 Hey everybody, today we are debating evolutionary fitness and we're starting right now. What's up everybody? Erica Gutsick Gibbon coming at you here as a guest mod on modern day debate where we are discussing evolutionary fitness today. I know both of these interlocutors quite well, they're both really great guys so I'm really looking forward to the conversation that we're going to be having. The general format is going to be each individual is going to get to introduce themselves and then we're going to hop into 10 minute opens with around 50 minutes to an hour of open discussion followed by a Q&A. So you're going to want to tag at modern day debate if you've got super chats you want to ask either of these two debaters very knowledgeable dudes and that's kind of the gist of what we're doing today. So I want to throw it to these guys let them introduce themselves neither of them are new to modern day debate but for those of you who may be new in the audience it may be helpful to hear about a little bit about their background and additionally you have to know their links are in the description so whichever one of you wants to take it away first by all means. So why don't you go ahead first since you're also going to do the first opening so we'll do you, me, you, me then we'll just go to open. Alright Sal first I'm Salvador Cordova and I'm a research assistant in the field of molecular biophysics. Prior to working in biophysics I was a scientist and engineer in the aerospace and defense industry. I have five science degrees including two master's degrees one in biology and one in physics from Johns Hopkins University. I plan to develop teaching materials for creationists so I wanted to present my ideas to Dapper Dino this evening to solicit criticisms and to give my students a chance to hear the other side of the arguments. I want to thank Dapper also for giving me an opportunity to promote my work by participating in tonight's debate. Thanks to Praise and James for hosting the debate and Erica serving as moderator. I have some publications both in secular and creationist friendly venues on the Tupoy Summer Race Two Family of Enzymes and also publications in population genetics. I have an unpublished preprint with my co-author John Sanford on the beta-lactamase nylonase family of enzymes. I was a professing Christian most of my life but I believe I was truly saved at age 15. I was raised in a Roman Catholic home and accepted evolution as it was taught to me in public schools and books. A couple years after becoming a Christian I rejected evolutionary theory because of the problem of complexity and consciousness but I was an old earth creationist most of my life and only relatively recently am I now a young earth and young cosmos creationist. Tonight's debate will be for the nerds and probably free of drama. If you want drama I can suggest a few channels like say Smokey Saint but you can probably expect a debate that will put nerds in nerds heaven tonight. Thank you. That is absolutely the truth. Couldn't have said it better myself Sal. I know we are going to have a super civil and very riveting discourse just because I know these guys and apologies in advance to the audience. You are definitely going to want to have Google handy for some of the more intense terminology that Sal may throw our way which hopefully we will get to hear some from him and Dapper with regards to their thoughts on some of the intricacies in minutia. So hit us up Dapper. Introduce yourself. All right. Well I'm Dapper Dino. You may recognize me from earlier debates I've done on this channel as well as a few on other channels. I have a YouTube channel that is mostly dedicated to sort of responding to various young earth creationist claims usually in the form of response videos. I also have a weekly show that this is actually displacing but normally I have a show on Tuesdays starting at 6th Mountain Standard Time. It's Kent with Benz. Me and my co-host Benz-Hovind. No relation. Basically just laugh at some stupid Kent-Hovind stuff. And also I believe next week we actually have an Eric with Eric a planned normal schedule. So Eric will actually be on my channel next week. I do not have a terribly impressive list of academic credentials. I have a history degree. And yeah, there you go. However I am pretty passionate about these subjects and I spend a lot of my time reading about them going into the primary literature scene with secondary, sorry secondary literature is saying about it and stuff like that. So I feel like while this is a little bit outside my normal wheelhouse it's a conversation I want to have and I think that both Sal and I will come away with some new stuff to think about perhaps or at least different ways to think about the same stuff we've been thinking about. And yeah, I want to encourage you guys to go subscribe to both me and Sal. Sal is just starting his channel so he needs all the subscribers he can get. He's simulcasting this so yeah go over there and help him out. He's got only a few videos but he seems to be uploading pretty regularly. So if you want more Sal's Cordova he's producing more Sal Cordova for you. Absolutely man. Subscribe to both of these guys and the wonderful thing about science and about scientific discourse is that it truly is for everyone. This is something that anyone can get interested in and thanks to the age of information, one of the few positives of the internet I might posit, we can all get to know these topics decently well. I am super psyched for this discussion though so I'm going to toss it over to Sal and just let him get at it because I can yammer on for hours as those of you who know me in the audience may know. So that will take it away. Thank you. Praise. I have my slideshow up and Dapper thanks for plugging my channel and I will do the same. We're nothing if we can't plug one another's channels. This is as you can see www.evidenceandreasons.org is my website and you can actually get to my website by clicking the YouTube channel there link so that's just I'm trying to make it as easy as possible to find my YouTube channel since the search engines don't quite hit it right now. The way I kind of frame tonight's discussion is should biology be seen through the lens of evolutionary fitness and I will argue for the negative and it's very simple reason when we look at a bird or an airplane we say that these machines and I'll call a bird a machine are machines that are fit to fly and they're fit to fly for a variety of reasons that don't have to be tied to anything to do with reproductive success. Now we could say an airplane is fit to fly because it flies. That's a true statement but it's a mostly useless statement. I think a lot of assertions and evolutionary theory are regarding fitness or unfortunately of that variety. It may not be as blatant as that and I'm hoping to try to represent the other side as well as accurately as I can and so to the extent that I don't express or articulate their views I want to be corrected on that. So that's why I'm very grateful to have Dapper here tonight. I'll say an airplane is fit to fly because it has wings that provide adequate lift and propulsion that sustains adequate speed to create lift. The real problem that needs to be solved is not the reproductive success of existing traits. The problem is the origin and evolution of reproductively successful traits and these are traits that selection in my opinion would often prevent from evolving. Now going back to the bird example, a flying bird, there are birds that don't fly like penguins, a flying bird flies because it has wings and its lift to weight ratio is above 1.0. And the same is true for an airplane and George Jackson Mivart said what use is half a wing and that may play later on into some of the discussions if we have time. That theme was echoed by Gould and also Behe. Now I'll point out here a submarine, man-made submarine and then what I would call a god-made submarine, the whale. They're able to operate undersea because of their characteristics and you know they are not machines that can operate like say in a desert. So I prefer to define like kind of the operational fitness in terms of kind of engineering principles instead of reproductive success. So that's just basically where I'm headed tonight. I'll point out some other things sharks are able to sense electric fields. So they're able to sense electric fields. They have such sensitivity that it exceeds anything we can make. We have machines that can sense electric fields but sharks can sense them at nanovolts per meter and I talked to radar engineers they said yep that's right about the limit of physics. So we could say a shark is fit to sense electric fields. It's also able, it has a suite of sensory organs that are able to sense all sorts of things and we can define fitness in that way. Eyes are also fit to see based on architecture and geometric optics. Now I'm going to introduce a little levity here. We can say individuals are fit. These two young ladies in this picture are young and healthy and we would consider them fit. I'm not going to endorse the following as an actual case study but I found this on the internet. The website claims that these two fit young ladies look like that before their weight loss program. So the sense of fit, physically fit, has nothing to do with reproductive success. We can determine it in terms of optimality of physical characteristics like weight or heart function, etc. Total SI just as a moment of levity, the girl here is quoted as saying he treated me the same way at 485 pounds that he does at 182 pounds. The girl doesn't have a size or weight limit. Sorry, that was neither here nor there. Just pointing out the idea of fitness doesn't have to be tied to any sort of evolutionary notions. Now I did go to the internet and looked for dictionary definitions of fitness. There's physical fitness. It is a state of health and well-being and more specifically the ability to perform aspects of sports, occupations and daily activities. It could also be the quality of being suitable to fulfill a particular role or task such as in this quote, he had a year in which to establish his fitness for the office. And then a little bit closer to the evolutionary definition of fitness, an organism's ability to survive and reproduce in a particular environment. I think that's a little vague but and perhaps it's not exactly the population genetic definition. This is the population genetic definition which is from theoretical evolutionary genetics and you could see it's math heavy. It's basically the number of offspring an individual has that survived to reproduce. We don't have to go into the technical terms. There's even more technical. Again, this is far removed from the way we just I introduced the idea of fitness of birds and airplanes. There are more technical ideas such as relative versus absolute fitness and fitness coefficients. We won't go there tonight unless you really want to. I published a paper on Fisher's fundamental theorem of natural selection. I was critical of it. I did some derivations to demystify it. I took some of the notations and tried to clarify them. And in