[00:00:04] Speaker A: ID the Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Greetings and welcome. I'm Tom Gilson. Today's ID the Future episode takes direct aim at Richard Dawkins and his 2019 book, Outgrowing a Beginner's Guide, a book he says is for all young people when they're old enough to decide for themselves. And, and an Amazon reviewer added, it's also for their parents. Well, today we get to hear some parents responding. Hilary Morgan Farrer has her Ms. In biology from Clemson University, and she's the chief author of two books on raising kids to counterculturalize and live out God's design for sexuality. Chatting with her today is Amy Davison, mother of three sons with a master's in Christian apologetics from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Together they host the podcast called Mama Bear
[email protected] Dawkins has a prominent academic reputation. Ferrer and Davison have something better. They have facts.
[00:01:16] Speaker A: Well, welcome to another episode of Mama Bear Apologetics. I'm Hillary.
[00:01:20] Speaker C: And I'm Amy.
[00:01:22] Speaker A: And we are continuing in our Doubting Dawkins series where we're going through Richard Dawkins book Outgrowing God, where he, he basically talks about his journey away from the Christian faith using.
Well, there's reasons in there. I'm not completely convinced that they're good reasons, but they are reasons.
And so we're actually getting into one of his areas of expertise right now. And we actually, I think the last one that we did on him was also his area of expertise. And we had nothing but good things to say because the way that he described the complexity of our world, I thought was he. I think he really nailed it.
[00:01:58] Speaker C: Oh, I think he did a great job. And even describing it in science, the videos he included, I was like, this is awesome. It was actually the most enjoyable chapter, I think. Not saying that I hated the others, but it was just like, this was really interesting.
[00:02:10] Speaker A: It was a really good chapter. I totally agree with you. And so now we're moving on to another chapter that I have some serious disagreements with. And so I'm going to kind of give you a little bit of the outline of what we're going to be doing today. I'm going to be taking a bit of the lion's share of this podcast. Just I have my master's in biology, so this is actually the area that I have studied. And then we'll move on to kind of what Dawkins is actually saying. I think in order to really be able to analyze his statements we have to understand what claims he's actually making.
And in his defense, I mean, I don't know. I know that he really has not been involved with a lot of research since his PhD, which was quite some time ago. And so a lot of the information that he's giving I think was accurate, maybe 20 or you know, more than 20, probably 30 years ago.
But I don't think the evidence now supports this. We really didn't have a concept of epigenetics back then, which again, I'm throwing out a word there that, well, we're going to have to define.
So we're just going to go through the chapter and say what are the claims that he's making? And then we're going to talk about what I see as some of the main problems with these claims and why I think there are issues there. So.
[00:03:18] Speaker C: Yeah, and kind of like with his other chapters, there's a lot that he packs into each one of his chapters. So when we were reviewing doing things, we're not able to hit on everything, but we're going to try and hit on the, the main ones that are there.
[00:03:31] Speaker A: I would say that the, the chapters where he hits on science, he keeps his train of thought better than any other chapter, which makes sense because that's, that's, you know, that's his area of expertise. Everything else, it was like just all these just random shots, you know, it was, I'm trying to think of. Yeah, it was like watching a bunch of squirrels running around. And it's like he kind of had a thesis at the beginning and, and then repeated it at the end and in the middle it was just all sorts of stuff that had not do with it. But when he gets into his science chapters, I think he actually keeps his train of thought.
And again, I think some of the information he had was the prevailing knowledge that we had 30 years ago. But I don't think that is what current scholarship supports. So first off, we're going to talk about some vocabulary. And the title of this chapter is called Bottom up or top down.
So we need to understand these are actually two different methods that people go about with design, with engineering and with biology. And so what he talks about is in the past we went from a top down approach. So the top down approach means that you're looking at the overall picture of stuff and then you're trying to understand each of the smaller compartments based on that.
But the thing with the top down approach is it assumes that we have a well functioning system that has a purpose and now we're trying to understand that system, when we're trying to break that system apart to understand it. In my opinion, this makes the most sense for a general view of biology. And honestly, I think a lot of biologists actually operate this way, but then they translate it into the bottom up approach. So the bottom up approach is this idea of how could this be built from the bottom up? It would be like, oh, golly, I'm so bad with examples on this. So top down would be. I think the example that he gives is kind of like a blueprint for a house. You have all the plans, you have all the schematics, you know, where each light fixture, where each plug is going to be, and then you start kind of doing little sections, then you lay the foundation, all that. The top down would be having the architect. The bottom up would be saying, how did things arrive from the beginning? It's like I'm taking a look at the very foundational thing and then what thing came next? And then what thing came next? It's kind of more of a time linear sort of thing of seeing how you could go from nothing to something.
[00:05:59] Speaker C: Right. And it almost seems like top down, that's the one that already assumes the design and purpose, whereas bottom up it's like, well, let's look at the end result and how we could get there without sort of that intentionality.
[00:06:10] Speaker A: Would you say that's fair? Yeah. And so he was saying that biology used to go from the top down approach. We see these really well functioning organisms and then we tried to understand it. But once the theory of evolution came along, now the big question became, how can we explain this? Starting from, you know, the very, you know, just, you know, self replicating RNA all the way up to, you know, complex mammals. It's like, how do we do it piece by piece by piece? It's looking at from the bottom up something called. Are you familiar with the term reverse engineering?
