Darwinism Will Collapse / Gordon Wilson

On this episode of The Right Stuff, Pastor Jared Longshore is joined by Dr. Gordon Wilson of New Saint Andrews to discuss Dr. Wilson’s book ‘Darwin’s Sandcastle.’ The two discuss the Christian approach to evolution and how the Creation account fits into science.

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There's a lot of books out there, creation books, as well as intelligent design books. I still felt like something was missing. Many Bible scholars, theologians, start to fall all over themselves trying to find a hermeneutic that will accommodate the prevailing views of science. They paint themselves in a corner where the scriptures aren't super clear. Well, maybe you're right, but maybe you're wrong, and you're going to have to eat humble pie if you have to try to back out of the corner without tracking pain all over the floor. Welcome to the right stuff, everyone. Glad to have you with us today. Today, I have the privilege of talking with my friend, colleague, fellow elder, Dr. Gordon Wilson, who is the author of Darwin's Sand Castle, Evolutions Failure, and the Light of Scripture and the Scientific Evidence. So a brief introduction to Dr. Wilson for those of you who don't know him, I'm just going to read it off the back here, Gordon. Dr. Gordon Wilson is currently a senior fellow of Natural History at New St. Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho. Prior to New St. Andrews, he was on the Biology Faculty at Liberty University. Gordon received his PhD in Environmental Science and Public Policy from George Mason University in 2003. His dissertation research focused on the reproductive ecology of the Eastern Box Turtle. Woohoo. All right, and everyone let the Eastern Box Turtle just tell us to just give us one little snippet about the Eastern Box Turtle. They're just of all of the turtles in the world. It's one of the prettiest. It's a terrestrial turtle, um, mosey and around mostly in the Eastern United States, although there's a species out west and southwest. And they're just, they have a, they're not the water turtles with a low dome. They have an arched shell. It looks more like a World War II helmet, US, and they have a really nice pattern, and a lot of kids growing up in the east have had lots of encounters with box turtles as they're wandering around in the woods or seeing them crossing roads. They have a hinge on their lower shell so that when they're being provoked by somebody or predator, they can literally raise the drawbridge and totally close up. So they can actually close up all the way? Yeah, their their lower shell shell is kind of like a drawbridge and it just totally seals up. So and then they pull all their legs in. The back part of their lower shell also seals up. So you're totally, you're, you're sort of impenetrable. Nice. Okay. It's great. If you like that, uh, ride in the dance. Right in the dance. They started dropping episodes five through nine. So, uh, one a week. Um, so for those of you who, um, for those who know you, you, uh, the ride in the dance is fantastic. You have a real love for creation and its evidence in the way that you live. You, I've seen on the ride in dance. You messing around with alligators from Florida where I'm from. Yeah, but that's right. You've shown me your beetle collection at your house. And, uh, but yet you, I told you I always knew you were smart. But now that I've read Darwin, St. Castle, I was, um, I'm intimidated by my own lack of scientific knowledge. So, uh, we all have our, we all have our, we all have our gifts, different gifts in the body. Yeah. Um, but I really, really like this book. So I'm, I'm only, uh, just over halfway through and, um, already, I thought, man, this is good on so many levels. Uh, but let's, so I want to ask you some particular questions. Why don't we start with the big one? Why did you write this book? Yeah, good, very good question. There's a lot of books out there, creation books as well as intelligent design books. Um, and I still felt like something was missing. Um, a lot of the intelligent design books were addressing one particular topic like, um, Michael B. He was writing, uh, on the irreducible complexity up in, in biochemistry in the cell. And so he really drilled down on that. It was a great thesis, but it was, that was his thesis, irreducible complexity. Um, John Sanford wrote genetic entropy. So he was looking at the degradation of the genome. That was one topic. Um, and then you have creationist books that are talking about all sorts of things from paleontology, geology. Sometimes they're broad brush and they're covering the waterfront. Sometimes, uh, they zoom in on one particular topic. I wanted to do a broad thing. So, um, this is some of my, what I consider, uh, key, uh, or salient points in the, in the debate. Um, both from a creationist, young earth creationist perspective. So we get into scripture and I start with scripture. Uh, I'm not a theologian. I'm not a Bible scholar, but I'm surrounded with them. Um, mm-hmm. One right across the table