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This is the Thinking Atheist podcast hosted by Seth Andrews. We did a
show recently on the awfulness of talk Carlson. You can find it in the
archives. It aired last year as I went back twenty years to find soundbites,
quotes, opinions, perspectives, and just general toxicity from this former Fox
News prime time host who is now just running around saying awful things as a
freelancer and on his own terms. He just did the Joe Rogan podcast and
I had to talk about it with my brother and the Lord arn Raw,
fellow atheist activist and an educator, specifically on well, you do a lot
of palaeontology, I know, but Darwin's theory of evolution. Arren, hey,
brother, and good to see you man, Thank you you too.
I have so many I mean, you caught me on a day we were
up all night with the storms. I'm not rested, I'm cranky, I'm
sweary, and so I'm going to say that I am so frustrated at the
peaceeople who just love goddamn fucking Joe Rogan. I listened to him talk to
Tucker Carlson and it was about all kinds of crazy stuff, and he just
he does this thing Joe does where he's like, right, oh, interesting,
and if he pushes back, he pushes back just a dent and then
he says nothing else. In fact, let me start with a clip as
they began the conversation talking about UFOs and the Bible. No, it's not
American technology well, or Russian or Chinese. It predates you know all of
that, Well, some of it does, right, Like for sure,
the Kenneth Arnold sightings that was really early on, that was like the nineteen
early nineteen fifties. He was seeing these flying saucers, these discs that were
moving over mountains. Well, right, I mean the prophet Ezekiel writes about
it in the first chapter Wheels in the Sky. Yeah, that's a crazy
one. Well it is crazy if you read it, it's like, oh
wow, you know, and so not just you know the Hebrew scriptures,
like it's all over every Vedic texts of course. So these are spiritual phenomenon.
There's no evidence there from another planet. I mean, I think that's
the op that's the lie, that they're from Mars. Look space. The
atmosphere is really well monitored, right, both for military for defense reasons,
but also because it would be nice to know when asteroids are coming. And
there's no evidence, has never been any evidence that there are lots of these
objects, these vehicles coming into our atmosphere from somewhere else in other planet.
There's no evidence of that at all. H So they're from here, and
they've been here for thousands of years, whatever they are, And it's pretty
clear to me that there are spiritual entities whatever that means, are supernatural,
and which is to say supernaturalis means above the natural, above the observable of
nature, and they don't behave according to the laws of sciences as measured by
people, you know, and they've been here for a long time, and
there's a ton of evidence that are under the ocean and under the ground.
So like with that fact set, what do you conclude? Lots do unpack
arin So he's talking about the Bible and the Vedis and for thousands of years
people have seen shit, but it can't be from outer space, but it
is buried under the ground in the oceans. I remember when I was when
I was a kid, when I was like twelve or thirteen, and I
had or maybe even eleven, when I when I referenced the Bible for something
about a shield in the sky, that somebody had seen a shield in the
sky. I can't remember because what what translation I was even reading at that
time. But I don't know what all of these phenomena are, or if
in fact they are all the same thing. So I'm not going to say
that they are extraterrestrial, nor am I going to say that they are spiritual,
whatever that means. Yeah, because there's there is no spirit. No,
there can be optical illusions, there could be a number of other things,
maybe things we haven't even happened across. I would think that a lot
of these phenomena are a mix of different things. You know, I've heard.
My own family has given me their observations of what they called the UFOs,
and on at least two of those occasions it turned out to be the
northern lights. They just didn't know what the northern lights were. Okay,
so it's awesome. No, it's awesome. Every time somebody throws a frisbee
into the air and takes a photograph. The people who want to believe will
believe. I am also, this is absolutely true. There is someone in
my family, a devout biblever, who is convinced, and people are going
to think I'm making this up, who is convinced that the UFO sightings are
the UAP sidings are. The unidentified things are in fact spacecraft, but they
are not carrying extra terrestrials. They are carrying or being piloted by the Nephelum
as referenced in the Book of Genesis, right, the giants. We're talking
about the angels who came down and fornicated with human women, and then there
were giants around the time of Noah's ark. And she believes, this adult
woman with a college edic of a master's degree, she believes that these spaceships
will land Nephelm are going to come out and they are in league with the
Catholic Church, so they and the Pope are apparently going to go and have
a kagger and plan the apocalypse. It's just jacked up. So to hear
somebody reference the Bible, know, the Ezekiel, to me just blows my
mind. Well, I noticed that he said that there's when he's talking about
that there's no evidence of transitional species, or of Darwinian mechanisms or whatever,
or just evolution in general. But he also uses the exact same tone of
voice when he says that there's no evidence of the different type, different possible
natures for unidentified flying objects. You know that he was there's no evidence,
there's no evidence of that at all. But that's that's exactly what he said
about transitional species. So now hang on, let me make sure I'm understanding.