[00:06:43] Speaker C: Yeah, I've heard of that a lot. When it comes to trying to figure out how to, like, how to make cars faster when they're taking it from another design and that sort.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah. So that would be kind of reverse engineering is seeing how something's already working and then trying to separate it into its components to figure out how it's working. That's again the top down. Honestly, I think that's what most biologists are doing. And then they spend most of their time turning it around and trying to figure out how it could be built from the bottom up, which to me is kind of a I don't know. I didn't occur to me until today when I was really thinking about this. I'm like, how much time has been wasted understanding something that all that time was put into trying to figure out how it could basically built itself instead of just focusing on how it's working and, you know, maybe certain things that were broken that used to work better. It's like having to figure out where it came from. It's like, I wouldn't say colossal waste of time, but it seems like time could be better spent just understanding rather than figuring out how it came to be.
[00:07:41] Speaker C: But anyway, yeah, it seems like a lot of hard work to try and find a reason behind there that didn't involve some sort of intelligence.
[00:07:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. So. So that's the top down, the bottom up approach. So the next one we're going to talk about is this concept of foresight, and this is going to be a really main theme of the podcast today. Foresight is this idea that there are certain things in biology that are basically having to solve problems before they become problems. And in order to solve a problem before it becomes a problem, you have to have something that can see in advance what problem you're.
So we're going to go into the idea of cell membranes. There's this great book by one of the Discovery Institute fellows named Marcus Eberle. Is that his name? Hold on, let me grab the book. Marcus Eberlin. Sorry, I was close. And it's called how the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose. And so one of the things that he goes into there is the idea of the cell membrane, that the cell membrane has to be able to control what things come in and what things come out within aqueous, meaning a watery environment without getting the ph to where it's starting to corrupt the. In order to have any of this stuff, you have to have sensors.
[00:08:53] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:08:54] Speaker A: For these things. So basically you have to have sensors in order to correct for it, but in order to have a functioning cell, you have to be already correcting for it. So it's this kind of circular reasoning. So foresight is this idea of that we see stuff in nature that looks like there was foresight there, it looks like there was design. And if we try to explain how it could have come piece by piece, unless you insert the foresight there, it is really, really difficult to make it happen on its own. So that's one of the things we'll be talking about. And then another one is just this concept of specified complexity. And so this is something have you heard of that before?
[00:09:31] Speaker C: I've heard of it in sort of the. It's a longer sense. It's called csi. It's complex, specified information, which is kind of along the same line. It's talking about how in design, you always see these certain characteristics of complexity, specificity, and information. And this one kind of. It falls along the same lines.
[00:09:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it does. So one of the people that really dove into this is a man named William Dembsky, where he was the one that came up with the concept of specified complexity. So the idea of complexity is just going to be some kind of pattern that is very. What's the word? I don't want to say random, but it's improbable is the word. So if we were to throw out a thing of Alphabet soup and line it all up into one line of letter after letter that is a complex sequence, the chances of getting that exact sequence are highly, highly improbable. However, there's no specification there, meaning it's not conforming to any predetermined pattern. So if I. If I put a bunch of, you know, out, you know, or we'll say Scrabble tiles out, and it just has all these random letters, the chances of it being that configuration versus another configuration are equally improbable. Now, say that I just shook the bag and put it all out and it came out as a. As a whole sentence.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: That is actually equally improbable as the random collection of letters.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: But I wouldn't have. Oh, there you go. I was going to say, really? Equally. That's interesting.
[00:11:01] Speaker A: Yes. Just because if you're just looking at the probability of what order those are going to be in, it is equally improbable. But you have another aspect to it. If you have specification, meaning it's conforming to a predetermined pattern, namely language.
So we can have things. It's like when people talk about complexity, if there's no pattern that's conforming to some other predetermined, like, you know, language or pattern, it's equally improbable. But if it matches something that we know of, I. E. Language that's specified complexity, and that's where you see, when people see specified complexity, they say, there was design here. Like, if I were to see a whole bunch of letters, you know, Scrabble tiles that spelled out John loves Hillary, I wouldn't think, like, yeah, that's the first thing that came to mind. I wouldn't be like, wow, what are the chances? I would think John left A message for me. Right. Because it's conforming to something that I recognize. But again, statistics alone, it's equally improbable as a, you know, whatever, you know, I'm not even sure if those were letters of the Alphabet.
It's equally improbable, but it's not specified. So this is where he, in this chapter, he is mistaking complexity for specified complexity.
And he doesn't come out and say these words, but this is essentially what's happening. So those are some of the ideas that I want people to be kind of listening for in this. So we're just going to dive into what is he actually saying in this chapter?
What do we agree with? What do we disagree with? So again, it starts out talking about bottom up or top down. That's the name of the chapter. And so here's kind of one of his statements. He says what was happening during all the billions of years of evolution was that the DNA instructions for how to make babies was being gradually built up, honed and improved by natural selection.
So he's basically trying to explain where we got humans from this bottom up approach. His is that he thinks natural selection can, can do this. And so he says indirectly, natural selection supervises the development, the development of bodies, meaning like, you know, human bodies. The difference is entirely separate from the fact that cars and houses are designed, whereas babies aren't.
[00:13:21] Speaker C: And he was mainly using that as an example of how you can, like if you take blueprints of a house, he was saying, well, you can take my house and build it, let's say in Japan, and have it look identical to it. But you can't do that with a human being. You can do that with cars and inanimate objects, but not a human being.
[00:13:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So he makes a difference. He differentiates this idea of a blueprint, which he actually is correct on this, that DNA is not a blueprint. A blueprint is actually kind of more of a pictorial view of what something's going to be like. It's a picture to picture, meaning we've got this sign here that means outlet. And we know that directly corresponds to this outlet. If we just follow this pattern here, we're going to build a house. Yeah, absolutely. People are not. You can't look at DNA and be like, what does a person look like based on this DNA?
