Speaker 1: Welcome to the Gods I View podcast. I am your host, Trevor,
joined by a special guest, doctor David Campbell from Gardner
Webb University.
Speaker 2: David, how are you doing all right? Good?
Speaker 1: Thanks for coming by. I appreciate it. Tell us a
little bit about yourself. How did you get into this field?
Speaker 3: So it's basically inherited. Both of my parents did graduate
work studying fossil seashells, and so I was out picking
them up when it wasn't as far for me to
have beenever and pick them up. So I've continued in
that area and so got under grand degree in biology
and graduate degrees geology, did some post work doc work
on DNA and now so he's focused particularly on rare
modern species. So I've gone through a wide range of
different training and now I'm teaching.
Speaker 1: Awesome, fantastic. So, so you said both of your parents
were in the same field or they were just both
both academics.
Speaker 3: Fairly similar field. My father did a little bit more
of the geology and a mother a little bit more
of the biology, and but pretty similar were they?
Speaker 1: Were they pretty happy when you decided to do that
or was it just expected that you'd be going down
this road.
Speaker 3: It was certainly not surprising, and they would have supported
doing other things as well. But but I'm both my
brothers all basically ended up in the same area.
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness, that's fantastic. Well, I had posted a beacon,
you know, on the hill, looking for folks to come
talk to me, because we around here, we I don't
know what we do. I was for most of my life,
I was an atheist and very persuaded by like the
nineteen nineties, in early two thousands new atheism.
Speaker 2: And you know, I was.
Speaker 1: In like middle school during the Human Genome project, and
when Bill Clinton said cancer would just be a constellation
in the stars and there was a space shut it
just felt like science had it all figured out, you know,
and religion kind of felt superstitious to me at the time.
But anyway, for whatever reason, probably not through my own will,
in my mid I started having like really serious doubts
about that, and read started reading the Bible, started really
reflecting deeply on my own views, which were sort of
a scientized religion themselves. And so we've just kind of
been exploring those ideas on the show. And uh, you
now you're you're a professor of paleontology. But I think
you teach a lot of classes related to evolution and
is it zoology or zoology? This is a debate I've
heard people have It's it's zoology, right, is the oh?
The is the oh the joiner between zo and all
the logy? Or is it zoology?
Speaker 3: I guess I would tend to prompt zoology, but I
mean those things, it's a lot of it's what you heard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, just kind of yeah, what your mentor
said before you or what your teacher said, yeah.
Speaker 3: Scientific names. Remember going to the Paris Museum and I'd
like to look at specimens of this. Oh you mean this.
Speaker 1: Exactly? Exactly yes. And so you know the fact that
you're in this field and you're also you have a
religious belief makes you an incredibly interesting person to me.
So I probably just if you don't mind me putting
you on the spot, if you could explain to us, like,
what is the I hate to use the word mainstream,
what is the consensus isn't even the right word either,
But what's the predominant view on evolutionary theory and how
we got here?
Speaker 2: What is that view? Basically, in a nutshell.
Speaker 3: Well, you've got talking as far as the scientific patterns go.
Evolution works rather well as a physical description of the
normal way that new kinds of organisms are created in nature.
There's variation in DNA copying is not perfect, so we
do have mutations and duplications and deletions and all these
sorts of things happening. So there's some variation in the
DNA offspring aren't totally identical to the parents. Of course,
sexual reproduction, you've out their mixing between the parents going
on as well, and a lot of those variations don't
really make any difference, but some of them may be
either more or less useful under certain circumstances, so that
will tend to have some individuals doing a little better,
some not as well. And we see changes happening over time.
Of course, also environment changes, and so what worked at
one time doesn't necessarily keep on workings. There may be
advantages to change due to that, as well as getting
better at something existing as possibilities there. And there's also
just the well that one was in the wrong place
at the wrong time and this one wasn't. There are
some aspects that aren't predicted just by the biological situation.
So over time we have a series of changes taking place.
We can look at the fossils and yes, types of
things change over time. The very earliest fossils are all
rather simple things, actually bacteria type stuff, and gradually we
see more complex things added on over time. So we
see that diversification and addition to new things happening. Likewise,
on the genetics we can see patterns of similarities that
match up well. Now there's always various unexpected things that
turn up as well. A few years back, somebody analyzed
the DNA from this weird grass from New Zealand and oh,
it's not a grass at all, but it was very simple.
It looked kind of grassy, but turned out to be
a very early diverging flowering plant, not close to the
true grasses after all. So you do sometimes find wait,
that isn't what we expected. But then you look closer
and oh, yeah, there are some reasons why what we
thought before needs to be corrected. So overall, evolution gives
a good physical model of how we get new kinds
of organisms, including ourselves. There's some current and some people
think that we need to say more about some of
the additional complications, like sometimes it's not just a little
bit of DNA that extra that shows up, but an
individual ends up with almost the whole genome doubled. Right now,
You've got extra a lot of things, and you can
mess around with one copy and you got the other
that's working. And so that seems to be associated with
some significant diversification events like vertebrates getting going. Various invertebrate
and plant groups as well seem to have that issues
of epigenetic patterns where DNA different parts turned on and off,
and that can be happening while individuals alive, not just
inherent and mutation, and that affects how it functions, flexibility
of the organism cybernation. There are a lot of complications
that do occur, and some people say this is really big,
we need to Okay, I call this a total new theory.