the process, I realized it's so abstracted away from our basic understanding of why an airplane would be fit. I said it's just totally decoupled. So if you think I'm overstating the case where I made this up, I'm not alone in this and I discovered literature to this effect. I mean, to me, what evolutionary fitness basically says is something is fit because it reproduces and it reproduces because it's fit. And let me just read some well-renowned authors and evolutionary biologist. Alan Orr said biologists have offered a staggering number of definitions of fitness. Richard Lewinton said it is not entirely clear what fitness is. And Andreas Wagner said fitness is hard to define rigorously and more difficult to measure. Andreas Wagner said an examination of fitness and its robustness alone would thus not yield much insight into the opening questions. Instead, it is necessary to analyze on all levels of organization, the systems that constitute an organism and thus, and that sustain its life. I define such systems loosely as assembly supports that carry out well-defined biological functions. This ironically sounds hauntingly familiar to something Michael B. said. He said a system composed of several well-matched interacting parts that contribute to the basic function of the system. And that is basically how I'm trying to describe the functioning of an airplane. And so I'm just going to skip some of the redundancy here. Finally, Richard Lewinton said from the Santa Fe Bulletin, and I'll read you three paragraphs to close this opening segment. The problem is that it is not entirely clear what fitness is. Darwin took the metaphorical sense of fitness literally. The natural properties of different types resulted in their differential fit into the environment in which they live. The better the fit to the environment, the more likely they were to survive and the greater their rate of reproduction. This differential rate of reproduction would then result in a change of abundance of the different types. This is a little bit closer to my definition, but not quite. In modern evolutionary theory, however, fitness is no longer a characterization of the relation of the organism to the environment that leads to reproductive consequences, but is meant to be a quantitative expression of the differential reproductive schedules themselves. Darwin's sense of fit has been completely bypassed. And finally, if a type increases in a population, then it is by definition more fit. But this suffers from two difficulties. First, it does not distinguish random changes in frequencies and finite populations from changes that are a consequence of different biological properties. Finally, it destroys any use of differential fitness as an explanation of change. It simply affirms that types change in frequency, but we already knew that. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much, Sal. That was that, you know, I don't even have the time you guys either. My job is so easy when I get to two civil and intelligent debaters. So we're going to hit it on over to Dapper and let him get his opener in Dapper. Do you have a sledge or are you just doing a spoken deal? Dapper, we can't hear you. I was muted. I do not have a presentation. Sorry. I apparently also am in a computer. Listen, I just thought you were taking a minute to really ponder it, to really think. I had to center myself. Yeah, of course. Of course. Yeah. All right. I'll just start on your first word then. And I'll let you know when you're at nine minutes. All right. Well, so the reason that we're really here ultimately comes down to evolutionary biologists tend to define fitness in a way that is inconvenient for some of my, I guess, opponents, although we're friendly opponents, positions, especially about genetic entropy. The problem with genetic entropy is that unless you can redefine fitness, it doesn't seem to work. And one of the problems here is that we're running into a similar situation and forgive the comparison. It's not meant to be insulting. But you might point out to one of the somewhat more intelligent flat earthers that, hey, density doesn't have a vector. So you can't use it to explain downward acceleration. And they say, well, what if we just redefine density to have a vector? It's like, well, I guess that might kind of help, but it circles back around to needing gravity. And now you just have a more complicated definition for density than you need. And we're in a similar situation here where fitness in evolutionary biology is defined in terms of reproductive success because in the long run, what's going to stick around is what has been reproductively successful. And one of the reasons that we measure it that way is because it's possible. Now it is tricky in many cases. For instance, let's say you have an overnight experiment with bacteria. How many generations have gone by? How can you track individual inheritance from one bacterium to the other? It's pretty tough. You basically can't, which means you need some proxies. But the proxies always have to come back to reproductive fitness. So for instance, in the long-term Lenski experiment, they compare the number of wild strain E. coli to experimental strain E. coli that end up being produced in test samples after whatever period I don't remember. And then they use those proportions to help determine fitness in the particular experimental environment. But in other places, you might have to just go with count offspring. So for instance, elephants, it's hard to get to more than one generation of elephants because they just take so darn long to breed. But the general hopeful what we can generally get to is number of grandchildren that survive to reproduce. If you or your population are at eight or over, you're going to probably maintain. If you go over, you're going to take over the population. If you go under, your lineage is tending towards extinction. That's just a result of math. And that's for, you know, organisms that are sexually reproducing with two sexes. So other organisms that can change there. So, but what my interlocutor here is suggesting is essentially sort of, we should talk about fitness in terms of the kind of thing you might go to the gym for. You know, I want to pump some iron. But the problem is that nature doesn't really care how strong or fast or agile you are or how well you can fly, except in that those things directly relate to your reproductive success. And I know there was the claim that some of these things don't, but in fact they do. If you were to take essentially any flighted bird right now, and except in situations where they've just newly colonized a new island or something, the kind of situation where we lose flightlessness, and then you were to say clip their wings so that they can't control their flight effectively, that's going to lead to a significant decrease in reproductive success. You can also see similar things with, you know, various breeds of domesticated dogs. So a beagle is not something that's going to survive outside of an environment where humans are purposefully getting them to make more of themselves. But in that environment, being an adorable little beagle is a huge reproductive advantage. And now this does make a complication. We could have something that in this gym membership kind of definition for fitness, we can say, oh, this is definitely fit, more fit, you know, it's stronger or faster, or it conducts this, you know, biochemical reaction faster or more efficiently. But the thing is that in every single one of those cases, there is at least a conceivable environment where being able to be better at that thing is actually costly to reproductive success. So it might be that the energy that it takes to maintain really big muscles isn't worth it compared to just letting you have, you know, a mutation that just reduces your overall muscle mass. And that might be a case and say human evolution where humans are much less muscular than other apes. Well, they don't really need to be that muscular. They're not uprooting trees or trying to fight lions with their bare hands. They're using tools, tools multiply your force so you can reduce the caloric burden on muscles. We get similar things with vaccine or not vaccine, sorry, antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Usually the adaptations to avoid the antibiotic would result in a less successful genome or phenotype outside of a heavily antibiotic, you know, present environment. But so what? All that evolution cares about is what is going to get you to survive. And evolution doesn't care about sort of your personal assessment because one of the problems with this gym type membership, sorry, definition is very heavily focused on what humans emotionally feel like is good. Humans like things to be big and strong and smart and fast. But nature doesn't care except where it helps. Another big problem with it is that you, I have yet to find even a hypothetical way to standardize this definition of fitness that is engineering or the gym type fitness. How do you measure it? Do you measure it in terms of like for strength, just how many, you know, kilograms the animal can lift per kilogram of its own body weight? Well then I would say, well that makes most insects vastly more fit than humans. But is that actually true? Are humans really more fit than say lady bugs? I don't know. On the basis of that, I guess they would have to be. But then you have to compare the things like what about speed? Are humans more fit than chipmunks because their overland long distance speed is higher? I don't know why. Why would we say that? And so you get to this problem where you just can't define it if we're going to go into this gym version of fitness. You can't measure it the same way that you can with reproductive success. So there's a whole bunch of things. The three main problems I see with it is, one, it's arbitrary based on human preferences that nature doesn't care about. Two, it actually doesn't affect the long term of biology because biology only actually cares about reproductive success. And three, it becomes impossible to actually quantify, which means it's useless for further study in science because you can't actually do any analysis on it, except in very specific individual traits. But again, since that doesn't tie back necessarily to reproduction, it doesn't really help in terms of evolutionary biology. I think that's basically my main points. I will say that I did enjoy Sal's opening, and thanks very much Sal. That was great. But I think that's really all I have is that, yeah, those three main points. So if we want to just toss it over to an open discussion, that's fine by me. Absolutely. We can 100% do that. Look, both of you guys are under time. I don't have to do a thing. I know. Before we go into this open discussion, give me a moment to shame the chat because we've got 238 folks watching, and we only have 62 likes and three dislikes I'm coming for you guys. I'm one of those blackers there. Yeah, smash the like button. Do the thing where you subscribe. Hit the bell. That's the other one. Hit that bell. If you want to get more James moderation and guest moderation for, you know, epic