Episode Transcript
[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to id the future. I'm your guest host today, Ira Berkowitz speaking to you from Jerusalem, Israel. I'm a teacher and writer with a longtime interest in evolution, but I think I've learnt the most about the subject from my guest today, Doctor Lee Spettner. His two books, not by chance and the Evolution Revolution, demonstrate adroitly that darwinian evolution should finally be retired as well. Doctor Spettner makes a strong case for his own hypothesis about how evolution really works. Doctor Spetner's credentials are extensive. He has a PhD in physics from MIT, taught graduate level courses at Johns Hopkins University, and worked for decades in military electronics, R and D. He's written dozens of papers and holds a few patents to boot. It's a privilege to be speaking with him today. I want to kick off today's conversation by talking about the problem of convergence. Doctor Spentner, for those new to the concept and as a refresher for everyone else, what is convergence?
[00:01:00] Speaker B: Convergence, or convergent evolution, is a concept that was really made up by the evolutionists to overcome the difficulty in their construction of phylogenetic trees. According to them, all life stemmed from some simple beginning and through random mutations and natural selection, evolved into all the many faceted versions of life that we find with us today. And they tried to construct a tree that works and shows that one thing evolved from another, which means that they are looking for a tree structure in which organisms that are far apart on the tree are distant from each other genetically, and organisms that are very close are close to one another on the tree. Or to turn it around, organisms that are very close genetically should be close to each other on the tree, and organisms that are far apart genetically should be far apart in the tree. And they found that it didn't work because they found that there were characteristics that would appear in organisms that had to be very distant from each other on the tree, and yet they had characteristics that were very close together. So they made up the concept of convergence and says, aha, there's convergent evolution. But for convergent evolution to occur, it's even more improbable than evolution itself. Look, in order for convergence to occur, the adaptive mutations that occur have to be pretty much restricted, because if I could get a large number of different adaptive mutations, if they were possible, then as Stephen Jay Gould said, if you replay the tape of life, it would come out something much, much different, which means that it would be very unlikely to get two organisms evolving the same thing independently. And nevertheless, they have bought into this concept of convergence. They made up this concept of convergence to try to explain away this difficulty. But convergent evolution is even more improbable than evolution itself.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Are there a lot of cases of convergence?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: There are many, many examples. Some of the most outstanding examples are echolocation, which appear in whales and dolphins. They were sea creatures, and they appear also in bats, which fly in the air. They have nothing to do with the sea. Now, nobody can say that the bats evolved from the whales, or the whales evolved from the bats, but here they are, each with a very similar echolocation system. And we'd have to say that these evolved independently. And moreover, some of the enzymes that are involved in the hearing in the bats and the whales don't appear in other organisms. And we find that there are something like a dozen amino acids that correspond from bats to whales that don't appear in anything in between. So they had to develop independently, and that's a very improbable thing to occur with random mutations.
[00:04:44] Speaker A: So they're genetically similar in the source of their echolocation, but other than that, they are miles and miles apart, which.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Means that they, according to them, had to evolve independently. So they made up this concept of.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Convergence, which really doesn't explain anything. It's merely saying, okay, here's the problem, we'll call it a name.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Well, what it is, it's a case of giving a name to our ignorance, that's all. You're right, it doesn't explain anything.
[00:05:11] Speaker A: Okay, let's turn to the famous finches of the Galapagos Islands. Under natural selection, millions of years of random mutations would have been needed to produce such variety. But you offer a very different explanation. What you call the non random evolutionary hypothesis. What is the non random evolutionary hypothesis, Doctor Spettner? And how would it explain the variety that we see among these finches?
[00:05:34] Speaker B: The non random evolutionary hypothesis I first introduced in my first book about 20 years ago, and I elaborated it on it in a more recent book, because there's been a lot more evidence for it. It says that mutations that are important for evolution are not random at all. They are non random. They are induced by environmental stress, or stress in general, usually my environmental stress, and they produce changes in the organism which are actually adaptive to the source of that stress. Now, coming back to the Galapagos finches, although the Darwinists have said that it takes some 5 million years to develop Darwin's 14 species of finches from some original finch that happened to land on this island that flew in from the mainland, there was an experiment that was performed where a hundred identical finches were transferred from a bird refuge in the Pacific to a set of four islands very close together, within 10 miles of each other, which was about 1000 km away. And they left them there to live and reproduce. And whatever they did, 17 years later, they came back and they found that these finches were not identical anymore, that they had filled different niches. Some had strong beaks, some had very sharp beaks. And each one was adapted to a different niche, eating different kinds of seeds. And this evolution took place, at most, 17 years. Could have been much faster, but they didn't look any earlier, so they didn't need this 5 million years at all. And it could have very well happened through this non random hypothesis that I mentioned. And I could go into the mechanism for this if you were interested.
[00:07:42] Speaker A: I am, and let's see if we can get to it. But that means if it's only 17 years or less, then these mutations can't be random. That would have taken much more time.
[00:07:53] Speaker B: That's right. It can't be random. And it can't be just due to natural selection, because natural selection also takes time. It takes a couple of hundred generations for a given adaptive random mutation to take over the population. So it's a big question of not having enough time for the mutations and not having enough time for natural selection.
[00:08:16] Speaker A: Well, thanks. I wanted to clarify something for our listeners, though I think it's pretty clear already. Your hypothesis really has no connection to what is called theistic evolution. From what I've heard, it's a somewhat apologetic approach. Basically, God fine tuned the universe at the big Bang. Everything evolved blindly from there. Then earth's first life form popped into existence by some blind cause or other. Random mutations came in, natural selection did the rest. That's really incompatible with your hypothesis, which says, no, nothing random has taken place here in order to bring about the evolution that we see.
[00:08:51] Speaker B: Well, I don't go into theology, but. Yeah, you're right. I mean, the theistic evolution, it seems to me, is a failed attempt to bring God into darwinian evolution. But since I think darwinian evolution really doesn't work, and I think it's just a futile attempt to make this non theory compatible with somebody's religion.
[00:09:18] Speaker A: Understood? Doctor Spentner, you'd mentioned that there is a mechanism. We're going to have to deal with it briefly because we are running out of time. But there is a mechanism that's already been discovered that may be driving this non random evolution.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: Yes, it's known that there are elements in the genome that move around and cause changes not only in the genome, but project further changes in the organism itself. And it turns out, interestingly enough, that these changes, they're called transposable elements that move around in the genome are actually triggered by stress, usually environmental stress, and they cause changes in the organism that are often adaptive to the source of that stress, which is a very interesting thing, which means that this whole mechanism is built into the organism. And it's very difficult to say how this sort of thing could have evolved, since random mutations don't seem to work. So this is somehow built into the organism. How it got there is something that we're not able at this point to explain scientifically, but it's undeniable that the mechanism is there and it works, and it produces the evolution that we actually see.
[00:10:43] Speaker A: Well, thank you, Doctor Spentner, for me, and I'm sure for many of our listeners, this has been a fascinating interview. And if our listeners want to know how it all really works, they can get the inside story from doctor spentners. Two books, not by chance, and the evolution revolution, both available on Amazon. This has been Ira Berkowitz for intelligent design the future. Thank you for listening.
This program was recorded by Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. Id the future is copyright Discovery Institute. For more information, visit intelligent and idthefuture.com.