It reminds me of the scene from the Matrix where he's reading all that code and he's like, all I see is blonde, brunette, blah, blah. I'm like, there's no way you can See that from all that code.
[00:14:17] Speaker C: Oh, sorry, I remember that scene.
[00:14:19] Speaker A: I was always like, nah. So he's totally correct that DNA is not a blueprint in that sense. But the funny thing is, like he says, there's no one to one mapping points between points on a DNA blueprint and points on a baby. That's absolutely true. But I think this is beside the point because what he goes on to say later is that DNA is more like computer code, which I absolutely agree with.
But this idea of there being computer code assumes that you have a computer to code.
[00:14:55] Speaker C: Right.
[00:14:57] Speaker A: Everybody likes to start out with these fully functioning cells and then say, you know, how can we take this DNA and change things? But being able. If you separate DNA from a living cell sale, I sound all southern.
[00:15:11] Speaker C: You sound very Southern there.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: From a living cell, basically, you're just going to have a lump of nucleic acids that do nothing forever.
I talked to my friend Paul Nelson, who's also with Discovery Institute, and he said he did this just as an illustration. He had his daughter do this thing where you can do a cheek swab and get the DNA and you can separate the DNA from the cell. And he's got it in his.
And he can show people, see, I've got the DNA. It's not doing anything because outside of a living cell, that DNA doesn't do anything. So this is one of the areas where I think that Dawkins is going on information that's at least 30 years old. It's this idea that it's the overall controlling molecule, and which has been the prevailing notion basically since Francis and Crick, is that the DNA is the thing that controls everything. However, they had no concept of epigenetics. Epigenetics, EPI means outside genetics, means gene. You can't control the DNA unless you have epigenetics, which is something that's controlling the DNA. And if it's controlling the DNA, it can't come from the DNA.
Let's see, what else is Dawkins saying here? So he says, if DNA is not a blueprint of a baby, what is it? It's a set of instructions for how to build a baby. And that's a very different matter. But again, remember, instructions. Instructions are useless unless you have something that is carrying out the instructions. Right, right. So it's more like a recipe for making a cake or like a computer program whose instructions are obeyed in order. In order. I love it. First do this, then do that. Then if so and so is true, then otherwise do that and so on for Thousands, thousands of instructions. This is absolutely what we see going on. Kudos to him. However, we have to ask the question, how, how does that build itself? I mean, how do you build in contingency plans without the top down approach? Anyway, so going on.
So here's an example of a bottom up approach and this is what he's trying to compare. Basically he goes into human embryology in this and so he compares it with a termite. And so here, here's his quote. Each individual termite just follows a set of simple rules on its own with no idea of what the other termites are doing and no idea of what the finished building will be like. So again, this is the bottom up approach.
I don't know exactly what those rules are, but this is the kind of thing I mean by a simple rule. If you come across a pointy cone of mud, stick another dollop of mud on it. Social insects make use of chemicals coated smells called pheromones as an important system of communication. So the rules followed by individual worker termites when building a tower might depend on whether a particular piece of the edifice smells like this pheromone or that pheromone.
So there's, there's an experiment that he goes into called. It was funny I put this in the notes and you thought I was being silly, but it's actually called the Boids B O I D S.
So what they took is. Have you ever seen those patterns of birds where it's just like they're moving and it just looks like it's this beautiful. It's like you see it in schools of fish as well. It's just almost like this dance I did.
[00:18:23] Speaker C: I looked that up. There's some, there's some great YouTube videos. It's called Murmuration and it is, it's. And I've actually seen it in person before, driving to Rockwall. It. It's beautiful. And yeah, it almost looks like this entity. You see them in almost like scary movies or something where it's like this, this mist is moving in. But it is, it's beautiful.
[00:18:43] Speaker A: There's actually. So there's a, there's a group that works with Discovery Institute called Illustra Media and they have a documentary called Flight that actually goes into all the aspects of birds in flight and it compares the movement of these birds. And there's this like one particular set of birds where it's just like thousands upon thousands. It's not just like a little flock. It's like thousands upon thousands that are doing this. And it's like I immediately put that on my bucket list of like, I want to see that in person.
[00:19:11] Speaker C: And it's loud too. It sounds like there's this rushing. It sounds like waves crashing on the ocean. And it is, it's so loud. So it's not just pretty to watch, but it's, it's, it's audibly really interesting too.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: It's a full sensory experience.
So one of the things that they had someone do in this Boyd's project is they actually try to say, okay, I'm going to take individual rules for. Instead of the idea of there being a choreographer of like, you know, who planned this beautiful dance, you know, kind of thing, can I take a set of rules and apply it to each bird? Like so, for example, it might be the first bird is making the decision that one's just going to be, you know, free will of what to do. And then each bird after that looks at one other bird and maybe there's going to be a split second difference. Maybe they're always going to turn in a slightly different degree and it's just a set of rules that are going to be the same. And what they were able to do with the Boyd's experiment is do a computer simulation model of this movement.
[00:20:14] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:20:15] Speaker A: And so what they, what they proved with that is that you can have a certain set of finite rules that apply to each bird individually that you can get what looks like, again, complex movement.
[00:20:28] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:20:29] Speaker A: But again, this is complex movement. It's not specified complex movement. So even though it's beautiful looking, it's not like they're forming. You know, I think of the wizard of Oz, you know, when she's on the broom, it says, what about something about Dorothy? Bring Dorothy. I can't remember what it says. If they were forming something like that, that would be a specified complex movement. But he's just talking about complex movement. So what we have to ask is, is what we see in nature, in biology complex or specified complex? And if it's specified complex, then this analogy does not hold water.