Others say, yeah, those are important additions to think about,
but it's not really a new theory. But well, that's
just your perspective, right right. Do you look more at
the well, all this is still continuing or all this
is new. Different people will spend that differently.
Speaker 1: I have I have a ton of just very naive
questions that I want to ask you, but maybe before
I get to them, I'm just curious and sorry if
I interrupted a train of thought. We can go back.
But what where That all seems very intuitive to me?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 1: You have a population of you know, deer, let's say,
and for whatever reason, through random mutation or maybe you know,
their environment changes, there's certain new traits or certain existing
traits that are more adaptive, They're more beneficial, and so
those deer have more success reproducing. And so you I
can imagine stuff changing over time and adapting, and certainly right,
I mean, we see this with selective breeding, like look
at dogs. You know, we can make dugs bigger, smaller,
goofy or whatever. But where like I won't ask you
to speak for all Christians, of course, because Christians have
varied belief and you're you're a scientist as well as
a Christian. So maybe maybe people who are kind of
like you, who know this field but also have some
sort of religious belief, where do they diverge from that idea?
Like like, what part of consensus evolutionary theory is like
a bridge too far?
Speaker 3: Boo evolutionary garry. That's fine biological model, and that's also
all it is, right telling us about biology. There are
lots of other things that are in important beyond that,
And of course there's some things that other areas of
science get at and some that science really doesn't handle much.
For example, actually ironically famously pointing out by David Hume,
Enlightenment atheist, going from is to aunt right doesn't really
work logically. Here's the way things happen. As far as
the natural laws, is that something we want to happen
is that good? It's a bad?
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 3: And not really one of the other. Well, we need
something beyond science to tell us that right. Similarly, as
far as the spiritual nature for humans, that's something that
biology doesn't really tell us. Now, the Bible says God's
given us that right, doesn't really give some sort of
scientific mechanism. So there are various possible ideas as to
just how our being in God's image, which of course
isn't a physical resemblance, but something about our spiritual nature,
how does that actually come in. That's something where different
people with different ideas of what in terms of the
stuff that is physically getting to look more like modern
humans spiritually like us as well, different people have different ideas.
There's a range there in terms of what people think
in well, we really don't have data to decide, so
it's kind of a right ideas you can speculate, and
that's about all we can do on those questions. But
I think that's really where we see having a meaning
and purpose, not just in existence, is something that the
theological information provides. Overall my experience, there's actually a fair
number of people in the field generally that have some
level of religious belief. Now what level it is varies
a lot, but I remember being it Paymological Society meeting
and a number of folks are saying, well, this is
what I do at my church, and there was actually somebody,
I don't go to church, what do I do? Because
so many people were talking about what they did relating
to faith things. So mm hm. Of course there's a
wide range of where people new things and also kind
of in terms of the m HM the pattern of
biological evolution, what all doesn't explain? Are there some things
where kind of runs into a wall doesn't explain stuff personally?
One m.
Speaker 1: H.
Speaker 3: I don't see that we're really hitting brick wall. We're
hitting a fog in many places. Uh, We're not so sure.
We can kind of see, here's.
Speaker 2: Something in what way? In what way?
Speaker 3: For example, how do you get from the various simple
building blocks of life that you can fairly really get
right in a lab experiment, from standard very simple chemicals
all the way to actually living things. Right, Well, we've
got some ideas if you do various stuff, you can
build up somewhat more complex molecules who do have experience
that way. Kind of coming from the other end, there
are ways we can see where you can kind of
simplify from living things and still have a functioning system.
There are some hints in the genetic patterns. For example,
today all living things are using a core set of
twenty amino acids, but the r and ees involved in
that there are some similarities between certain groups as if
they were duplicated from each other started with a smaller set.
Speaker 1: So we can see this would kind of be like
a modern version of those experiments in the seventies or
something where they basically had like the the amino acids
and water and they like hit it with various you know,
electricity or radiation, and they said, oh, now we have
more amino ad some something like this famous experiments.
Speaker 3: I'm not familiar what you can build as you're saying,
like the amino message, the sugars, nukelets, lipids that way
in a pretty reasonable and here's what you could have
on some random planet kind of like early Earth conditions.
Speaker 2: But you can't make a protozoa.
Speaker 3: But we certainly have not made a prozon and even
a bacterium that way, right, So okay, you can get blocks.
Speaker 1: And ironically enough, although this is a cheap shot, that
that that experimental setup had a designer, right, it had
a had a a someone setting up the conditions for
it to happen.
Speaker 3: So definitely, where do the laws of nature come from?
That's one where alience doesn't tell you that they're there,
and science works with it, and we could get off
into the missive multiverse claims that M. Kenny needs work.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting. Tell me what you think about this.
