 Everybody, today we are discussing older creation and naturalistic evolution and we are starting right now. Ladies and gentlemen, thrilled to have you here for another epic discussion. This is going to be a lot of fun, folks. If this is your first time here to modern day debate, wanna let you know we are a nonpartisan platform so we have nothing but debates on this channel and we wanna let you know as well that no matter what walk of life you come from, we really do hope you feel welcome. We're excited to have you here as we try to have just a mix of people from all walks of life. And also, if it's your first time here, consider hitting that subscribe button as we have many more debates to come. Dr. Randall Rouser will be taking on David Smalley next week, in fact this coming Monday, on the classic atheism versus Christianity debate so that should be a fun one. And with that, let's get into today's debate. We are really excited, like I said, call it a discussion, it's gonna be easy going and we are very excited to have these speakers with us though. This is going to be a really fun one, folks. I think you're gonna enjoy it immensely. So let's get it started. In particular, we'll have kind of five to 10 minute opening flexible kind of opening statements and then we'll have that open conversation followed by Q and A. So if you have a question, feel free. Fire it into the old live chat. If you tag me with at modern day debate, makes it easier for me to get every question in that list. Super Chat is also an option in which case you can not only ask a question but if you want you could make a comment or objection to the speakers and they of course would get a chance to respond to that. Also it'll push your question or comment to the top of the list for the Q and A. And with that, I wanna let you know before we officially get started, I have linked both of the speakers in the description to make it as convenient as possible. If you'd like to hear more folks, just click on those links below. So with that, very excited, and we'll just do a quick hello first and just kinda see what our guests have been up to. So Erica, good to have you back. We'll start with you. Very happy to have you. And what have you been up to lately? James, I'm always ridiculously hyped to hop on modern day debate and have a discussion. I'm very excited for today's discussion in particular. I've seen a lot of what Dr. Rana does and I'm just excited to have a chat. Lately, I've literally just been working on my thesis. That's what I've been spending most of my time doing so. Excellent, really exciting. And Fuzz, you've asked me to call you. Dr. Rana, it's Fuzz, we're excited to have you. It's a pleasure. And so any sort of projects you've been working on recently, anything like talks you're preparing, anything like that, we're excited to hear about it. And thanks for being here. Yeah, yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me and I'm looking forward to hanging out with Erica and having a good time chatting. Right now, like everybody else, I'm trying to manage this whole COVID-19 pandemic. And also in the midst of that, I'm trying to finish up a book on the biochemical anthropic principle. I think most people are familiar with the idea of the cosmological anthropic principle that there is design and fine tuning in the universe. And the question that I'm approaching is, does that idea of fine tuning apply to biochemical systems? And so finishing up the book, so that's something that's been a lot of fun working on. Really interesting. Excellent. Well, it's exciting to have both of you here and Erica's gonna get the ball rolling. So we'll hand it over to Erica as she does this, like I said, kind of flexible opening. The floor is all yours, Erica. Absolutely. As usual, I'm gonna share this screen here so you guys can see my little PowerPoint here. And a little full slideshow screen there if it'll actually let me. Okay, can you guys all see that or can you see that in general? Let's see, I'm gonna shrink it down just one sec. But yes, definitely we can see it and I'm just gonna adjust it and there we go. Absolutely. Okay, I'm gonna get started then. So we're discussing kind of naturalistic evolution versus fine tuning, older creation, things of this nature. So I've titled my presentation, How Did Biodiversity Arise? And it's by me, Erica, that's it, give it on YouTube. And we've got this nice Archean Earth painting in the background that I just, I really think it's a cool looking picture. So I chose it to kind of hit things off. For those of you who don't know, I'm currently pursuing my master's of research in primatology. So I like monkeys and apes and things like that. So here's my position in a nutshell. Where I'm coming from, some 3.8 to 4 billion years ago, simple life arose from chemical evolution. Through the next several billion years, life proliferated in form, including the following, the emergence of eukaryotes, irradiation of body plans of Navy Akron and the Cambrian, the transition to land, diversification, the Paleozoic, Mesozoic and Cenozoic, and the evolution of cognitively specialized apes. So that is to say humans. And it's those very specialized apes that allow us to have this conversation that we're having now, which I'm very grateful for. So what Dr. Ronan and I seem to agree on if I'm getting this correctly in what I've seen him do before here on YouTube is the definition of evolution and fitness, the age of the earth. He is an old earth creationist to my knowledge, which is absolutely fantastic. I love when we agree on that premise because I usually devote a chunk of my presentation to explaining why I think the earth is indeed very old and the evolution of some hominids. But I do think that we are different a bit as well because while I'm not a biochemist, I do find what I've read on the origin of life studies and pro to eukaryotic transition to be somewhat compelling. I find the Cambrian explosion unproblematic and I hold that all humans today hail from a lineage of Myocene apes potentially starting with St. Helanthobrace genensis. Additionally, I also hold that nearly everything humans do and are is either identical to or an altered version of what other animals display. I do think there are some things that are uniquely human but I don't think that they're unique enough to completely separate us from the animal kingdom. I would love to pick Dr. Ronan's brain on kind of where he draws those lines and things like that. So the origin of life, currently there seems to exist some plausible mechanisms for the emergence of nucleic acids, proteins and lipids. But frankly, as compelling as I find it, I'm not necessarily married to any particular hypothesis or kind of line of thinking. I think that this is still a very new field and a lot is changing. So I'd love to hear what Dr. Ronan thinks about all of that stuff. But I did find some of the work on by like Jeremy England on statistical physics of self-replication and the argument that the thermodynamic, the laws of thermodynamics actually lend themselves to the formation of life in order to increase entropy to be kind of interesting. Endosymbiosis, I thought it was really interesting that we've got some organisms today, some amoebas actually that are exhibiting like types of endosymbiosis. They're consuming these organelles and incorporating them into their own body plans. I find that very interesting as far as how can we apply that backwards in time? If we can see this occurring even in the simplest version now, what does that say about having a billion to two billion years to work on a very simple single cellular life? Multicellularity, I'm sure Dr. Ronan has seen the paper from 2019. I thought this was just a cool paper regardless of what you make of it. Essentially, they found that predation when like the predation of single cellular algae led to multicellularity in the species which I thought was very interesting and it wasn't just colony formation if memory serves. The Cambrian explosion, I mean, it should be very evident that when it comes to micro stuff, I'm not nearly as well-versed as anthropology and the like, but the Cambrian explosion, I know at least a bit about, it's predated by the rich Ediacaran period. So in the Ediacaran, we've got basal burrs like acarya, this was very recent organism that was just discovered considered to be one of the first bilaterians. It's got symmetry, differentiation of the head and the rear. And this animal created a critical link between the Ediacaran and the Cambrian. So essentially, I think that the Cambrian explosion is really more of a slow burn because we see all of these weird fleshy mats and fronds and fractal type things lurking around to the Ediacaran that then do give rise to a myriad of different forms and body plans. But we're far cry from where we were in the Cambrian where we were like, look, it's just all of these random super complex organisms popping in and out of nowhere. So I think that that area of research is getting richer as we move along. Human evolution, I think that there's obviously very rich fossil record with an impeccably smooth transition from a basal sehelicopistidensis or something very much like it to anatomically modern homo sapiens traits. We have genetic analyses that links humans to the other apes and the old world monkeys and the haplarines, et cetera, et cetera. And behavior gets around. So traits once thought unique to humans are actually found in many of the extant primates as well as indications of them are found at fossil sites. So we see tool use in nearly all the hominins and in modern GS10 and Cluton. We also see it in many of the old world and the new world monkeys, which is really interesting. Many of the platurines are actually in their stone age, which was previously thought to be a genus pen thing alone or a hominoid thing alone. We find language components in geladas, Campbell's monkeys, Diana monkeys, chimps, binobos, and likely many hominins. And we can't prove it with any of the hominins, right? Because they aren't around anymore. But it serves to reason that if we're finding them in organisms that are relatively basal now, that we probably would have had we'd been present seen something of a gradient. Art, we see art in anatomically modern sapiens, archaic sapiens, Neanderthals. We found some art in some cave sites in 2018 and Denisovans in 2019. I think it serves to reason that if we find them in art associated with these organisms, we probably would have seen it in Heidelbergensis as well, maybe even erect this. Empathy, genus pen exhibits potential theory of mind in consolation and informing ignorant group members of danger and in thievery. This is something that we, you look at this two decades ago, we wouldn't have thought that necessarily to be possible. We generally thought that empathy, at least to a certain degree, was a human's only thing. And spite, of course, are very spiteful monkeys, very spiteful hominoids, and humans can be spiteful as well. Here are some cool images that I just thought I'd pull up. Over to the left on the top, we kind of have our, this was in Spain, the Neanderthalensis arc that was found from 2018. It's just some interesting cave art. Obviously you see some familiar looking shapes there that imply some things going on in the noggans of these dudes. And then at the bottom, we've got some weird design etching patterns that are very clearly intentional that are attributed to Denisovans. They're found in the same caves that we find Denisovans remains. We also see consolation and of course these chimpanzees. This is a male that recently lost a fight. And one of his siblings actually, I think it's a brother has come up and is consoling him. Interestingly enough chimpanzees and all of genus pen, so chimps and bonobos, share 90% of their gestures with human toddlers. So I found that to be very interesting. This isn't something that we have to teach them. It's something that they just kind of share. It's almost implicit, which implies some very interesting connotations to the origin of communication and language. And then I like this picture of this baby human and a baby gorilla reacting in a similar way to a stethoscope tool use. This is very cool over here on the left. Chimpanzees and orangutans have been seen using sticks and sharpened spears that are sharpened sticks and regular sticks that they've done with their canine teeth to hunt. Now they're not throwing them or anything super, super incredible like that. But the females are actually more likely to use tools than the males in chimpanzees because they go off by themselves and they use the spears to skewer bush babies, which is fascinating. And that's something that they didn't see. They didn't learn this by observing it from people. They figured it out themselves. The orang on the bottom is copying fishermen, which is interesting in its own right. On the top right, this is kind of funny. This is a, I think she's a bonobo, but her name is Julie. She was observed in a group of four different chimpanzees. And in one group, Julie was obviously present. She started putting a piece of grass in her ear. And all of the other chimps started copying her. And then this diffused to other groups. So this is this weird monkey sea, monkey dew, cultural diffusion in a very, very basic way. There's some interesting work on that. Then of course the mirror test of self-recognition and things of that nature. So human itself is a gradient. So this is a paper from 2020 that suggests, it used to be just humans and Neanderthals. And it was humans and Denisovans were interpreting. And now it's Neanderthals and Denisovans along with a distantly related ghost lineage. So all that's really interesting. And it really kind of makes you think, like what is it that makes us human? What makes us so unique? Is everything a big smeared gradient from this common ancestor to present? I can't speak to it, but I'm interesting to talk about it. So statistics, I always throw these up here just for the heck of it. Separate ancestry is very much not parsimonious with the data that we see. So I used to be a pretty firm and theistic evolutionist, but I was never an older creationist because I always saw the continuity of life to be pretty compelling, but that's just me. I would read through these, but they're long and I don't want to take up too much time. I'd rather