Forgive me. He's saying there is no evidence that it is from out
there, outer space, beyond our atmosphere. Yeah, so if we're if
we're we've seen where some of these UFOs are actually photographed in space, you
know, so I mean plenty out there and buy out there. We couldn't
mean the entirety of the cosmos. There can be all kinds of it,
not not intelligently designed, but you know, there can be phenomenon that produces
lights certainly, you know, even what we perceive to be objects, the
things that like. There was one that was recently analyzed. It was we
talk about how it flew fantastically fast, so much faster than everything that we
own, and then they realize that it's a forced perspective situation where the ocean
far on the other side of this object is moving very fast because you're turning
your camera to follow this object, and so it looks like the ocean is
moving at this ridiculous speed, when in fact the object isn't going anywhere near
that speed. And so if they're not all the same thing, if they
don't require all one explanation, you know, there can be many. I
mean, like I said, in one case, somebody mistook you know,
the Northern lights or whatever. Who knows what object they might have been seeing.
It could have been space de breed that they might have been photographing from
the International Space Station or whatever. There can be optical illusion lights. There
can be a number of different things involved. And I would say that that
Joe Rogan was on the ball with one thing where he said that a lot
of this could be technology that we have that maybe not even our own government
knows all about, because if you want to keep something secret, you don't
tell a lot of people, and you certainly wouldn't be telling a lot of
government officials. I just love the fact that beyond the planet space agencies like
World Space Agencies, Tucker Carlson is apparently mapped the hundreds of billions of galaxies
in the universe to be able to just say nah, nah, absolutely,
it's totally impossible. It must be something biblical that's buried in the ocean and
under the ground. Do you remember where they announced the SR seventy one when
they revealed that to the public. I do not. The SR seventy one,
I'm guessing, is what a planeplane. It's a mock three plus byplane.
It goes as ridiculous speed at an incredible altitude, so it's virtually undetectable,
or was undetectable at the time that it was an operation. They didn't
announce that to the public until the early eighties, I think, and it
had already been in service for like twenty years they were using this thing,
I think late in the Vietnam saga. They've had it for a while.
So all the while that they're bragging that they're breaking the sound barrier, and
they can. They have planes that can go faster than sound, they don't
tell you how much faster than sound. They don't tell you that they've got
something that rides on the edge of the orbit where that rides on the edge
of the atmosphere and can go mock three plus and they won't even tell you
how fast it goes. But it can cover the United States in thirty minutes,
and they don't tell you that until it's been decommissioned, declassified or decommissioned.
Well, it wasn't. It wasn't being used as a spyplane anymore,
is what they're telling us. So now, at the risk of sounding paranoid,
I'm thinking, you didn't tell us that this thing existed in the twenty
years that it's been in operation. And now you say, well, we've
had this thing for twenty years. We just didn't tell you. But now
you know that this thing exists, And I'm thinking, wouldn't you have replaced
that Oh you know yet, that secret we have something else, And like
I said, I don't want to be paranoid about it. I just it's
likely if they kept that secret, what's the chances that they have some other
type of technology that they haven't announced yet. I pulled up that classic quote
from Arthur C. Clark. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Okay, I don't want to interrupt the next thought, which is going to
be a long win, and we'll start with a clip from Tucker Carlson explaining
why evolution is crap, and then get are In Raw to weigh in next.
Talking here to my buddy arn Raw, we're speaking about the April nineteenth
interview with Tucker Carlson on the Joe Rogan podcast. He believes that all of
those generations passed were wiser, smarter, more enlightened, even more educated than
we are, and they rightly embraced biblical creation, whereas we went into evolution
for which there is no evidence and science is walking away. Here's a clip.
I don't actually think that individuals. I don't think I'm that important.