So there's this idea about evidence where you know you
can eventually your theories will become so similar that any
piece of evidence will equally support both of them. It's
the idea that if you have four people around a table,
a blackjack table, and they're all placing bets on what
suit the next card will be, and someone says spade,
someone says heart, someone says diamond, someone says clubs, and
the dealer takes a sneak peek and says it's red.
And so there's two people. There's two theories at that
table who that evidence equally supports. And increasingly it seems
to me like that's what science is doing. Some of these,
you know, the theories of the origin of life, for example,
a biogenesis, the origin of the universe, fine tuning the
theories behind this, it would be impossible to come up
with a piece of evidence that would support God or
the multiverse, but not the other.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean.
Speaker 1: It's like the theories have evolved, part in the pun
to just mirror God. So there is no experiment you
could design to figure some of this stuff out. And
I think that's kind of I don't know, something strikes
me as I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical of that if the
theories just keep changing over time to just look like
God without God, it's like, well, that to me, that
seems a little I don't know, what do you think
about that idea?
Speaker 3: I mean, we don't have a way of taking tests
tube and putting things together and hey, there's God. Of course, right,
you cannot put God to the test scientifically, it's not
really something that you really could do. But so it
is going to kind of go to what seems plausible
to you. There's not really a scientific right this proves
one thing or another. So there certainly are a number
of the aspects of the laws of nature that look
like if you change them, even just a little bit,
things aren't suitable for life. Is this because they were
designed for that? Is it just well, if they were different,
we wouldn't be here wondering.
Speaker 2: And kind of a survivorship bias. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's not really scientific data that you can really
do with that. We have a one universe, so not
a very good sample size, and it's not even a
randomly picked one. So from that, what seems most plausible
to you? Does this look likely that it's because it
was designed to be that way or not.
Speaker 1: It's it's interesting though, because, I mean, there was a
time where the scientific worldview and the theological worldview that
you could design experiments to sort of support one or
the other, you know, because we used to think the
universe was eternal, right, and that this was sort of
the more atheistic worldview because the idea of the universe starting,
anything that has a start has a cause, and therefore,
you know, God right, or whatever the colom cosmological argument is.
And but but then that changed. Then then the you know,
the worldview that the universe had a beginning became the
scientific worldview, you know, And so it is it is
odd to me that there was a time that you
could conduct experiments or observe data that would sort of
prove one or the other, but now you can't because
they've the scientific worldview has evolved to be like a
mirror image of the religious worldview. So to me, I
think that kind of I think we let them get
away with that too much, you know, that them, you know,
we're all that's not the right way of calling it.
But that does seem to be like a a an issue.
It doesn't feel scientific to me to just keep it's
it's tough because you know, you always update your theories
in the face of new evidence, But there does seem
to be just a a priori reluctance to even entertain
like an a gential creator as part of the answer,
you know what I mean. It's it seems like a
kind of non scientific in a strange way.
Speaker 3: And you've got okay, two things there, One the can
a scientific tests answer this question? And then m but
do you assume that science covers everything?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 3: Well, you've run pretty great problems if you do. But
you're making that assumption then that we've got a scientific bottom.
Therefore we don't need God. No, I mean the Bible
portrays God being behind all sorts of ordinary physical processes.
Speaker 2: This is.
Speaker 3: From that point of view, it's how did God do
something right? And did he use the ordinary patterns of
natural laws or occasionally a miracle doing something differently. So,
for example, going back even earlier, geology, rather popular Enlightenment
idea was Earth being basically eternal and while okay, sometimes
this area rises up and is eroding land while that
area is under the water, and then they swamp, so
you do have changes, but they're fairly psychical and people. Yeah,
they're around throughout the practically eternal earth, not that different
from today. Just the rain remains then went under the water,
and so that was kind of a popular Enlightenment deism
type point of view. And more they looked at geology
and no, we see a trend over time and it's
going back to simpler life and then we just have
rocks and extrapolate further, and that looks more like a beginning,
like some eternal cycling. And so that was perceived among
geologists pretty chilly in the early eighteen hundreds as pointing
to match with a more biblical point of view rather
than the eternal cycles type of thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3: And then similarly, kind of city state type ideas versus
big bang. A lot of the let's have to stay
state was that sounds like creation. But at the same time,
m well, in principle, God could create a stay eight
universe and then it looks steady from whatever point of
creation there is. So it doesn't really prove something one
way or the other, but you certainly had people advocating
this for that view. And then yeah, the science points
to our universe having a beginning at any rate and
the Earth having a beginning, things like that. But yeah,
multiverse is one that's kind of a miss. There's kind
of pup about what is supposedly doing, and then there's
the taking close look at what act is there.
Speaker 1: And I mean it's evolutionary theory applied to cosmology. It's
kind of interesting. It's this idea. You know, Well, the
reason all the constants are fine tuned is because you know,
there's many universes and the only ones that are adequately
fine tuned can give rise to life. You know, just
like how did this uh you know, why does this
dog look like this?
Speaker 2: Well? Over over?