get to chatting. So some questions for Dr. Rana. What in your opinion makes a biogenesis impossible? I'm not sold on any particular hypotheses. I think metabolism first is interesting, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. What reservations do you have about the endosymbiosis hypothesis? So the jump from promute carryouts. Do you still hold that the Cambrian explosion is without explanation? How do you grapple with the concept of extinction events? So this is something that I don't really talk about in my presentation, but I think we've got these really interesting like mass death events occurring in the fossil record, where sometimes we'll see, I find the most interesting one is that of the Devonian where we've got multi-toed tetrapods with big lizard-like things, lizard-like and amphibian-like things with five to eight toes. Now, after this big extinction event in the Devonian, all of our tetrapods have five toes only. So I think that that's very interesting for the sake of continuity in that for whatever reason, those organisms had some kind of advantage or they were just lucky, one or the other, but I have a problem with kind of this punctuated progressive creation. And finally, what empirical and standardized criteria indicate that anatomically-moderate humans did not evolve from a prior lineage? So, and I don't know necessarily that Dr. Rana holds that they didn't, I'm just kind of curious to pick his brain on that. And that's all I've got. So I'm really grateful for the time and I'm really excited. Absolutely, very excited to jump into the open. Well, actually it's great. So Dr. Rana, flexible five-determinate opening statement, the floor is all yours. And then when you guys are ready, we'll go into the open conversation. Thanks for being here. Yeah, excuse me, yeah, thanks. I appreciated that presentation, Erica, very much. And I don't have a PowerPoint presentation to present, but I'll just maybe help to lay out what my position is and maybe give some insight as to why I hold that position and then maybe we can go from there and have a conversation and begin to flesh out some of the specifics. And just by way of background, I am an old-earth creationist, but I didn't start out life that way. In fact, when I was an undergraduate student, I was an agnostic for lack of a better way to describe my views. I didn't know if God existed, I didn't care. I was real interested in doing everything I could to become a biochemist. And so, like all the aspiring scientists took courses in chemistry and biology and embraced an evolutionary viewpoint on life. I had no issue with the idea that evolutionary mechanisms could fully account for not only the origin and the basic design of life, but also for the history and the diversity of life. And held that view as I went into graduate school and it was really immersing myself in the study of the cells chemical systems that number one convinced me that these systems were designed. I was just deeply impressed with the elegance and the sophistication of these systems that I was learning about. There was an ingenuity to them. And I began to really ask serious questions as to how then do we account for the origin of biochemical systems, which of course is ultimately the origin of life question. And this would have been the mid 1980s. And at that point in time as I looked through the different scenarios that were being suggested for chemical evolution for abiogenesis, I just didn't find any of those explanations to be compelling. And so I essentially drew the conclusion that really does look like there is a mind that undergirds everything that we see, at least at life's basic level. So at that point, I would have said that the origin of life looked to me to be a divine event and would have embraced some version or some form of theistic evolution at that point in time and held that view for a number of years. And over time just became, I wouldn't say disillusioned, but became concerned that maybe this idea that evolution could provide this grand explanation for everything we see in biology was probably an overstatement of the explanatory power of the evolutionary paradigm. Not to say that there's not strong explanatory power in biological evolution, but I just didn't think that it had that total explanatory power. And so for example, I do see things like the origin of euteriotic cells to be again, something that looks like is beyond the capacity of evolutionary mechanisms to account for. I'm well familiar with the Indosimbion hypothesis but yet don't find that to be overly compelling when we dig into the details of what would be required for that origin event. I do think the Cameron explosion is mysterious. I particularly what I'm troubled with with regard to the Cameron explosion isn't the explosive nature quote unquote of the event in geological history, but rather it's what would be required to generate organisms that have highly integrated organ systems and the necessity of generating these genetic programs that could create or produce body plans. And so I don't outright reject the biological evolution. I think that biological evolution does have again the capacity to explain what I would call variation, but I do see, I do have questions about whether or not those mechanisms that can account for quote unquote, micro evolution, speciation, evolution at the level of a genus or a family could actually account for biological innovation. And that's where I see there needs to be in my view, some kind of input from the outside. When it comes to the origin of humanity, my primary concern is really the notion of human exceptionalism. And I do think that you can make a robust case that human beings really do stand apart from all other creatures, including meander falls in the denose of ends. And what causes us to stand apart, I would argue would be a suite of properties that we uniquely possess, the chief being a symbolism in our capacity to manipulate symbols. I do think that human beings again, seem to be distinct modern humans and atomic behavior behaviorally modern humans seem to be distinct. And so, whether one views the origin of humanity in evolutionary terms or through the work of a divine event where God is creating human beings specifically, I do think the most important concept is ultimately the idea of human exceptionalism. I think, again, Eric and I share the idea that the earth is old, we do recognize that the fossil record is a real description of life's natural history. I do think that there are features in biology that can be readily accounted for through evolution. I just don't think the totality of biology can be explained in that way. And that's why I hold to an older creationist position. I'm not real comfortable with the idea of at least some versions of theistic evolution because I don't know how you would distinguish between theistic evolution and evolution that is just happening through natural process mechanisms. Although I am intrigued by the ideas of Simon Conway Morris and that school of thought that he is part of, that it seems, as I understand it seems to be arguing that there's something built into the laws of nature that are in effect prescribing evolutionary endpoints ahead of time and that there are constraints within the laws of nature that are dictating the evolutionary outcome so that there is an inevitability to evolutionary outcomes. And to me, that idea is strongly, I think, theistic in nature can be co-opted for somebody who's a theist. And it really is a very different type of theistic evolution than I think, oftentimes I hear espoused. And so I find that idea intriguing. I'm not completely sold on it, but I do find that idea intriguing and actually exploring it to some degree in the book that I just mentioned that I'm working on which the working title was fit for a purpose. So anyway, that's kind of a broad overview of my perspective. So one other point, and then we can open up a conversation, is I do acknowledge that in effect, what many people believe to be a compelling evidence for an evolutionary history of life would be essentially shared biological features that we observe among organisms, including human beings and again, the fossil record. And so I think part of my project has to be, then how do I account for the features of life's history that seem to be compelling in terms of an evolutionary framework? And I draw from ideas that were part of the scientific construct prior to Darwin. The ideas of Louis Agassiz that life's history reflects a series of progressive creation acts on the part of a creator. And so I tap into that idea of Agassiz and try to contemporize it in my work. I love Sir Richard Owen. He's one of my heroes in science and I find his idea of archetype biology as a way to explain homologies is intriguing. And so again, I'm looking to contemporize those ideas. So to me, for example, when I look at like the hominin fossil record, I don't look at it with the idea that this fossil record argues against evolution. I recognize why people view the hominin fossil record as compelling evidence for human evolution. Rather, my project is how do I make sense of that fossil record from an old earth creationist perspective recognizing that there's other things that drive my view of old earth creationism. Namely, again, I think the elegant design that we see in biochemistry, the challenges to abiogenesis. And then what I do see is just incredible and elegant design throughout the totality of biology. So anyway, that's kind of my perspective in a nutshell. You bet, thanks so much. We'll go right into it. Yeah, so I think that's really, that helped in a lot of ways that helped me kind of conceptualize where you're coming from. I guess my question would be, it's almost a bit strange because you say, I'm arguing from an old earth position and you can understand how the things like the fossil record of that nature, the transitional forms and the hominins, how that could be indicative of evolution. But at the same time, I guess I'm struggling to understand why then theistic evolution wouldn't be compelling to you because I used to be a pretty fervent theistic evolutionist. And the way that I would look at it was that evolution, very similar to aspects of chemistry or physics is simply a mechanism that was put in place to inch and the mechanism that was perfect and that it kept life from failing. No, elect has all these capacities to adapt and to change to the world around it. And so no matter how many mass extinctions you throw at it, it's gonna come back stronger and better off for it, at least for those given environments. So I guess, like, I don't really understand why that wouldn't be the route that you would take, like why you would go to more older creation route than, okay, God puts a mechanism into place, he sparks life and then lets it run. Yeah, well, it's a combination of both scientific and theological convictions. Scientifically, I held to theistic evolution for a number of years. And even now I still play the game, so could I revert back to that viewpoint? Sure. And to me, I think if I embrace that idea, I'm still left with no explanation that's satisfying to me for the origin of life or the origin of eukaryotic cells. I do still think the origin of body plans is mysterious. I'm not sure that current evolutionary theory can genuinely explain what I would call biological novelty or biological innovation, but yet I do see the reality of evolution in at least in a limited sense. So I see evolutionary processes as part of God's providence where it allows life to have a robust element to it, but I don't see evolution as having genuine bonafide creative power and potential. So that's part of my scientific hesitation with that view. And then theologically, when I look at the creation accounts, it does seem as if where in the creation accounts does speak about God, bringing about the origin of different life forms that the words that are used seem to imply God's direct and personal involvement. I also see, again, the issue of a historical Adam and Eve and the image of God is really very important to me as a Christian and so I don't know how I can preserve those ideas theologically and embrace the idea of wholesale human evolution. Now, again, I find the ideas of Simon Conway Morris really provocative and there's a good grief. I think it's Andreas Wagner, he's a German biologist who actually argues that even when you look at the body plans, his argument is that those body plans actually arise out of constraints within the laws of nature. And so again, it kind of gives you this eerie sense that isn't it interesting that the constraints in laws of nature are actually dictating body plans, not a contingent evolutionary history and in that the body plans that are again, arising out of nature seem to be exactly what you would need to have the diversity of life that we see on the earth. That's kind of the theme of the book that I'm working on now fit for a purpose. So that would be a version of theistic evolution I could be much more comfortable with because it's strongly teleological in nature. The way I see the nature of the mechanism of evolution as broadly understood to me doesn't seem to have a teleological element to it. In other words, I don't know what in that process that would somehow suggest there's a mind behind it versus that it just looks like it's a natural process mechanism. So those are in a very broad sense kind of my concerns with the theistic evolution. I'm just curious, what Erica, what caused you to go from a TE position to more of an agnostic or maybe a naturalistic view of evolution? Yeah, it's interesting. I've been asked that a couple of times and it's always been for me. It's never been a science thing. I mean, like I said, for my initial position, I was fine all the way up to, you know, abiodensis quote unquote, but I imagined that it was something that, you know, got put into place and then sparked and then just let it run with this mechanism that kept life running and kept it going and kept it robust and I was very cool with that. It wasn't until I kind of started looking into, unfortunately, like the history of the texts that make up the Bible and kind of looking at an anthropological perspective, comparing that to other like religions and neighboring areas. And, you know, I started noticing a lot of similarities between the sort of the