debates as the youngsters would say. What Erica is trying to avoid saying is you guys want more Erika. So hit like whenever Erika is here. Yeah, that's the truth. I'm not getting enough affirmation from the chat, and you guys know I subsist almost entirely on positive attention. Everyone in the chat, please tell Erica what a great moderator she is. You know, she's the star of the show. People were just this has nothing to do with anything if he I'm just going to plug you here, Erika. The last we had two debates with Dr. Dan and the first debate everyone was coming because of you and when you didn't show up because you were hanging out with your fiance. All these guys on Twitter were just like, oh, Erika, that's what I came for. And then the next debate you announced that you were engaged in all these guys are just like, oh, the whole internet was hard broken. You guys are lucky that I use like blinding, you know, lighting in here so you can't see how badly I'm blushing. I'm changing the subject abruptly before you guys mean more embarrassed than I already am. So hop into the open discussion. I will let you know in 40 minutes. I like to hear Sal start that because I think back and forth. I think you had so many excellent points. I don't think I'll be able to address them all all at once. And it doesn't mean I'm trying to dodge them because I think every my students deserve a response to everything you said. So I will try to address it. If I miss it please feel free to remind me and you know me if I say I don't have a response I'll just say that. So I'd like to point this out and I'm just going to solicit your opinion on it and I'm sorry to put you a little bit on the spot but this is what I raised to my students praise if you could help me. I have an abstract here on intelligence and childlessness. Okay. Is it coming up? Oh, thank you. Here we go. This is a question of social science research demographers demographers debate why people have children in advanced industrial societies where children are not our net economic costs from an evolutionary perspective however the important question is why some individuals choose not to have children recent theoretical developments in evolutionary psychology suggest that more intelligent individuals may be more likely to remain childless than less intelligent individuals analyses of the national child development study shows that more intelligent men and women express preference to remain childless early in their reproductive careers but only more intelligent women not more intelligent men are more likely to remain childless by the end of their reproductive careers controlling for education and earnings does not at all attenuate the association between childhood general intelligence and lifetime childlessness among women one standard deviation increase in childhood general intelligence that's 15 IQ points decreases women's odds of parenthood by 21 to 25 percent because women have a greater impact on the average intelligence of future generations the this genetic fertility among women is predicated is predicted I'm sorry predicted to lead to a decline in the average intelligence of the population in advanced industrial nations so my question is is that assuming hypothetically that this is an accurate portrayal of the environment does that mean would we say evolutionary fitness in this case favors traits that decrease intelligence in other words kind of to put it more in more vulgar terms that does it make stupidity well it certainly is the case that there would be a so essentially what we're seeing here is a circumstance where the fitness peak has shifted which is one of the things that I find anti evolution literature rarely tackles is the shifting of the fitness landscape so the fitness landscape is this idea where we have peaks of high fitness around a morphological landscape that's sort of it's a 3d curve of hills and valleys right up at the peaks you're good at reproducing down in the troughs you're bad at it but because the environment can change where those peaks are can change now I would not say that this means that being dumb as in the lowest IQ possible is what's going to be at the fitness peak but what it does mean is that the fitness peak in some places has gone to a somewhat lower level of intelligence and that getting to that fitness peak will be advantageous but going beyond it won't so for instance this is unlikely to lead to say humans who can no longer use tools or language because that would be such a big disadvantage in industrial society that it would be hard to see why that would be something that would be favored I don't think most people want to have their life partner be unintelligible and illiterate most people don't want that so there is a new fitness peak so it's not that we're selecting for being dumb or that being dumb is evolutionarily advantageous is that a new lower intelligence is the peak in some places and yeah I don't see why that is a problem plus it also means that based on this definition of evolutionary fitness which is just differential reproductive success we can make a prediction like a roughly 15 IQ point decrease over the course of some period of time because we've used the actual standard evolutionary definition in something that's measurable so now we can make a prediction it would be hard to make a prediction on the basis of this gym version of fitness where we just say well I feel like smarter is better therefore this is bad okay well that's great I mean I don't necessarily disagree I would prefer people to be smarter but I don't get to make that decision what do we do with it now and I don't know what answer there is for sort of your position Sal in terms of what do we do with this this definition like can you measure it is are you just measuring IQ points for fitness why do you think that's a valid way to measure fitness for any animal is to just measure IQ points I was oh thank you that was an excellent response I was just pointing out that selection can select for decreasing capabilities once those brain cells are lost it may not be recoverable I mean we don't know that yet but there is concern and there are other peer reviewed papers to that effect I just wanted to point out for the sake of the audience that one of the top evolutionary biologists Michael Lynch he says without any compelling arguments and I'm right here I don't know if you can see my cursor I'll try to move it up a little bit at this time it remains difficult to escape the conclusion that numerous physical and psychological attributes are likely to slowly deteriorate in technologically advanced societies the incidences of a variety of afflictions including autism male infertility asthma, immune system disorders, diabetes already exhibit increases exceeding the expected rate this observational work may substantially underestimate the mutational vulnerability of the world's most complex organ the human brain because human brain function is governed by the expression of thousands of genes the germline mutation rate to psychological disorders may be unusually high at least 30% of individuals with autism spectrum disorders appear to acquire such behaviors by de novo mutation it has been suggested that there has been a slow decline in intelligence in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past century just some things have shown that there's a decline and the way I attribute it is that sometimes selection selects for less intelligence and then also sometimes selection is not able to clean out totally purge out some of the bad in the collective human genome so I'm just throwing out another data point and you could see that this is where I developed just for your information this is where I developed some sympathies for genetic entropy and I believe it's the correct characterization of human destiny unfortunately creationists believe that we are intelligently designed but also cursed now just one last thing on this point and then feel free to ask me questions you've been so kind to answer mine and respond this is symptoms of premenstrual syndrome and I just happened to find an interesting article maybe I'm not going to belabor it they asked what's the evolutionary advantage of premenstrual syndrome and they articulate why it's good to have all of these characteristics I'm not saying any of you should buy it but this is the sort of thing that kind of bothers me a little bit when I study evolutionary literature so many of the examples of beneficial mutations are not increases in complexity but losses in them so I mean reductive evolution is at least to my knowledge is the dominant mode of evolution both in the laboratory and field observations the only place that I see that evolutionist evolutionary biologist claim that the dominant mode is not reductive is kind of in their imagination of the distant past so that's all I had thank you very much for responding to my questions Dapper so there's a few things one thing that I want to say is that this current increase that we're seeing in things that we would generally characterize as pathological genetic conditions in Homo sapiens is not because of some noticeable acceleration in our mutation rate or our phylogenetic replacement rate it's again another example of a shift in the fitness landscape for Homo sapiens Homo sapiens are essentially taking out lying parts of the fitness landscape up to be peaks or to be part of the larger peak and that's because of their rather absurdly high capacity to change the environment around them so humans move into a place where it's far too cold for them and then they just decide to grab someone else's fur turn it inside out and wear it as a coat and then they decide to make houses out of actual snow and somehow that manages to work so they take what would otherwise be a deadly hostile environment and change it into something where they can survive and then as they increase their technology you get to the point where what otherwise would have been death sentences is now a controllable and while unfortunate certainly not life ending or reproduction ending disease and so that is humans changing the fitness landscape if they weren't doing that we wouldn't see this so rather than an example of some new thing happening in genetics or something that we can generalize to evolution as a whole we're seeing changes in the fitness landscape and I feel like again this is something that anti evolutionists really have trouble addressing is when you point to something and you call it reductive or maybe it's losing some specificity well the fitness landscape changed and there are cases where in a new fitness landscape we can get new things so for instance there's the and I know I'm pretty sure you've heard about this one Dr. Dan has mentioned it but in mgroup HIV virus there is a protein VPU which conducts its normal old function that it did as in its sister populations among the simian immunovirus groups but it also antagonizes homo sapiens tetherin which has an unusual structure compared to other primates human tetherin is smaller and so SIV has trouble antagonizing it but this VPU protein which doesn't normally do tetherin antagonism at