My life is that important. I don't I will die. I know that,
and I try to keep that in mind every day but you're important to
everybody that cares about you. You're important to the people. But if we
don't think, if we don't think people are important, then what do we
think is important? I guess that's what I'm not necessarily that we don't think
people are important. But if evolution is real, and if there is,
this is instant, I don't know, but it's it's it's visible, like
you can measure it in certain animals. You can measure adaptation. Yeah,
but there's no evidence that. In fact, I think we've kind of given
up on the idea of evolution. The theory of evolution is articulated by Darwin
is like kind of not true and in what sense, Well, in the
most basic sense, the idea that you know, all life emerged from a
single cell organism and over time and there would be a fossil record of that,
and there's not. There's not a fossil record of transitionary species like species
that are adapting to its environments. Tons of record of adaptation, and you
see it in your own life. I mean, I have a lot of
dogs. I see adaptation and dogs, you know, through the shore litter
to litter. But no, there's no evidence at all, that non zero
that you know, people, you know, evolve seamlessly from a single cell,
Amiba, No, there's not, there's not there's no chain in the
fossil record of that at all. And that's why you don't actually hear people
you hear to make reference to evolution, because the theory of adaptation is clearly
obviously true, but Darwin's theories totally and that's why it's still a theory almost
two hundred years later. You know, No, we have not found that
at all, and I can't even guess. I mean, I have my
own theories on it, but they're not proven. What are your theories?
God created people, you know distinctly and animals? I mean, I think
that's like, I think what every person on Earth thought until the mid nineteenth
century actually right, But it's not a new idea. They didn't have computers,
they didn't have a general understanding that we have today of the process.
Do you think we understand more now? Yes? Really you don't think that
we understand more today. They stand way less. We understand so little that
we're actually sitting here allowing like a bunch of greedy, stupid, childless,
childless software engineers in northern California to flirt with the extinction of mankind, so
no previous generations would be like what, no, stop now when he's talking
about the childless software engineers. The front part of that clip, they were
talking about AI and how we are creating what could be a runaway I don't
know, technology that might surpass us, become a god, wipe us out.
I think Tucker actually suggested that we drop nuclear weapons on all the data
centers where AI is being developed. I'm sure there won't be any literal fallout
from that. But when he this is an example of Joe Rogan just sort
of chuckling because he's talking about evolution Tucker and he says evolution is real.
Tucker says, is it? Everything that Carlson said about evolution, every every
single sentence was wrong. I mean where he says we don't have any evidence,
where he says that there's no there's no fossil record of that. When
he when he's just absolutely every single sentence, he said, well that's why
it's still a theory two hundred years later. Just all of it is wrong.
Let me tee you up to go point by point, all right,
there's no evidence that all life, especially human life, specifically human life,
originated from a cell, an original cell. Yeah, embryology, we all
we you know, somebody was telling me that, one of the believers was
telling me, you know that I didn't come from a you know, a
single cell. I didn't come from a drop of gou And I'm like,
really, how were you? How were you created them? Because all of
the rest of us were formed from spermatozoa, from a zigo, from a
drop of goo. And the guy was very confused by that. And then
when you get into as I did my fifty part series on the systematic classification
of life, I explained the taxonomy for human evolution. And then where I
would throw in, okay, embryological evidence, here's genetic evidence, here's fossil
evidence, and so on. And here's where we've pinpointed beneficial mutations and identified
them as where exactly they are on the code on and when what this was
a you know, this was a missense you mutation that resulted in this this
feature, and and and and here's er vs that we share in common not
just with other apes, but with what with the other Old world monkeys and
so forth. I include all of this data. It's like nine and a
half hours worth of viewing. And this is this is all the evidence that
the Tucker Carlson says doesn't exist at all. I mean none, zero,
And I'm doing this is a summary. This is the briefest summary I can
give, and I don't even have a master's degree, much less a PhD.
I'm giving you the bachelor level of the information. If you want to
get more advanced in that, there's a fucked ton more that I didn't show
that he's where he's talking about. That there's none. So we have overwhelming
evidence from a whole bunch of different fields for the commonality, you know,
like the single cell organ at least for a last universal common ancestor. I
would say, what applies at least for eukaryots, Maybe not for the procrits,
because evolution is by definition and ancestor descendant relationship, and with unicellular microbes
you get a lot of horizontal gene transfer and other processes like endosymbiosis where one
cell engulfs another and then they start working in symbiosis. There's there, and
these are not They're not evolution in the traditional sense of being an ancestor descendant
relationship. There's not a lineage there, nor even a branching tree pattern.