[00:21:07] Speaker C: No, that makes sense because when you think of. And he compares it to dancers too, he compares the, the mer, the. The merds, the movement of the birds as, as choreography and dance and where we think of ballet and that sort of thing, Swan Lake, you know, obviously that is, that is specified and have these movements, but they're all to follow this certain pattern. Whereas the birds, it does, they, they fly around, they all maintain this certain amount of distance between each, almost like fighter planes when they're Flying. They keep a certain distance here, but it's not like they're doing anything intentional with it. Making a shape or a message.
[00:21:41] Speaker A: Yeah. So the guy who did this experiment's name is Reynolds. So Dawkins says the important point is that Reynolds didn't program at the flock level. So the flock level would be that complex movement that we're seeing. So it's not like he cor that complex movement he programmed at the level of the individual bird. Again, that certain set of rules and flock behavior emerged as a consequence. So here's his bridge over, he said. So such bottom up programming is also how embryology works with individual cells in an embryo playing the role of individual birds in a flock. So this is going to be his argument that he goes into is embryological development, which means just when you have the sperm fertilize the egg, it forms an embryo and then it starts dividing. And so he's going to say, do we have certain sets of rules that we could apply to those individual cells that can get. There's two stages. It goes through the blastula and the gastrula. It's called the gastrula because think of like gastric, it means stomach. It's where it's forming this, this kind of cleft that's going to end up being part of that, that whole.
It's like a double wall. Right.
[00:22:53] Speaker C: Where how it came into itself.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Well, if you think about it, you know, you go in through the mouth and you come out through, you know, the other area and it's all one long tube. So this is like that very beginning of that tube. So.
So he says embryonic development, the process away which bodies are built, is a bottom up process. Every cell in the developing embryo follows its own little local rules. And so in some senses he's correct on this, that when you go from one cell that divides into two cells, which divides into four cells, which divides into eight cells, they're following a pattern right there. Right.
And then he kind of, he has a picture here of where it's going through that blastula stage to where it's this ball and then it starts hollowing out and it's the early gastrula.
Even this, you have to have slightly different rules because if something's going to start caving in on itself, it means that one side is either multiplying faster or larger than the other one. Because it's like that's the only way for something to bend.
He says admittedly, a gastrula is not very complicated and it doesn't look at all like a baby. But I think you can see how bottom up rules followed by each cell working on its own could form the gastrula. And that's actually true because even if you were to program into each of those cel, as long as you're this close to the neighboring cell divided the same rate, and then once you get at X angle, then this side starts, you know, dividing more and then you start getting, you know, there, there are ways to figure out rules that could form this, but the question is, is that the way humans are formed from beginning to end?
So he, he, this is what's called, what's that, that fallacy called either confirmation bias or cherry picking. He's taken example of bottom up, where bottom up absolutely does apply. So it's like we don't want to say that he's wrong, that this isn't a bottom up, that we can't get to this stage in fetal development.
[00:24:56] Speaker C: Right.
[00:24:57] Speaker A: By each cell following specific rules. Absolutely we can. But if you're using that as your example, that you can do it the whole way through, through all of nature, well, you gotta have a pretty limited scope that you're looking at. And if nature works upon both principles from bottom up and top down, well, absolutely, you can find all the bottom up approaches that you want. But that doesn't prove that everything is bottom up.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Right.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Does that make sense?
[00:25:21] Speaker C: Yeah. No, it means that it can't necessarily have a universal application.
[00:25:25] Speaker A: Yeah. So he had someone who actually did the same thing with the Boyd's project, that with this ball of cells. So a guy named Oster, he, he programmed a single cell and then including its tendency to divide. And he was able to have a simulation of this blastula and this gastrula forming. So he was able to do the exact same thing that Reynolds did with the birds, where this flock behavior kind of emerged from programming the individual birds. He was able to get this gastrula emerge from programming just an individual cell. But again, I would say you had to program the cell to have a certain set of parameters. Yeah, it's like, what, how do we get these certain set of parameters? People just assume that these certain set of parameters conform themselves. But again, that's, you know, anyway. So he goes on to say, later stages of embryology are too complicated to deal with here.
Different tissues, muscle, bones, nerves, kidneys, liver, they all grow by cell division.
And here's where he does get into some of the epigenetics. He said, you know, we have all these different tissues. The reason they are different is that different stretches of DNA, different genes are turned on. In any one tissue, only a small minority of the tens of thousands of genes are turned on.
Then he goes on to say each tissue grows by cell division following the local bottom up rules. Again, he's kind of taken, okay, we've got this first embryo here that follows the bottom up rules. Okay, now we have a bunch of complicated stuff that we're not going to go into. Well, now that we get to the tissue level. Okay, now this again falls to the bottom up rules, right? The devil's in the details and the devil's in the gaps. So there's a lot that goes on between going from an embryo to an organism on the tissue level. And so again, yes, there are aspects that follow this bottom up approach, meaning you can build it up slowly with a certain set of rules that each cell follows. But if the in between times take something like what he says, a choreographer, an architect to do all that, then we have a problem and we can't use the bottom up approach for everything.
[00:27:40] Speaker C: And would you say that his focus on the bottom up approach is he's trying to find a way to sort of edge out that creator? That's kind of the focus here, the purpose of it.
[00:27:51] Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. So the bottom up approach and the reason why I think biology is so obsessed with it is that is the only way to explain this apart from a creator. So that's why I think they spend so much time actually studying things from a top down, saying, how can we understand this? Okay, now we have to take all this time and explain how it could have come on its own. Because unless it could come on its own, then we have to say there's a designer there. And you know, as the Lewantan quote, you know, we cannot allow a divine foot in the door.