all maintains its old function but also latches on to a different functional site on human tetherin than other SIV viruses use when they are using their own proteins for tetherin antagonism which is what allows HIV to infect humans in the first place this is a brand new function nothing was reduced further we have examples like human lactase persistence is not a result of any loss of function it's actually an enhancement to the promotion of the enzyme lactase so your cell just normally when mammals undergo their weaning where they lose their lactase production it's not that there's necessarily inhibition it's just that other things are promoted more and so the actual amount of lactase produces insufficient to effectively digest lactose in humans with lactase persistence that promotion is strengthened so there's just more of the function that was already there so while it is easier to point out something that maybe lost some degree of function in one area and that caused a benefit to a large extent that's just because of a sampling bias it's easier to see those things they're more obvious it's not always very obvious when say a mammal gains some slightly tweaked and slightly more effective metabolic pathway because I mean what do you look for so part of that is just there's the story about a guy who's searching all around for his keys under a lamp post and someone comes by and says oh what are you doing he says I'm looking for my keys did you drop them here he says oh no I dropped them over there there's no light over there so I'm looking here we get that same thing with which mutations we tend to look at we tend to look at the ones that are obvious to us and are also produce dramatic effects but we have plenty of examples of non-degenerative evolution happening in multiple areas we have an example of I believe it was a flounder in Antarctica that had a duplication of one of its genes coding for some protein I can look it up later if we need to the antifreeze protein right so it kept the original protein and then it gained a new antifreeze protein which allowed it to survive in colder temperatures so it's not at all the case that everything is reductive there's a lot of examples of brand new functions that do not reduce any old functioning however evolution is sort of a it's sort of a slap it together at the last minute sort of a force so if something is convenient here and it's not reductive in this gym fitness sense evolution is just going to go for it because all evolution cares about ultimately is reproductive fitness and that's why again it's the important aspect of evolutionary biology is how we make predictions it's one of the only things we can directly measure and compare across organisms so for instance if it turns out that Sal you're stronger and smarter than I am well that doesn't tell us much about our genetic success in an evolutionary sense because if you're stronger and smarter than me but you don't end up having more descendants well I mean good for you but in terms of evolution that would mean that I would be the winner there not that it's a game that we have to win evolution is just what it is and also I think there's one thing that a lot of times you said things like this is fit to fly and I think that implies it's sort of extrinsic purpose to biological organisms that they don't actually demonstrably have organisms exist because they make more of themselves they don't have any particular purpose in a grand scheme at least in terms of biology now if you want to say that they do in some sort of spiritual sense or something like that I don't really care to argue with that but I do want to be careful that we don't import import or sorry impart to creatures some extrinsic purposefulness that they really don't have in the grand scheme of things like what's the grand purpose of botflies is it to make everything miserable for everyone that's what they do I would prefer to say that that is not an intended purpose from some great omnipotent creator who created botflies because he hates everyone so that's all I got well thank you for your response there are actually quite a number of things I would totally disagree with but we may not have time and I wonder if Erica is looking through all the super chats and if there are questions in the queue and they're just dying to ask because I do there are a couple things that I didn't respond to Dapper and I apologize in advance and feel free to remind you I think one of them was regarding whether there's just kind of an alternative definition in engineering fitness I would say there's not we don't have one set of specifications to define fitness for every machine so I can elaborate on that more so actually I have a very specific question about that because I think this might drive to the heart of it so let's say we have two members of the same species and we'll just pick something that people are familiar with so we've got two wolves and to keep things simple we'll say that they're the same sex using this engineering version of fitness how do you correlate which one is more fit on this basis and give it a number that we can use to meaningfully make predictions about future data in terms of wolf population genetics sometimes the traits may the changes may be the effect on the way they're able to compete reproductively might be too weak to detect and even evolutionary biologists might not be able to detect that we know that because based on the population size a lot of things that may even have hypothetically reproductive advantage will be treated almost neutral so it's not so much putting exact numbers on reproduction it's talking about how successfully they're able to operate in an environment so let's say one wolf has better optics it's not a subject to myopia or other other optical problems than the other wolf that's clearly definable in terms of geometric optics and physics and performance and so their metrics perhaps the way to do it is not the whole organism but in terms of the functioning of various parts because the way we score airplanes we've had airplanes that are basically the same airplane but then they've had slight modifications to the preference of the mission because I follow War History, particularly aviation and we'll say you have one set of specifications that describe this airplane is designed to operate at high altitudes but it doesn't have a lot of armaments, it's not going to be a great fighter at low altitudes and that's all it is I think I understand what you're saying but there's a couple important things one is the reason we can do this for say different aircraft designs that we want to say which one we want to use for the same purpose is because humans are being an extrinsic purpose to an aircraft humans which are not aircrafts but who build aircrafts have decided I want an aircraft for this purpose, maybe it's cargo hauling between I don't know, Singapore and Guadalupe for, it doesn't matter so we have specific engineering requirements but unless we can find who is telling a wolf what its purpose is and what they would like to see it do regardless of reproduction we cannot come up with a similar objective criterion for wolves in how they interact in their environment because frankly the wolves don't care that much and neither does evolution all that biology cares about is evolutionary biology is all that that cares about is what's going to happen in population genetics of these wolves and so I have to repeat the question how do we measure the fitness between these two wolves and then use that measurement to make quantitative predictions about the future of wolf genetics based on that assessment I don't think we make quantity for reproduction and genetics I don't think that's the purpose see the purpose we can also define the operating parameters of a machine without saying without having to see that's the thing is that's one of the problems is we're conceiving biology in terms of reproductive success we need to look at biology in terms of engineering machines and one thing I wanted to point out tonight and thank you for reminding me is there's a developing field of both biophysics and systems biology systems biology looks at at biological systems as biological organisms as collections of systems even if we don't say metaphysically established purpose we can still affix parameters like a like an engineer would and say I don't know what the purpose of this vehicle is I don't know what it was meant to fight or maybe it was a bad design but we can establish that it's operating performance characteristics in terms of climb rates and speed and all these other factors and that's exactly what a lot of systems biology does in terms of cognitive anatomy we can compare the the optical function of a human eye versus that of an insect and we could say okay this is optimized to do tasks it can do sensory operations and it can see these sort of things at these wavelengths these are just all engineering specifications and I find that a more just because I'm an engineer maybe I find that a more satisfying way to describe biology is that one third of MIT engineers in one study one third of MIT engineers are studying biological systems that's because they have the proper skill set to understand how biology works and I'm really you know I feel I have a lot of friends in evolutionary biology and I have a picture of one of my professors I studied evolutionary biology and I feel kind of bad that I have to rag on their field but modern research into biology like at the NIH they have a staff of 30,000 people there only about 30 people are dedicated evolutionary biologists it's just not a skill set that is needed for modern research into biology that's because a lot of biological systems they look designed they parallel and in fact many cases exceed the engineering specifications of anything we can build and I could enumerate so many examples and the thing is even if we don't metaphysically assume that there is some purpose it's hard to run away from the fact that these machines can operate and perform like the bird's magnetic compass it enables birds like the Arctic turn to fly from the North Pole to the South Pole it took thousands of years for humans to be able to build intercontinental navigation systems and we still don't know how the bird does it we do know it has a magnetic compass that uses quantum spin chemistry and entanglement and I have a citation that it exceeds anything we can build and so I don't have to assume purpose but we know that this machine does it better than anything we can do so I can say that at every level of biology so thank you for entertaining me I'm going to agree that yes there are many organisms that can do things in terms of feats of engineering say that humans struggle or cannot at least currently accomplish but I'm not denying that measuring how these things work and determining the exact optimal resolution of an eagle eye or just how fast a prong horn can run or something like that I'm not saying that these things aren't important things to learn and that they are not aspects of study that are proper for biology but when we're talking about fitness as a technical term it really