from me. And, uh, so I'm surrounded with those people that I can, uh, check, check, make sure that I'm not, uh, getting out on the skinny branches as far as my, um, exegesis. And, um, so I started with scripture first. Says, what does the scripture say? Who do we trust? Do we trust the scientific establishment? And then, um, what is the science? What is the secular scientist, uh, scientific community saying? And then many theologians that, like you were saying, I'm not a, you know, I'm not a scientist. Um, so many of the theologians, Bible scholars, are intimidated by the scientific community. They think, well, they're the high priests of truth. And, uh, if they say, thus, say, a science, then I have to bring my, um, theology in line with it, which is very wrong headed. The many Bible scholars, theologians start to fall all over themselves, trying to find a hermeneutic, um, that will accommodate the prevailing views of science. And that's just a bad, bad, I was reminded of very reading your book of just how new this is, like how fresh all this is. And one way, and this might not be the approach that people would like to take, but just because of the recovery of Christendom, I mean, we're reading Thomas Aquinas from the medieval era. We're reading Augustine from the fifth century. And, um, and then you hear like these, these views that can't be questioned. Right. Find out they've been, like, well, in the 1950s, you know, we discovered this in the 1950s or we discovered this in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Right. But I also like that in your book, you had some good qualifications of saying sometimes creationists, um, basically they're just not honestly dealing with the science. They're trying to classify particular, right, um, right, strange, uh, developments in the fossil record, strange, strange fossils, you're trying to force them into a category when it's okay to just say, that's a weird thing. Yeah, so weird thing. Yeah. God is not beholding to our categories. So getting, uh, getting back to your first question, um, uh, I was wanting to just kind of pull together a bunch of different topics and each chapter is addressing a different topic. Some, you know, who do you trust? Uh, Ken Genesis accommodate deep time, you know, millions, billions of years. And then I move on to biology, you know, um, the dating methods. Can we trust dating methods? Um, look at the fossil record, look at the idea of created kinds. Um, and I think too often my fellow creationists, I really, really love my fellow creationists, so I'm not gonna throw them under the bus, but I think sometimes we, they paint themselves in a corner. And, um, where the, the, the scriptures aren't super clear. And, you know, I think they just unnecessarily get boxed themselves in like that box themselves in it. And I think like, well, maybe you're right, but, you know, maybe you're wrong and you're going to have to eat humble pie if you have to try to back out of the corner without tracking pain all over the floor. Um, so, um, yeah, so we gotta be, thus the setup. I want to ask you about some of those that you brought up, coming right out of the gate in the book. So I'll highlight here for people that are, that things, we'll see if we can get through this, but what I'd like to do is talk about, can we trust the dating? Right. So you start with this, you have a chapter called blind dating. So can you trust the dating? I enjoy naming chapters. They were, they're well named, uh, chapter four, so the whole dating situation. Right. And we date, the second is, um, micro and macroevalution and actually getting down to like what is that? And you call that one designer, jeans, um, then the third is going to be the fossil record, which is going to be dealing with like, what it's going, what do we actually find down there? And maybe if we have time trying to get to the primordial soup, um, but, okay, we can start to be, yeah, you brought up dating. Yeah. So can we trust these dating methods? That's my question. Can we trust them? No, the thing is, uh, many people are intimidated by the radiometric dating. They'll often say carbon dating because it's easy to say, but carbon dating is just one type of radiometric dating. Um, a lot of people, when creation starts to talk about dating, a lot of lay people just glaze over because they just like, um, that's sciencey stuff and I'm not tracking. But it comes up in all the kids books. I have to realize it and come up, you know, and we, we have to at least have a cursory understanding of dating just so we realize that it's, it's a very, there's, there's tenuous assumptions that go into it. Now, I'll try to, I don't use this example in my book, but a colleague of mine at Liberty used an example of, um, if, if radioactive material, what they do when they're dating a rock, whether it's potassium argon, they're looking at ratios or you could say in a simple term, percentages of the radioactive parent and the parent decays into non-radioactive daughter. So uranium, uh, 238 decays into lead 206 by emitting alpha