stories and things of that nature. And it started to take on a very, very cultural diffusion route for me that looked very similar to any other culture that you would have multiple cultures sitting together, trading stories, tweaking them and doing things like that. And because the Bible is so large and so robust and there's so many books to it, it's made it very interesting and somewhat easy to track it through time and looking at what all it's been through, it's kind of taken on more of a human character to me in a lot of ways where I look at the writings and I think, okay, like the long and short of it would be, it feels like a book that was written by people. And a lot of the things in it espoused very human emotions. You know, I'm like, for instance, I'm very into the idea of Jesus as a person. I think that a lot of the things that he espoused and taught are excellent. But the God of the Old Testament to me is very much a kind of a classic patriarch in the sense that he encompasses all of the things that would have been valuable and kind of exalted at the time in one singular figure that then takes care of those whom he watches over. So yeah, for me, it was almost just like a moment where I was like, wow, this feels like a classic human text. And then I started to wonder, okay, well, why do we treat it so much differently than we treat other texts that some people hold in other parts of the world equally as venerated. And then when I started to look into the history of other texts, I was noticing a lot of like cross-over and similarities. You know, and that's why I'm kind of in like an agnostic position where it's like, I'm still trying to seek out, I mean, I'm open to anything to be quite honest. So I'm just kind of looking into the deeper aspects of that and the historicities and things of that nature. And it was sort of in concordance with that that I was like, okay, and I was left with, all right, well, now I've got this worldview where I've got the science and the only part of it that I was kind of, you know, after I've kind of made that transition that I was like, all right, I didn't really know very much about was the abiogenesis aspect. And when I started looking into it, I was kind of like, okay, I can see how some of these would be plausible. And given that we're dealing with, and again, I'm not sold on any particular hypotheses. When I was going up through high school, it was always, oh, it's RNA world. Like RNA world was the one. And now it's more like metabolism first. And some people are like, oh, maybe it's more of like a membrane deal. And once I looked into it, I was like, okay, I could see several different ways that this could happen. But even if we were to create life in a lab using conditions that we think are prebiotic, we still can't prove that that's necessarily how it did happen. So I think it's always going to remain somewhat of a mystery. And in that aspect, I'm very loose on the whole, well, life is here and there was a lot of time. And we have a lot of mechanisms that are workable. So I don't consider it as much of a stumbling block. And then I consider evolution as a mechanism to be impeccably robust, basically from, I mean, again, I'm macroscopic life. So I primarily look at like eocene, oligocene to present and the evolution of primates and diversification of primates. And so when I look at it in that aspect, I'm like, oh wow, like I'm blown away by perceived parsimony, I suppose. So I just think it's a very, I think your position is very interesting. I guess from my perspective, I'm kind of like, I guess I still don't understand why atheistic evolution would be a problem because for when I was looking at it, I guess before I was all the way back to, well, God just put a mechanism in and set it in motion. I was like, well, where there are problems, maybe he just steps in, maybe each mass extinction, there was a new, it's like a blank slate. I always called the Cabrian like God's deviant art phase. Like he gets on there and he's drawn all this crazy stuff and doing all this weird experimentation. But now I look at the Cabrian and I find it very interesting through, and I'm sorry, I'm rambling, I'm almost finished, but through a lens of evolutionary biology, it almost seems like we're starting with all these really wacky, inefficient body plans. And the one that works the best kind of rises to the top and proliferates and outcompetes everything else, which is why I think it's very interesting that right when we start getting multi-cellular life that's relatively complex, at least compared to what came before, we start seeing like wacky things like hallucinogenia or opobinia, these guys that just literally look like they were made up for Ridley Scott movie. But then things start getting relatively, relatively monomorphic again. And it's like, well, we've got these forms that work. And then after every single mass extinction, that same thing happens again. There's rapid diversification, all these cool different forms, and then something takes the lead. And to me, that is somewhat robust. Sorry, if you wanna just, I don't even know if you wanna run with that. I guess I could ask you a question. I saw in one of your presentations that you don't consider like Neanderthals to necessarily be human, I guess, in a colloquial aspect. Could you like dig in on that a little, maybe? Yeah, okay, that would be good. Yeah, I mean, my perspective is that Neanderthals are fascinating creatures clearly in their own right that had some obviously significant cognitive capacity that was reflected in the tool usage and the culture that they displayed. But I see them ultimately as cognitively inferior and again distinct from modern humans in significant ways. And to me, I'm not actually convinced that Neanderthals had a capacity for symbolism or an open-ended generative capacity. You mentioned the discovery of quote unquote Neanderthal art. Well, the evidence for Neanderthal art is primarily based on the dating of the art in certain caves in, I think it's Spain and France, where the dates come back in some instances to be in the 60,000 year range plus or minus something. And of course that's prior to when modern humans made their way into Europe, so the argument would be, well, Neanderthals must have produced this art. But when you actually, first of all, dig into the details of that work, it's only a handful of samples where you actually have those high dates. And in fact, even samples taken from the same art work actually will give you dates that would be much more in line with modern humans making it where the 60,000 year date seems to be an outlier that stands apart from all the other measurements. But that whole dating is based, it's actually a really cool technique, at least conceptually, with the idea that as you have the water flowing over the cave walls, it deposits calcite and within the calcite is radioactive uranium. And that will undergo decay to produce thorium. And so the uranium thorium ratio then can give you in principle the date of the calcite when that was deposited. So if you can get pieces of calcite beneath the art and on top of the art, that gives you a sandwich for when that art was created. And the problem is, is that it's an open system. So the water is continuing to flow over the calcite deposit when it forms. And thorium is more soluble than uranium. And so what ends, no, I think that's the, wait a minute. Yeah, I think the thorium, no, no, the uranium is more soluble than the thorium. And so what ends up happening is that as the water flows over it, you're preferentially dissolving your uranium leaving the thorium behind, which actually gives you an artificially high date. And there's been a number of follow-up studies that have been done using that same method, but actually recognizing that it's an open system and doing things to be very careful to ensure that the open nature of the system isn't influencing the results. And in those instances, they all come back questioning whether or not that cave art is that old and whether or not Neanderthals were the ones that produced it. And so there's a number of claims about Neanderthals mastering fire, making musical instruments, burying their dead ritualistically, the list goes on. And in every one of those claims, there's follow-up studies that really seem to throw a lot of water on those claims that they don't, those claims don't stand up to, to screw me. And to me, the clincher for the idea that Neanderthals weren't like us as humans, that they were cognitively distinct. And I would say cognitively inferior is the insight that comes from Ian Tattersol and Nome Chomsky and a number of other co-authors. This was a PLOS one paper where they were looking at the origin of language and they were using symbolism as a proxy for the origin of language. Because symbolism leaves something behind in the archeological record language doesn't. And they pointed out that that when Neanderthals appear on the scene, there's really very little by way of genuine progress in terms of their technology. It relatively remains static. And Neanderthals arguably were on earth longer than we've been on earth. And yet we appear on the scene and very quickly after our appearance, there's this inkling of symbolism that's emerging in the archeological record. And it's as if our technology just explodes, that it's this exponential growth in technology. And their argument is there's got to be something that distinguishes those two different trajectories for technology. And they argue that it seems as if what humans possess is not only symbolism, but this open ended generative capacity. And that they argue that this is what really distinguishes modern humans from Neanderthals. And from my perspective, I think you could make the argument that symbolism and open ended generative capacity really are signatures for the image of God and could be used at minimum to argue for human exceptionalism. So that would be, to me, what I think to be why I would distinguish Neanderthals from humans. I readily accept the fact that it does indeed look like there was interbreeding that took place. You know, I find that interesting for a number of reasons. One is I'm, you know, my understanding is from the genetics that we have for Neanderthals is that they formed these smaller insular population groups that when humans were migrating, you know, through the Middle East and into Europe and Asia, those groups presumably were relatively small groups. So the likelihood of encounter to me seems to be remote, even though there was significant overlap in our existences. And then on top of that, you know, there isn't, there does appear to be developmental differences in humans and Neanderthals where that at least we know from the time of birth to adulthood that there are very different types of developmental regimes that you see. And where it doesn't look like Neanderthals, at least my understanding, spent much time in adolescence based on the microanatomy of Neanderthal teeth. The brain development seems to be different. There does seem to be fundamental differences in the Neanderthal and human brain. Yes. You know, focusing on the parietal lobe and in particular. Percipital too, yeah. Yeah, and so I think you could make the argument that really humans and Neanderthals are fundamentally distinct in ways that support human exceptionalism and human uniqueness. And so that to me is really the thing that I find most significant, from my perspective as an older creationist because it allows the preservation of the image of God. And the fact that it looks as if the symbolism seems to be unique to humans and shows up very close to the time of humans, you could take that as being, in a sense, kind of a creation event. So that's how I would interpret that. I don't know if that, you know. Yeah, no. I'm curious to see your reaction to that. Yeah, I'm interested. I'm with you. First of all, I want to say, I am definitely, with regard to anthropology, I am definitely one of the people who's like, yes, I think Neanderthals are not a subspecies. I think they are specific. I think they're their own species. In my opinion, you have Heidelbergensis and then you've got an offshoot of Neanderthals and then you've got an offshoot of sapiens. And I would say, I agree with you. I don't think that the evidence is compelling that they were creating musical instruments. I do think that some of the burials suggests some kind of ritualism. I think we find some with like pollen grains and things like that that suggests burial with flowers and things of that nature. I think that there are some very interesting like jewelry that's been found in caves attributed to Denisovans from like 100,000 years ago, which is indeed, I would say certainly before humans would have gotten to the area that Denisovans inhabited. So I would look at that and I would say, I think I find a compelling reason to believe that there's more of a gradient than I would think that you would propose. Language is a really, really interesting thing to talk about because I agree with you. You can't track language through the fossil record, but you can track symbolism. So when we're looking at extant primates, we can look to their communication patterns and ask ourselves the question, okay, how kind of derived are their communication styles, I guess you would say. And then you can use that to kind of think, all right, well, what's actually going on in their head? Because it's one thing to see, you know, monkeys calling to one another and they understand what certain calls mean, but for a long time there was the question of like, all right, well, are they just reacting to the acoustics or their underlying semantics? Because obviously there's a difference between, monkey hears a call from someone else and they associate that call with danger versus they hear a call from someone else and they see a picture of the danger in their brain. So there was an interesting study, you know, done on that concept on Diana monkeys that was, oh gosh, I wanna say it was like a decade ago. I can pull the author up in just a second, I have like a research document for it. But what they basically did was they recorded, Diana monkeys are sexually dimorphic in their call pattern. So males and females make different calls and then they have different calls for different predators. So if they see a leopard, they make