Speaker 1: Welcome again to the Nonprofits, the weekly recorded show that
Speaker 1: addresses current events and news items from an atheist and
Speaker 1: humanist perspective. And there is nothing more human than talking
Speaker 1: about dinosaurs, right, Eli, we're talking about about dinosaurs.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well actually no, probably not, but wake up, babe.
Speaker 2: New tetrapod just dropped. Until recently, all the available evidence
Speaker 2: suggested that the first tetrapods transition to land somewhere between
Speaker 2: three hundred and fifty nine to three hundred and sixty
Speaker 2: million years ago. However, new findings have challenged that model.
Speaker 2: In what is now Victoria, Australia, researchers uncovered lizard like
Speaker 2: footprints that preliminarily date back to somewhere around three hundred
Speaker 2: and ninety five million years ago. So the most significant
Speaker 2: implication of this finding is that animals existed on land
Speaker 2: roughly forty million years prior, ear earlier than we previously
Speaker 2: thought they had. That is certainly a controversial claim because
Speaker 2: prior to this, the earliest known fossils were of possibly
Speaker 2: semi aquatic animals that existed after the Devonian period. These
Speaker 2: fossilized footprints placed land dwelling animals land dwelling four legged
Speaker 2: vertebrates on land before the end of the Devonean period. However,
Speaker 2: these data are preliminary and therefore necessarily incomplete, so it's
Speaker 2: not time to change the textbooks yet. Peer review and
Speaker 2: further data collection will confirm or reject the new hypothesis.
Speaker 2: The story is from Popular Mechanics by Elizabeth reign On
Speaker 2: May nineteenth, twenty five.
Speaker 1: So, while I am deeply disappointed that it's not dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: it is land land lizards. Right, that's what a tetrapod.
Speaker 2: Is, something of the sort. Yeah, tetrapod is a four
Speaker 2: legged animal, tetra meaning four pod meaning.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh pod actually meaning feet yeah, tripod? No, you're right, thanks,
Speaker 1: But Okay, it's not time to change the textbooks yet.
Speaker 1: Why not we learned a thing, why can't we teach
Speaker 1: the new thing? True?
Speaker 2: Great question, So, because I think it's actually really likely
Speaker 2: for a lot of people who don't really kind of
Speaker 2: understand these processes say look at this and say, like, oh,
Speaker 2: they can't even get the story straight. But what this
Speaker 2: means is that prior to this, we didn't have a
Speaker 2: reason to believe that there were animals on land. Prior
Speaker 2: to the oldest fossil we had found now this data
Speaker 2: that dates this fossil to the timeframe that it does
Speaker 2: three hundred and ninety five million years ago. It's just
Speaker 2: preliminary data, and preliminary data is necessarily incomplete whenever we
Speaker 2: find it. So this is where peer review comes in.
Speaker 2: This is where like other archaeologists and experts are going
Speaker 2: to come in and take a look at either the
Speaker 2: pictures or the actual footprints themselves on location and see
Speaker 2: if they can come to some sort of consensus, and
Speaker 2: at that point we will start to change what the
Speaker 2: model's being taught would say. Of course, I'm using the
Speaker 2: Royal wee as I'm not, are.
Speaker 1: You, I'm really involved with the textbook creation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, not these textbooks.
Speaker 1: So I do genuinely find this interesting and really fascinating.
Speaker 1: But I imagine, like I do, and I imagine most
Speaker 1: people have a really hard time connecting or having any
Speaker 1: kind of emotional bearing on this sort of thing at all. Cynthia,
Speaker 1: what does this mean to you? Does it matter? How
Speaker 1: do you feel?