And so it's like I'm trying to think of in terms of translating, it's like they're reading in English and translating into German so that people can then read it in English again or something. It's like there's this unnecessary translation of like, why don't we just stop study it from the top down? If it's something warrants a bottom up, then study it from the bottom up. But when it warrants a top down, stop trying to shoehorn it. So this is basically the main thesis of his chapter, is he's taking examples of bottom up things that do work, namely on the embryological scale, you know, movements of things like birds, the divisions of the embryo and things on the tissue level, things that can be bottom up.
And then trying to say, because these exist bottom up, we can assume everything's bottom up. Yeah.
So this is where we need to go into what are some of the problems which I've kind of hinted at, some of them as well been going along, but let's look a little bit more into what some of these problems are. But before I do, do you have any questions, things that you think need to be clarified? Because I know that sometimes it's no.
[00:29:32] Speaker C: Everything, and I don't, for transparency sake, I don't have a huge biology background. So. No, in listening. No, this makes sense. And kind of thinking along and how you've been explaining it, it seems a little bit of this sort of part whole fallacy is creeping in here is because these small parts can be explained in this way, therefore all of it, you know, can be explained.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:29:52] Speaker C: And that's not always the case.
[00:29:56] Speaker A: Yeah. And this is why I think it's good to not start out in science with a preconceived notion of how things have to be. Because if we want to say, hey, some of these things are best explained top down with an architect, with a designer, now let's figure out how it works and reverse engineer it.
We should be free to study it like that instead of having to say, okay, we're not allowed to study this unless we figure out how it could have come from scratch. That's that. That to me seems like a lot of wasted time when we could be just learning how something works.
[00:30:23] Speaker C: It seems like it kind of edges out other abilities to be able to study it from different directions too. And I'm kind of curious, when you were studying biology, did you experience this in, in your studies? Was it the focus was completely bottom up or did you see a blend?
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Well, one of the things that I noticed when I was studying was I, I was, you know, I purposely went to a secular school. I went to Clemson. And because I didn't want to be getting, you know, the Christian perspective on this, I wanted to hear what was being taught at, you know, you know, top universities. And one of the things that I noticed is very similar to what Dawkins does here is they would take stuff that was experimentally validated and experimentally observable and reproducible and, you know, all that stuff, and they would talk about that with, you know, an appropriate level of authority and confidence, and then it would switch over into something that was purely conjecture, that was not experiment, experimentally viable, that was not reproducible. That was not observable, that was only assumed.
And they would speak about it with the exact same level of confidence and certainty.
[00:31:29] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:31:31] Speaker A: And so as a student, if you're not really paying attention to that, you think, oh, everything they say is experimentally, you know, verified and they can't see the difference between this one is observable and reproducible, and this one is conjecture, this one is based on philosophy, this one is based on assumptions. And I would say that was the number one thing that I saw, is that they switch back and forth between things that, that were observable and things that had not been actually observed that were just postulated and they did not skip a beat for their amount of certainty. And I think, and I don't think they did that on purpose. I don't think they were trying to be deceitful. I think it's something that basically people are educated into just believing these things without really questioning the foundations of. Is, is that as viable of a theory as the things that we can actually observe? So anyway, that was what I observed and that had I not had the background that I had, I probably would have just not known the difference. But, you know, purposely listening for that stuff, I was able to really differentiate when the professor was saying stuff that was, had been observed and when they're saying stuff that hadn't. So anyway, that was, that was my interesting takeaway from that, I would say. So let's talk about some of the main problems for this bottom up approach, which is what evolutionary theory purports.
You have to basically be able to build stuff piecemeal and not have any view of what the end goal is according to natural selection, which is what Dawkins, I mean, talks all about throughout this book. Everything is, is reducible to natural selection. The thing with natural selection is it has to. The organism has to be able to reproduce and it has to reproduce in a way that's more survivable, has better fitness than another one.
So I would say one of the biggest problems that we have for this is you have to have a perfectly functioning reproductive system intact already.
So the reason for that is if you have a reproductive system that is basically killing off your early babies, there's no way to pass on those genes, right?
[00:33:39] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, you're not going to get anywhere.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: So for this I want to go into. It's when we first started studying for this podcast, I was like, oh, I remember studying this and I couldn't remember this idea of, you know, people think this idea of going from marine Animals, or even marine mammals to land mammals is just a matter of, you know, growing feet. And they forget about all the things that have to happen in order to go from a marine life, meaning living in the ocean, to living on land. And one of the ones that I thought was the most fascinating.
[00:34:12] Speaker C: It's definitely very important, especially to the men in the audience.
[00:34:15] Speaker A: Oh yes, absolutely. Is basically the way that the, the, the sperm is protected in marine life versus land life. So we have the testicles on. In most mammals are located outside the body. Because what happens here. I'm going to go have an article here that's titled. It's from the Scientific. Wait, no, that's not what it's called. It's called, it's from American Scientist. It's volume 86, number five, September to October 1998. Oh, that's, that's pretty old. So this has been around for a while.
So it's titled Reproduction Reproductive Thermoregulation in Marine Mammals. So let me unpack that one.
[00:34:57] Speaker C: Yeah, that sounds fancy.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: Reproductive, meaning we're dealing with reproductive organs. We're dealing with the female and the uterus and the male and the sperm and the gonads and the testes, testicles, all that thermoregulation, basically, how do we keep things at the correct temperature?
And then in marine mammals. So we're talking about mammals that live in the water. And so here's how it starts out.
