals in between fish and reptiles and in the same way, between dinosaurs and birds. This means that there should have been a lot of fossils of these intermediate animals. The question is, do these fossils exist? It feels a little bit like a detective story looking for the links in the chain.
So, John, going back to our previous episode, we had a question about uniformitarianism. It's a long word, but can you share with us what is that concept and how does it apply to geology and also fossils as well? Okay, so the concept of uniformitarianism, I think I mentioned briefly was proposed by James Hutton in one of his books he wrote about 1785. And the idea was that the processes on Earth have been going on much as they are today but for millions of years.
And so we get these gradual changes over time. The boulders are rounded over time by wind action. There's wave action, eroding rocks.
And so by studying what happens today, we can assume that that's essentially happened over the past. Now, one of the reasons why this is very important is that evolution requires a lot of generations to produce all these supposed mutations to evolve new creatures. So they need long periods of time.
And therefore the Bible's short time frame just didn't fit. So they needed very, very long times for evolution for the evolutionary model. And, John, one of the questions I have is that obviously scientists recognize that there were extinction events meteorite being crashed into the Earth and things like that.
So you've got these catastrophes and you've got these uniformitarian processes. So how do they decide whether it's a catastrophe or a uniformitarian process which is actually generating this geological feature? Wow, okay. An interesting question.
I mean, we've got the layer of particular mineralizations associated with the extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous and this sort of thing. One of the theories for that is there was a meteorite impact and so forth. But the thing is that we actually don't know the mechanism.
Where did the meteorite land? Anybody can put up all sorts of theories, but what does the evidence tell us the evidence tells us that there was a massive water based catastrophic event and that eliminated and buried the animals as opposed to all these. We can all sit round the fire and come up with fanciful events of a meteorite hitting and tidal waves and all this sort of thing. And it's know there are catastrophic events and we can probably discuss that in more detail.
Sure. And one of the things which really interests people is dinosaurs. And it's a fascinating topic, and I know, Justin, you actually had a real interest in this topic as well.
So did you have a question on that for John? Yeah, I did in chapter five, the last chapter, but it ties into this one because of the fossil record you bring up, know, Dr. Mary Schweitzer and her team discovered a T Rex with soft tissue in it. And you listed a number of others that I hadn't heard.
And my question is I first read an article by Mary Schweitzer about their discovery a few years ago, and she said that when they realized that this was a not fully fossilized T Rex, she said, I just got chills because we all know these things don't last for millions of years. And so considering these things are not really trumpeted and most people don't know about them, but at the same time they're not hidden and buried, what is the scientific community doing with this? And Schweitzer and her team and others, what do they believe about it, since it's not something that lasts for millions of years? Right? Well, it's very interesting when we study the chemistry of these biopolymer molecules, these long chain molecules that are associated with the soft tissue remains that they discovered there. We've done experiments at different temperatures.
We know how quickly they would break down. For example, DNA, if it's stored at about 20 degrees, for example, would last only a short period of time. If it was only ten degrees, the average temperature might last a few thousand years longer, this sort of thing.
So the fact that we find these long polymer molecules seriously challenges the long age dates for the dinosaurs, for example. And we find soft tissues in other things. They've extracted DNA from leaves and other things as well.
But one of the issues that they're facing now is, well, okay, under the conditions that they were buried, somehow they were preserved. So it defies our current biochemical understanding of the stability of these molecules, which as studied by chemists, so the chemists say, well, hang on, those molecules can't last that long. The geologists, if they cling to their long ages, they say, well, they must have.
So there must be some other mechanism that has helped preserve them that we don't know. Maybe there's some iron there or they're putting forward all sorts of suggestions that maybe there's some preservation mechanism. But really they've found so many different types of soft tissue now in the dinosaur remains that really just these other attempts to come up with preservation mechanisms just don't fit known chemistry.
So the bottom line is it's pointing that they can't be millions of years old. They must be only thousands of years old at max. So, John, part of what happens in evolutionary science sounds to me like you come across some phenomena and then evolutionary science is just looking for an explanation which could confirm evolution rather than necessarily trying to find what actually happened.
Is that what happens in terms of there's real push towards evolutionary explanations that are going on? Oh, definitely. I mean, because this is the dominant paradigm in science and so that's what everybody is looking for. In fact, there is no other paradigm other than God and creation.