certain call and if they see an eagle, they make a different call. And it's important because if there's a leopard, you should probably go up into the trees and if it's an eagle, you might wanna come down from the trees. So what they did was they would, they would do a prime probe method. So they would first, they'd play a primer call for all of the monkeys and they would first, first they tried it with a leopard call and then eagle call and then they got them primed kind of to that and then they would play the male warning call and watch what the females were doing. So they would play a male warning call for a leopard and then they would play a leopard call. And the reaction to the primer was much more intense than their reaction to the probe because obviously they're hearing that male call and they're trying to be quiet because they're like, we don't wanna attract attention from this leopard and they've already kind of reacted to it. So they do the same thing with the eagle. But what was really interesting is when they would play a primer for like an eagle and the primer being the male call for, oh no, there's an eagle. And then they played a leopard call and it was an enormous difference from what they were seeing previously because the monkeys were surprised and their reaction was very like, it was very intense because obviously they weren't suspect, they weren't expecting that, they felt lied to. And then the males that they had taken those calls from were less trusted because they knew that they'd basically been duped. And the conclusions from the paper was there's something semantic going on there where the fact is it's not just an acoustic thing, it's a semantic thing as well. And the fact that this is occurring in dinnons, which are guinea monkeys, which are very basal monkeys, it says a lot for, okay, well, what's going on in our higher level hominoids? Like gibbons have these elaborate, beautiful monomorphic, or sorry, very beautiful calls that are dimorphic in nature and they're monogamous. So the males and females, they form these elaborate songs with one another and they're ridiculously complicated and they follow linguistic laws for human languages. And this is something that's mirrored in the dumbest of all the old world monkeys, which are geladas. They are these planes living, grass eating baboons. They sit up there and all they do all day is they eat grass. Their social systems are really weird, but they sit up there, they eat grass, they hang out, they're minding their own business. But a professor of mine went up there and was like, all right, this would be really interesting. Let's record their communication style and see if it follows language laws. Because if these guys are the most basal, it would be very interesting to see if they also followed the laws, the laws being Zip's law and Menzerath's law. And they did, their very simple chitterings followed these linguistic laws that every human language that we know of follows today, which it's basically linguistic efficiency for getting a message across. And so now you've got this weird connected gradient of like, okay, we've got the primer for language that's really, really basal. And then you've got something with a little bit of semantics going on. And you could take that further with the hominoids where we see all of, you know, a wide library, a dictionary, if you will, of gestures that are mimicked in human children, which that just blows my mind. You know, these things are somewhat innate and as inherently social creatures, there should be a selection for understanding things of that nature and gays following and kind of stuff like that. So as someone who's like interested in anthropology and human evolution, what I'm thinking to myself when I see studies like this is I'm thinking, all right, I did not expect these animals to be capable of this. What does that say about the organisms that have brain cases that are vastly superior to those of genus Pan, the chimps and the bonobos, the australopithecines, what were they up to? What were the parentheses up to? What about, you know, early, like early homo habilis and rudolfensis and erectus. So it's not something that I can necessarily prove, but it's something that I would say is expected by evolutionary theory, right? I agree with you that all of a sudden there seems to be this explosion of knowledge in anatomically modern sapiens like 100,000 years ago where we're doing things that others weren't doing, including like 45,000 years ago, we see the domestication of the dog, which was big, big ups on that one. That like gave us a huge edge on the ender calls and Pat Shipman, she's an anthropologist who actually suggests that the domestication of dogs may have helped drive the neanderthals into extinction. So I do agree with you there, but I think that evolution kind of predicts that, right? Like whenever you've got, sorry if you can hear my dog barking in the background, speaking of dogs, but I think it's very interesting that in the technology in an anthropologic setting or morphology in evolutionary setting, when something works, it catches like a wildfire and all of a sudden it's everywhere, be it a body plan, like we were talking about in certain aspects of like the later Cambrian or technology and humans as late as like the first computer and then everybody's making computers and making them more efficient and doing all of these things. So I guess to me, the aspects of human exceptionalism, they really do just seem like souped up versions of what we would see in kind of natural selection. I do think humans are exceptional in a lot of ways. I think other animals are exceptional in a lot of ways too, in different ways, but exceptional. And so I guess, you know, Robert Sapolsky and I want to get your thoughts on this. He famously said in the lecture, he was a big baboon guy, like he just researched baboons of the heck out of baboons. He loved them, which I don't understand because baboons are really mean, but he said to characterizing the human animal, most things that humans do, other animals just do. We do, we share a lot of characteristics with all other mammals, including like hormones, pheromones, communication, whatever. There's a handful of things that humans do that we do the same thing as other animals, but we tweak them. We do them slightly differently, you know, our communication patterns, certain kind of certain social hierarchies, innovation with tools, things like that. And then he said, there's a very small group of things that makes us totally unique. And his example, which I thought was very poignant was he was like, we empathize with things that, we empathize across space and time, which is something that other organisms just don't do. We see a picture of something sad and it makes us sad. And that thing may not even exist. So humans are exceptional, I would agree. I just think our exceptionalism, it looks like it's got this clear gradient to me as we move along. And I wish we could see the extant animals, you know, of the hominin fossil record, but I'm interested to hear your thoughts on that just in general. Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, and I've not done a lot of work or thinking in some of the areas that you're talking about with regard to, you know, primate behavior, right? And though it's fascinating, and I was mentioning to you before we started the program, the work of Jill Pruitts. And, you know, to me, I think it's fascinating that you do see a number of studies primarily, you know, my familiaries with work on chimpanzees, where they're doing just these incredible things, you know, in the wild. For example, the observation that chimps will take a tree branch and manufacture a spear with it, and then it will actually attempt to hunt bush babies using that spear and have been observed successfully doing that. Or, you know, the idea that chimps can, will make use of plants for medicinal purposes or the construction of bedding in trees. It's where they're selecting, you know, tree branches that have the right type of tensile properties and then also have insect repellent properties. And these are not necessarily the most commonly available branches in the area. So they're, they have an understanding, I guess, of botany, or at least some limited understanding of botany, right? And so that's, you know, to me is really remarkable. And there was a, I'm not gonna remember the reference, a paper a number of years ago that was published looking at a chimpanzee archeological site where they were looking at stone tools made by chimps that actually, and it actually was an archeological site because the site dated at, I don't know, 5,000 years ago or something like that. And it was before, I think humans were actually in that particular area. And anyway, but they were noticing that the tool usage was very reminiscent of that of Homo habilis. And so their argument was what habilis is doing is really approximately what we see, you know, chimpanzees doing. And so they argue that really, you can't look at habilis as being more, you know, cognitively advanced than chimpanzees. And so taking that concept, you know, I've actually argued that in light of what the chimps are doing, could you interpret Neanderthal behavior? Could you interpret the behavior of Homo erectus through that lens? So in other words, instead of looking at the behavior of the hominins where, you know, our behavior as modern humans is the endpoint and then the mirror, or not the mirror, but the lens by which we're looking at everything, could you actually use both of those, the chimp behavior and the human behavior as the lenses? And when you do that, it really feels to me like the great apes are clustering with at least the hominins, you know, like the erectus, the habilis, maybe Neanderthals into kind of a behavioral group that again, shares certain aspects of the behavior without a modern humans, yet modern humans really do appear to be distinct. And so that's kind of the way I would, you know, where there seems to be, again, you could argue antecedents to modern human behavior that's present, you know, in the primates and in the hominins. But is that, does that antecedent necessarily, is it just necessarily a gradient to what we're doing or is there a step change? Is there a real discontinuity? And I'm the opinioners of discontinuity, but, you know, I recognize that, you know, that would be, again, a view shaped by my commitment to, you know, the image of God, right? Yeah, yeah. No, I'm with you. I mean, and I think, yeah, I think that we're just looking at it almost from slightly different angles. I would disagree that chimps map necessarily with like, or like with homo habilis or even I would even say the Australopithecines were potentially doing different things. I think that we tend to forget, I tend to forget this a lot, that chimps have been evolving for just as long as we have. So, you know, they've been coming from their own stock and we know for certain that they passed things down. Like the mothers teach the offspring. So there's this weird proto-culture, I mean, it's not even a pro, it's a real culture where they're teaching things that aren't inherent to them to their offspring. So who knows how long they've been doing this kind of thing, I can't say. At least 5,000 years, like you said, they've got an archeological record. But to me, it's almost like technology, like I said in anthropology, we see it in these big bursts, you know? It's like we've got humans mucking about doing hunter-gatherer stuff for 200,000 years. And then we start changing it up a little bit. And then we really hit our stride like 10,000 years ago and start doing weird agricultural things, you know? So I think it was almost, for me, the biggie, like when I'm like, okay, what changed? I personally think it was population growth and the exchange of ideas. So this cultural diffusion is going on where it's like, I mean, I experienced it as an individual where I'm like, why can't I get this idea that I'm trying to convey on paper out? And then when I talk to someone else about it, we give each other feedback. And being social animals, I think that was just a huge like springboard platform for our species to basically be like, while you've been living over here in the mountains and I've been living over here in the grasslands, like what can we exchange? You know, it might be that their technology has application where I live and vice versa. So for me, I think that there's a lot to be said geographically for that. And the fact that Neanderthals, like you mentioned earlier, I think part of the reason why they didn't, why there's that split between humans doing all this cool stuff and Neanderthals not really doing all that much, although we are finding out more things that they're doing. I think they attributed very basic rope use to them, knots and rope use to them very recently. But I think it's because they were isolated. I think that isolation is the death knell for social species, where it's like they just, they can't exchange any ideas. And given that we put all this stock into these big noggins, we can't exchange ideas with one another, we're hosed. But we've been playing in my kind of field this entire time. I would love to get your opinion on kind of some biochem stuff, if that's okay. So I don't hog the, hog the gas. Yeah, we definitely can do that. But just one other question really for you and not really disputing your point, I think your point's interesting. But it does seem, you know, and I do agree that, you know, that there's something that took off with modern humans that again, I think is related to symbolism. But then the question really is, what is triggering that? And to me, I think part of that trigger is, you know, not just simply cultural evolution, but I think there is some kind of biological trigger because again, I would go back to the fact that we do seem to see, again, differences in brain structure between humans and the androphals. And that difference doesn't seem to be inconsequential, at least as I understand it. And, you know, it is interesting when you do compare, you know, the human genome and the neanderthal genome that there are differences in genes that seem to be related to cognitive development. And there's even some really cool work that people have done where they're trying to map out methylation patterns