only has use in terms of evolutionary biology as it relates to the outcomes in population genetics that fitness causes so if you want to have a discussion about you know how fast a cheetah is or how strong a grizzly bear is that's great and it's a great conversation to have but this conversation has to relate to the technical term of fitness because I recognize that you brought some dictionary definitions for fitness but just like in any other scientific area the scientific jargon term the technical term for something does not have to correlate very strongly to what is in the dictionary for lately for instance I don't know if you know this but in quantum physics quarks are said to have color and the interaction of quarks based on their color is called electro-quanto I can't even remember it it has chromodynamics electro-chromo-dynamics or something like that quantum chromo-dynamics actually I'm not familiar with that field my physics program didn't go into your stuff which I regret but the thing is that when we say that quarks have color that's not what that literally means it doesn't mean that if you get a whole bunch of them together they'll look red for one thing you can't get a bunch of them together that way light the same way that objects do so this isn't one of those cases where it doesn't matter what the dictionary says about fitness what matters is how it's used in the area of science where it's used as a technical term which is evolutionary biology and population genetics and no amount of saying we can measure these things and we can see how wonderful life is changes the fact that when it comes to making predictions about population genetics all that matters is reproductive fitness that's it all the other things only matter in as much as they affect that and I don't see why we need to change that in this one technical field because we're already talking about all these things in the standard secular mainstream science everyone's talking about how great sharks are at the electrosensory perception everyone's already talking about how strong ants are or all these things but when it comes to population genetics it doesn't matter how strong they are it matters how well they reproduce and how strong they are only matters to that in so much as it helps them reproduce and so that's my problem with this line of argumentation where yes it is important but it's not on the topic in my opinion I think that's a fair point there is one thing I want to if you'll indulge me this is one time I hope you'll be actually a little bit more verbose so I can get something on Google for a minute or so I'd appreciate it so thanks and that is one of the things that concerns me about a lot of debates about very technical scientific terms is that a lot of times the person who's proposing some change is making a good point in that the thing that they would like to capture with their measurement is a great thing to capture in a measurement it's just not this measurement so I don't think anyone is going to say we should stop paying attention to the actual abilities of individual organisms or species it's just that those answer different questions so if you want to say how does a cheetah get that fast that's a great question to look into things like spine flexibilities, springiness of the ligaments things like that leg length but if you want to say how does a cheetahs keep reproducing that's a different question and it needs a different measurement and I think I have filled in what otherwise would have been dead air sufficiently for Sal maybe I'm hoping because I'm running out of things Sal you're going to save me. Alright Heidi thank you now I think you made very valid points and I would want my students to hear what you characterize because I think you're more straight up than most people I've dealt with and I just wanted to point out something when I studied what disillusioned me about population genetics and you know there's some really great guys in the field like Joe Felsenstein he's always been generous and kind to me and it just hurts me to death that I just have to trash his life work I mean it's not it's not my life work so trash it away so this came up because in my research in a peer reviewed paper that I've several of them that I've actually been working in population genetics and for what it's worth this is not my field because I really don't like it the problem is that even within the field of population genetics they're finally admitting they're not able to come up with very stable predictions yes we can track a trait I mean if it has a really strong selection coefficient as in like bacterial resistance you can really say okay this is going to right you know this one yeah the problem comes when we have more complex organisms and the interactions between their interactions between the genes such as linkage epistasis in that there are many of these genes this was actually kind of a crisis and this I'm just showing a paper that said the theory was beautiful indeed rise and fall in circulation and maximizing methods in population genetics and it was talking about the whole paper is actually kind of a painful mathematical read but it talked about how the idea of fitness even being maximized fell apart and I showed a little bit of a clip of Joe Felsenstein's book Theoretical Evolutionary Genetics in that book in the later chapters it shows Patrick Moran dissected this and it was actually it caused a crisis he showed that fitness may not ever maximize may not their pathological situations if there's linkage and epistasis that all these genes may not fix and it may never maximize and then as I pointed out was saying it's very hard to measure it what he was specifically studied was density dependent selection so you could take the same organisms so like say fruit fly has allele A and another fruit fly has allele B depending on how you change the density of the initial populations say in a fruit fly farm it'll affect who ends up being the most fit and it really bothered Lewinton he said well then how's this any different than just looking at the reproductive schedules after the fact he didn't use the words after the fact but that's essentially what was happening he said he could not predict because the equations were not tractable they're called couple differential equations so I'm saying even on the terms of their own ideas it falls apart and then they also use a lot of they use a lot of approximations that don't work they assume in the case of Lewinton that example with the fruit flies it works better if the models assume kind of a stable fitness coefficient and stable reproduction rates which is not true and it just blows everything away and it's very hard to say that it may not make not only does it not make very good predictions even in the present day if it's having problems in the present day making predictions how's it going to be able to say anything about what happened in the past with any degree of reliability I'd like to address some of that please please please there's a few things one is and I think this is a really quick one you may not be able to get to the hypothetical peak fitness in an environment which I would just say okay that's fine as long as the as long as the lineage persists it doesn't need to get to a particular peak in fact most fitness landscape modeling does not involve organisms generally making it all the way to the peak before peak shifts you might get some exceptions but another thing is most of what you've just given over it's difficult to actually assess fitness short of just literally counting offspring which in most model organisms isn't feasible but that's a problem with measurement not a problem with the idea because in cases where we can carefully measure it we can make predictions and basically what you're saying is the instrument error is too high so what's throughout the whole idea but that's essentially the same thing as saying well you know these first few telescopes don't really tell us much about the solar system so let's just abandon astronomy and we'll stick with you know, Aristotelian cosmology well as time goes and new parts of science develop better techniques better instruments and things like that their predictions become better and their measurements become more precise so I that whole thing about the trouble in finding out what things are going to affect fitness how and the trouble in measuring fitness it's a technical problem and one that I don't see any reason why it won't improve as the ability of say humans to do things like sequence genomes track reproduction in various organisms use perhaps more appropriate model organisms as we discover what those might be there's no reason any of those things can't happen so this is essentially just someone saying to someone in like 1820 you're never going to get a fixed wing aircraft to work look at all the failures okay that doesn't mean anything and I think that's the situation we're in now I don't deny that assessing fitness and making predictions can be difficult and that the predictions often have a high margin of error what they exist and they can be verified but this this version of fitness where it's basically the kind of thing you go to the gym to get as far as I can tell can't even in principle make those types of predictions never mind make fuzzy ones that are hard to that you know have a wide margin of error as far as I can tell it's just not making predictions in population genetics at all and so right now I'm faced with we've got one thing that's hard to do but it does give results and we've got another thing that I don't have any methodology for I don't have any standard units for I don't even have a really clear definition of and it's also as I've said very tied in with human emotionalism and it has yet to produce results and I know which of those two I would go with it's the one that's producing fuzzy results I have one more slide to go with I don't want to belabor the topic I do agree with you that they're not units specifically for engineering fitness if this is a shameless plug for a paper this was peer reviewed for a ID friendly institution called the Blythe Institute we're not they don't push biblical creationism even though everyone even though a lot of the people there are young earth creationists they try to highlight things that are we try to argue in terms of mainstream science as much as possible so even though you'll see me cite scripture in one venue I don't cite it in this one for the Blythe Institute this is a free online open access it was kind of scraps from the cutting room floor of an actual secular peer reviewed thing that I submitted I've received word that it might be accepted we'll see and I just going to share a quote just take it for what it is and I think it's I mean it's fair game to see if I'm representing this accurately but in my paper at least I give the full citations and so I invite people that are really interested in this stuff to look it up so I'm going to read the quote and kind of give my take on it this is by Joe Felsenstein 2017 he was the author of the population evolutionary theoretical genetics and this is from his essay mathematics