Speaker 1: You know, there's many dogs, right, and these selective pressures
can can select for traits that are most adaptive, and
that's I guess how the universe works. But I think
even most scientists now sort of view that idea with skepticism.
It's like it's like a like a bridge too far
to just pose it. Well, maybe there's an infinite number
of universes, you.
Speaker 2: Know, it's a it's a it's a big it's a
big leap, and.
Speaker 1: There's of course no evidence for it other than the
fact that our universe is fine tuned. So it's a
solution to a problem, but it's not. There is not
any evidence for it, so.
Speaker 3: No additional like I'm saying, I mean the kind of
picture for Narnias, that's another universe.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, Multiverses.
Speaker 3: Aren't inherently atheistic. But also there's several different multiverse models. Yeah,
different things. I mean some of them. It's basically saying
there's a bunch but they're all basically with the same laws. Okay, well,
why are the laws for all the universes?
Speaker 2: Pseudo?
Speaker 3: It doesn't get around the question. It just claims there
a whole bunch more. There even ones that are saying
all these different universes of different laws, there's an infinite
number of bad options. Right, you could have an infinite
range of possible physical laws and none of them are
the good one. So that doesn't really avoid the problem,
just kind of moves it back. One, why is the
set of parameters for generating the multiple first universes such
that it does generate at least some that or at
least one that are suitable for life?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and where did that engine come from? Where did
that universe creation engine come from? As well, yeah, you're right,
it's just you you you said, it's sort of kicking
the can down the road, or it just moves the
question back. That seems to be true for all of
the big questions, right, like even for evolution, which again
just to restate, like clearly there's observable phenomenon there that
that evolution occurs in some sense then and then there's
like debate around certain issues. But I do wonder if
you were to run that clock all the way back
to the very first life form capable of reproduction, what
happened before that? Do we does evolutionary theory address evolutionary theory?
It's always it's sort of put forward as an expert
nation for life, the origin of life, but it really is,
and it's it's the explanation for the origin of different species.
But in pop culture we treat it like the explanation
of life. Where does science stand on that today? The
origin of life?
Speaker 3: Yeah, technically why is shereally drawn for? The evolution is
the process kind of going once we've got life, and
then apiochansis the process of making life from non life,
and they do kind of grade into each other some degree.
You have some of the same factors involved, but a
bio chances there's a lot less data and evidence to
pending things down, and so there's a lot more speculation.
We certainly have Okay, these things work this way, and
it looks like you could kind of have something like
this as a system that's working. So there's ideas out there,
but it's much more we've got to guesses how that
this part works and this part and kind of how
they might fit together. It's much more of a speculation
and discovery right situation, where that my guess, and I
wouldn't put it particularly stronger than that, is that there's
an awful lot of things that do happen by natural
law type processes, and biblically miracles happen, but they're relatively
rare and therefore special reason. And even with them, they
tend to seem to be kind just what is needed
for the particular purpose, and say, kind of turns the
water to wine, and then the servants have to go
lail it out, put it in the cup and carry it.
It's not a magic fountain refilling all the cups. So
my guess would be that, given that there seems to
be a not using miracles but it's not necessary, that
I guess is that God probably worked things happening through
natural laws patterns. But that's a guess with rather limited data.
Speaker 1: Well, it seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to speculate.
I mean, we're all just speculating when it comes to
the origin of life, and the only difference is we
propose a you know, a first Domino toppler or a
first cause, whereas a atheist person wouldn't it would they
would just pause it some mysterious force or just randomness
or infinite time, or some some way to sort of
account for the life lack of a motive engine. But
I'll speculate wildly. This is not you talking, so everyone listening,
this is me saying these wild and crazy things. I
kind of I can't help but think about I don't
think we can help it. You know, our culture influences
us when we think of analogies and metaphors. We can't
help but use what we know. And I can't help
but think of the way a video game works. You know,
the characters in the game just have a different relationship
with their physical world than I do, being outside of
their you know, whatever it is that they are, you know,
information spinning on a disc right, And there's things I
can just do that they can't do, and vice versa.
And if I were a programmer, I could imagine trying
to make a game that just operates on its own,
you know, I could. I could program each little character
with a chat GPT like level of intelligence. And I
could if I had infinite time and wisdom. I could
sort of set up a game that just works. You know,
maybe I need tectonic activity, you know, maybe this is
important for the natural cycle. And so I can put
all these laws in these constants, and after that, I
wouldn't really need to get so involved by some like
major action by going into the code and editing it,
you know, but I could. And so to me, this
is sort of a it's amazing how cool this metaphor
is for existence here in the twenty first century. So
I appreciate that from you, because I do find some
Christians are really reluctant to entertain that any of these
things happen, like even natural selection, Like oh, that's I
can't entertain that idea. And it's like, well, no, we
have to use our reason. I mean, we can observe
a lot of this stuff. So I appreciate that. I
will ask sometime. I have a paleontologist. I've always wanted
to ask someone this question. We have a fossil record
and it's not continuous, but it's pretty impressive. I imagine,
do we this This will show how little I know,
you know, we humans and chimpanzees. We are proposed to
share a common ancestor, and of course we all share
according to evolutionary three eight eight common ancestry, every organism
shares a common ancestor with us. How good you know,
because I imagine, okay, we have some common ancestor, and
then from that common ancestor we have chimpanzees, we have humans.