Speaker 3: Well? I think that the finding reminds us how scientific
Speaker 3: knowledge is always provisional and it's open to revision with
Speaker 3: new evidence. So the idea that tetrapods, the ancestors of
Speaker 3: all land vertebrates, includes ourselves, and we're walking around tens
Speaker 3: of millions of years earlier than thought, shifts our understanding
Speaker 3: of lives for conquest of lands. And even with this
Speaker 3: particular discovery, you know, the presence of clause is a
Speaker 3: key marker distinguishing the amine, the amnion, the amniotis, and
Speaker 3: the amphibians. And the tracks suggest that tetrapods, the group
Speaker 3: including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals including humans, were already
Speaker 3: walking on the land significantly earlier than the fossil bones
Speaker 3: wreckers actually previously shown. And moreover, the discovery actually calls
Speaker 3: into question the previously accepted impact of the n Devonian
Speaker 3: mass extinction of the tetrapod evolution. So these footprints indicate
Speaker 3: that the evolution of tetrapods and continued relatively uninterrupted through
Speaker 3: this event, suggesting that tetrapods actually began diversifying earlier than
Speaker 3: the more robustly more robustly rather than once believe. And
Speaker 3: I think that this actually shows how cool science really is,
Speaker 3: because like what we what we know about science is that,
Speaker 3: you know, you usually start out with a hypothesis and
Speaker 3: you test that a hypothesis to see if we can
Speaker 3: actually become you know, we can make it into a theory. Now,
Speaker 3: theory is not necessarily truth per se. It is the
Speaker 3: closest thing to fact that we have based on the
Speaker 3: methodology of testing that we used in order for us
Speaker 3: to prove or disprove the hypothesis that was that was
Speaker 3: previously approsed. And then we also know that after you
Speaker 3: pose a hypothesis, even if it becomes a theory, that
Speaker 3: theory is still subjugated to question. It's still subjugated to
Speaker 3: even more methodology of testing to see if it is
Speaker 3: still the same the same closest thing to fact that
Speaker 3: we had you know previously, you know before. So even
Speaker 3: to Eli's point, there's still more testing, there's still more
Speaker 3: you know, pontification, there's still more you know, relative you know,
Speaker 3: studies that have to be done in order for us
Speaker 3: to say that if this is an actual thing, cool discovery,
Speaker 3: great hazza, as you would say, Rob, well, but you know,
Speaker 3: but but we're not necessarily to the point where we're
Speaker 3: like really need to like, you know, overturn the previous
Speaker 3: theory to this one just yet.
Speaker 1: So you might see me like looking around because I'm
Speaker 1: trying to find a hat just for a bit. But uh,
Speaker 1: what I want to do is put on my theist
Speaker 1: hat for just a second and say something like that
Speaker 1: was really lovely. And what I believe you just said
Speaker 1: is that science is incapable of establishing or determining truth.
Speaker 1: So what good is it?
Speaker 3: Oh wow, that's exactly what I was not saying.
Speaker 1: Because it's constantly changing, Then what good is it going
Speaker 1: to be doing for us?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, because then my pushback would be specifically
Speaker 3: to the theis. First, it is that, but you consider
Speaker 3: truth fixed, and it's not. It's not. And and here's
Speaker 3: the thing. When we are always having these questions about
Speaker 3: what is the closest thing to fact versus not, and
Speaker 3: then you go to the old axiom of well, religious
Speaker 3: says this, therefore it is. We even found out that
Speaker 3: when religious said, religion said that the Son was a god,
Speaker 3: then actually did like some you know, making a pathic
Speaker 3: is like, maybe that's not a god. Maybe that's like,
Speaker 3: you know, like a body like in space. Did the testing,
Speaker 3: did the method? Did the method in order for us
Speaker 3: to prove that's the case. And then we found out
Speaker 3: that's the case. So now we declassified the sun as
Speaker 3: a deity and actually said, this is a natural phenomenon,
Speaker 3: and we have found that to be the case in
Speaker 3: any case, you know, and a lot of different things
Speaker 3: that we have you know, pushed towards this is like
Speaker 3: an actual like you know, religion or a spiritual thing.
Speaker 3: And then when we find out, oh, when we're actually
Speaker 3: like paying attention and doing like more testing, oh, this
Speaker 3: is a natural phenomenon.