versus evolution and he writes Fisher and writes one locus equations turn out to be approximations sometimes bad ones the mathematical tools at hand have not revolutionized our understanding of the evolutionary process many evolutionists I love and I love that Joe Felsenstein calls them evolutionists many evolutionists will fail to find the clear and simple messages that population genetics theory once seemed to promise and this actually began all the way back in 1989 and it was repeated so I'm just pointing out that what we may hear in the popular press as far as the success of population genetics helping us to understand evolution I don't I think it's overstated it's overhyped and an example of that is actually Fischer's fundamental theorem of natural selection because for a while it was said Fischer's fundamental theorem of natural selection was called Fischer's central theorem and it might have been accorded that status because Fischer himself said it's the fundamental theorem but the idea that Fischer's theorem is biology's central theorem is by and large a myth and promoted by people like Richard Dawkins and people like Joe Felsenstein it basically said it was never really that fundamental after all so there are a lot of myths floating around my role in this is to try to educate the public on and I know you're very optimistic and it's a commendable thing to be optimistic but I'm rather negative on where the field's going to go and that's all I have to say thank you for engaging my thoughts I think you've given me some valuable criticisms to think on and I really want to thank you for that well you're very welcome I mean I think that's a big goal of this is to you know give each other something to think about and I'll come into this expecting that you're going to suddenly adopt my position on most of this stuff so like I get that but one thing that it still concerns me is here we're now correct me if I'm wrong because I haven't read your paper and I haven't read the one that you're critiquing either so I'm kind of getting this third hand but it still seems yes that's quite alright quite alright it still seems that most of your criticism here is that this particular theorem requires overly idealized circumstances to produce good results yes and I can't dispute that I don't know but I'll just accept it for the sake of this argument and say well okay but that just means that we need better techniques and we already have techniques that are better than they were before I don't think anyone would say that in 2020 we're not better at measuring actual fitness in laboratory model organisms than we were say in 1970 I mean we just obviously are for one thing we can just actually sequence the genomes of model organisms that we're using in evolution experiments and so I don't see why this trend is going to reverse and again no matter how difficult it is to measure fitness and no matter how fuzzy the predictions from it are we actually have a measurement technique in evolutionary biology or several depending on exactly which organism you're trying to get to but it centers around the idea of reproductive success and it does make predictions even if sometimes they're inexact and sometimes we've overlooked some things that should have factored into the calculation but that we didn't so again we're still stuck in a situation where for the type of science where evolutionary fitness is important it still comes down to reproductive success and it still doesn't really matter how much iron you can pump at the gym if it doesn't result in more reproduction relative to your peers so I don't know what the point is in bringing up difficulties in measuring fitness or making or the difficulties involved in making predictions based on somewhat fuzzy measurements because I accept all of those it doesn't really change the fact that going to a new definition of fitness will be yet less useful in science than it is now in evolutionary biology and population genetics which is the only area where it really matters in terms of this definition for fitness I think you have modified you've given me valuable feedback perhaps what I will say is that and we can think about this collectively because I haven't committed this to textbooks yet and this is why value your input I think the more the main thing that I wanted to say is the whole the whole discipline is not delivered on what they wanted to I mean I think they're very sincere guys and they spent their lifetime but I think the enterprise has failed one of the reasons is actually one that was pointed out by Kimura himself there is a problem measuring fitness because it depends our resolution the accuracy of our measurement depends on the population size if we have small population sizes a lot of traits that otherwise would be considered fit they can't be measured to be as such and that's the theory of near neutral mutations by ATTA and so just I think what has happened is kind of like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle as a matter principle there are limits to how accurately and how much precision we can get in our measurement I think we have the equivalent right now in population genetics because of near neutral theory and so perhaps not even granting that we'll accept that definition it I think the field is in major trouble as far as the promise it had hoped to deliver on and there's a lot of sincere guys and I commend them for trying to figure this out but I don't think I'm going to add now a personal thing I think God ordained that organisms would not be able to be explained in terms of evolution and this is one example I'm seeing some stuff coming through the chat now by the way if there are things you feel that I've not addressed I'm very much welcome continuing the discussion I probably would need to think on a few things thank you for hearing me out and seeing what I did I think the only major thing that I would like to hear addressed perhaps at a later date is the degree to which your idea behind engineering fitness seems to be based on human preferences so humans like things that are big and fast and strong but I don't see any reason why science should care what things humans find traditionally satisfying in other organisms except in regards to pets I guess human desires for pets are a pretty strong selection pressure on pets so I'll give it that but other than that I have trouble figuring out why we should base a scientific measure so strongly on something that seems fundamentally to rely on human psychology rather than anything extrinsic and in the objective universe outside of humanity I'll just address that briefly it's the biophysicists that are have added into the discussion but the thing is saying this is what's physically possible isn't a value judgment but saying this being stronger is more fit seems now granted maybe I'm wrong about this but it seems like an emotional value judgment saying this is more fit because it's more of a thing I like saying this is this animal can do this physical thing as a statement of fact but once you assign it some kind of fitness value it sounds like you're making a value judgment especially since you don't have units that you can use to objectively quantify it so guys we're at about 45 minutes now I want Sal to be able to finish his thought here maybe if you guys want to continue the exchange for maybe five more minutes or so till we're about at 50 minutes if you want to and then at that point we can either I don't know if you guys discussed closers is that something you guys would be discussing don't do like a quick like three minute closure reach or something we could just do that right now that's fine I was thinking Sal you could go ahead and finish your thought and then we go into closers because I don't want you to feel as if you don't have enough time so maybe we'll just I'll let you know in five minutes if you guys want to continue the discourse for that much longer and if not then we'll just let me know when you're ready for closers and we'll do that otherwise you guys just continue and I'll let you know well I think as far as emotionalism we do have to the extent that their mathematics can be considered beautiful and compelling we find these things in biology we find that in biology there are systems that exceed anything that we can build by several magnitudes it's bewildering and the biophysicist are studying it there's this lecture by William Bialik either Yale or Princeton professor at National Academy of Science he is a physicist and he says biology it's more it's more perfect than we imagined and I found that kind of peculiar that a physicist would weigh in on this discussion when we see so much pain and suffering in the world and disease and he's yet saying biology is more perfect than we imagine and I began to look at all the metrics that he uses to make that qualitative assessment and I just invite the readers to look at how this has arrived at I don't think it's he uses it in terms in terms of physics I referenced it earlier like geometric optics there's optimization in geometric optics there's optimization in sensory organs like magnetic perception, electric perception it's at the limit humans can never do better than that since this is my closing statement I'll just segue quickly in my closing statement then if that's okay with you Dapper oh it's fine so this is a segue into my closing statement I read in the Psalms last night that it said it's a Psalm by Asaf he said I will take refuge in you Lord so that I may declare your works and so this debate has given me a chance to declare the works of God that's what I believe I know that not everyone will agree with that but when I see that we have machines in biology that exceeds the capability of our collectively our best scientists and engineers that signals to me this was the work of God that we could take a planet of 8 billion people and put all the resources we cannot build machines as fabulous as these and I I only stumbled upon this lecture by William Bialek it's available freely on the net more perfect than we imagined and you could see what I'm describing unfortunately for me personally he attributes all this to natural selection and I think there's kind of a disconnect so that's what I feel that you all and I'd like to thank Dapper you've given me an opportunity that even though you disagree in my heart I feel I've taken refuge in the Lord today and declare the works of God thank you all right first I hope you're not taking refuge from me because I don't want you to feel like I'm someone you have to take refuge from but in a more serious vein I think what we've seen today is that while there is a really good reason to talk about how well organisms can perform various functions it is not the same question as how fit they are in this sense that is meant by evolutionary biology and population genetics and even if you are an anti evolutionist population genetics remains a thing populations have genetics and you can do statistical analysis on them and what things are fit is simply a matter of measurement and while there are difficulties switching over to some less well defined and even in principle immeasurable