And in fact, the branching tree that we recognize for Eukaria arises out of
what would be better described as a as a network, like a like a
spider web, rather than a root, if that makes any sense. But
there's a there's a lot of complexity there, but we have we have the
evidence to indicate that we do. What we don't have any evidence for at
all is his creation by God. And in fact, we have a whole
lot of evidence that the narrative that he's citing for the creation by God,
we have evidence against that. So no evidence for it, plenty of evidence
against it. He says that these these these extraterrestrial beings are spiritual, right
we have we don't. It's not just that we don't have evidence of spiritual
anythings, it's that we have substantial evidence against them, and specifically for the
soul. I've interviewed a handful of philosophers and neuroscientists. I've interviewed Patricia Churchland
recently to seized, Daniel Dennett, a handful of other neuroscientists, and they've
all come to the same conclusion. Everyone that has talked to me has said
that there's no support at all for mind body dualism, neither in philosophy nor
in neuroscience right exactly where it would be. If such things were real,
there would be evidence in neuroscience of it, and instead what we have is
profound evidence to the contrary, that everything about your personality or quality, that
the essence of what is yourself who you are, can be physically manipulated by
drugs, by trauma, by degradation or disease, things like this. So
there's no spirit, there's no soul, there's no magic. All of the
combined religions together can't show that there's a there there. Not only are they
violently at war with each other as to what each group wants to make believe,
but they can't show that the common thing they agree on exists. They
can't even show that that there if. I often say this that if there
was a supernatural aspect of the universe, there would be some indication of that
and people. So you can't. You can't ask for physical evidence of a
supernatural thing. Yeah, you can. If magic existed, you would have
gandolf Obi wan Hermione you know, Spock, these people would be showing that
you can actually do a mind meld. You can actually you can actually do
these you can demonstrate this to some reliable ways. Okay, so science can't
explain it. Can we verify that it's there? I don't have to know
how to explain it. It can remain completely inexplicable by science. When when
a faith healer walks into a child a child cancer center, and then all
of the children's children children's cancer goes into remos, and every time he walks
in and does this, I'm going to have to concede that, Hey,
there's a there there, that's a thing that happens. I mean, why
is this guy only doing these tent revival things where he's breaking in the money
from all these roubs. Why doesn't he ever actually walk into children's medical center
and do some fucking good Why does that never happen? Was because it's not
real? Well, you bring up a salient point that doesn't get brought up
enough. Doctor Julian Mussolino has written a book called The Soul Fallacy, and
he made the point that you have made. It's that the soul interacting with
the physical would still be there would be a point of interaction there something measurable.
The way I put it is that whenever God reaches his immaterial hand into
the prime material plane to affect some physical change, he pulls his arm out,
dripping with physics, you would see a physical response to some sort of
agent that is outside side the physical It's the same reason that who was the
gentleman who had the pipe. He had some sort of an industrial accident and
the rod goes through his brain and it damages his brain and he begins to
exhibit personality changes. It's because the physical brain was his essence, so to
speak, no magic required. It's funny listening to Tucker Carlson, I was
reminded of Christopher Hitchens talking to another Fox News host, Sean Hannity, who
was saying the most asinine things and asking what you and I know are rude,
aimentary questions, And he said, you give me the impression of someone
who has never heard any position against your opinion ever, Like you sound like
someone who has never had these conversations. So when when Tucker says, it's
just a theory, that's why, at two hundred years later, evolution is
just a theory I mean, come on, people are walking away. How
would you respond, Well, Democritus proposed twenty five hundred years ago that all
elements, all compounds, can be broken down into elements, but that the
element can only be broken down to what he called an atom. This is
what he theorized. That the atom is the smallest divisible element of the smallest
indivisible part of any element that still retains the chemical properties of that element.
So that's atomic theory, and it's still a theory thousands of years later because
it's never been proven, because science has a rule that no theory can ever
be proven, because if you prove something, well, then you stop looking
into it, don't you, And you're never going to improve. You're never
going to improve if you prove. If that makes any sense, well,
hang on, I mean if I say that evolution has been proven, if
I say it even in the more colloquial sense, I mean there's utility in
that world there. I mean, it has been demonstrated, it has not
been debunked, et cetera. The problem is this. The problem is that
science has this definition that proof. Absolute proof only exists in mathematics, So
absolute proof cannot exist in science. Science is not mathematics. They're closely joined.
They work communism, but they are different disciplines. But when people are
talking about whether it's been proven, yeah, they're not using that that term.
They're using the colloquial thing. They're using the notion of a more.