How good is the fossil record connecting those two points,
you know, from modern anatomical humans to a common ancestor
with chimpanzees. How complete is that fossil record?
Speaker 3: Okay, would be kind of okay. Forest is generally a
really lousy place to get fossilized, really good place to
get decayed away and back into the food web. So
and that's where quite a lot of the great apes
I like to live. So our fossil record for the
chimps is not very good. For human relatives somewhat better.
So we do have some older EIGHTE fossils that well,
kind of basic early ape could reasonly be ancestral to both.
But then actually it's the chip lineage that we don't
have much on the fossil For humans. We've got ones
that well, it's basically an ape sized brain, which by
animal standards pretty good by human standards not so good,
but getting more upright stance and good for running around
on the ground as opposed to the knuckle walk approach
that's the usual for chins and grills. I mean, they
can stand and walk if they need to, handsful or something,
but generally they're using their hand knuckles as well as
back feet for walking on the ground, whereas we're on
just the hind feet. But you still have probably the
scramble up a tree for safety rather than just flat
out running. And then we gradually see here are ones
that are increasingly better at getting around of the ground
faster running. For example, the eight and the early Hammond
and ribcage tends to be somewhat more funnel shaped rather
than straight sides like us straight sides. That's more room
for lungs.
Speaker 2: Got it.
Speaker 3: If you're trying to outrun that saber tooth, you want
to get plenty option. So we have increasing specialization for
running around on two feet on the ground, and then
start also getting noticeably larger brain size and gradually start
to see more use of tools. And then especially with
the first modern humans, we start to see all of
a sudden there's a takeoff in things like more decoration,
a lot more innovation, things like that going on. So
we've got kind of the sequence for us, but the
chimp sequence, we've got a few teeth and things like that,
but not very much fossil material for more chimp or
gorilla like things.
Speaker 2: That's interesting.
Speaker 1: Okay, what what as far as you know, what would
be like the best example of the most complete fossil
record from some common ancestor to two distinct species. I
hope ideally not like at the level of like, you know,
bacteria or you know, stuff like that, some something recognizable.
Speaker 3: I mean bacteria. It's actually extremely challenging because once you
get passed, Okay, this one looks like a dot, this
one's kind of oval, and that one's a little twisty,
you pretty much summarized what all the bacteria looks like.
There are a few weird ones, but in appearance they're
off engineeric. It's being in chemistry and things like that,
which doesn't necessarily preserve well. Some of the things with
the best fossil record actually are tiny stuff floating around
in the ocean, in the plankton. There are some of
those that make a hard shell, and so those are
major part of the sediments out in the ocean making
up chalk rock and things like that. And so given
that you've got huge numbers on them, and they've also
been studied rather extensively, we have some very good transitions
of going from for example, the big extinction taking out
the dinosaurs also hit hard for the ocean plankton, so
a lot of things tying out a few survivors. Hey,
not much competition, and you see diverse case to forms
really taking off in those groups. Also, being really tiny
doesn't take much rot to have lots of them, and
as they change the time their useful marker for time
and a little tiny bit of rock. That's something you
might get up when you drill a hole, and if
you're drilling a really deep hall, you've probably got a reason,
and that reason is usually oil. Knowing exactly what layer
you're in helps you find the oil.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, it's like an ice core sample for land.
That's interesting, pretty good money in being able to figure
out which layer're in. Right that, there's been quite a
lot of looking at these tiny fossils and how they change.
Some of the work that I focus on with the
snails and clams, we do have some examples, like Project
involved in right now trying to thoroughly document the various
snails and clam fossils here in the southeast in US
from kind of a little before the ice Age is
really get going on into ice age up too recent
and not too surprisingly, they're somewhere we've got the oldest
ones that definitely look different from the modern ones. And
then in between age and it's in between, and there's
somewhere we're kind of well, what do we call it?
It's midway between these two? Okay, so sort of heavy
this name slashed, that name that we make use for
the shells that are in between an age and in
between in form I get. I guess what I would want,
Like if I were an evolutionary biologist, I would want
to be able to make this argument where I have
like some ancient I'm gonna use I have no idea
what these words mean. Paleolithic, No, that's the wrong, you know,
ancient shrew or whatever that I'm proposing eventually, over millions
and millions of years, turns into this, let's say bat
or something, some winged creature, right, I would you know,
I would want to be able to show like the
incremental changes from like one body plan to another. And
I would kind of expect, given that each of these
incremental changes existed on Earth for maybe hundreds of thousands
of years, you know that there would be a lot
of fossils. Now, I know fossilization is rare and stuff,
but is there anything like that where we can really
like go through the change of a body.
Speaker 2: Plan or anything. In evolutionary biology.
Speaker 3: We do have some things like going back cambering, we
have major diversification there, and we're kind of establishing a
lot of the major body plans for living things. And
so again going with areas I've focused on a lot.