and even differences in gene expression by looking at, you know, promoter binding sites and things like that and, you know, transcription factor binding sites. And you do seem to, again, have data that suggests differences in the regulation of genes that do relate to, again, cognitive abilities. Doesn't say that that means that humans were cognitively superior, but it does say there seems to be arguably cognitive differences. So it seems to me like there's something more fundamental in humans and the androphals than just simply, you know, the population sizes and that idea of cultural transmission. Not to negate that as being important. Yeah, just an additional factor. Yeah, I think you're probably right. I think it would be almost like silly of me or of an anthropologist to be like, ah, it's all cultural, you know, because you're right. There are these huge differences even just in the skull shape of a human, anatomically modern human skull versus neanderthals. They were bigger, but you're right. It's all in the parietal and occipital lobes. They would have kicked our butts at the Olympics, but they're not, you know, winning any Nobel Prizes. So I think you're right. I think it was probably a combination. For me, I just don't see a problem with selection being the result for that because we see cognition heavily selected for in social species. Organisms that innovate, especially in primates, you know, other primates literally just walk up and they're like confused, okay, what are you doing? You know, the Japanese macaques were doing this with washing and salting their sweet potatoes that they got. It's a provisioned population and one single female started washing the sweet potatoes off and taking bites in between seasoning the sweet potato, I guess you would say. And all these other Japanese macaques started copying her. And now, several generations later, they still do it or they spread rice out onto the sand because there were these coastal dwelling macaques and ground monkeys and that same female did it again. She took a scoop up of sand with all the rice in it and then washed the sand and the water to get the grains of rice like all by themselves. So she didn't have to pick them up one by one, which it's like, and again, that's culturally like all over the place in that particular population. So to me, I'm like, this is really cool, but I guess I'm not convinced that it necessarily has to be a phenomenal explanation. But again, that's kind of my field, like it's easy for me to be like, ah, like I look at all this stuff with primates and I watch primates and hopefully we'll be doing that again in the field once things open back up. But for like, I guess for me, if I were to be convinced of a theistic position, I don't think I would ever leave, go further than theistic evolution. I find it impeccably robust as an explanation. So I guess, you know, being a biochemist, like I just find that, I guess I just find it almost a little bit surprising because, you know, I'm sure you've read like Neil Shubin and some of the stuff he's done with Uriner Fish and some assembly required where he talks about like hawks genes and how just little tweakings of hawks genes can change entire body plans. And when I read that, I was like, you know, being someone who's like, I watch monkeys, I see this and I'm like, whoa, this is insane. Like you can, you know, with the Drosophila put the experiment where they grew legs where the antennae are supposed to be or antennae where the legs are supposed to be just by rearranging hawks genes. So do you not think that that's at least a viable explanation for like, especially given you're an older creationist, like we both agree there's all this time. So it's, I guess for me, it's almost like I can't, I would see it almost as an inevitability that you're gonna get changes in body plans eventually until you get something like where we are now with tetrapods and certain arthropods where it's like, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. So what are your thoughts on that? Let's kick it over to Fuzz and then just wanna give you guys a quick warning that will probably in about kind of say like three to five minutes go into the Q and A. Oh my gosh, this flew by, I've had a blast. Yeah, well, you know, maybe what I could do is address that question in the context of the origin of life. Yes, that could be cool too. Yeah, and you know, and to me, you know, I've spent, you know, 35 years thinking about the origin of life problem. Whenever I can, I'm going to the ISIL conference, the International Society for the Study of Origin of Life, you know, and even have published an article in Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres on the origin of cell membranes on the evolutionary models for the origin of cell membranes. So, you know, I am, you know, well immersed in this area. And, you know, to me, there's nothing in the laws of chemistry or physics that essentially make the origin of life conceptually impossible. In other words, the chemistry and the physics that we need for the origin of life is part of nature. And so the paper you're citing by Jeremy England about the thermodynamics. You know, I don't have any question issue with thermodynamic could the origin of life process happen. You know, but to me, the fundamental issue isn't is the chemistry or physics available, but it is what we discovered in the lab, does it actually have geochemical relevance? How does it translate from a laboratory setting it to the setting of the early Earth? And that's where, to me, I think is the Achilles heel of a biogenesis where I walk away thinking that the original life problem is intractable. And so, for example, no matter whether you do like a replicator first approach or a membrane first or metabolism first approach, they all suffer from this problem. So for example, just as a quick illustration of the issue, one of the set of experiments that were done that really gave a lot of to the RNA world hypothesis were first done in the mid 1990s. And this was where people were assembling RNA molecules on a clay surface. This is really significant because now you have clay because clay has these interstitial spaces where these building block materials could accumulate, attain really high concentrations which is critical for driving reactions in a forward direction. And the clay could serve as a catalyst and would drive the formation of RNA polymers. But when you look at, and so of course, if this is happening on the early Earth where you've got clay and other minerals, now you suddenly solve the problem of the original life occurring in an aqueous environment. The problem is when you look at these studies, first of all, they're done under these chemically pristine conditions where you have nothing in that system that would have been present on the early Earth that would have chemically competed with the formation of the RNA polymers or would lead to their hydrolytic breakdown. So this is all excluded from the experimental design. In addition to that, they're stopping the reaction before the RNA polymers get above a 50 mer because once they hit that point, the RNA now is irreversibly absorbed onto the clay. And that's gonna be the death nail in a chemical evolutionary scenario. You have to do this in distilled water. You have to get the clay from a particular supplier. And then you've got to matriate the clay and remove anything other than sodium as the counter ions. And then you've got to use chemically activated building blocks. When you do all of that, then you can assemble RNA on clay surfaces. So in other words, the experimenters are actually playing an indispensable role in the success of the experiment. And regardless of the prebiotic chemistry study that you look at, this inevitably is the problem. And so I wrote a book, sorry for the shameless self promotion called Creating Life in a Lab, where I basically made an argument for God's role in the origin of life by looking at the work in prebiotic chemistry, saying in every instance you have intelligent agents that are designing this experiment and then are involved in controlling the conditions in such a way to make that experiment have a successful outcome. And as soon as you remove the involvement of an intelligent agent and now translate that or try to translate that chemistry to the early earth, you're gonna have what in effect is non-productive chemistry. It doesn't mean that it couldn't happen to some degree, but it's not gonna be productive in contradiction to the origin of life. And in fact, there was a perspectives piece written for nature communications about two years ago now. Clements Riker, I think is the author where he talks about basically prebiotic chemistry and human intervention, where he essentially presents in his perspectives piece, the argument I make in my book, Creating Life in the Lab, is that we neglected to take it into account the role of human agency and he actually calls us the hand of God dilemma and the paper. And so to me, this is where I see the Achilles heel. It's not that the chemistry in the physics doesn't exist. It's just that it's never gonna happen unless you've got somehow intelligent agents overseeing this. And it's not just this Clement Riker that identifies this, but other people, Paul Davies, Simon Conway Morris have also identified this as a problem. So to me, this is why I'm not only, I'm convinced that chemical evolution is not possible, but I'm also in light of this convinced that there must have been a mind in some capacity. Now, it could very well be that, I'm not saying that God zap life into existence. It could very well be that God is working through the processes of nature to bring about the origin of life. Like a fine tuning, you would say. Yeah, but there's still this divine involvement that somehow has rigged things or has driven things to that particular end point. And then you couple that of course with what I see to be just really elegant design in biochemical systems. And that to me, convinces me that there must be a mind behind everything. And I know James, you're trying to get to questions, but yeah, so to your question about like the origin of body plans, let's talk about the Cambrian event and more generally the origin of body plans. To me, when I look at the mechanisms available to us in molecular biology, I don't see those mechanisms as being capable of in effect providing the mechanisms you need to generate new body plans from pre-existing body plans. So I'm not disputing that the mechanisms aren't there, but by analogy, I see the same problem. It's one thing for a molecular biologist or an embryologist to go into lab and to play around with the hox genes and produce fruit flies with the legs coming out of where the antenna should be. But there's another thing for that to happen, again, just in an undirected manner, because what we know from mutations to hox genes is that they are absolutely devastating because when you have a mutation in a hox gene, it's impacting embryological development at the very early stages. And so to me, when you're trying to go from one body plan to the other, there's so many interlinked genetic programs that are taking place, this network of genetic interactions, and then to then to modify that is gonna have such large scale reverberations that it seems to me that it's gonna be non-productive. So the question is how do you get all of that to work together in a coherent way to create new body plans? And this is actually a point that Jim Valentine and Doug Irwin bring up in their graduate textbook on the Cambrian Explosion published a few years ago now, where they essentially refer to this as internal selection, where they're arguing that we don't have right now a fully-orbed evolutionary theory that could actually explain and affect the origin of body plans. I'm not trying to put words into their mouth, that they somehow are closet ID people or anything like that. Just pointing out that here, experts that have worked on the origin of body plans and in light of the Cambrian Explosion that are raising concerns that would be kind of in line with the concerns that I'm raising. So that's why I see it as being divinely orchestrated, whether God's zapping it or God's working through natural processes, I think either way, it looks to me like you need divine involvement. Yeah, I think all of those are to your point, all of those are incredible questions that I think that people are genuinely asking about the origin of life and the origin of body plans. I think for me, I mean, first and foremost, one of the aspects that I find most compelling is just how much time we're dealing with. So with the origin of life, I'm with you. I don't think that I'm not one of the individuals that necessarily thinks that life had multiple origins and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. Maybe it did, I don't know. I'm also just not a biochemist. But I think of how old the earth is and I think about how early we start to see life in the fossil record. And I'm almost like, I'm almost shocked by how quickly it happened. But I find it very interesting that we have such a long period of single cellular life and then all of a sudden we have this explosion. I mean, biologically it's an explosion, I guess geologically it's an explosion. Biologically it takes hundreds of thousands of generations but we start to see more complicated things going on with eukaryotes first emerging and then multicellularity and it's always like, wow, what's going on? Most of the papers that I've read on it, though even the ones like the kind that you're saying where they're like, yes, we have these big problems because most of the origin of life papers will be like, here is a big problem. And then they'll be like, here's our hypothesis on how we think maybe the problem could be fixed. So I'd be interested in looking into that paper on the body plans to see if they, I mean, maybe they don't, but to see if anybody has commented and been like, well, here's my proposed explanation for it. Because to my understanding, a lot of the stuff with body plans and Hawks genes isn't necessarily ons and offs, but it's ons and offs in the duration of expression. So getting longer limbs, more digits, more time essentially for things to develop that can then change the entire game. So I guess for me, it's time and mechanism on origin of