It's not absolute proof, it's a provisional proof. It's it's according to an
overwhelming preponderance of evidence beyond reasonable doubt, to a point where a jury would
would uniformly agree that, yeah, this is the If this theory is true,
then we should see this, this and this. We actually do see
this, this and that. So yeah, effectively that evolution has been proven,
Einstein's relativity has been proven, and of course atomic theory had been proven
even before Oppenheimer, even before they set off the bomb, germ theory,
all those, Yeah, you had the cell theory of disease and all of
that, and yeah, these remain theories, they are also facts. But
then we have such a fundamental misunderstanding of science that people would think that a
theory is just a guess. Like Tucker says, well, I have my
own theories about No, those are first of all, they're not theories at
all, because science considers that a theory is not a guess. It's a
body of knowledge. It's a field of study. That's what a theory is.
In my high school, for example, they taught a class in music
theory. And I remember, just because I was an obnoxious kid, I
through the door open one day during class. I wasn't in the class.
I just burst into the class to interrupt them, and I said, you
can't teach music in school just a theory. It's never been proven. You
were that guy even as a young person, like the Seeds of Rebellion,
and you were a contrarian even back then a little bit. Yeah, But
I want to bring up something else that that that Tucker had mentioned when you
mentioned that, it's like he's never talked to he's never talked to an evolutionary
biologist. That seems evident for him to say, no evidence of that at
all, nuns zero, right, He's clearly never spoken to anybody who knows
dick about this subject. But then he goes on about how the left,
because you know he has to. He says it's binary. He says everything
is binary, and that's the problem, and he wants to divide everything between
good and evil. So when he was talking about these the whoever is,
who were whatever is involved in the UFOs, you know, he's just deciding
that they're spiritual, he's decided that they're beings. These are all assumptions.
And then he says that it's binary whether these beings are good or evil.
Well, it's if it were that these uh, these phenomena are at the
hands of some agent, and these are beings of whatever type, then they,
like us, will not be binary. You know, there's this there's
this curve. I forget that, the the I forget what it's called.
But but you know, most people actually side right around the middle, and
it's it's harder and harder to reach either extreme where he thinks everybody is,
and that everybody's either at this extreme or at this extreme, when virtually nobody
is at those extremes. They're all more or less intimately, and that you
have to be more and more radical to get closer to the extremes where he
thinks everybody is. So it's not a matter of being binary that it's good
or evil. If these were beings, then like us, they're going to
be They're going to be a mix, and they're going to have a certainly
you know, different nuance, and we will completely agree with them on this
point and this point, but maybe not so much that one. And maybe
they have this completely aberrant idea over there. It's not just that the world
is not just black or white. It's not just that there's a spec that
there's a gray scale, there's a spectrum of color. There's so many other
things to consider that in a binary mindset, like t Tucker keeps reverting back
to, you can't even begin to conceive all or you consider all these things.
So when you talked about politically, he's divided everything binary again, and
so it's just the left versus the right. And of course it has to
be the far right versus the far left, because we can't have moderates.
You liberals become the same thing as leftists. And that's just the way you
divide everything moderate right wingers, because far leftists and all of that. And
he wants to put a category on whether whether the opposition then is good or
evil. So of course he's decided he's good, therefore left is evil.
And when he's talking about AI, then he's talked about how these uh,
did these people have no problem with AI. He has a problem with AI,
and the leftists don't have a problem with AI. I've yet to meet
a leftist who did not have a problem with AI. Seriously, Well,
let's say concerns, and I want to be clear, I don't I'm not
just talking about the paranoid aspect of AI, that we've created something that is
that is too smart to to be controlled and all like that. That could
be a reasonable thing to worry about in the future. My issue, I
have several other issues with AI that don't have anything to do with that.
It's it's the way that the AI produces artworkwild you know, by by basically
plagiarizing all these other artwork projects and piecing things together so that you can just
have an easy cheat on the So there's an ethical thing with AI the way
it's being implemented dealt with, and the AI that we have now is not
even AI that people worry about, you know, there's wholly different categories there.
Apparently all the people developing AI decided to not have families or not have
children either. It's amazing how he apparently has surveyed she's canvassed the entire technological
landscape to see, and those who are childless are than what I mean.
I've got a couple of lovely step children. I don't I never parented a
child. I qualify as child less. I guess in that way somehow that's
supposed to diminish me, is it? Does it diminish me morally? I
mean, I'm trying to figure out what his point is. Yeah, well,
she doesn't want me to identify her on this, I'm sure, But
I know somebody who was a mother of three who's working the development of AI
and she has problems with it. She's working for the development of AI and
she has problems with AI, as does everybody on her team, as does
everybody that reviews her work. Everybody has a problem with AI. Well,
I don't mean to derat we are talking evolution. I'm one of those guys
that I have used AI tools like to partition out shows, and there have
been some times when I couldn't find the art that I needed for something.