With the shells, we do have a nice sequence, for example,
where start with kind of a cap shape shell, something
that's crawling around kind of snail style, but not a
true snail, just kind of cap cheap pattern which some
snails have, but this would have been somewhat different anatomically
into tail. And then we've got some that are kind
of skinnier, more narrow cap shape, possibly a little better
for digging around. And then as they get more skinny,
the two sides get my hands kind of coming together more.
See the shell right along the midline getting bitner a
little flexible, and if we go all the way to
pulling so that the bottoms can come together and the
top edge is entirely flexible, we've gone from the cap
shape to a clam. And we do have this sequence
of fossils showing that type of transition. Okay, interesting, So
things that have a good hard skeleton to look at
and that lives someplace like in shallow water where it's
pretty easy to get buried and preserved. So we do have,
certainly for the vertebrates, some nice transitions between more fish
and amphibian style of things. Is another good example. Of course,
they're actually are certain types of fish today that have
some ability to kind of screw down the water a
little bit. Famously, they got the mud skippers and kind
of the Indian Ocean region. Remember when I was in
PG glimpse, there's something scutting along the water surface and
climbing out of the rock and it's a fish. Not
quite what I was expecting to see there, So, I
mean air has a lot more.
Speaker 1: The first evolutionary biologist to find that fish must have
just been ecstatic.
Speaker 3: So there are a fair number of fish that breathe
air to get more aucyen. Tarpin, for example, popular game
fish around Florida because if you get it very vigorously
jumps around internashes.
Speaker 2: And beautiful fish. They're huge.
Speaker 3: Being that active needs a lot of auction, So tarpin
actually golpen air breathe that they will brown the held underwater.
But if you're kind of in an area that's kind
of a low an auction, breathing ear is useful. And
if it's kind of a but he is there's some
bugs around, maybe being able to get out a little
bit scoot around between one pond and the next, they're
use in that. Whorse, there's also used in being a
fast swing fish that stays out in the deeper water.
But there are potential advantages and so we do have
specimens where the limbs of some of the lobe fins
are getting more suited to be able to hold them
up rather than just for paddling. Also, if you're in
the water, you can just sort of we go fins
and tilt this way that way. On land, it's handy
to be able to turn your neck. Fish don't really
have necks, but we start to see the fossils where
the yeah, it does not firmly attached to the shoulders, but
giving a little flexibility there to bend around. So we
have a nice series from fish with lungs and paddles
that have bones kind of like aramon leg bones in them,
but it's paddles to ones that start to have some
bit more support, getting some kind of toe type structures
in the foot, getting a little bit more of being
able to move the head around. And then the very
earliest ones we considered true amphibians have actually feet than fins,
but they're still also living primarily in the water. They
still have their gills, actually still have a lateral line,
which is a sensory structure that works in water but
not in air along the side. So there's still mostly aquatic,
but certainly able to crawl a bit across the mud.
And then further specialization goes on from there. But we
have fairly nice transitions going from more fish style thing
to more amphibian and again that's shell what are good
place to get buried. They have bones. So yeah, well
then I mean sequence there that's super compelling to me.
I mean because you can sort of imagine like, okay, yeah,
I have this brief human life. So while I well,
it may seem far fetched that this tarpan could someday
be a you know, cow like creature or something, you know,
at least theoretically, I kind of see, like, compounded over
time in the right conditions, that pretty serious body plan
changes could happen. But of course I'll just never see it,
because you know, I would need to live for a
million years. But you know, I do wonder because something
we haven't really talked about directly is speciation, and this
is like a hot topic. You know, Yeah, Okay, changes happen,
and they can compound, and they can be pretty dramatic.
I mean, look at the difference between a chihuahua and
a Great Dane, But technically a Chihuahua and a Great
Day maybe not physically, but technically they could reproduce. Right,
So so what so two questions I guess is like,
what what is that threshold that has to be crossed?
Speaker 1: I assume it has to do with the uh, you
know X, you know, chromosomes that relate to sexual reproduction
need to change perhaps, But and then also I mean, yeah,
this stuff happens over huge time scales, but there are
a lot of different species on Earth. So surely in
the five hundred years or so that we've had or more,
I guess biologists or something like biologists, surely we've seen
species should happen, right, And if so, what are what
have you seen?
Speaker 3: We do have a number of good examples there. Now,
as you know, it's kind of complicated when do we
say these are actual separate species. There are some challenges
of just where do you draw the line, And so
we do see things that are all sorts of degrees
of difference from each other. Ones where and I think
those are probably the same, and those are definitely the same,
and as a getting pretty different. One place where you
can kind of see the process of figuring these types
of things out is if you get some different editions
of field guides for birds. It's a fairly accessible option,
and you'll see there are some changes in the species
that are recognized. For example, one of the newest ones.
They just recently decided that the western and Eastern warbling
vireos here in North America are different enough to those
are really different species.
Speaker 2: Is that so?
Speaker 1: Is that an anatomical distinction or is it Does it
related to the ability to reproduce.