and incomparable version of fitness can only hinder the actual ability of scientists to make predictions even though sometimes the predictions they do make are not very precise it is very difficult for me to think that it is a good idea to abandon something that does produce results for something that even in principle it's hard to see how it could now I do still want to talk about things like how fast cheetahs can run and how well sharks can sense the electrical impulses of their prey's muscle and how well an eagle can see those are great, I love all that stuff if you have seen any of my content I always go off on tenets about how cool some animal is because of some amazing ability it has I mean, or how cute velvet worms can be, I mean come on it's basically a super power true I knew I would get Erica with that one so those are really important conversations to have in biology but it's just not this conversation and I feel like we need to be wary about different aspects of biology especially when it still feels like this attempt to redefine fitness is in service to a hypothesis that has already failed, which is genetic entropy and yeah, that is basically where I will leave it Oh man, awesome I think this was an incredibly fruitful conversation, I enjoyed the heck out of it honestly, they're really and truly and I know this is like mega dorky but there's almost nothing I enjoy more than these kind of conversations that are so civil and are genuinely in exchange of perspectives and new information I've learned quite a bit myself it's too civil we have to be mean for a second Sal, your room is far too green and it's terrible far too green Hit back Sal, come on I'm gonna mod gloves off, get him Sorry, it's just not me I'll do it for you I'll tell you what the only time I would ever get mad and just kind of go berserk, I might get thrown in jail is one guy was just he was doing some things that were threatening my mom and I was just another guy so you crossed the line but it's so easy, you could just say your tie is a stupid shade of blue dapper or I hate Godzilla poster I was gonna come for the top hat the top hat, yeah it is I'm gonna just refer you to Smoky saying he'll do a better job Sal and his plays in the night Smoky I am so excited for some of these super chats some of them are in general chats as well Praise has done a great job collecting them we've got them all in the side chat some are general statements, some are questions and as is typical for how James kind of runs the channel and kind of how I like it as well if the question is for one individual the other one is fine to weigh in as far as I'm concerned but I think that the person asked to should get the final word on the question and so we'll jump right into it so first of all for two dollars from Schrodinger's cat dapper they say you know what's up Schrodinger's cat says dapper dino knows what's up so there you go dapper that's a nice compliment to start things off I myself got a few super chats and I think it was because of all the kindness that the two of you were hoisting upon me against my wishes so the first is from Sphinxer of Doom for five dollars and then also from Mark Reed for five dollars and they both congratulated me on being engaged Sphinxer of Doom says what was all that one in a million talk which I think is a compliment because I think he's Sphinxer of Doom and it's a dumb and dumber reference you know what it's been so long since I've actually seen dumb and dumber so look at me I'm a mess I gotta get on it also hi to Sphinxer of Doom he's a navy buddy of mine oh really okay cool okay awesome actually I think we've maybe I've engaged with that person before perhaps on your channel but I appreciate that very very kind gestures I was saying in the chat one of these days I'm gonna drag my fiance into one of these moderation things and force him to engage with people that I'm just whip on the regular from Ingwe Himawari which I'm almost certainly butchering but I hope not for ten dollars the question for dapper dinosaur how do you personally feel about the hypothetical conclusion that human reproduction is a net harm and that and that if that's true then we should cease to reproduce as a species and effectively end humanity I mean I guess the first thing is a net harm to what for me I'm sort of a sort of like philosophically anthropocentric I think that since you know most of us are human that ultimately things like human flourishing should be our long-term goal and I think that generally speaking having a healthy environment and high of biodiversity tends to help with human flourishing more than it tends to harm it and so I can see arguments as to why we might want to limit the amount that humans reproduce I don't see any good reason that we should say that humans should simply go extinct for the sake of other organisms if it comes down to humans or other organisms like it's literally a binary choice I tend to say humans Gotcha, gotcha okay from yeah I figured Sal would I figured the other person would jump in if they wanted to but no pressure Sal you don't have to we don't skip over that's fair enough we'll provide the evolutionary famous professor of evolutionary biology said that in two billion years all life on earth will be extinct so fitness is going to go to zero all this will be moved a little existential dread for us yes I'm sorry okay from David Neff this is a question for Sal can you think of a structure that is not irreducible complex yes there are plenty of them I see them all the time and like collagen collagen it can a few parts of it can be compromised and secondly there are systems that are that are robust like it was an experiment conducted by I'm trying to remember her name is Brenda Andrews I think it was Brenda Andrews she's a Canadian researcher she was taking yeast and doing knock out experiments she could knock out all these single knock out genes it's like the organism was fine the moment that you knock out the second gene things went wrong so she clearly demonstrated you have systems where you can knock out one gene and the organism is able to survive so the analogy to this is they have five redundant see now you know how much I love aerospace they have five redundant navigation systems if four of them are knocked out as long as there's one remaining we'll continue and we see many of these things in biology and I've actually argued I said irreducible complexity is only one of the problems if we have anything that is redundant that's a more severe problem because it's not as easily visible to selection and there are a lot of there's a lot of robustness and there's a lot of robustness and redundancy in biology that makes it not quite so sensitive to these damaging perturbations and mutations but that actually creates another set of problems for natural selection so nice to see you David thank you for being my friend we love classical music together and I have another kindred spirit so absolutely briefly if you want to comment on that as well David you're welcome to but before we move there is SJ Thompson in the chat has offered to have you on her channel if you like Sal she wants to know how she can reach out to you if you have a public email or however would be easiest for her to get in touch with you SJ I feel insulted that you didn't offer me to say it's my invitation come on does anyone have I'm sure she is tied to this channel is one of the regular moderators for the chat I want to thank SJ Thompson for her service so I really do want to get a hold I think I think James let me give a throw can I give a throwaway email just for this purpose because my regular emails getting just spam to death whatever that in the private chat whatever we'll find a way to get it to her for sure if you put it in the private chat you can just put in a regular one and we won't share it we can just share it just to SJ oh okay so I just put in an email she can reach out to me and thank you I'm very flattered and that's very kind of you um so my only comment on the the irreducible complexity thing is that irreducible complexity simply isn't a barrier to natural selection it's multiple ways to evolve through natural selection what would meet be his definition for irreducible complexity are known they occur it's really not a problem it's just kind of a weird trope in certain areas of creationism that this is a problem and I have something to share with David Neff I don't know if you can paste it I don't have a means of pasting it this is the Brenda Andrews I mentioned the name Brenda Andrews so you'll get your fill of examples of non irreducible complexity if you visit that lab she has these are real experiments that showed many systems in biology are not irreducibly complex that's just one thing I want to point out with creationists sometimes when I call them out on something that they're not phrasing quite right they just think I'm a traitor and just like dude I'm trying to help you you know it's like quit using those arguments like second law thermodynamics just drop it that is a classic one I have yet to find someone who's used the second law thermodynamics argument who's been able to tell me the units for entropy which as far as I'm concerned if you're going to use a scientific law and you can't tell me what units and it's not quite Jules Jules for Kelvin you can convert it to bits actually with Boltzmann's constant I studied statistical mechanics and thermodynamics in graduate school because and I decided the evolutionists were right on this one so there you go it's hard to use that argument while also understanding even the most basic stuff I'll give you a freebie here you just ask them what has more entropy a warm living human or a frozen dead rat I like that a warm living human has substantially more entropy than a frozen dead rat for the simple reason you just take the amount of water in a human and there's a standard molar entropy based on the number of moles pretty easy I'm just like how could the ID and creationist community have swallowed this it's so obvious sorry to point that out sometimes it's tough love this is tough love for the community of my own family it's really hard to say hey you screwed up I'm on your side but you screwed up it's like I don't want to be the one to do it I'm having to be the one that's a tough one too because you know the process of owning when you're wrong about something is like one of the hardest things to do in the world I know it's tough for me but we'll go and hop into the next super chat before we get into an entirely new discussion and keep everyone here for the rest of the night from RJ Downard for Sal was the autism spectrum designed in humans and if not how and when did it arrive according to your model yes I believe it was designed in the sense that when we say biology is intelligent okay so intelligent design is like Paley's watch we just believe things are designed because they're like machines but then we had the problem of evil and so creationism says we're intelligently designed and cursed but a curse is actually a design too let me try to honor RJ's question so I said I guess the rest is moot was autism spectrum designed and so