I try to filter AI out of my image searches when I'm using stock images,
but there have been times when I had no other choice and has been
a resource. But at the same time, I feel the way you do.
I used an AI image because somebody, the person that I was addressing,
had used this image of based their argument on this image, and so
I used it. And I was criticized for using their image against them because
they use that image. I'm not promoting AI they did. I'm just showing
you what they created that where they created this. But there's so much criticism
about it. To say that nobody on the left has any problem with AI
is just is myopic and stupid and wrong. There are two issues concerns that
I have, and I don't want to become my parents, you know,
we're like these kids today. But I don't think this falls into the same
category. The first reason is the one that you mentioned where instead of being
a tool for the human creation, you know, art and expression and writing
and painting and music and all these things that I think are part of the
human experience, and when machines replace us in that way by often plagiarizing stuff
that has already been done and mixing it into a soup and taking the human
element out of this wonderful form of express and I have real concerns, you
know, I think technology should serve us, not replace us, unless it's
a menial task. You know, they become the calculators that help us to
do what we do more efficiently. The second thing is, I think we're
moving so freaking fast. What's that line from Jurassic Park, right signedists,
we're so busy doing it because they could they didn't stop to think if they
should. I'm not sure we've stopped to assess the implications of what we're making.
So I have another friend, my best friend of all time, was
doing He was driving for Lyft or uber or one of these, and they're
testing self driving cars in Phoenix, and so he's paid to not drive a
car. He sits in the passenger seat. He's supposed to monitor everything.
You can't. If you touch your phone at all, you get fired.
You have to be paying attention to the road. All of that. Well,
somebody, one of these self driving cars ran over somebody at one point,
and the whole project gets scrapped. And they look at the driver of
this driverless car, and at the moment that they hit that person, he
was looking down. He wasn't looking at the road, and so the whole
project is scrapped. Somebody got killed. That's the end of it. That's
you know, we're not going to have self driving cars yet. You were
an American atheist in Phoenix, you saw downtown you had that little that cab
driving around by itself with the lie dar thing on the roof. It's exactly
what my friend was driving or not driving. They went ahead with it anyway,
it didn't matter. And what they did was they just took the human
out of it. They had a human in the car that was supposed to
prevent this from happening. The human didn't prevent it from happening, so they
removed the human and just let the car drive around downtown by itself anyway.
And you order the car with an app, you know, the car pulls
up, you get in, and then it takes you where you're supposed to
go, and all that, no driver at all. I don't know if
I'm opposed to that. I mean, I would live in a minority report
future where you could just make a car your living room, chill out and
whatnot. But let me help you with this, Okay, friend, I'm
gonna put Tucker hang on, people, I gotta put talker over here for
another three minutes. Go ahead, go ahead. My friend is again driving
for Uber ear lyft I get him confused whichever one it is. But that's
because he he needs a way to make money, and the other industries that
he was working in, it just it's easier for him to do this.
Then the cost benefit, the travel benefit, the commute of times and all
that, it's easier for him to do that. Now, what happens when
he can't do that? Because he trained the machine to replace him and it
replaced him, which is what's going to happen. So in Arizona, now
there is a truck that's been driving from Tucson to Phoenix on it I think
a daily route. It's doing the same thing as that light our taxi downtown
Phoenix. It drives by myself completely. When you replace the trucking industry with
automated trucks, and you've replaced all the cashiers with automated cash you know,
to put the self scan thing right, how can we complain that there's not
enough jobs when we've automated everything. When you've got forty five percent of the
of the workforce is in you know, driving something, whether it's trucks or
taxis or whatever's that's almost half. How can you say to go get a
job, there's no jobs to get. So that's one of my complaints with
automation and with a Now everyone knows what it's like when we are at a
convention and I'm sitting at a table with a root beer and ur and is
drinking something as thick as pens oil with a cryptic Viking name that probably has
fire coming out of it, and we start talking and you look up and
it's hours later. This is why. Because you put us in a room,
you put ron in a room, and time time speeds up or slows
down. I can't really decide, but you are just that good. Coming
up, I'm going to talk about a biogenesis, the first cell. Right,
there's a first cell argument, and that's where it all came from,
including us. I'm going to talk to arn about that next. My supporters
on Patreon get the show early and commercial free. You can sign up at
patreon dot com. Slash Seth Andrews continuing my conversation here with arn Raw,
I want to talk about out a biogenesis. People say there must be a
creator because who created the first cell? It. Let's allow that everything came
from a single cell. Who made the cell? Hence, God, how
would you respond, well, almost every part of that is wrong too.