life. And then for me, the biggest hurdle is really just origin of life. Like after that point, a lot of the strut, and I've obviously not looked into every minute facet of body plans and big organ and organ systems, development of those kinds of things. But a lot of it tends to be like, it can emerge from a precursor or it can end up that precursor being functional in some aspect, doing something. Cause I think Jerry Coyne was the one who put it where it's like typically when you have the transition from one thing to another thing, be it a structure or organism as a whole, all of the intermediates have to also be functional and they have to be viable. It can't be lethal, like you said. So I'm with you. I think that there's so much work to do with origin of life studies and with some of the earlier leaps. I feel like I almost get the vibe, and correct me if I'm totally off base, but I feel like I almost get the vibe from you that once you hit the Cambrian, things, I almost get the vibe that things could probably just like continue and like almost less of a progression, progressive creation thing and more of a tinker. Not necessarily a theistic evolution wholesale, but like tinkering body plans with active intervention, but the appearance of evolution. Because like you said at the beginning, if evolution's not happening, it certainly looks like it's happening and or something very similar to it. So I think it speaks to the fact that it's like, we've been doing origin of life studies for like what less than a century, like when all is said and done and things tend to increase exponentially. I agree with you, if we create life in a lab, I personally, while that would be incredible and really cool and fascinating, I don't necessarily think that would be groundbreaking in the sense that it's like, we've cracked a biogenesis. All that would say is in given conditions, you can get life. And then the question would be, well, have those conditions ever existed on earth? Are there mechanisms for the conditions? I mean, you can take fine tuning all the way down. I would wager, I think that it comes, like a lot of this stuff, philosophy of science, necessarily it will eventually run headlong into philosophy regular where it's like, well, do you think that there is indeed a mind behind it all? And for me, a lot of that tripping up is like, well, how do we define a design? How do we define what we think is, like it lacks empiricism in my opinion. But I really do think it's fun to talk about. That's true. This first question may tie in very closely with that last point that you were talking about, Erika. And do want to remind you folks that both of our speakers are linked in the description, so if you want to hear more, you can. This first question comes from Meerkat SK5. Thanks for your question. Says, if Fuzz provided ways to test for divine intelligence in biology that he suggested were the origin of life experiments in the past, or I think they said that he suggested with the origin of life experiments in the past. And a robust common design model, would you convert to his position? Oh, I would consider any model put forward. I mean, I think if it were, the trip words there are, it is robust. If it's inherently robust, then of course I'm gonna be like, oh wow, like what a robust model that's inherent to the question. I would absolutely consider any kind of model, kind of suggested to me. The key word is model. I think Fuzz is different in this aspect for sure, but I encounter a lot of creationists who will propose an idea, but then there's not really a functioning model behind it. And then I'm like, cool idea, how can we look at it? Like how can we test it? How can we empirically measure it? I think you also run into some problems when it's like the second something divine can be measured, it stops being metaphysical and it starts being physical. So I'm of the personal opinion that spirituality is by its very nature, very personal thing. I don't know if you could ever measure it. I think you would create some very big stirs in the philosophical community and the scientific community if you could. Gotcha. And this next question is a really fun one. So they had said, Dr. Rana, now that I'm not always up to on pace with the news, they said, now that high level physicists working for the Pentagon, confirm that aliens exist and are actively visiting Earth as a fact, what does Christianity have to say on this? Demons or did God forget to tell us about this? By the way, I'll let Fuzz answer, but then I have to say something about this. But go ahead Fuzz. Yeah, well, I guess I'm not aware that this has been established with the rigor that the person proposing the question suggests, but I mean, you know, the thing is, I don't know at this point that SETI has made any positive detection of any advanced alien civilization that's out there. And even if they did the, given the constraints of the laws of physics, the likelihood of that civilization traveling through interstellar space to reach Earth is extremely hard to envision or imagine. So, you know, I just am not convinced that, you know, aliens, you know, exist let alone can travel to the Earth. So I would, you know, be skeptical of that claim to begin with, but let's just say hypothetically that we do discover that there is alien life out there and we discover an advanced alien civilization. I don't know that that necessarily invalidates anything in the Christian faith because if you adopt the view that God is a creator, who's to say that God would stop or limit himself to creating life here on Earth. God could easily have created life anywhere in the universe, you know. So, you know, the scripture that we have is obviously Earth-centric and human-centric. And so, you know, it doesn't really have any bearing one way or the other on whether or not there's alien life out there. So, you know, I'm just not convinced that aliens exist for scientific reasons. But even then, if they did, if we could somehow demonstrate that, I don't know that it necessarily that it necessarily invalidates Christianity. Now, I have three friends that have written a book called Lights in the Sky and Little Green Men, a Hugh Ross, an astronomer, Ken Samples, a theologian and philosopher, and then Mark Clark, who's a political scientist, and they actually explore in this book the UFO phenomena from a Christian worldview perspective. So, if you're interested in digging into that more deeply, I would commend that book to you. Absolutely, and that is actually what I was going to bring up is that we just booked for next, I think it's next Wednesday. No, no, it's the 12th. So, later in August, Dr. Hugh Ross is actually going to be visiting us and we're going to have a discussion on is there something to these alleged alien abductions? And by something to, we mean like, is there evidence that there might be something supernatural going on and we'll have somebody else arguing that it's fully naturally explained and whether or not it's aliens or not. So, really fun one, we were excited about coming up. And I guess, I've read that book by the way, Fuzz, and I love that book. It's really interesting, kind of the different arguments and stuff like, so yeah, so that should be fun. But the next question- If the Pentagon announced aliens this year, first of all, I'm surprised I missed that too. But second of all, what a year, you know? What a year. If 2020 would be the year that would begin. Yeah, if it's going to happen, it's going to be this year, that's for sure. So true. And next question, Matthew Steele, thanks for your question, said, Dr. Rana, would you accept evolution as true with the caveat that a biogenesis isn't a necessary component? If not, why not? But if so, to what degree? Yeah, you know, to me again, I don't necessarily think that you can extricate, you know, a biogenesis from evolution. I see that as, you know, when I look at the, again, evolution from a naturalistic perspective, it seems like you really do have a continuum going there. But I don't necessarily believe that just because we don't have an explanation for a biogenesis, that that in and of itself invalidates biological evolution, just to be clear. But again, I'm just not convinced of other aspects of life's history as being explained, again, through mechanism alone, like you carry a genesis or, again, the origin of body plans or the origin of human exceptionalism as just some examples. You know, but I'm, so I'm, you know, couldn't quite buy just a biogenesis as divine and then evolution kicked in from that point on. However, again, I do find the ideas of Simon Conway Morris intriguing. And, you know, and one of the things that I find provocative about the record of nature is the widespread occurrence of convergence. Because as I understand the nature of the evolutionary mechanism, and this is influenced by the thinking of Stephen Jay Gould and others. And that is that it's a historically contingent process, which means in a nutshell, that really the outcome of evolution is unpredictable and that if you could magically rewind the tape of life and let evolution run again, that the outcome would be different every time because of the historically contingent nature. And yet what we see is widespread convergence in the history of life, which looks as if evolution independently hits upon the same solution or nearly identical solutions time and time again. And so there's a famous debate that took place between Simon Conway Morris and Stephen Jay Gould, which is kind of ironic because in Gould's book, Wonderful Life, where he kind of at a popular level lays out this idea of historical contingency, Simon Conway Morris is one of the heroes of that book. And yet he and Simon Conway Morris later on developed this very intense debate with one another about whether evolution is historically contingent or whether there's actually prescribed endpoints that evolution is driven to. And Simon Conway Morris argues that convergence is evidence that there are these again, prescribed endpoints in the evolutionary process. And as I mentioned that the ideas of Andreas Wagner who argues that maybe the laws of nature are actually constraining body plans and that the body plans are not an outcome of evolution per se, that actually are essentially what are dictated or prescribed by the laws of nature. And so you combine those ideas and now I think you have a very strongly teleological view of evolution. And that's something that I would be sympathetic towards. So in terms of evolution, but I don't know that I could accept the evolutionary paradigm as it's currently formulated, again, for scientific reasons, but there's also theological reasons connected to that as well. Gotcha. And thanks for your question from SlamRN. Good to see you again. Says, for RNA word clay, do they matriate out all the potassium? Does clay exist in real world without some of these chemicals that they take out? Oh yeah, I mean clay in with you, just go out and dig up some clay. It's gonna be filled for all kinds of different cationic species. And so the process of matriation where you're replacing all of those cations with sodium exclusively produces a clay that would be unlike anything that you would see in nature. And again, you have to run these reactions in distilled water. So if you have any kind of ionic content in that in the water in which the clay and the RNA building blocks are immersed, that has an inhibitory effect on the reaction. Super interesting. Okay, and Matthew Steele says, Erika, I need you to spill the secret to your incredible positive energy. And then they say, this must be French. I don't know what this phrase is. It sounds good though. And they say, because my antidepressants seem like a waste of money. What is the secret to your joyfulness? Erika, I think they're asking. Listen, I honestly just love science and I love talking to people who are passionate about the things that they're passionate about. I think I like sap it from other people. But honestly, I just, I don't know. I love to be alive. I would just say, pursue what makes you happy. And if you can find a way to make money off of it, if you can't just, you know, enjoy being alive. We don't get too much time. So I appreciate it though. I take some of my energy. I'm putting it out into the universe for you to have. Very nice. And thank you, Andrew Handelsman says, James is a beta. Thank you very much for that. And Steven Steen, nasty but benevolent troll says, James is so hot, I can't even put it into words. I appreciate this. I told you, how many times now you've got to wipe the kids. We appreciate the goofy people. Thank you, all of you goofs. I've wondered before too. Now, I used to, in fact, I think I even asked Steven this. I said, should we become, like should we stop calling each other beta males and all that stuff? And I thought, maybe, you know, we have to be professional and formal, but at the same time I thought the Joe Rogan experience is the biggest platform on our planet. And it's not particularly formal. And so we're kind of keeping it easy going here. We're still reading these super chats that call people betas. But let's see, we've got a critic here. Epistemology and gaming, thanks for your question said, I'm late, what did I miss? Did Dr. Rana bring a model to this debate or critique evolution? What would you say? It's been kind of broad. It's been pretty high level, broad level, in terms of like what's been discussed? Would it be fair to say both or neither in that it has been broader? I feel like it was kind of both. I mean, I feel like more than anything, we just had a very robust and enjoyable conversation. But I would not say Dr. Rana did not critique evolution. I would say I would like to hear a more specific model, but I feel like a potential model was pointed to. I don't know, Dr. Rana, what do you think? Yeah, well, yeah, you know, I mean, that question is a fair question, first of all. And I really shy away from trying to put a lot of effort into critiquing evolution. I'm happy to explain why I don't think that what's available to us today with regard to evolutionary theory is capable of accounting for certain transitions in the history of life. But I'm not completely sure that I would say that that's a critique of evolution. It's just simply pointing out what I see to be currently shortcomings or whether there are inabilities