Speaker 2: I I don't know much about this.
Speaker 3: So this wouldn't relate to some extent if it's been studying.
How much do they hybridize or not? And do the hybrids,
if there are any, seem to do just fine or
not so great? And then also and we.
Speaker 1: Know we know that they used to reproduce and have
viable offspring and now they sometimes don't.
Speaker 3: Is that they are very similar? Okay, I don't think
we have the way back. They used to be freer,
but we can see now those look pretty similar. But
these days DNA differences are very important. Do we see, okay,
these ones have this range of things and then there's
a gap here and then these or do they grantually
all blur into each other for birds or it's also
very important. Are do they have different songs? Which is
a key thing for the males and females to recognize
each other. If the song is different and the female
here's one and it's interested in and here's the other
and isn't, well, that's going to differences. So there's kind
of gradually rightcognizing these two. Well, they do kind of
look different, but they seem to mix pretty thoroughly. Where
they come together, and so you get some things that
older books, That is, two things that now are one,
and there are somewhere these actually seem to keep themselves apart.
They seem to be different, and so we recognize them
as two species where they were previously put together, but
actually seeing the process in action. One place where this
sometimes happens relatively obviously, is in plants. Plants can reproduce asexually.
A plant sell that's alive, given suitable conditions, can grow
into a new plant. Most of ourselves can't do that,
but in plants, asexual reproduction is really really possible. Bolsto
you can get a new species that doesn't have to
have lots of others like it, that can potentially just
reproduce itself a sexual thing. And it turns out this
can happen quite a lot. If two different ones hybridize,
that may end up with a full set of chromosomes
form both parents, and now it's got twice as many chromosomes.
That doesn't breed well with either parent, but it can
reproduce itself interesting, and so we get a group that
is not able to breed with anybody else newly formed
from that hybridation event, and this does happen in nature.
For example, a little bit of accidental human help and
standard salt marsh grass along east coast of US accidentally
got transport over to Europe and the two inner bread
and made a new kind with more chromosomes, doesn't breathe
with either parent, but reproduces itself. This is actually pretty
important to us because some additional examples of this are
wheat and corn beating an awful lot of humanity. Yeah,
pretty important, and so there's a number of examples. There
are a few animals where this happens as well. For example,
Campelloma is one group of freshwater snails in eastern US,
and there are some normal it's sexually reproducing standard set
of chromosome types, and then if two of those happening
it together are actually it sometimes just happens within an individual.
It's extra copy that becomes a distinct lineage that reproduces
asexually and different from either parent form. So we do
have that sort of instantaneous and even beyond species, there
have been cases like notorious Rafabraska. It was supposed to
be a triumph of Soviet science feeding the world. They
in the lab crossed radishes and cabbages. So the goal
was to have something with the edible radish root and
the cabbage leaves. It had cabbage roots, and that wasn't useful.
But here are things from do separate genera now merge
into this one useless plant. So we do have things
of that sort. There's also some more gradual ones. One
very famous example comes from a group of fruit flies,
not the standard lab genetics ones, but another type where
there were various species living on some of the native
plants here in the New World, and then Europeans brought
these apples, really big fruit.
Speaker 1: And and apples are in like the rose family or something, right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: So if fly instead of coming to one of the
native like a hawthorn with a little fruit, here's this
great big apple, they actually court and meet on the fruit.
So a fly that starts liking the smell of apples
rather than the previous those will tend not to mix
with each other so much. And so we've got now
a population that's specialized on apples that's not particularly mixing
with the ones that still live on the awthorns. And
so we've got is it completely too being a new
species or somewhere along that line. Kind of hard to
decide exactly if we've made it to definitely two species,
but it's certainly headed that direction.
Speaker 1: That. Yeah, I mean, that's that's interesting. I think I
think it seems very reasonable that some things come from
other things. You know, this is just totally there's there's
nothing logically inconsistent about that, and that at some point
in the process of changing, you cross some threshold where
there's no going back, or at least no going back easily,
or no no ability to reproduce, or whatever the standard
is for determining a new species. I have a last question,
because it's almost I told you an hour and we're
just right, we're right there. So let me ask my
last question here. And it's kind of convoluted, so I
so saying that that that all sounds incredibly reasonable. I
can sort of imagine. I can like abstract myself out
of my small human frame and picture that the millennia
and the millions of years going by and these radical
changes happening. And I can even go all the way
to like imagine a human coming from a naked mole,
rat or whatever. You know, eventually, you know, and many
many iterations, I do sense so, and this maybe it's
because I'm out of the field and I'm mostly learning
the stuff on YouTube. You know, it does seem like
there are like new challenges to kind of the neo
Darwinism framework revolution not for evolution in general, but just
the specific way we think this happens. Seems to be
under more scrutiny than I have ever known since I
was first interested in the topic. So kind of a
two part question. One have you noticed that? And then
second part, are any of the new ideas particularly compelling
to you? Like, for example, there's a a biologist at
TOFFS named Michael Levin who's very popular, does a lot
of interviews, and he's showing just radical body plan changes
that do pass on to the next generation in relatively
simple life, like these little simple worms and things without
altering the DNA. So he's showing hereditary changes without DNA changes.