yes and he said if not how and when did it arrive according to your model so I'd say that the curse of Adam and Eve when that happened is when all these bad things happen and our genome started to get more vulnerable and autism spectrum started to set in as our DNA just started acquiring more mutations and inability to repair that's that's not strictly a scientific question that's more of on the theological so that's um that's about as best as I could do RJ so that's my opinion if people ask will did all these bad things happen it was it designed and a lot of people will not like me saying yes but if you you know again this is theological if you if you read the Old Testament you'll see a lot of pretty well designed punishments for people let's say that um and I know really a lot of people left Christianity because they read the Old Testament it's just a little bit too hard to take and on many levels I get that just just for the audience's sake you know I don't want to trivialize suffering there's a guy in my church that has worse than autism spectrum he has a neural degenerative disease he's probably terminally ill his sister has it his father died of it and so there's a lot of tragedy going around so I don't want to be just flippant and say yeah God designed this it's with great grief that I say yeah I think God designed curses on humanity and um that's one of the tougher things of being a creationist on many levels I wish I were wrong um it'd be preferable to think all this was an accident so thanks for the question RJ and I don't really have anything to add yeah I think that was um that was comprehensive for sure um okay from Caleb for two dollars great debate and then Caleb also says that they would love to see myself and standing for truth in another debate as if three debates weren't enough for you Caleb you're a glutton for that kind of content I suppose um I would love to debate standing again I've posed some questions to standing I would love to hear an answer to some or or all of them and second that I do I'm open for more conversations of the channel um for let's see okay from curio debunk uh elephant gene let's see this is a bit oddly or worded I'm afraid I might mess this up so elephant gene what kills cancer cells is duplicated lots of times why has a designer not duplicated it for you okay so they're referring to the the the elephant genes which essentially protect against tumor growth and they're asking why this has not been duplicated in humans if there's a designer I suppose that would be for cell yes this is this is one of the deep questions about uh design problems because it's obvious god could have created us to live forever and he's ordained that we we die and so that's part of the curse one thing I will point out is that um I do suspect that uh our our genome and whatever else makes cells uh live probably was in a lot better state many many years ago that's that's that that's a speculation I don't have any experiments to prove it uh cancer just as a total aside cancer is an interesting thing uh kind of in a sad way but we found some immortal cells through this process and it kind of gave me the thought that yeah maybe we were designed to live forever but then things have fallen apart and so I do think that there is a record of Christian theology in our genome in that we see design but then also a curse at the same time so trying to answer your question as best as I can and I apologize if I don't answer it as directly as you would want I think God withheld certain things from us uh so that we would die that we would be in need of a savior and to that just to close out a thought it says in 2nd Corinthians 417 this momentary light affliction is building for us the way to glory so that people that believe in Jesus Christ uh the ones who suffer from cancer like some people in my church and have passed away um that's part of the happy ending the story every every great work of literature that has a happy ending and have tragedy in the middle so that's more of a philosophical theological answer not a scientific one I actually do have a little bit of something to add to that um this explanation where we have um on the one hand we have anti-evolutionists going on about the amazing design of you know uh say the human brain or shark electrosensors to pick one that I know Sal likes but then on the other hand when they're asked about these obviously suboptimal in terms of what is this engineering fitness uh aspects of biology uh those get hand-waved away as the result of a curse and I think that's just having your cake and eating it too you gotta you gotta make a stand does the designer do good work or does it do bad work and if every time you see bad work you just hand-waved away and say curse I can't disprove you but all I will say is you've removed your idea of design from falsifiability or testability therefore it is not useful in science and science must continue as if your design hypothesis did not exist um that's all I have there all right cool it was a question for Sal so Sal if you went around it off you're certainly that's certainly something you're entitled to having been in the defense department and we also study biological warfare uh cruel designs or sadly not anything that are uh that escape our notice and and and so I think it's perfectly legitimate if we also argue that there is a curse that was also well designed and I think Krio Debunk did point something out is that it works really well in elephants but there's nothing like that in humans that's telling me that that was a design that was withheld from humans to kind of maybe humble them and it is part of the curse so although I do respect uh Dabrodino's point and I think they're work around at it but I'd like to just move forward and that's probably a conversation for another day and something that I need to chew on because it is uh I think a very um pointed objection so thank you you're welcome I think it would be a super interesting conversation to listen to um so from Jonathan Kelso for ten dollars something uh additionally very kind for for me as well so I appreciate this Jonathan they say I have to become a new fan of the gutsy gibbon channel I've been choosing uh her long videos over movies lately still trying to get gutsy and chill to catch on awesome work thank you Jonathan um I myself now would love for that to catch on although knowing the implications for Netflix and chill I'm not sure that uh I'm I think that might boost my channel rating up to PG 13 um but thank you Jonathan I do very much appreciate that um from Ingwe uh Human Worry again for five dollars for Dabrodinosaur who assigned the reproductive fitness value to evolution if not humans why doesn't human preference apply to reproductive fitness too um could you repeat that I feel like I might not have understood that completely yeah sure who assigned reproductive fitness value to evolution if not humans why doesn't human preference up to reproductive fitness too well so as far as who assigned this definition of fitness um ultimately it's simply what matters in evolution in in the long run the only thing that's going to tell you what the genetics of a population are going to be like in the future is who's reproducing to what and to what degree now so it's it's sort of like asking who assigned length to our measurement of distance it's like that's what you're measuring if you want to measure who's going to end up what genes are going to end up predominating in the future you have to measure reproductive success so there really isn't a person who assigned this I'm sure there was a first person to come up with it um but it's hard to imagine a different way that you could actually measure fitness and then still have it be a useful measurement that you can use to make calculations and predictions so yeah it's it's just sort of like who who assigned temperature to thermodynamics well reality did it's something you have to measure if you want to talk about this sorry yeah no no awesome and there was a second part like or not no problem I think that was reasonably accurate that's all I have to say oh cool hey we agree goodness there you go so that's the last super chat that we've got um I again you know I can't say this enough I found this to be incredibly enjoyable uh for those of you out there who you know got nothing to do this evening and you're thinking to yourself well I really wish that this would go on for another two hours uh there's good news for you because both Sal and Dapper are hosting after shows on their respective channels so you can go to those after shows and revel in more discussion uh which is which is just going to be superb I I certainly will be attending so by all means um please if you guys want to say anything else and then I'll do James's classic ending tagline um just thanks for being here I guess yeah go on go on Dapper okay fine I'll go I just wanted to say thank you to I got to give in praise I am that I am for producing which that has I'm bad at that so I always appreciate when someone else takes that away from me um I especially want to say thank you to Sal um Sal and I have had you know off-air conversations and we get along pretty well and I really appreciate that and um so yeah I really want to say thank you for coming and having a conversation that was intelligent and that actually involved listening to your opponents points and did not involve absurd straw man because I don't know if you saw my debate from Friday but it was essentially the opposite of this I I didn't see it maybe I should now well let's just say as as nice and polite and willing to listen to me as you were Alex was the exact opposite um just a few technical things I want to thank the people who recently subscribed I got 7 new subscribers on my channel I'll point out a um you should be able to find the after show but I have to do some technical things because I'm running the after show uh to get it started so it might be just a little bit delayed I want to thank everyone who's come out here and then uh let me highlight one thing if you go to the uh to the channel you can go to evidence wwevidenceandreasons.org and then you can go to my youtube channel um I did give a talk about um my life story that was actually reported in the prestigious scientific journal nature in 2005 which I consider a miracle of god that uh nature would want to cover my life a little bit of my life story so that's just a highlight that's just a shameless plug for my channel so uh that's about it and uh thank you Erika and thank you praise thank you dapper uh I I wish you all a wonderful holiday season happy Thanksgiving Merry Christmas happy new year and take care and god bless you superb okay guys I I don't know if you guys noticed but I totally glitched out and dropped from the stream for a minute there so I'm glad you guys held that up for me while um okay well if I think that's that thanks again everybody for being here check out these guys's after after shows uh subscribe to them and subscribe to modern day debate like everything and hit all the bells and get all of the notifications for all three and don't forget to keep sifting out the reasonable