Speaker 1: Sure, but how can you determine that the so I'm
Speaker 1: just going to use the theist hat, how can you
Speaker 1: determine that the natural phenomenon is not just created, uh
Speaker 1: and established by the rule set of God like for example, So, Eli,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. If science can't perfectly tell us the
Speaker 1: reality of what is because it's constantly changing, then I
Speaker 1: don't really find this to be different from say, any
Speaker 1: religion talking to any other religion and saying, well, you're
Speaker 1: wrong and I'm right, Because isn't that what the scientists
Speaker 1: are doing too? How can we possibly work on a
Speaker 1: set of belief systems that is, one on purpose constantly changing,
Speaker 1: and two made by people who disagree with each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that's a totally fair question, And obviously,
Speaker 2: of course we hear stuff like that all the time.
Speaker 2: So here's essentially what it is. I kind of touched
Speaker 2: on it at the beginning, is that you don't come
Speaker 2: to a conclusion until you have a reason to come
Speaker 2: to that conclusion. We didn't have a reason to think
Speaker 2: that there were tetrapods on land three hundred and ninety
Speaker 2: five million years ago because we had never found any
Speaker 2: evidence that that was the case. Now it seems like,
Speaker 2: once again preliminarily, it seems like we have found evidence
Speaker 2: that that is the case. So that's when we're going
Speaker 2: to start to say, like, oh, yeah, look, maybe there was.
Speaker 2: And the purpose of peer review, like we mentioned, is
Speaker 2: that now that these researchers have reported and published their findings,
Speaker 2: anybody else Cynthia rabbah blah blah blah blaha, or myself
Speaker 2: or anybody else in the world can look at that
Speaker 2: paper and say I disagree with this and here's why,
Speaker 2: and you can write a review of that paper and
Speaker 2: send it to that journal. Are they going to publish it?
Speaker 1: Probably not.
Speaker 2: Maybe it depends on if it has merit and if
Speaker 2: it's well written, right, But that's the thing that anybody
Speaker 2: can do so when So that's where where we find
Speaker 2: this method to be a reliable one, because we're not
Speaker 2: relying on what what you know was written down one time,
Speaker 2: and we're never changing that no matter what we find
Speaker 2: out or no matter what we learn. To the contrary,
Speaker 2: we're not just listening to one person's interpretation of you
Speaker 2: know what all of this means as we find it,
Speaker 2: we're getting a consensus from everybody who has preferably only
Speaker 2: those who have expertise in the field, who actually have
Speaker 2: knowledge that are caught up in the conversation, rather than
Speaker 2: still catching up in the conversation. And that distinction, I
Speaker 2: think is where most people start to kind of muddy
Speaker 2: the waters between whether the whether scientists disagreeing with each
Speaker 2: other is the same things as non scientists disagreeing with
Speaker 2: each other.
Speaker 1: Well, I completely understand and agree that we should be
Speaker 1: appealing to expertise, which is not necessarily the same thing
Speaker 1: as appealing to authority. But as you're saying, any anyone
Speaker 1: can participate in this, and ideally they develop the expertise
Speaker 1: such that they can speak intelligently on the subject. So
Speaker 1: are you saying it sounds like you just said that
Speaker 1: I rob the theist am invited and perhaps even challenged
Speaker 1: to participate in the scientific conquest of knowledge because I
Speaker 1: absolutely don't believe that this occurred. Yeah, I can't do that.
Speaker 2: Absolutely anybody can. Yeah. I would invite any theist, and you,
Speaker 2: Rob the theists especially to yeah, write a review about
Speaker 2: the findings that have been published and send it to
Speaker 2: I don't know the name of the journal that it
Speaker 2: was published in, but I can find out and we'll
Speaker 2: tell everybody what journal was published, and you can send
Speaker 2: your review, your peer review, to that journal and see it.
Speaker 1: Soyll publish it. Whenever stuff like this comes up, I'm
Speaker 1: taking my non existent theist head off, or is that
Speaker 1: the bit whenever whenever stuff like this comes up, I
Speaker 1: think about So this is a little side bit I
Speaker 1: think a survivorship bias, because I'm sure you guys actually
Speaker 1: literally today I was just asked, Rob, how often do
Speaker 1: you think about ancient Rome? And I'm going to be
Speaker 1: bringing it up right now with their roads, and I
Speaker 1: don't know if people think about this very often with
Speaker 1: the ancient Roman roads, and people are like, they don't
Speaker 1: build them like they used to accept they they probably did.