And you're not going to publish a scientific paper that goes there. It just won't get published, unfortunately. So that's the issue they're forced into that particular square, which is really sad, but that they attempt to hold on to this when the evidence is overwhelmingly pointing in the direction that evolution is not only absolutely impossible, but never happened as well.
But again, more and more scientists, particularly older scientists that aren't worried about losing their jobs, are saying, well, hang on, let's look at this realistically. The evidence isn't there. And one of the key factors is, as you mentioned earlier, the absence of intermediate species in the fossil record.
This is very, very significant. Yes. So tell us, in terms of this transitional fossils, we also come across the term genetic drift.
So can you explain what that term really means? Genetic drift? Yeah, sure. Okay. So as the different organisms evolve, this is a standard mechanism of trying to explain how new body parts could form.
You see, so they're saying, well, assuming that enough genes are transferred, then we can get sufficient changes to make some new sort of organism. The whole problem with that theory and people talk about, oh, it's genetic drift, and we can see this movement of genes and all these new creatures formed. But essentially it's like I mentioned previously, if we try to simplify it down so we can understand if we have the code F-I-N which we interpret as fin.
Right. We have to make that into a arm. No genetic drift.
As many times as you reproduce the word F I NIF, if N, all the different combinations, you're never going to end up with arm. No way. It's totally new code.
And that's what they miss. They miss the fact that for all these new developments, you need totally new code. This genetic drift concept, what they're hoping for is that somehow these segments of genes that will come across will somehow trigger this new viable mechanism.
It's absolutely impossible because not only have you got to have the code work, but you got to have all the other codes and the amount of genetic information to move from a fin to an arm shoulder blade system is enormous. And I think what happens is that people we just don't think our mind can't comprehend the enormity of the genetic code. Yes.
And it's just glossed over. And the other thing is too, we've got to remember that many of our current educators and this sort of thing have grown up being taught all this series of evolution. And as I mentioned previously, we've got these books now for young children ages three to five teaching them about evolution, five to seven, five to eight, early primary school.
And they're being taught fish evolved into amphibians, amphibians into reptiles, reptiles into dinosaurs and birds and mammals. Story about yeah, it's just inculcated at a very early age. And this is so wrong on the basis of what we now know from biochemistry, from paleontology and so forth.
Yeah. So moving on to this concept of transitional fossils. So basically the idea was from Darwin that as this genetic drift occurred, as mutations occurred, after about 1000 generations or 10,000 generations, you'd branch and become a new species.
So the challenge is, well, where are the fossils on that between pathway through so tell us, are they there? No, that's the siblings that are not there. And when you think about you think about and we talked about previously, 98% of the species are extinct. And we've got millions of species already here.
So that means we're looking at 100 million to 200 million species in the past. All those species have to evolve by our evolutionary intermediate stages. We should find trillions huge amounts of all these intermediate evolutionary species of trilobites, evolving butterflies, insects and rhinoceroses, all these sort of things where we don't find them, they're not there.
Turtles just form as turtles. If we look at flight, we've got what, birds, insects, bats and the extinct predators. Okay? So we got these types of all the fossils of those creatures appear fully formed.
So if we take birds transitions, no transitions. And so if we look at birds, for example, birds have hollow bones, they got different breathing systems, air sacs that go directly associated with the heart and so forth, digestive system, totally different structures. The codes for these are absolutely massive, absolutely massive codes and not even close to each other.
And there's no evolutionary pathway steps for this. The same with insects. And we look at we had this picture of a dragonfly up earlier, the structure, you know, to compose the wings of that dragonfly and the amazing flight that it can perform, the genetic code to build all those structures and in a butterfly and even just in the wings.
A guy got his doctorate a few years ago at University of California, San Diego, looking at the patterns in the butterfly wings sort of thing and their optic properties. And I remember he's know somehow nature knew how to make these defects that produce these beautiful colors, camouflage and this sort of thing called it defects, crystal defects, so that diffract the light and so forth. But they're all represented by code, complex codes.
And this is what I love it. And these creatures just suddenly form and they're there. And the same with flowering plants, all the different parts of flowering plants.
And when we go to birds, again with feathers, when you think of the structure of the feathers and the classic example are, well, birds evolved from dinosaurs and dinosaurs, some of them had scales and these scales solely form feathers. Man, when you look at the structure of a feather, it's amazing. You've got this hook barb and barbell system, like a velcro thing.
