Is Evolution a Fact? part 1 - SC2501

Speaker A It welcome to Science Conversations. I'm Casey Vacurcher. Isn't evolution a fact? Joining me to discuss part one of this topic is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the programme, Dr. John hi, Casey. Hi. Dr. John Ashton has written a book entitled Evolution Impossible. And we will be talking about some of the topics in this book, including the 12 Reasons why Evolution cannot explain the origin of life on Earth. And so you'll hear more about this book as we go along. And I just want to start the the topic with asking you, John, you know, evolution, obviously when it's being challenged, one of the most obvious questions that come to people's mind is, but is an evolution of fact? Like, isn't that obvious? And so you talk about this in your book and why do people generally think this? Speaker B Well, this is what they've been taught at school and university and of course we accept it's taught in science classes. Science is all about scientific evidence and observations and this is what people have been taught. But it's quite fascinating that when we come to actual evolution, it's a term that has a very, very broad meaning and so it can mean different things to different people. But generally to say the person in the street, when we're talking about evolution, we mean the gradual development of organism over millions of years from very simple organisms to more complex organisms, sort of little worms evolving into fish evolving into amphibians evolving into reptiles evolving into birds and splitting off into mammals and eventually us evolving from some ape like animal. So this is what generally people mean by evolution and evolution being taught in schools. Yes, but evolution of course can just mean change, changes that occur over time. And one of the things we need to look at is what are the mechanisms that cause this change. And there are a lot of different mechanisms that can cause different types of change. We talk about landscapes evolving and this sort of thing. We talk about maybe machines evolving over time as engineers made modifications and this sort of thing. Speaker A That's true. Speaker B When we talk about life on Earth and the changes required there a couple important differences occur and that is the evolution of new types of body parts occurring naturally has never been observed. And there doesn't seem to be a direct transition either, observed in the fossil record as well. And the other thing is we know that the changes that would be responsible for evolution come about as a result of chemical reactions to a molecule we call DNA. Now one of the important things is that those chemical reactions that are required to cause those changes only occur in living systems for a start. So that raises a very interesting question. Of how did life first begin? And, you know, so that's one major problem for evolutionary theory because there has to be a starting point somewhere. But the other thing is too that the changes required to this DNA molecule, which is essentially a book of code, it's a book of instructions on how to, to construct an organism. These books are extremely complex and huge. You know, they'd be much larger, they'd be equivalent to multiple large textbooks. And how can this new information arise by chance? Chemical reactions? That is a major problem. Speaker A So you've raised quite a few important questions there that are coming to mind about the validity of evolution. So how do experts in evolution actually prove that it's a fact? Or how do they try to prove that evolution is a fact? Speaker B Okay, so the major academies, science academies around the world have published statements saying that evolution is now considered a fact by scientists. But when you examine their statements, they don't actually provide any scientific evidence. And so one of the, if you go to, say, some websites like say University of California, Berkeley website on biology, they may have a statement along the lines of, biologists regard evolution as a fact, but they're still trying to work out how evolution happens. And so this is a very, very interesting thing. So scientists have established this position on a basis of faith because they have no other explanation. But to date, there is actually no known mechanism as how evolution. And when we again talk about evolution, we're talking about the production of new types of body parts, new biochemical reactions, this sort of thing that are required for living systems to occur by chance that hasn't been observed. And when we look now at the mathematics and the probability and understand more biochemistry, we actually understand that the complexity of those reactions is so huge that it's to be impossible. That's why now we have a growing number of highly qualified scientists rejecting the evolutionary scenario and saying it's absolutely impossible. Speaker A Wow, that's very intriguing. And you're saying, like you're saying how they can't find the evidence. To me, this sounds, how would you put it like this should never happen in the scientific world. Because isn't the process of regarding something as a scientific fact quite rigorous in terms of how you would, how you would prove that something is a scientific fact? Doesn't have to go through a lot of steps. Can you explain a bit more about that? Speaker B Yes, well, a lot of scientific papers have been published in the area of evolution, and some of these have looked at a number of different areas. So for example, Darwin's originally theory was based on what we call homologous similarities, in other words, similarities. So you have a fish fin, say, possibly changing into arms and legs, and so there's similarities there. And so, as you know, different animals have eyes and lungs and this sort of thing. So we have a series of similarities that slowly, well, that change, according to the theory, due to a whole lot of mutations. And one of the fascinating things is that when they began measuring the DNA of these creatures and different animals, they found that they actually didn't match that theory because the DN patterns didn't follow the same patterns of evolution. And so, you know, you have crazy sequences when you look at, you know, higher animals in what their previous relatives were. And so, you know, I think in, if you look at humans, we got DNA from mushrooms and, you know, all this sort of thing. So it's quite, you know, fascinating how it's very, very different now. And this is very, very confusing the that they're publishing a lot of papers trying to look at mechanisms, at how possibly new genetic information could arise. But the more they delve into it, of course, the more evidence they're finding that living systems are just so complex and yet interconnected, it'd be impossible. The other area that has underpinned evolution theory, of course, has been palaeontology, the study of the fossils. And so here again, Charles Darwin had read Lyell's book, which looked at where he emphasised very long ages based on erosion and sedimentary rates. They hadn't accounted for the catastrophic past of the Earth. They assumed a uniformitarian position, hence calculate very long ages. And so this gave Darwin very, very long ages. And we also found the fossils distributed over these layers. And as we went higher up in the layers, the fossils seemed to get more advanced. And one of the fascinating things is again though, when we look at these fossils, we find they're fully formed organisms and they're there and then they're not there, they become extinct. So we don't see evidence of the gradual change of the intermediate species, which is what you would expect. Yeah, yeah. And this is actually very important, but lots of papers again have been published looking at these things, trying to find intermediate species and so forth. But again, as we have done more and more research in these areas, we find that, and we do more explanation, we find, hang on, in actual fact, the fossil record fits a catastrophic model. And this then again throws serious doubt on the long age model as well for these structures. So there's a lot of inconsistencies. Now, one of the areas in scientists is scientists can tend to work in silos, and so they can be working in one area in, say, palaeontology area. Then you have another group of scientists working in the area of geology, working on erosion rates, saying, hang on, our continents would erode away in less than 10 million years. And then we have our geologists in other sections saying, oh, hang on, this structure here is 600 million years old. And it's quite fascinating when you look at the published data across the different fields and you find, hang on, we've got massive contradictions here that aren't being pointed out to people and hence the reason to put the book together. Speaker A Yeah, yeah, no, that's very interesting how you're explaining those things. It seems like even though evolution is considered a fact, it seems like they're still trying to build up evidence that would fundamentally support that as a fact, when really that doesn't seem to be showing up. Like there's more holes showing up than conclusive evidence in support. And I guess that is quite a challenge to consider, isn't it, for the scientific community? We're going to continue this conversation with you very shortly and next time we're going to look at, continue to dive into the question, isn't evolution a fact? So be sure to join us.