Speaker 1: We just have the ones that survived we don't know
Speaker 1: how many aren't here. So when it comes to fossils,
Speaker 1: we have no idea how many fossils we don't have.
Speaker 1: We don't know to such an extent that it is
Speaker 1: actually impossible to even begin to think about how many
Speaker 1: we don't have. So that means that discoveries like this
Speaker 1: are even more profound and important because we have to
Speaker 1: keep our survivorship bias in check. But it also just
Speaker 1: continues to demonstrate just how much we've learned and how
Speaker 1: much more we have to learn. It is one of
Speaker 1: those cases of it literally asks more questions. So what
Speaker 1: I would say is to people who are atheists, we
Speaker 1: hear is there is there a connection to the historicity
Speaker 1: of this because I know that, Uh, I can actually
Speaker 1: talk on this like atheists can have a religious experience
Speaker 1: that is a very specifically defined term, and people can
Speaker 1: think about the expansiveness of Earth and how we've been
Speaker 1: on here. Cynthia, do you have any kind of appreciation
Speaker 1: for how this has has gotten here or does it
Speaker 1: not matter to you? It's okay if it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: I get it's it's a lizard from a long ass
Speaker 1: time ago.
Speaker 3: Well as as a as a Hoovian. I always had
Speaker 3: a soft heart for the Silurians, you know, since they
Speaker 3: predated humankind, and if you are human Hoovian AnyWho. But
Speaker 3: as far as like humanity is concerned, and especially when
Speaker 3: it comes so like this, you know, tetrapolineage. The discovery
Speaker 3: actually deepens the connection that we have to a distant
Speaker 3: wild world, and it reminds us that our place in
Speaker 3: the natural world is shaped by an ancient history of adaptation, survival,
Speaker 3: and change. And it also underscores the importance of scientific
Speaker 3: humility and curiosity, continuously questioning and refining our understanding of
Speaker 3: our past. You know, I think that it's like really important,
Speaker 3: and I know that like some people have a tendency
Speaker 3: to dismiss this, that the history of a thing helps
Speaker 3: define a thing. Now we are more understanding of where
Speaker 3: we may be as a society or even as an individual,
Speaker 3: depending on what has happened before. And I know, as
Speaker 3: a person who is a student of history, and that's
Speaker 3: one of my favorite subjects and has been for a
Speaker 3: very long time, that finding out the history, even from
Speaker 3: a personal point of view, really helps open my eyes
Speaker 3: and understanding to why I am the person that I
Speaker 3: am today. And a cool thing about against science is
Speaker 3: that you know, especially when we're looking at archaeology and paleontology,
Speaker 3: that it definitely relies on, you know, adaptive history of
Speaker 3: the planet itself in order for us to make that
Speaker 3: type of connection to from where you know, our ancestry
Speaker 3: came from versus now, and why the earth and life
Speaker 3: has developed the way that it has, and even give
Speaker 3: us like an idea of what would possibly become in
Speaker 3: the future as far as like how we're going to
Speaker 3: develop as a species and also how we may even
Speaker 3: develop as a society. So I think it's important for
Speaker 3: us to really be able to like lean into these
Speaker 3: subject matters in order for us to really get a
Speaker 3: better idea of, like, you know, who we are and
Speaker 3: where we're going.
Speaker 1: I agree, I was, I was just thinking, and I
Speaker 1: disagreed with myself. But the idea was, if you believe
Speaker 1: system is such that if something like this could not exist,
Speaker 1: and therefore you disbelieve it, is it possible for you
Speaker 1: to even enjoy or appreciate, come to understand that level
Speaker 1: of knowledge of the before times? Effectively? Can we think
Speaker 1: about that as something that has happened prior and that
Speaker 1: it does affect us? Is that even a question that
Speaker 1: makes sense? But I disagree to myself instantly because then
Speaker 1: I remember that there's I forget what it's called. It's
Speaker 1: a very famous theist who has it, but it's that
Speaker 1: museum of the creationist museum. Yeah, where the humans are
Speaker 1: with the dinosaurs.
Speaker 3: So oh that would be Kent Hoven.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, you're right, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a.