That it's not that everything came from a single cell. There was never a
point when it was just one and there was there's this there's this vast gray
period as to whether these these first cells are alive or not. Because we've
got these precursor stages. People always want to say, you know, you've
got this powder that we just get this inorganic substance sand or whatever and just
pour it into this blender and out pops a rabbit. That's what they're asking.
When when is science ever produced life from non life? They don't understand
that it is many different increments of different chemical processes in different in different environments.
There's different processes that are not even related to each other that can happen
sequentially but in different environments. So I've been following this a little bit.
I've got a list of a few dozen, or at least a couple dozen
of different peer reviewed studies for different aspects of this, for how this developed,
how that other thing developed this one. And then you get up into
homeostasis, which is like the final criteria when all of the chemical things going
on in the cell have differentiated from the exterior of the cell to maintain a
kind of temporary balance, and then we can call that life. But that's
still although biochemistry is grotesquely unnecessarily complex, so complex and inefficient that the complexity
alone argues against a design that you wouldn't a designer wouldn't make something this bad.
Okay, a designer would make something that worked better, more efficiently,
and wouldn't have all of these different parts. Is like this. You know
this is a haphazard compilation, that something this complicated could only happen by accident.
Sure, the most effective efficient designs are whittled down to have the most
economy a few as necessary moving parts. Yet people see something that's wildly complicated
and they say, well, the complexity proves design. No. An efficient
simplicity would be the hallmark of an intelligent designer. And what we have throughout
biochemistry is just insane complexity and inefficiency. And the way that life developed was
not as the believers always want to say, it wasn't like in this.
They imagine the world as it is today and then suddenly, poof something came
alive, and because they have to shorten everything, they always want to look
at every evolutionary change. They want to say that an individual fish decided to
grow legs and then walked out on the land. They want they want everything
to it's going to be an individual in the course of one lifetime, and
it has to be like, you know, one hundred million years worth of
diversity happening in one lifetime of that one individual. That there's no way you
can understand evolusion when you're trying so hard not to. How did a rabbit
give birth to a kangaroo, give birth to a shark, give birth to
a primate, right, give birth to a monkey fish? Frug, Yeah,
it's just weird. One of the resistances I hear out there is when
I say the human animal, you know, we're an animal, and a
lot of believers blanch. They will physically blink where we're humans, there were
humans and there are animals. And I try to explain how animals are categorized
using my civilian knowledge base. I know you've had this conversation in much more
depth. I come to you and say, I ain't no animal. Ecclesiastes
three eighteen to twenty one. The Bible admits that we are but beasts and
that the only reason people will people refuse to acknowledge. This is our vanity.
That's what the Bible says. Well, describe or define animal a human
animal? What makes me an animal? Well, the common definition biologically you'll
get a little bit of if you look it up in regular dictionaries. Some
dictionaries will include unicellular life forms of like protests and such, they'll call unicellular
animals. There's no such thing. By definition, all animals are multicellular.
They're mult multicellular eukaryotes with an internal digestive tract, meaning we're heterotroph We have
to we sustain ourselves by ingesting and digesting other living cells, so we can't
reproduce, so we can't feed ourselves via photosynthesis. We can't exist on sunlight.
We must consume external organisms to survive. That's one of the criteria for
an animal. Yeah, that's the whole thing. Really multicellular, you multicellular,
you carry it heterotrophe. Doesn't it have something to do with you know,
we have the symmetrical eyes and ears, arms, legs, et cetera.
We have most animals don't. No, I mean I know those flounder
doesn't educate me, Come on, educate Okay, Well there are they're like
tenophores that don't have any organs at all, and they have cilia with which
they move around. They can even produce lights and such, but they don't
have actual organs, and they eat like every animal has to eat. The
simplest animal is a sponge and that has a a system of tubes and cilia
that they attracted the their their food and and and and digested internally like everything
else. And there are a vast array of very simple animals that don't have
eyes, that don't have any organs or that you know, or that have
very few, and that just don't fit, and so many of them don't
move. Is it true that at some point in our development, both the
top and the bottom, the front and back of me was just an asshole?