particles. To make it simple, uh, I like this example, think of peel, unpeeled potatoes as the radioactive parent. Now parent decays into daughter. Now, let's say when you're peeling the potato, the peels flying off are the radioactive particles. And then once you've finished peeling it, you've now got your non-radioactive daughter. Now, you come, I'm, I'm peeling potatoes for Thanksgiving dinner. And you come into the room and you see a stack of unpeeled potatoes and a stack of peeled potatoes. And I'm peeling this big Idaho potato. Most of them are Idaho potatoes. So that's where we are. And you're peeling, I'm peeling away and you go, gee, I wonder how long Gordon's been peeling. So you decide, well, I'm not going to ask him. I'm just going to make some assumptions. So you measure how long it takes me to peel one potato. And you get your stopwatch out. It takes me one minute to peel because I'm a guy. It takes me one minute to peel one Idaho potato. I put it down and you go, okay, and then you count how many peeled potatoes there are. And there's a hundred. We're having a big, jank of egg type two. There's a hundred peeled potatoes. And you go, well, it took him one minute to peel one. There's a hundred there. That means he's been peeling for over an hour and a half. He's been peeling for a hundred minutes. Okay, well, that is true. If I didn't change my peeling rate, peeling speed, my peeling speed, maybe I took a break. Maybe I only peeled one potato, the one you saw me peel. And there was a whole mound of peeled potatoes, pre-peeled potatoes already there. We go into a rock, say a geochronologist who are the guys that are the people who date rocks. Geochronologist, and I don't know all of their methodologies, but they go with their expertise and they're measuring these ratios of parent to daughter and or peeled potatoes, unpeeled potatoes versus peeled potatoes. You're making assumptions. Have my peeling rate changed? Or was the rock created with a certain ratio? Let's say it had a certain ratio of uranium to lead at day one. Because is the assumption that the assumption that it was all parent no daughter at the start. Or there's assumption that we can figure out through other assumptions and other technical processes that we can at time zero, million, millions of years ago, we can figure out the initial starting conditions. And the thing is, this is historical or forensic science. We can't go back and figure out the starting point. We just can't. And so, yeah, if your assumptions are right, the peeling speed is the same. I only had unpeeled potatoes at time zero. And no one came in and dumped peeled potatoes. Or subtracted, unpeeled, dumped peeled potatoes. And you can use the hourglass analogy. You can say, well, it's been trickling this long based on the trickle rate and based on how much sand is in the top, how much sand is in the bottom. But again, assumptions, assumptions, assumptions. Give the three because you do this in the book. Use the hourglass and you got three straight straight points of debate. Yeah, the three assumptions are decay rate stays the same as constant. You know the starting ratio, all parent, or you at least know the ratio of parent to daughter. There's no other force adding or subtracting sand. Yeah, you know the ratios, you know the rate and the decay rate stays constant. And the system, though, that was one of these assumptions, is that the system is closed. That you don't have any things adding or subtracting, parent, or daughter, during the duration of its being on earth. And you've also got lots of water, groundwater trickling through there. So the closed system assumptions, not a good assumption. You could be having more parent added, more daughter, or a parent parent. A parent parent. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure that if you double clicked on that. And as you, I'll just restate it as you have, if you have the hourglass analogy, parent to daughter, everyone is acknowledging and you would acknowledge that yes, this is what's happening through these particles. What is it that we're shooting off? What's it called again? Well, depends on the type of radioactive material. It could be alpha particles, alpha particles, or it could be beta particles, but either one, alpha particles going off and we have parent reducing into daughter. Yeah, the only difference with the hourglass analogy is the whole concept of half life. Because if you've got say 100 percent parent, the half life is how long it takes for half of it to decay. Well, if it takes millions and let's say, one and a quarter billion years to decay half of it into daughter. In our normal thinking, we'd say, well, it takes another one and a quarter billion years for the remaining half to go. But in half lives, it's not that. It's half of a half. Okay. So the first half decays in a half life, then half of the remaining decays in the same amount of time. So you're always constantly having, it's kind of like how you're cutting pie. One half life, half the pie's gone, another half life, a quarter of the