Neural tissue is very sensitive to rising temperatures. An increase of only 4 to 6 degrees Celsius can disturb brain function, leading to convulsions and even death. Death. To avoid such catastrophes, mammals have evolved elaborate physiological mechanisms to regulate their core body temperatures. Unfortunately, this core temperature is about 3 degrees above the ideal temperature for the production and storage of viable sperm cells.
So let's unpack that statement.
Have you ever heard the word homeostasis?
[00:35:55] Speaker C: I have.
Where I've heard that. That.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: So homeostasis is being able to maintain a regular body temperature. So we all know that if we get a fever, that's a sign of something going wrong.
[00:36:07] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: And so our bodies are, you know, is predictable enough for temperature that a change in temperature is signifies something. But there's all sorts of ways that we have to control this. So like when you go outside and it's really hot, what does your body do?
[00:36:23] Speaker C: It starts wetting.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: That's right, you're getting all swampy. What that does is it's putting liquid on your skin and when liquid evaporates, it takes the heat away from you. So that's one of the ways that we regulate our temperature. Now, when you get really cold, what happens?
[00:36:39] Speaker C: Usually your hair rises on your arms, you get those little goose pimples.
And I believe I remember reading in the short story in English they were talking about, the blood typically starts flowing. That's why your hands get so cold. It flows to more toward your chest and to protect your internal organs from getting too cold.
[00:36:58] Speaker A: Yep. And also, if you're in a cold environment, it's going away from the surface. It's trying to preserve that heat because if it were towards the surface, then it would be getting cooled and your body would be cooling down. So here's a fun fact. You have a little muscle that surrounds every single one of your hair follicles. It's called the arrector pili.
[00:37:17] Speaker C: Interesting.
[00:37:18] Speaker A: And what happens when you get goosebumps is that erector pili contracts. And what that does is since the hair follicles is also coming out of an open, basically kind of a porous surface in the body, it closes that porous surface, which. That porous surface is where you secrete sweat, which helps you cool off. So if you're trying to keep your heat in, you're going to basically shut that gate.
And so that's what those goosebumps are, is you're shutting the gate so that you're not allowing the heat to leave your body. Now, the other thing that you do is you start shivering. You can't help it, you start shivering. Muscle contraction produces heat. This is a way your body maintains its thermal regulation. So all of these, you know, you could theoretically explain these evolutionarily. However, you can't explain these evolutionarily when it comes to reproductive structures, because this is like a chicken and the egg scenario. In order to have a reproductive structure that can reproduce, an organism that can reproduce and pass on these good genes, you have to have these regulatory mechanisms in place. So like it says here, that the body's ideal Temperature is about 3 degrees higher than what is for viable sperm cells. So this is why for land mammals, we've got these really great ways of keeping our body temperature, but the testicles are on the outside, because if you were on the inside, it would be too hot and it would actually destroy the sperm.
Now, we have another problem. When we go into the water, we've got a couple different problems. Number one is, especially with Arctic creatures, if you're in really cold water, what happens if the sperm's on the outside of body or not? The sperm, sorry, the. The testicles are on the outside of.
[00:38:57] Speaker C: The body, there's no way you're going to be able to reproduce and kill everything off.
[00:39:01] Speaker A: Oh yeah, you would freeze. You'd freeze that sperm. And so it has to be on the inside of the body. However, we also have the problem that being on the inside of the body is actually several degrees too high for the sperm to survive.
So how do we get around this problem?
The way we get around this problem is there's actually blood vessels that go from extremities. So in a. For example, in this one, for the marine ant mammals, they're talking about Se and dolphins in particular the dorsal fin and which is that top fin, the one that scares you for, you know. Yeah, yeah, the shark week. So that fin and also the tail fin have a whole bunch of blood vessels that go from there because they're towards the surface and they actually go all the way to both male and female reproductive organs and wrap themselves around it. So what happens is if the temperature for it, well, we'll say for the male, for the, for that, for the testicles there that are on the inside, if the temperature, if the temperature starts getting too high, it starts bringing blood in from the cooled blood from the fins and wrapping it around the blood supply for those testicles, and it cools the blood to keep the sperm at the correct temperature.
[00:40:16] Speaker C: That's so interesting. Internal air conditioning.
[00:40:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. It's basically internal air conditioning.
So here's some of the other things that it talks about. The body temperatures of resting seals and dolphins are commonly between 36 to 38 degrees. High enough to inhibit the production of sperm in most other mammals. So again, just at their resting. So think about when they're swimming real fast, they're getting all sorts of heat coming from the movement of that. They need something actively cooling it off. So let's see. And if it gets too high, it says it can lead to development of abnormalities of the skeleton, the nervous system and other tissues. And spontaneous abortion, which means miscarriage and fetal death are real possibilities.
And so here's the sentence that I starred and stuff here. The research described here, provides evidence of novel vascular structures that prevent thermal insults to reproductive tissues. Now that's a bunch of science jargon, so let's unpack that. So the research described here, I'm assuming you're smart enough to figure that out, provides evidence of novel vascular structures. So the word novel when you're in, in biology means that this is a new structure. Meaning that we don't see like this long evolutionary history of it, we see it suddenly appear in this, in this organism that we don't see other places. The, the ones that, you know, on a genetic level there are some of these that are called orphan genes. And orphan genes mean that, that it is only in this. It's like they can't find out where it came from. It's only they can't find any parents. That's what it's, it's, it's also an acronym for something I can't remember, but it means they can't find the parents to it. It's an orphan gene. So it's just kind of inserted in there.