Is that true? That is the difference between protostomes and deuteros domes.
Well, of course, I mean that's what I was going to say.
I mean, next, but go ahead, I mean, I know what
you're I know what you're talking about. But go ahead and elaborate in a
common folk out there. Go ahead, for the when the when the zygot
first exists, when you of the two gammeats meat, and they produce a
zygot and it's a single cell. Now the cell starts multiplying. Now that
cluster of cells, the first structure to be developed is this invagination on one
side that continues through to the other side. And so at least with nephros
I think it's nephrozoans that we have this passage that goes all the way through
where where things like sea and enemies and stuff like that, and jellyfish they
don't they have a mouth that is also their anus, so they take food
in and have to expel it in the same place. But then we have
nephrozoans that the passage goes all the way through mouth on one side, anus
on the other. And it's the difference in which one develops first. So
in us, in humans, or at least in the classical definition of the
deuterostome, that first structure, that first imagination, which eventually continues through to
become the other whole, the tunnel through that first thing becomes your asshole.
And so there is a point when that is literally all we are. When
I was a Christian, I remember thinking about evolution in terms of robbing me
of my specialness. I was just a monkey. My granddaddy wasn't a monkey.
I don't know. And then of course the conversation is, well,
I'm related to the monkey, but I am not a monkey. But you
disagree? Am I a monkey? Are? Right? Yeah? We all
are. A monkey is any member of the taxonomic sub order of Anthropoidia,
also known as Semiformes. In either place, it's the monkey clade. If
you describe what the diagnostic characteristics are that identify any monkey that applies to all
universally accepted monkeys, then you're describing people. And then a subset of that.
You've got the Old World monkeys and the New World monkeys, and then
there's some extinct groups too. But if you describe the Old World monkeys Katarini,
all the diagnostic characteristics thereof is distinguished from the New World monkeys. Again,
you're describing people, and then there's another distinction. People often distinguish the
modern Old World monkeys from the apes, but there's a fossil group that is
also Old World monkeys, pro play Epithecoidia that a lot of people neglect.
If you describe what those characteristics, you know it still applies to it to
us. If you describe what the subset of Old world monkeys called apes.
That's any member of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidia, and that's that's lesser apes and
great apes. But if you if you describe what great apes are, that's
Hominidae. Again, you're describing people. And this is how the cladistics works.
It includes all of our all of all of the descendants of a given
group, without making any exceptions. This idea that I wasn't created by a
divine king used to just I don't know, it diminished me. I'm just
I came out of the muck. I'm as common as the other animals,
you know, the lower things. And of course I had to totally change
my perspective to see my connection with the living world as really, if,
for lack of a better word, even more miraculous, you know, if
they're a natural miracle kind of thing. Where as imperfect as evolution is.
I feel a greater connection to all living things today. Imagine you know,
somebody comes somebody comes to you and they're like in the middle class economically,
and they tell you that they started out as a great billionaire, but they
pissed it all away. You know, that's their fall from grace or you
know, they arose from humble beginnings. They were in the projects. They're
the self made man. They got their own education, they work, they
worked the three jobs, got to where they are. You know, that's
the story, right, They came from nothing, they arose to something.
That's where we are right in evolution. So that's the more appealing tale to
me. And then you know the Buddhist idea of I love this joke and
that the Buddhist goes up to a hot dog vendorances make me one with everything.
If that's the goal, we are inextricable. We are animals. We're
part of this biosphere. We are a part of nature, not apart from
it. And I have a sense of massive sense of belonging. Well,
since we know not to get our science from Tucker Carlson, is there a
series of videos on evolution science based videos or resources that you would point this
audience too, and I can link it in the description box. Well,
as I mentioned before, I did do because I noticed that nobody had done.
I did a series of videos of fifteen fifty part series on the systematic
classification of life that shows are the human evolutionary lineage literally from Microbes to Men
fifty videos, which is a summary. It just blows my mind. Are
and if nothing else, it's my chance to see you, which I rarely
get to do these days. You and I are both speaking in Sarnia,
Ontario at the Bluewater Atheist Humanist Conference coming up in August, So I am
looking forward to, you know, seeing you again, and I'm sure you'll
have that drink that is thick and dark black and there's smoke and fire coming
out of the top and whatnot, and we'll catch up then. But it's
always a pleasure, my friend. And you keep kicking and educating out there,
okay, thank you, and you keep communicating because you are a great
at that very kind thank you. Follow The Thanking Atheist on Facebook and Twitter
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