pie's gone. But even on that half life, you're saying, we've been tracking that for a while. Yeah. But there's no way to guarantee that it's always been decaying at that rate. Right. Or that God could have made it with a certain ratio at the beginning. And this is where we're bringing a lot of assumptions and, oh, God wouldn't have done that because he would be deceiving us. It's like, no, if we're imposing on God these assumptions that if he has 50% parent daughter in the rock for some other reason, he's somehow deceiving us and to making us thinking it's old. Well, no, he might have other reasons. When God made the garden of Eden, there's all sorts of things that in our own cause effect mindset, say, well, it's got a soil profile. It's got these different soil horizons. It takes thousands of years or hundreds of years to make that soil profile. It's got trees in the garden. Do they have tree rings? These trees are a day old. They were made a couple days before Adam. Not all parent and no daughter necessarily. Yeah. So it doesn't have to be radioactive stuff. It could be the age of Adam. Well, if he's an adult person, somebody who's a forensic doctor, medical doctor can say, no, he's 22 years old. But he wasn't. But he wasn't. He was, he was just made from clay, dirt, dust, yesterday. And so we have all these assumptions, bro, what is he going to do? Put two zygots on a slab of granite? Okay. Nice. All right. So this is dating. This is dating. All right. That's very good. I want to go to the second topic. Sure. Sure. And you call this with designer genes. What's the difference between micro and macro evolution? These are really important questions because a lot of people get that mix up. And it's understandable they get it mixed up because the evolutionists are on purpose or well, accidentally or on purpose, trying to blur the distinctions. Micro tends to be small scale changes within a kind. Now some would say a micro is just changed within a species. And I would say, well, let's not limit ourselves to that because a lot of creations, including myself, say that you can actually have one species becoming several. The Genesis doesn't, well, King James says species, but that's not the biological definition. Okay. Most translations say kind. And we don't know, we really don't know how big and inclusive that kind is. If you're a biologist or someone who studies mammals, let's just give an example like chipmunks. We all just go chipmunk, chipmunk, everybody just chipmunk. But there's 20 species of chipmunks in North America or thereabouts. Do we think that Noah brought on the arc 20 species of chipmunks? Or are those different species of chipmunks just variations on a common chipmunk theme? And they live in different habitats, have different physiological ecological ways of, they've, they've, they've through gods agents, gods, provision of things adapting to different environments and ecosystems, these different chipmunks all have slightly different features, slightly different color patterns, but they're all chipmunks. Some might be in alpine areas, some might be in desert areas, and stuff like that. It's like, I'm fine with all of those species of chipmunks being in, from one particular kind. But that would be micro, and it's not like you're gaining any information or you're just, this is just all genetic kaleidoscope based on what that chipmunks got. macro in the way I make it very clearly distinct from micro. It's only one letter difference in the words. So a lot of creationists prefer not to use micro one because they don't like the word evolution. So they would rather say genetic variation. That's fine. The whatever the case, whatever word you use, you need to define your terms carefully. And macro evolution, most evolutionists will just say macro is just a lot of micro. It's just accumulated micro over millions and millions of years. It's like, sorry, you can't, you can't get new features. No matter how long you let chipmunks go and adapt to environments, chipmunks will never, ever evolve antlers. You know, period, why? They'll never evolve a shell. They'll never evolve feathers. Why? We have certain creatures that have very clear cut things. Traits. Neomorphs. Neomorphs. But they're not just a different color of fur. Because you can get that micro stuff. Those are micro kind of changes. You're changing a gene that may be the fur color changes or how much melon you put it. That's not macro. Macro is where you have totally new genetic information being infused into that Tritter. Now I would say as a creationist, no, God didn't infuse evolutionary processes can infuse new genetic information. Mutations happen, but mutations don't write new genetic software. So when you look at very clear examples like turtle shells, antlers, feathers, whatever the case is, you go up the chain of evolution. It's very easy to just tell students, oh, a little bit of change a little bit of time. A lot of change and a lot of time. Most people don't think critically enough to go, well, that sounds good. So you say in the book that I