[00:41:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:42:00] Speaker A: So novel vascular structures that prevent thermal insults. Thermal insults, meaning bad things happen because you're the wrong temperature to reproductive tissues, meaning both in the female for the ovaries and the uterus and stuff. Thank you. I'm like uterus, I'm a woman and I can't think of this word. But then also for the, the testicles and the man, or the man, the male. Excuse me. So these are novel structures that prevent things happening. So now let's, let's think about the bottom up approach that Dawkins talks about here. In order for, okay, we're going on natural selection, you have to be able to basically reproduce and then have your offspring that can out compete everybody else in order to reproduce. These mechanisms need to be in place already or else you kill off your ability to reproduce.
[00:42:45] Speaker C: Right.
[00:42:47] Speaker A: So what this means is this structure had to evolve instant. If it evolved, it had to evolved instantaneously altogether. And this isn't even counting all the other things like changes in lung or the feet and the flippers and all that stuff. In order to go from, from ocean to land, you have to immediately change the structure for the testicles.
[00:43:10] Speaker C: And not just even that. It's like multiple structures in one.
[00:43:14] Speaker A: Yes. It takes multiple structures in one.
[00:43:16] Speaker C: Yeah. Highly complicated.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: Very, very complicated. And it all has to happen at once. This would be an example of what we talk about with foresight. It has to be able to predict that something's going to be a problem. These marine animals have to. Their bodies had to have predicted that the gonads being outside the body will make it too cold. Gonads being inside the body or the test. Testicular structures inside will make it too hot. So we have to create this vascular system that goes from external, that goes from the fins to cool off the blood to make it just right.
And at the same time, the first organism to do this cannot be killed by any other means. It has to happen instantaneously and all the other things that in the evolutionary language or language lineage have to happen instantaneously and it has to survive. And it has to survive exactly all of that.
So I just have to say, friends, this is a problem for evolutionary theory.
Let's see.
Let's go to another one from Foresight, from Marcus Heppelmann's book. And this is something that is in all cells. A lot of times people like to begin with the cell and what can happen from the cell. But you kind of get to the cel. If you were to look at how complex the cell was.
Sorry, was. As if it's not complex anymore how complex the cell is. We're going to look at just one of the features of the cell that really has to be in place before we can even get a viable cell, and that's the cell membrane. So I'm going to kind of read off some of Marcus's stuff here. So this is on page 15 of Foresight.
It says evolutionary theory appeals to a gradual, step by step process of small mutations sifted by natural selection, which is colloquially referred to as survival of the fittest. We've talked about that. But a gradual, step by step evolutionary process over many generations seems to have no chance of building such wondrous, such wonders, since there apparently can't be many generations of our cell or even one generation until these channels are up and running. And so the channels he's talking about are the cell membrane. So this is exactly what we were just talking, talking about. You can't have survival of the fittest and you can't have surviving cells unless you have certain structures in place in the cell and one of them is the cell membrane. You have to allow the right things in, allow the right things out, like wastes. And you have to have a means of detecting which are the things which are the right ones. And if you're getting too high. So here's something he says also on page 15.
Somehow a double layer membrane, flexible, stable and resistant, needed to be engineered. One that would promptly and efficiently protect the cell from the devastating O2 permutation. So basically, oxygen, if you've ever heard of oxidative stress, it's like nobody knows what it means except for chemistry students. But it's the thing that kind of degenerates your cell.
So it has to detect the devastating oxidative permutation remains stable in aqueous acid media, which means it's going to be in a liquid environment that's slightly acidic and able to Handle fluctuations in temperature and ph. These are all the things the cell has to be able to detect. It has to detect ph and it has to keep its inside environment different from its outside environment.
But then here's the clincher. To do all these tasks, the cell's molecular shield also would need a mechanism to sense changes in temperature and ph and react accordingly.
So in order to even have the cell to begin with, you have to have the structures in place. It's like in order to maintain the right, you know, ph, the right amount of water, the right amount of chemicals keeping the waste out, you have to have structures in the cell membrane that already detect these things.
So basically a cell can't survive unless it detects these things. And it can't detect these things unless it survives.
[00:47:21] Speaker C: Wow. It's a well oiled machine. And you see that too like when you look at any biology textbook and it actually shows pronounce of whether it's plant cell or animal cell.
They're very complex and they're beautiful and how everything works together is so impressive.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:37] Speaker C: Now have they ever given any accounts or are you familiar with any accounts of how this could have happened sequentially?
[00:47:45] Speaker A: No, I think this is one of the ones where in the literature you'll see things like kind of like what we saw with in this paper here. I'll read that sentence again because I.
[00:47:56] Speaker C: Know this is kind of. I'm familiar that this has been an issue before within sort of the naturalistic side of things.
[00:48:03] Speaker A: You just use the word to evolve. Usually when they don't know what happens, it just says it evolved to have this.
[00:48:08] Speaker C: Ah, gotcha.
[00:48:09] Speaker A: And that's our, that's our paintbrush that we say it evolved to have it. We don't know the details and but we're just assuming that that's what happened. And granted there are lots of things that we have been able to verify that have evolved. Absolutely. But and this is another word I should have gone into at the very beginning. I'm sad that I'm going into it at the end. The concept of intelligent design.
Intelligent design. A lot of times people call it creationism and a cheap tuxedo. Yeah, that's kind of the kind of. What's that word? Kind of what's. When you trying to put someone down, what's the word?
[00:48:43] Speaker C: Do you call that ad hominem? Is that what you're referring to?