Speaker 3: That's Dinah Land, Yes, in Alabama.
Speaker 1: So the fact that that exists current too, I as
Speaker 1: an atheist, going, WHOA, this is neat and like informs
Speaker 1: my understanding of the past. It feels like there's something
Speaker 1: just so much more human about wanting to understand the past,
Speaker 1: no matter where you get your information from. So eli,
Speaker 1: where should I get my information from?
Speaker 3: Is there?
Speaker 1: How should I go about learning the past?
Speaker 2: I mean it's really hard to be for us, you know,
Speaker 2: the royal us, to get a good grasp of what
Speaker 2: went on in the ancient past, specifically because even in
Speaker 2: recorded history we kind of like fragments of some things
Speaker 2: that some people wrote down, but like you know, the
Speaker 2: everyday lives aren't being documented, and then when you get
Speaker 2: to the ancient past, there wasn't anybody to write it down.
Speaker 2: You have to wait until you find something that suggests something,
Speaker 2: and then you can really only find out like the
Speaker 2: most assumptionless implication of that suggestion of whatever you find.
Speaker 2: So it is really difficult. But that is kind of
Speaker 2: like I said, why you know, scientists rarely change their
Speaker 2: perspectives or their worldviews or like entire models based on
Speaker 2: one person interpreting something in a certain way.
Speaker 1: I think that happens to Well, if you're saying that
Speaker 1: it is very rarely the case that a single person
Speaker 1: changes all of the understood knowledge of that, do you
Speaker 1: think that's because are you aware of the trope of
Speaker 1: the sociologists that would go back go out in like
Speaker 1: the early nineteen hundreds with a like a pick in
Speaker 1: one hand, or the archaeologists with pick in one hand
Speaker 1: and a Bible in the other, where they would go
Speaker 1: out into Egypt during the Egyptology graze and like dig
Speaker 1: things up and then go ah, well, let me interpret
Speaker 1: this from my traditional Christian background like this, This is
Speaker 1: why it seems to me that it's so important that
Speaker 1: all of this information not knowledge, because knowledge is human.
Speaker 1: All of this information gets filtered through many minds that
Speaker 1: we can better interpret it.
Speaker 2: And that's exactly where I was going. It's because that
Speaker 2: is a very point. I think an individual will contradict
Speaker 2: the you know, the scientific consensus based on you know,
Speaker 2: one interpretation, but the scientific consensus rarely changes based on
Speaker 2: one interpretation. And that's why, like you said, Rob, we
Speaker 2: get many, many minds to review data, to look at
Speaker 2: information and analyze it and interpret it and say, based
Speaker 2: on everything that we know that is relevant to this
Speaker 2: thing that we can think of as we're writing this,
Speaker 2: this either does or does not comport with what we
Speaker 2: understand to be reality. And could there be a mistake, Yeah, certainly,
Speaker 2: but we need to find that before we just assume
Speaker 2: that there is one there and throughout the whole thing.
Speaker 3: And I think that one more thing, if I just
Speaker 3: piggyback off of what Eli was mentioning, is that we
Speaker 3: have to also understand that one individual, regardless of how
Speaker 3: educated they are, can still hold different biases when it
Speaker 3: comes to the information that they actually you know, consume
Speaker 3: and it's going and how they interpret it versus how
Speaker 3: it should be you know, actually seen are going to
Speaker 3: be two different things. So that is why we have
Speaker 3: peer review. That is why it's important for us to have,
Speaker 3: as you all mentioned, many minds to really weigh in
Speaker 3: on a subject matter so that we can get close
Speaker 3: the closest thing to fact is possible because we had
Speaker 3: many eyes, with many with many people who possess certain
Speaker 3: knowledges to actually interpret the information that's in front of
Speaker 3: them at that time.
Speaker 1: I think that's perfect. Honestly, I genuinely think that that's
Speaker 1: really insightful, because what we cannot have, it seems to me,
Speaker 1: is any individual person be able to dictate what is truth.
Speaker 1: And then that's how you get people with dinosaurs. So
Speaker 1: I was just going to cut it there and then
Speaker 1: go hey,