It's kind of bizarre, it doesn't make any sense. And
these are through things like modifying ion channels and epigenetic
networks and things. So it is this idea that random
mutation and environmental changes as the engine for evolution? Is
it inadequate? Giving some of the rapid changes we see
in short successions like the Cambrian explosion and things. Is
it inadequate? Do you think we'll have a new evolutionary
framework in twenty years thirty years?
Speaker 3: Part of the problem is what counts as a new framework,
right right, right me. It's something that's often missed, like
the paradigm shift claims and things like that, is right,
something that's already working. The ideas have to explain that too,
as well as give us something more right. So, I
think it's going to be building onto now whether that
when that gets say, this is new kind of the
ship of theseus question that's kind of a challenge to define,
Like is the city species the same problem. I think
one very important thing is we've had awful lot of
technological advances happening, being able to analyze what's going on
with the DNA, with the other biological molecules, the proteins
in much greater detail, and of course also having a
computer power to analyze what data and so we're discovering
a lot of things that we simply weren't able to
see before. So that's really giving us a lot of
new ideas, a lot of new information on oh, here
this is happening beyond the things that we knew about,
and here's that happening. So I think we are really
seeing a revolution in terms of the additional information and
understanding more complications, more things that are going on that
are factors. And so for example, oh, this is an
epigenetic change, we can show that that's what's causing it.
And how big a difference does that make? How might
that play out over time potentially leading to different selective
forces and leading to that becoming a new form versus
existing ones. So there's definitely a lot of questions of
that sort. I think we are likely to have a
more complex and more complete model coming along, whether that's
totally a new version like I've got the book kind
of evolution two point oh, and I would tend to
be more like I call it evolution one point before
seven B. But that's my way of thinking about things
versus his way of thinking about things. It's not that
he's wrong. He just really focuses on the here's what's new, right,
and I focus a little bit more on the here's
how it connects to the old.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Of course, also a complication is sometimes there's confusion with
random as a label, what do we really mean? There's
one important thing to keep in mind is that there
are a bunch of things that can be considered random
that the Bible says God's in control. It's not removing
God from the picture. It's a description of it's not
something we can predict it fully, whether this is a
flipping a coin that mathema random or something that it's
not exactly mathematically random, but it's still not something practical,
like say chaos. Technically there is an exact math formula,
it's just that you have to know the setup in
more detail than it is feasible to apply the formula.
A tiny difference in your input will lead to a
big difference in what comes out. Or there's the seems
purposeless sense of random, But at what level? If I
flip a coin, no matter how much you stay the coin,
you're not going to figure out why, right, So likewise,
the fact that something doesn't have a internal purpose doesn't
mean that God can't be using it for his purposes.
And also kind of what do you mean by random mutation?
Some mutations are more likely to happen to others. It's
not completely random in that sense, But what is, as
far as we can tell scientifically random about mutation, is
that organism can't say, oh, climate's getting warmer, I need
to mutate this gene to work better under warm conditions.
A may or may not happen, and it does not
happen because it is more useful to happen that way.
But of course if it does happen to be useful,
then that conveys an advantage, or if it happens to
be detrimental, then conveys a disadvantage. There have been some
studys finding that, okay, we have this mutation bacteria that's
useful for them, and then we take some of those
bacteria back again, undo that mutation and they mutated faster. Well,
it turned out they had a mutation that promoted having
more mutations. Oh and because the lab conditions they were
in what they had wasn't working great, mutating more helped
because their current situation was bad. If you got something
that's already working, then mutating more generally not so good.
But they were mutating more, and of course that makes
it more likely for the useful mutation happened as well
a bunch of not so useful ones. So what's truly
random that something gets confusion. People think that random means, say,
God's une involvable. No, it just means right, something particularly
predictable by us or by the organism that has the mutation.
Speaker 2: Fantastic.
Speaker 1: I think that's a good spot to end, if you'll
stick with me while I just summarize a few things
and hang out while I in the show so we
can say goodbye. I appreciate that perspective because I find
myself frustrated, and maybe this is a personality flaw. I'm
frustrated by everybody, you know. I'm frustrated by the certainty
on one side and the certainty on the other side,
the sort of like they have the preordained knowledge of
what the truth is. And I think to just assume
that God couldn't do it this way is kind of
a strange take, right. I would kind of expect the
origin of life to be pretty complicated and just rich
in mystery, and so I love that there's more questions
than ever. But I also don't think that's a huge
flaw of the scientific process. You know, that there's more
questions than ever. I think we're just learning, and so
I hope we can all sort of not call each
other names in either direction. This is a tremendous mystery
that we find ourselves in and it's very exciting, so
I appreciate your perspective. If anyone has any questions, email
me at God's Eye Viewbook at gmail dot com. And
if you have a question for doctor Campbell, you can
send it to me and I'll pass it on everyone.
Thanks for listening, Stay safe out there, and God bless