 Now, just as a side note, we've been studying Darwin's finches on galactic acylone now for over 100 years. Interesting thing to note, you know, in over 100 years, as those finches breathe, you know, the only thing they produce? Finches. We've yet to have, like, a fern or rhinoceros or anything other than a finch come from those particular animals. Dr. Herob made this point several times during his speech. Finches never give birth to rhinos or ferns or dinosaurs or whatever. Bacteria never give rise to people. It's a way of poking fun, of contrasting our scientific understanding of change on a geological timescale with our everyday experiences of animals giving birth to animals just like themselves. The psychology behind this belief that evolution predicts that a finch would give birth to a rhino is interesting to me. I don't imagine that anyone in that room, if you ask them in all seriousness and honesty, believe that scientists, geneticists, cancer researchers, naturalists, or any other person with an advanced understanding of biology is sitting around wondering if a new form of life will come sliming out of a peanut butter jar or that their house cat will give birth to a horse. If you pulled the same audience that just chuckled at the ridiculousness of this assertion, they would tell you that scientists are very intelligent. So it suggests that for the purposes of this one question, they're willing to suspend their respect for experts in the health and scientific fields. It's funny specifically, I hope at least, because everyone in the audience knows that no one seriously holds to the belief that finches give birth to rhinos. Now if you passed high school biology, I hope you know that this idea of strange offspring is not a prediction of evolutionary theory. And if you took a college level course, you may even know that the process is actually forbidden by one of the laws of evolution called Dallow's Law of Irreversibility for the Belgian scientists who proposed it in 1893. Here's his version of the law. An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors. What it means is that once an organism has specialized into a particular body plan or adaptive trait, there is no known way for it to retrace backwards along its evolutionary history to a common root. That is, birds cannot go back to being generic reptiles, rhinos cannot go back to being generic mammals, and humans cannot go back to being our common ancestor with the other apes. How does that apply to Dr. Herob's assertion that finches might be expected by evolution to give birth to rhinos or ferns? Dallow's Law forbids backward motion, but it also, by implication, sets the pattern for forward motion. Finches, as a group or species, must have come from an animal which shared a common ancestor that was more generalized but that contained almost all the elements that finches also possess. That is, finches evolved from an ancestral bird also of class avies. These ancestral birds must have evolved from related ancestral vertebrate animals, and that ancestral vertebrate evolved from some other animal with related characteristics. The process of evolution is one of branching forms, not radical jumps. Rhinos have their own evolutionary lineage, a series of branchings from nearly indistinguishable forms. It is not a prediction of evolution that one animal would give rise to a different order of animal. The natural history of species is, in fact, the process of specialization. Let's take dogs, for example, and I strongly recommend Arun Ra's video on the evolution of dogs. But in a very general sense, dogs are a specific type of wolf. If we were to reproductively isolate a group of dogs for long enough and they were no longer inter-fertil, they would become an even more specific species of dog, which is a specific type of wolf. If all the wolves in the world died out, we would then have two distinctive species with no living common ancestor. No doubt future creationists, descendants of Dr. Herob, citing the absence of transitional forms, would claim that each of these two species were independently created by a supernatural power. So, Dr. Herob's concern that scientists believe fenches left to their own devices will produce baby rhinos is unfounded. Not only is such a change forbidden under evolution, but if it did occur, it would be proof that our understanding of genetics and hence evolution is flawed. On to the next travesty of science Dr. Herob has in store. Thanks for watching.