to account or explain certain things. And also, so what I like to do is focus most of my attention on, why do I see actually elements or signatures for design within biology? That's where I like to put, you know, again, most of my effort. And, you know, at reasons to believe we've got this approach that we've developed called a creation model approach. And we're not really trying to say that our creation model can supplant or serve as a scientific model, but it's more in the spirit of what science is about, where we said, okay, if indeed our perspective on reality is true, these are some things that we think, these are some ways we think nature would look. These are, in effect, certain predictions that we would make. And our predictions aren't necessarily highly specific always, but these are again, ways in which we can allow people to evaluate the truth claims of the Christian faith or at least the truth claims of our particular approach to the science-faith conversation. So it's a testable approach, but I would never say that it's essentially something that would supplant the scientific model. Now, you know, I am increasingly spending some effort in thinking through, you know, maybe developing a model that would essentially build off of the thinking of Sir Richard Owen and develop some kind of genomics model with the idea, could we develop a model that could account for, again, the shared features that we see among organisms at a genetic level? And as a result of that, could we make actually some specific predictions, you know, that would be discovered. But along the way, we do actually make predictions. I'm on the record in 2000 of predicting that we would discover that, you know, so-called junk DNA would actually have function attributed to it. And that's a prediction that I think has actually matriculated. Now, is that prediction unique to a creation model approach or, you know, compared to what the evolutionary paradigm would predict? I don't know one way or, you know, if that's necessarily true, but it is a prediction that we made, you know, in light of our particular perspective. We didn't talk about a human chromosome too today. We have a great video that I watched and enjoyed talking about. But I might be opinion that human chromosome too is a fusion event, but I think it's a fusion event that to me looks like it must be the product of divine activity. I don't know, and we don't, you know, we can unpack that at another time why I think that's the case. But one prediction that I would make as a result of that is that there is actually a functional basis for why human chromosome two looks, is a fused chromosome compared to the chromosome two A and two B and chimpanzees. So in other words, I don't know what that function would be, but my prediction would be that there would be some kind of functional rationale for why that's the case that we get to discover. So that would be an example of where, you know, we could make a prediction from our particular approach that would be, you know, more in line with what you think of as a scientific prediction. You got it, and thank you for your question. This one coming in from Slam R.N. And Erika, I know that these last three questions are also all for Fuzz. So feel free if you want to add in, you can. And this one, they asked, they said, Fuzz, since you hang out with astrophysicists, will we ever go to Mars since our guts cannot survive the cosmic rays and there is no way to block them? That's interesting, isn't it? Well, you know, I do work with two astrophysicists, Hugh Ross and another astrophysicist by the name of Jeff Zwirink. And neither of them are convinced that we could actually transport humans from Earth to Mars for the types of reasons that the person asking the question brings up, that the exposure to the high energy radiation environment in interplanetary space would probably do people in, not to mention kind of the psychological challenges being aboard a spacecraft for that duration of time in a confined space. And then when you get to the surface of Mars, the likelihood of survivability is probably very, very low. So they are the opinion that this isn't going to be feasible and so they take the viewpoint why bother. And I'm actually convinced by their arguments, but I am of a different stripe. To me, I think, yeah, it doesn't look like it is possible, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try. And so to me, I am skeptical that we're gonna be able to do it, but I'm rooting that we'll be able to figure out how to pull that off and be able to actually send people to Mars and who knows, maybe one day colonize the surface of Mars. But again, I think that's probably more science fiction than science fact right now. I think if we could get there faster, like if we could speed up the actual journey there so that if something did go awry, we could get help there faster, I think people would be a lot more willing to like pump money into the concept. But I think no one is really currently very on board with signing up to go. I mean, I'm sure there are people who are fascinated about science who are very interested in doing it, but for funding reasons, I don't know that we're gonna get there like soon-ish. It would be so cool though, that would be amazing. Well, I think everybody's familiar with the fact that NASA just launched another mission to Mars, right? Yeah. And of course, they have to find that window that happens every 26 months where Earth and Mars are on the same side of the sun. And even then, you know, you're looking at a what if six month, eight month something journey. But then once Earth and Mars are on the opposite side of the sun, you're hosed in terms of getting, if there's something that's gone wrong, you've got to wait two and a half years before you can mount the rescue mission. So, you know, this is a limitation I think of. So in effect, you have to think of it as a one-way trip or a suicide mission. But I don't know that I would do it given my life circumstances. But I could easily see somebody who has a driving curiosity, who doesn't have any kind of personal commitments, who would say, you know what? I'm willing to take a trip to Mars knowing that I may not survive it, but it wouldn't it be cool to be, you know, to be able to walk on the Martian surface. And that experience in and of itself would make it worth it. So I can envision people in their right mind rationally deciding, you know, to do that. And hey, you know, you might even get a high school named after you if you want to go on Mars. The ultimate, you've made it like, consolation prizes, getting a high school named after you. It's worth it. That is so interesting that you'd be stuck for two and a half years. That's really, I didn't know that. That's wild. Terrifying, that's what I would call it. Really cool. So next question, appreciate it. This one comes in from the Quiet Gorilla. Says, Dr. Rana, why not just accept that we haven't figured abiogenesis out rather than quote unquote, insert God as the answer? Yeah, that's a great question. And, you know, I'm perfectly comfortable with somebody saying abiogenesis or eukaryogenesis or the origin of body plans is a deep scientific mystery. And when it comes to abiogenesis, maybe it's an impenetrable scientific mystery and just leave it at that and not necessarily change their worldview. But to me, and this is I think a subtle point that maybe I didn't articulate well. It's not just simply that we lack an explanation for abiogenesis that I believe that there's a mind behind it. It's also the fact that work in prebiotic chemistry seems to indicate consistently that intelligent agency is playing an indispensable role in affecting the chemical or physical transformations needed to support the origin of life. And I also look at the elegant design of biochemical systems, which I think is also a signature for the work of a mind as well. So that's why I'm inserting God. I'm not really inserting God, but I see God as a viable explanation. Now, is it a scientific explanation? That's a different conversation, right? But, and I do think there's ways that you can move it towards, towards functionally a scientific problem or a scientific question. But that's why I think it's a divinely orchestrated event. It's not just the inability to explain it but there's other factors coupled with that. Out of sheer curiosity, if I may, what do you make of the, because I know we talked about the RNA on clay for quite some time and I learned some new stuff about that. I had no idea that they exposed the clay in the lab to various chemical elements and got into, I guess it would be like a receptive condition. What do you make about that? I think this was in like 2017. It was that one paper on like the wet dry cycle for nucleobases and like assembling RNA. And it was like a revisiting the warm little pond idea that it's like if something is close enough to the surface there is a series of cycles that prime it for RNA assembly, because I have only read the abstract of it and I was, I actually think I saw it and I was like, oh, that's really interesting. I'll read it later. And then I just never did. But it just, it just, I was trying to put my finger on it when we were talking about the clays because I was like, I feel like that's not the most recent thing that's been suggested. Well, I mean, this idea of these wet dry cycles or these hydration dehydration cycles is very integral to a lot of mechanisms that evolutionary biologists appeal to because part of the problem with the issue is you've got an aqueous system and in an aqueous system because the formation of peptides or RNA chains is essentially a condensation reaction in an aqueous environment, the equilibrium is gonna lie on the direction of essentially the monomer is not the polymeric system, right? And so, but if you're under dehydrating conditions now you can at least drive that reaction in the forward direction towards polymerization. But even then in many of those experiments you've got to incorporate that dehydrating agents that further drive the reaction in a forward direction. But again, the Achilles heel is that you can mimic that in a laboratory and that really looks like it's a workable mechanism. But as soon as you start thinking about what's going on under the conditions of the early earth you're going to have such a complex chemical environment that you're never going to get actually the formation of a peptide or the formation of an RNA polymer. There's gonna be so many reactions that are also condensation reactions that are gonna inhibit this. And there was an original life researcher by the name of Robert Shapiro who died a few years ago. And his nickname was Dr. No in the original life community because he was always throwing water on everybody's explanations. And he identified something he called the homopolymer problem. And what he points out is that in order for you to have proteins or nucleic acids that will actually adopt higher order structures that are stable you have to have a homopolymer backbone where the R groups or the side groups can vary but the backbone has to be essentially an identical repeating backbone. That's a strict requirement for the original life. And he identifies all kinds of reactions that would essentially inhibit the formation of a homopolymer backbone. Whether they're chain termination reactions or branching reactions or switching reactions. And so these are problems that would apply to any kind of hydration dehydration mechanism is once you start incorporating the chemical complexity of the early earth environment then you're gonna wind up with just a mess. You're not gonna wind up with productive reactions. Not even having read that specific paper that's what I would see in general would be the concerns that I would have. But I would be, from time, I'm constantly reading papers in the original life literature and invariably I'm always amazed at the ingenuity of the original life researchers. Absolutely. Some of the most fun scientists to hang out with they're so optimistic and so creative and inventive but that actually is part of the problem is that they're so creative and inventive that you have to wonder how relevant is this to actual prebiotic earth. But always the problem to me is, can you really translate what they're doing in the lab to the early earth? And nobody has been able to do that. Again, original life researchers realize that this is an issue and more and more they're paying attention to it. But this is to me the kind of the Achilles heel. Yeah, I think it just as a, I'll be very brief, James, but yeah, I think that the key is, I think you're right, the key is figuring out, okay, well, first and foremost, what were the prebiotic conditions? You got to almost turn to the geologists for that aspect and investigate those early deposits and be like, okay, what was the atmospheric composition? What was the oceanic composition? What are we dealing with here? And then once you have those conditions, I think you can almost start looking in different places because as far as I know, it's like maybe it's shallow tidal pools, maybe it's hydrothermal vents and different things work from different aspects. So I almost wonder if you couldn't get some kind of like, almost like a weird tidal geyser environment where you've got like kind of both playing a role. Of course, that's me just like spitballing it conceptually, because I get where you're coming from. I mean, again, I'm not a biochemist. So hearing it from you, I'm like, okay, yes, that makes sense. But I'm interested in seeing, you know, how in this year, 2020, how individuals are coping with that. Cause I know orchid life researchers are not so confident so as to be like, yeah, we got it cracked. You know, most of them are like, eh, here's a problem. Here's maybe a solution. So to me, it seems like a jigsaw puzzle that's almost half done. Not so much that you can tell what the picture is but that you can start to maybe get an idea. Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because a lot of origin life researchers will talk about the work in prebiotic chemistry or clues or pieces to the puzzle. So they use that very same metaphor that you're using. You know, the person that you may want to take a look at is a guy by the name of David Deemer who's at UC Santa Cruz. And he actually is proposing something very similar to what you proposed, Erica. And that is, you know, that there could very well be these localized environments on early earth where you have these, you know, near chemically pristine water conditions that actually may be the venue where you would get the origin of life taking place. And he's actually a membrane first guy. