 According to textbook biology, the gap in time between a chimpanzee and a human is how long? About five million years. The transition from an ancestor that looked, you know, this wolf-like deer-like putative progenitor to a fully aquatic cetacean was roughly a window of time of about what? Seven to eight million years. So in the time supposedly that it took for a chimpanzee, a chimp-like ancestor to become truly a hominid, you have this transition from an aquatic mammal to one that's from a terrestrial mammal to one that's fully aquatic. But what happened in the past few years is that this window of time has become very narrow. It was thought in 2001 that there was anywhere from nine to eleven million years. We now know that this gap here between a terrestrial mammal, a putative ancestor of whales, to a fully marine cetacean was around one to two million years, at most around three million years. Now what does this mean in engineering terms? When you look at the first cetaceans, the first aquatic whales, truly aquatic, living birth and seed, nursing their young in the ocean, complete their whole life cycle in an oceanic environment, and you compare their anatomy, their soft part, their hard part anatomy, to that of, say, a putative ancestor. You're not talking about three changes or five changes or ten changes. You know, it's not like you take a cow, cut off the leg, shave it, throw it into the ocean and say, hey, go out there and the best of you. You need a number of profound systemic transitions. And here are just a few of them. You need, for example, an ability to move the tail flute up and down in the water. You need a special backbone modification, a special bone called a ball vertebra. You need the ability, you need blubber for temperature insulation. A whale that you need to dive down, say, 2,000 feet, 5,000 feet in a matter of minutes. Then you need some means of adjusting for that. You need the ability to drink seawater, changes in kidneys. You need the ability to conduct labor underwater. You need to reduce the island. You need to transform the forelimbs. It's on and on and on. It's literally hundreds, if not thousands of engineering changes that had to have occurred. And they had to have occurred not in 50 million years, not in 100 million years, not even within 10 million years, but within a very narrow window of time. And here's just a few more examples of that I will not belabor. But the question is, and it's the one question that I want to address tonight, can the geological pattern, the progression of forms, be explained by the textbook processes of population genetics? That's code for neo-Darwinian theory. Does neo-Darwinism, as it exists today, provide an adequate, causal explanation for the origin of these new organ systems? Now, according to the theory, what you need for evolution will occur. Any type of evolution is you need mutations. You've got to have variation. You've got to have selection of sieving process. And therefore, if you need new traits, the more you need, the more mutations you have to have. It's a risk for the bill of evolution. So, how do we judge whether or not the theory works? Well, by its own standards, that is the equations of population genetics. It's a numbers game. You essentially need three things. In order to get enough mutations for you to take, say, a domestic dog and to transform it with some other kind of animal, you need either many generations of selective breeding. You need a lot of mutations coming in, a lot of variability that you can select, or you need immense population sizes. And then, once you find those few odd variants that fit the bill, it's not just enough for them to appear. They have to become fixed in a population. They have to become the dominant traits that you find throughout the lineage. It's like dog breeding. You select a certain breed, you pick a trait, and you don't just want, I've got this one trait, and I'm now going to let it breed with any mongrel that comes along. No, what you do is you carefully cultivate it so that you end up with a type that breeds true. It's the same idea in neodymium theory. If you don't have any of those three things, then you have a problem with variation being exhausted, you don't have any risk for the milk, or you have what's called genetic risk, and all that means is simply that the whole process is willy-nilly. It's random, it's haphazard. And what I want to think about is the kind of changes, with this in mind, the kind of changes that would take you from this kind of animal, as cartoonish as it is, to this kind of animal, batosaurus. Remember, this transition was only a few million years. Now, I want to show you something of very remarkable innovation that Cetacea have. I just want you to think about how you would engineer this. And I also want you to think about from the standpoint of very useful complexity. Cetacea do not have the male reproductive organs on the outside of the body. The testes are on the inside, and they're right next to the muscle systems that generate heat during swimming. What they have is a cooling system, though. You know what happens, for example, in humans or dogs if the testes do not descent? What happens? Sterility. And that is because further production requires a lower core body temperature than what you have in those mammals. What they have is a system where they shut cold blood, or cool blood, from the tail flutes, from the dorsal fin, and they bathe the testes in this cool blood. That, in turn, takes the heat, and then it's dispersed throughout the cardiovascular system. So even though they're swimming and they're generating a lot of heat, the core temperature of that organ is actually below body temperature. Now, the problem to think about here is, which comes first? You need actually both systems in order to have reproductive viability, or at least that first flush you do. So, how easy is, let's imagine, let me just step back for a second, just a few more slides so please bear with me, but imagine that you need only two changes to DNA to build this system. Let's just imagine, all you need is two mutations, and you go from having the standard terrestrial type reproductive, male reproductive apparatus to having a whale