But it's not only velcro, it's velcro that slides. But there's more. The whole thing would a feather, you get an old feather and you put water on it just all crumples up.
With birds in flight, if they didn't oil their feathers, those barbells wouldn't slip as easily. And the other thing is they would fall out of the sky because the feathers would get wet and they die. They've got to have a preening gland producing oil, which is a particular biochemical molecular structure.
You got to have code for all that. Plus the preening gland has to arise at the same time as the feathers, or the feathers don't work, but they're just a biochemistry associated with the preening gland. And if the preening gland was on the top of his head, he wouldn't be able to reach it with his beak.
To get the world to spread, it's got to be in just the right spot. It's brilliant engineering and yet the evolutionists believe that this all arose by blind chance. There's no intermediates and that's just one little creature that we're talking about and it'll own all the different types of insects, all the bats, their sonar, how they can adjust their sonar to allow for diffraction of the sound wave into water.
It just blows your mind. And then we get into the plant kingdoms and the structure of flowers and pollination. You're going to need the insects at the same time as the flowers.
The insects don't have food or the flowers can't be pollinated. And all the intermediate steps to make all these creatures or where are all the fossils of all the intermediates developing? They're not there. We find just fully formed animals.
They don't change. So contrary to what many scientists would suggest when asked the question, well, where are the intermediary species? It's not just a few that are missing, it would have to be millions. And so it's not any small thing, but it's a massive hole in the theory of evolution.
It is. One evidence is absent, sorry, no one example of that that I came across in reading your book. There the Cambrian explosion.
If we look at the pre Cambrian strata and what's been preserved in that, in contrast with the huge diversity and array of life that's in the Cambrian strata, so to speak. How does that fit in with the evolutionary perspective? Where did the information come from to have such a sudden entry of all these different species? Well, that's right. It's the Cambrian explosion, isn't it? Books have been written on this, separate books, stephen Myers book, and that's a classic example.
And this is very early. This is right down the bottom of the fossil lab. We've got these highly complex creatures and we find the fossils of the fully formed, fully functional creatures, but no fossils of them developing from some ancestor, some previous ancestor.
And yet, as you say, we find examples where conformably underneath these Cambrian rocks are these earlier sedimentary rocks completely free of fossils. So Stephen Meyer's book, his title Darwin's Doubt, actually kind of leads us to, or points us to the idea that Darwin himself was questioning evolution based on the fossil record. Is that true? Was Darwin worried about these lack of transitional look? There were a number of issues that Darwin thought with the theory.
I don't think he saw that it would blow up to be what it has to come. I mean, he put his theory out there. He was interested in putting out new theory for people to grab hold of.
And I think people really grabbed hold of it because, as we discussed earlier, it was now a mechanical model that could be applied to the biological scientists. And this sort of raised their status a little bit in terms they could compete with the physicists and chemists and engineers and theologians. Well, the theologians were more or less left out.
Yeah, but they were the opposition now, and they had an answer to challenge the biblical perspective. And at the time, I guess, the biblical supporters didn't have as much of the biochemistry and geological evidence as we have today to knock the theory on its head. But, I mean, a number of commentators have pointed out that if Darwin put for his theory today on the base of what we know today about DNA and the fossil record and so forth, it just wouldn't get up.
Oh, yeah, nice, but doesn't fit the data. Yeah. Morgan, did you have a question for John today? Yeah.
It may seem a simple question, but sometimes the simple questions are foundational. And the question is simply this what did the fossils then tell us? Well, the fossils tell us quite clearly that creatures were created fully formed. So this fits the creation model in the Bible.
There's no evidence of evolution in the Bible, in the rock record. So, in other words, it fits the biblical picture perfectly, where we'd see the Bible created all the different creatures after their kind. And there's another reason why the biblical model makes sense, too, and that's the ecological position.
So many different species depend on one another. We talk about pollination and insects and birds and bats that can play a role in pollination. So we have these ecosystems as such and that's what the Bible describes.
And that's why the Bible talks about creation in six days, in a very, very short time period. And this is again where evolutionary theory has major problems in terms of ecological systems and some people want to cross over and go into theistic evolution and this sort of thing. They got major problems there as well from a number of different areas.
But the fossil record paints the Bible picture that there was all these creatures existed and they were wiped out suddenly in a flood. And one of the fascinating things is too that they haven't changed, like over millions of years with the transitions. Like the colicant we find in fossils, in rocks that they date 380,000,000 years old or 350,000,000 olds, very long time.