[00:48:46] Speaker A: Yeah, there's another word I'm thinking of. It'll come to me later. Pejorative is what I'm looking for. It's the pejorative of it. The concept of Intelligent Design. It's like they act like this is a God of the gaps. Like, oh, we don't understand how it happened, therefore it must have been God.
That is actually the opposite of what intelligent Design is doing. Intelligent design is saying we can tell the difference. Again, this goes back to the complexity and specified complexity. Complexity being an improbable series of events. And specified complexity means an improbable series of events that actually forms a pattern. And this is what we see in DNA. It's forming a pattern that creates proteins that can regulates the cell. We see this in epigenetics where it's deciding when to turn off different parts of the genome so that you don't have like liver cells growing in your eyeball. Eyeball.
This is a process called differentiation. And he kind of glosses over that. That's, that's the in between times between you when you have the gastral gastrula and blastula and then when you have these fully organized differentiated tissues. He's like, oh, the middle stuff's really complicated. I'm like, yeah, that's the stuff that needs to be explained. Yeah.
And it's not the idea that because we can't explain it, God did it. Intelligent design says we have seen specified complex information. The only times we have seen that is when there is someone who is inputting information.
[00:50:09] Speaker C: Yeah. When there's a mind behind it.
[00:50:11] Speaker A: When there is a mind behind it. Therefore, when we see things that follow this pattern, we can infer a mind. So we are not operating on what we don't know. We are operating on everything that we do know.
And saying we have never seen something like this being produced without a mind this complex specified or specified complex information.
So anyway, that's intelligent design. I should have gone into that. But whenever people are trying to kind of get around that, you'll see this is an adaptation.
The term adaptation assumes that this organism didn't used to have it and then based on its environment, did have it from natural selection. But there's no way to show this organism without that structure. Yeah, it's just assumed. Or you'll see it evolved to have blah, blah, blah, which means, means it's here and we don't know how. And you know, maybe other organisms don't have it. So therefore it must have evolved. And again, I, I, one of the things that I learned in my master's in biology is that evolution can do a lot more than I thought it could. But it, the gaps in there are numerous, and they are explained away with intelligent design that we could actually study things without having to translate it into this bottom, bottom up approach.
So I think we're. Yeah, we're going over time. So I hope that this was informative. I know that this was a lot of science.
Is there anything else you'd like me to clarify before we close off this?
[00:51:41] Speaker C: No, I think it was really clear and about the only contribution that I can make to this podcast besides random comments here and there is. So this provided a lot of really great videos, actually, that you can watch with your kids. So we're going to include it within the comments. Comments. One of them was, you mentioned it earlier, Dawkins sort of observation of termites within a termite mound. And he kind of belittles their abilities. And so he's like, they. He says here, the termites, they don't have the foggiest idea of what a termite mound should look like. None of them have a picture or a plan or, you know, a blueprint anywhere. Which, of course, you know, this isn't like a Disney movie. They're not going to have little plans and talking and that sort. So, yes, no, he's absolutely right there. But he sort of says, well, they just follow a simple set of rules. They have no idea what's going on, no idea of what the other termites are doing. And actually, when you watch some of these videos, you see that that's actually not true. There's a great channel that my kids love watching on YouTube that's called Antscanada. And it's this gentleman who has been hashtag, oddly specific. Yeah, I know.
It's this guy that just started making videos of his ant farms. Full disclosure, if your kids enjoy this channel, they're gonna be bugging you for an ant farm. But it's fascinating. He has one that I'm including specifically on weaver ants and how these ants work together. You'll have certain ants who are biting onto leaves to hold him down, other ants that are grabbing larva to use the silk that the larva produces to glue the leaves together. Because the leaf, when they get them all connected, they provide this perfectly humid environment that nurtures the larva and everything. And it works out great for them. And so it actually shows that these critters working together to get to this common goal. Now, I agree that with Dawkins that, you know, I'm sure they don't have this grand structure. They're not imagining that they're going to make these termite mounds that are 30ft tall. They may not understand that aspect of the end result, but they do understand, okay, we do have to ventilate. We have to keep the termite mound within a certain temperature, otherwise the larva is going to die. The fungus isn't going to grow, that they eat. It's going to be too humid, you know, it'll kill off the colony. So we have these amazing structures. And another video that I included is how architects have actually used how termites have built these mounds to construct buildings in.
[00:54:04] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:54:04] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:54:05] Speaker A: That's reverse engineering right there. Yeah.
[00:54:07] Speaker C: So because they were. The reason is, is this architect was challenged to build this building. I forget where it's. It's in Africa. But they didn't, they wanted this huge building, but they didn't want to pay for the cost of how much it would cost to air condition. So he had to figure out how this building could be air conditioned without actually using AC units. So he looked at termite mounds and how they did their air conditioning and he actually made this building that functions at something like 35% less energy consumption than any other building there.
[00:54:36] Speaker A: And impressive.
[00:54:37] Speaker C: So, I mean, you imagine how hot Africa gets. The building stays a very comfortable, they say, 82 degrees because of what he's using here.
[00:54:45] Speaker B: That was Hilary Morgan Ferrer and Amy Davison, hosts of the Mama Bear apologetics
[email protected] ripping ever so kindly into Richard Dawkins book Outgrowing God. If you want to learn more, by the way, about the intelligent design implications of termite architecture, check out chapter five of the Discovery Institute Press book, Animal Evolution and the Mysterious Origin of Ingenious Instincts. It's available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And do check out the Mama bear
[email protected] for more great apologetics resources, including the rest of their Doubting Dawkins podcast series. For ID the future, this has been Tom Gilson. Thank you for listening.
[00:55:37] Speaker A: Visit
[email protected] and intelligentdesign.org this program is copyright Discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