reproductive apparatus. It's an outrageous stretch, I know, but let's just imagine, let's just suppose. And you say, well, who's done that calculation? Well, in 2008, in a peer-reviewed journal called Genetics, two authors, Dyrton Schmidt, attempting to refute Michael Media, they look at this problem within mammals and within fruit flies and some other groups. And the question that they asked was very simple. They said, how long would it take for two of these coordinated changes to appear in a population? And they said, well, of course, BD's wrong because we know that in our lineage where mammals, it would take, you would see these two coordinated changes appear every 216 million years. Now, what's the problem with that picture? The problem is, you only have five and a half million years. You don't have 216 million years. But if you take their figures and you adjust it to what you would have if you were talking about some prehistoric whales, some proto-whale, existing cows, any kind of hippopotamide, doesn't matter what you're talking about, and you wrap it down, what this corresponds to in whale time is it would take for two such changes, 43 million years or so. But again, you have a problem. Now, what's that problem? You only had a few million years. And again, we're talking about a very complex system but all this being presupposed that two simple changes to DNA is going to be able to build that. Now, it could be argued, and here's just a paper if anyone wants to cite it, Genetics 2009, it's open access. Anyone can go and they can retrieve this paper, they can look at the map. And one of the first papers to really tackle the subject. Believe it or not, it hasn't been tackled until just the past few years. And here's just going documentation of their map. So there are three problems though. The problem is that when we look at it, there were too few generations involved in the transition from a so-called walking whale to a fully aquatic whale. The numbers of mutations needed appear to be are prohibitive. And we know though that unlike bacteria and like viruses and like fruit flies, mammalian breeding population sizes are actually quite low. Take rats for example, you would think, well there are millions, it's not, you know, billions of rats worldwide. But yet, breeding population, there are only about 100,000, 400,000 or so of breeding at any one time. So the number of the issue is there was not enough time and I'm just going to skip over that lengthy slide. The problem though with the Dürer and Schmidt models, if it is a problem, just remember two DNA changes will give you this elaborate engineering marble, is that they presuppose that the first change caused a slight decrease in function. You lose something and then you've got to rely on the second change to get the system up and running. But what if you say, I'm going to grant that you don't need any of that, that there was no cost at all, period, to the evolutionary process, that it was completely neutral. So let's suppose that, and I'll show you the model, that what you have and you've got a free gene floating, if you will, as a gene pool ran into a ball, that you need anywhere from one to ten neutral, that is, will have no effect if you make the change, could have a positive effect, but there's no cost to making the change within a period of time. And we're going to have a breeding population size, prehistoric whales that are roughly what we know of not existing whales, but let's say human populations or cows of what have you. And let's rerun it. In other words, let's grant to the theory everything that it wants to reify that there you will. And here's what you find. This is a strictly neutral model. What you're saying is that, okay, I've got, here are the number of mutations to come up with that engineering marble. Here are the number of generations needed to get, you know, one, two, three, four, and five. And what you find is that given that extra gene and given just a few changes, really by the time that you get to two to three mutations, you've already exceeded the amount of time available. So if you assume that in making this, you know, like building a ship at sea, you've got to tear the ship apart, nevertheless you're out in the ocean and then you've got to rebuild it, if you assume that that's not going to cause any engineering problems, everything's going to go along no kind intended swimmingly, nevertheless you run into this time problem. This is a problem that is quite severe. This is a problem that is entailed by the equations themselves. It falls out of the map. And here's another issue again. That if you grant a strictly neutral process, with no cost, excuse me, and it would typically need only two or more mutations in a duplicate, before you get an adaptive novelty, before you get that cooling system with a reproductive, then there were simply not enough generations or years for this to happen. The problem is that when we look at the DNA sequences of these different types of mammals and we look at the changes required for new functionality, and this is what Dr. Doug Axe is going to be speaking about in particular, what you find is that you need far more than four changes. In other words, this last point is that you need too many engineering modifications to be made, but you have too little time. And that's both my point and I will end it over to Steve. Thank you. It's very subversive of Dr. Sternberg to use such a sexy example on a college campus. When he first went through the series of all the anatomical changes, I thought, we'll talk about the whale, but he got it. One point of clarification, when he was talking about the dirt and spit, dirt and Schmidt paper, the context is important here, because they were talking about, they were trying to make a calculation that would take for two coordinated mutations to occur in service of a common function. Michael Beehe had made a calculation of that sort based on studies of malaria bacteria, and it's come up with a very big, scary number. I think it was 500 million or maybe even more, maybe something like a billion, I can't remember. And so they came back and said, no, Beehe is wrong. It would only be 216 million, which is equally prohibitive.