And yet we find these fish are alive today in the Indian Ocean that look exactly the same. They haven't morphed in any way, they haven't changed in any way from those particular fish. And I think I mentioned Dr.
Carl Werner in another episode who studied the exhibits in museums and he photographed the exhibit in the museum and then photographed the live creature today and showed in hundreds of examples across many different filer. There's no change. They haven't changed over many years.
But if genetic drift was occurring you'd expect that there'd be this slow transition away from those original species which are fossilized to what we have today. Yeah, we've been recording science for the last couple of thousand years really since the Greek era. We've been making observations since Aristotle and so forth and we haven't observed any evolution.
We've tried to speed it up in the lab. We haven't observed that. But when you think about if there's been a couple hundred million species evolved over the last 600 million years, we should see a new species fully evolving every three or four years or so.
We haven't observed in the past 2000 years, we haven't observed any evolution. So we don't see these transitions. Something else that you mentioned in your book about Dr.
Carl Werner, I think it was, was that he and his wife discovered that as they did research in different museums and places, that there were at least 430 different mammals that were found fossilized with dinosaurs, including birds, which of course, was supposedly to have evolved from dinosaurs. But of all the 60 museums they went into, none of these actually shared these in their displays. And I guess my question is, at what point do you think scientists and archaeologists, paleontologists rather, will say, well, we don't know how to answer how this happened, but here it is? And to actually show the public yes.
Well, I think the issue is, as I said, we have so many books purporting to show evolution in all sorts of pictorial forms from kindergarten onwards that it's very difficult. The museums are following that picture. There are leading paleontologists that have questioned this and said, well hang on, we don't actually find this evolutionary evidence in the fossil record.
And one of those would have been Stephen J. Gould from Harvard. Well, he was more that yes, he did say that and hence his punctuated equilibrium that somehow there were sort of massive changes that occurred at very short nose produce this and Eugene and what do you think of punctuated equilibrium? This idea that there was this kind of stasis and then this massive jumps? Yes, well that's another fairy tale that people are cling hopes on that somehow all this massive new code can arise by chance.
There's some sort of environmental condition that just promotes massive new meaningful code. But that's wishful thinking. It's a fairy tale.
It's the frog turning into a prince type thing. We can wish that, but where's the scientific evidence not going to happen. The code is just so massive and so complicated and yet it works.
All those different little functioning bits all line up and the biochemistry is far more complex. We have biochemists that specialize in just a particular area of science, in this area of science and the biochemistry is so huge and that's just the biochemistry, let alone anatomy and physiology and all the structures that go along with it, all the engineering bits. And following on from Justin's question and a comment that you made earlier, you made the observation that you'd never get a scientific paper published which made reference to God or the Bible or to supernatural miracles.
I mean, why is that the case? If science is the search for truth and God exists and he created species supernaturally, why couldn't we publish that in a scientific journal? I think it's just a cultural change and a social change where political groups atheism is the dominant culture within science and it fails to recognize that many of the leading scientists in the past were very devout Bible students, believed in God and they made a number of the major scientific breakthroughs. And the dominance of Christians right through to the mid 1950s was very strong in university. But since that time unfortunately it's been squeezed out and this is where it all needs to be reversed now and the evidence pointed out, the evidence is overwhelming for the existence of a creator in God.
It's fascinating. And so what we're looking at here is this fossil record and all of these animals and plants which have existed down through the years but we just don't find these transitional fossils. It's really, really amazing.
And the fact is that it is intriguing that we find these fossils but at the same time we have an opportunity where we can't see these transitional forms. We have this massive theory of evolution but all the links are just not there in the fossil record. And the question is where does that leave the whole theory? It seems to me that evolution is looking more and more impossible.
And the good news is, this is if you have really enjoyed the discussion that we've had today and you would like to learn more about the scientific evidence, about fossils, about paleontology, about geology, I'd like to encourage you to go to your favorite online bookstore and get Dr. John Ashton's book, Evolution Impossible. It's a fantastic read, easy to understand, but really, really informative as well.
And next time, we're going to be exploring the very reason why there are all these fossils buried in the ground. And you might be really surprised, could it be the flood, which the Bible is talking about? And remember, you can watch any of these previous videos on our website on Three ABN. 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.