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I mean, that would make sense because you've got the lipids near the vents. So that would, I mean, I guess, I don't know. Again, this, I'm like big concepts on this. The second week biochem was not my strong suit. I passed. There we go. But that's like my, that's my, I passed and then I was like, I waved at it as it disappeared on my rear view mirror. Yeah, but yeah, but anyway, yeah, David Deemer's someone you might find interesting to read. Next up, we have a question. This one coming in from speed of sound of gravity. Appreciate it. Said for Dr. Rana, can you tell us where and when and how ID intervened on the physical by how I mean, what it, it, you like, what would it be like if we were observing it? And if you can't, then it ain't science, they say. Yeah. Well, okay. Couple, yeah, a couple of directions to go with that. And the idea of divine action is one of the most complex areas in philosophy and theology. So the question of how does God interact with creation is an incredibly complex question for those of us who believe in a supernatural transcendent creator that interacts with his creation, not just in terms of creating, but also in terms of interacting providentially with his creation and with humanity. And so, in other words, I'm in good company in terms of not really knowing precisely how it is that God could intervene or what that would actually look like if we were observing it. But I do believe that you can actually detect evidence for the work of a mind or evidence for the activity of a designer through scientific methods. And the reason I say that is because study and even archeology are in effect intelligent design research programs. And what I mean by that is, for example, an archeologist can pick up a rock and determine, okay, is this rock shaped by natural processes or was some kind of intelligent creature like let's say homo habilis responsible for shaping this rock. So that in effect is design detection. And moreover, archeologists can give you some sense for what was the characteristics or the capacity of this particular intelligent agent. And I've written a number of blog articles exploring this idea where I think archeology kind of can provide us with a framework for how we could scientifically detect the work of a designer. So there's a real interesting study that was done a couple of years ago where people were claiming that Neanderthals actually made their way into North America about 130,000 years ago. And this was based on a site not too far from where I live in San Diego County, California, where they discovered essentially a mammoth site that looked as if, no, sorry, a mastodon site that looked as if the mastodon remains were processed. And so the criteria for analyzing that site was, okay, we see cobble and we see bones that look like this is an artificial arrangement. So there's an artificiality. They then ruled out other possible natural process explanations. And then they went in the lab and they said, okay, couldn't we replicate these features that we see that we think reflects, again, the activity of some kind of a hominin on these remains. And so that was kind of a third step in their case that these mastodon remains were actually processed by some kind of hominin. And the reason why they went through that effort is because they dated the site at about 130,000 years ago, which again would be, sorry, about 110,000 years earlier than modern humans made their way into the Americas. And so they argue that the best explanation is that this was actually evidence for Neanderthal occupation. Now, incredibly controversial claim. I don't know if it stood up at the time, but the criteria they use is in effect the criteria that I would argue for design detection in biochemistry. That when I look at biochemical systems, they look as if they have this artificiality to them. And in my book, The Cell's Design, I kind of lay out a case for why that is. So we've talked about the fact that right now a biogenesis doesn't seem to be able to explain the origin of life. And hence the origin of biochemical systems. And then we've also talked about the idea that when we go in the lab and we try to create artificial cells or try to replicate different steps in the origin of life, that again, intelligent agency seems to be a vital aspect of it. So in other words, in my argument for design, I am utilizing the same criteria that an archeologist would use to make the case that there is evidence for design in biology. Now, the leap to that this is a divine action is essentially a theological leap at this, at least in this context, there would be a theological leap. But in other words, if you believe that there is evidence scientifically for design, then at least one possibility is that it is a divine mind and other possibilities that perhaps it's an alien intelligence. But there was a question that was asked where we could rule that possibility out, which pushes you closer to the prospect that it's a divine, the work of a mind that exists outside of nature. So anyway, that's where you could at least move it towards the direction of a scientific question or problem. I think, so just off the top of my head, I think the only problem with that is that with stuff like commonance and looking for design and tools and whatever hand axes and things like that that we find in the East African Rift, I think it's easier because we have something natural to compare them to, like something that is definitively form naturally, like a rock rolling down the scuff marks that a rock would just get by rolling down a hill. So I think it would be a difficult one to apply the design principle necessarily to a self just because I don't know that you have something to compare it to, like something on the same level that you could be like, this is what it looks like if it's natural, so what does it look like if it's designed? So we're almost like between a rock and a hard place on creating a design criteria and then applying it to the cell because inevitably I think as humans will either put a bias in one way or the other and look for design where it isn't or a certain on design when there has been design which would just, I don't know, I just think that creates a difficult problem just mulling it, just hearing it for the first time, mulling it over. Yeah, actually I'm impressed for mulling it over for the first time, you actually are very insightful in terms of your critique there, Erica. And in fact, in my book, The Cell's Design, I bring up that very point is that how do we detect design, right? If we're looking at a biochemical system, what is the criteria for claiming that it appears to have an artificiality to it? And so I actually propose what I call an intelligent design pattern which is essentially saying, look, we know as human beings when we design that the designs that we produce have certain properties or certain features or characteristics that reflect the work of a human designer. And so could we develop that as a pattern that we then compare biochemical systems to where it's kind of a pattern recognition. Now, of course, the objection to that would be, well, does that necessarily mean it's a divine mind? And my response is that, well, from a standpoint of Christian theism, if you believe that humans are made in God's image, then what we do as designers could very well be a reflection of what the creator has done. So I'm bringing in Christian theology into that to try to establish the criteria that I use. Yeah, I think that's an interesting way of like, because typically, right, when we're trying to figure out if something is designed by a human, we compare it to the natural. So I think it's interesting that you almost took that and inverted it and you were like, let's take something we know for sure is designed and compare it to the unknown rather than the natural to the unknown. That's an interesting way of looking at things. I wonder how that would be done like the minutia of that. Yeah, well, and to be fair that that approach, again to your point, is really putting the onus on the person who is claiming design to rigorously show that it's designed versus what I oftentimes see done by people that are advocating design where they try to argue, there's no way that evolution can do this, therefore it's designed. I don't find that to be very satisfying at all. And all it really is doing is speaking about how well developed evolutionary theory is at the moment versus saying, are you actually owning the onus of showing that something is designed? Yeah, I- What is the criteria? Now, you could argue that my criteria is insufficient, but at least it's an attempt to say, here's how we could, through the use of analogical reasoning, how we could maybe say that biochemical systems look designed. And then of course you have these intriguing insights from biochemistry like the F1F0 ATPase that is this incredibly amazing, electrically powered rotary motor that is this energy transduction machine that just looks eerie in terms of its machine-like properties. Yeah, I think I've seen that one. Yeah, that one's really neat. Yeah, so anyway, those are my thoughts for better or for worse. You've got just a few more. This one, Steven Steen says, I am at least 20% Neanderthal DNA bare minimum. It's true. Next, thank you. I took a little bun, that's the telltale sign. Next up, absolute atheism says, Dr. Rana, could you please tell the flat earthers that we live on a globe? My guess is, I'd be really surprised if Dr. Rana was like, actually. Yeah, we live on a globe, but I don't know that a flat earther is going to listen to me anymore than to you or to Erica or to you James, but we live on a globe. To me, if for no other reason, just look at the airline industry because they're all about making money. And if you've ever taken a flight from one continent to the other, you never fly in a straight line, you always take this arc around the globe. Have you ever noticed that you always go towards the North Pole and down if you go from North America to Europe? The reason why you do that is because on a sphere, the shortest distance between two points is this arc. There's a certain geometric set of parameters that define the arc. But this is how airline companies are flying around the world. And the shortest route is gonna consume the least amount of fuel. And for economic reasons alone, you have to think that the earth must be spherical because on a flatter, that kind of route makes no sense whatsoever. And why would the airline companies, if they're doing everything they can to charge you extra money for baggage, burn unnecessary fuel just to support a conspiracy that the earth is spherical? So anyway, there's my argument. Hey, airline companies, of course. You can, if you wanna have a conversation, if you wanna replicate the experience of having that conversation with the Flat Earth, or you could like go to your local park, find a good wall, hit your head against it a couple of times, and then go home. Super interesting. Our first ever economics argument in the world of Flat Earth global, it's really interesting. That's fun to listen to. And Sunflower with the last question that I have on this list says, Erika, if we evolve to be as intelligent but less and less conscious in the future, do you think consciousness is a trait we should attempt to preserve? I very much enjoy being conscious, but not all people do. So I think that that's a very subjective question. I mean, I'm definitely, I am in favor of preserving consciousness. I think that with consciousness comes a lot of the beauty and experiencing being alive. But you could take the argument of pure utility and be like, well, consciousness leads to suffering and suffering in all forms is bad, even if it's offset with good experiences. So I think you could make a philosophical argument, I guess for that. I wouldn't be in favor of it. I dig it. I dig being alive. I'm into it. I'm in it for the long haul. Gotcha. And with that, I think I'm gonna double check really quick just to be sure we didn't miss any, but do wanna give that reminder folks that the links of our guests are in the description. Also wanna let you know if you haven't heard somehow, we are excited as modern day debate is invading the podcast world folks. This is really exciting. So this is an addition to the YouTube channel. We are now on podcast. So let us know if you can't find us on your favorite podcast, we will work to get on there. And then we do have, as we had mentioned, some exciting debates coming up. We're excited as Dr. Rouser will be back on Monday, facing off against David Smalley from Dogma Debate. So Dogma, I mean, they've been around for a long time, way longer than us. So that should be really fun. And so wanna say a huge thanks to our guests. We really appreciate you, Erica and Fuzz, it's been a true pleasure to have you. Oh, it was, I had a blast. This was very fun for me. Me too. Me too. Great meeting you Erica. I hope that you and I can do this again sometime. Oh, absolutely. Listen, you've been on Jackson's channel. So I know that you're willing to go on channels. That was a risky move. I might ask you to come on sometime. Hey, I might just do that. And you know, Steve McCrae. Yes, yes, Steve's awesome. Well, he and I are actually starting a program called Agree to Argue. And we have an old channel. And so we just might have to bring you on to agree to argue. Oh, you know what? I'm in, you know, I love a good passionate debate with the YouTube blood sports. That's what I meant it for. Let us know, we will tweet those debates out that you guys do fuzz because we do want people to know no matter what channel or platform they're on, we do want people to have the choice to listen to any debates they want. So we'd be happy to promote that. We're excited for you. And so yeah, I wanna say folks, thanks so much. It's been a true pleasure to have you all here on this Friday night, folks. And as always, keep sifting out the reasonable from the unreasonable folks and take care.