believe the feather is a neomorph. Now the evolution is going to say the feather is a modify from a scale. Right. Some kind of scales of a fish scales. No, it's a scale like a more of a reptilian scale. Fish scales are a little different, but reptilian scale morphs into a feather, but you say it's a neomorph. It's a neomorph because even though scales are keratin like our fingernails and so our feathers, same protein, but there is genes that don't just code for the material that's used to make a feather. Just like, let's use buildings as an example. You might have like in a residential section a simple brick rancher house. And then you go to another place on the University of Georgia campus and it's this big beautiful brick, Georgian architecture, administration building with pillars and capitals and everything. And you can look at the bricks and the bricks are the same. So you could say, well, the genetic information for the bricks is the same. There's a lot more information. What about the architecture? So feathers have an architecture that scales don't. And there's a lot of what a biologist call gene regulatory networks. And gene regulatory networks are these gene networks that orchestrate the development of something like a feather or a shell or an antler or you name it. An ear. I mean, there's gene regulatory networks to form any kind of architecture. And what evolution is get a lot of mileage on is by pointing at the similarities of, oh, same protein. And then we'll just modify it. It's just bricks. It's just a pile of bricks. No, there's a whole lot of architectural blueprints. They go into organizing those bricks into a totally different building than your brick rancher. So sometimes it's nice for students to get a little bit of biology to say, listen, it's not just about bricks. It's about architecture. And everything you look at plants, animals, I don't care what animal you want to pick. Worms, birds, amphibians, reptiles, you name it. Everything has got architecture, everything. And just like an alligator, it's got a totally different architecture than Niguana. They're both reptiles, but totally different architecture. I'd like to keep pressed on this a bit because you keep used, you use a neomorph would be some kind of trait in the alleged predecessor. Right. Or a successor. Well, before, so if you're dealing with a feather, you're saying Mac revolution is the claim that scales turn into feathers, which is the claim that scales which don't have, I think you use the language of genetic information to code for feathers. You're saying the scales don't have genetic information to code for feathers. And some people have said that scales were homologous to feathers, but a deep dive shows that there's all sorts of information that reptiles don't have that birds have regarding feather development. And that's the key for, it's not whether you can speciate or not, that you're just kind of like going down a rabbit trail that's just not. The point, the point is, can you have the way I define macro evolution is the evolution of new structures or neomorphs where the ancestor did not have that structure, nor the genetic information to code for it. Now, it might not have had that structure, but the genetic information might be hidden away in the genome somewhere and you just need to somehow turn it on. And so, okay, maybe there's some latent information that's hiding away and all you need to do is turn it on and it'll pop out, but that's not evolution. That's just turning on a gene, you know, so kind of like a Swiss army knife, you might think, oh, it's just a pocket knife. And then someone goes click and us, corkscrew pops out and you go, whoa, look at that macro evolution going on. And it's like, no, it's not macro evolution. That was designed into the stupid knife in the first place. Yeah, this would be a connection of theology and science. Here would be a gusting goes into this in great detail in his literal commentary on Genesis, which I think, I don't know if you, I think you might cite that I've read it somewhere recently, but the, we deal with that a lot in our class, the Racheone semi-nallis, the similar reasons. It's just interesting. It's basically the same, the idea that the information is embedded. So, here's what I want to do. A quick glory break, just glory of creation break before we go to the third and then final. I want to go to the third and final, which is going to be the fossil record. Before we do that, I just want to do the glory break of the house fly. Tell us about, you do this, tell us about what God is doing, turning maggots into tusks flies. Yeah, when I was in, I was, did my masters in entomology, and when we were studying flies, I was learning about, there's thousands, hundreds of thousands of species. I forget, it's over a hundred thousand species of flies. It's bad news. I feel like that's bad news. You probably don't be as bad as that. And then that includes midges and mosquitoes, flies are a big group. There's the higher flies, the ones that we see flying around our house, that we get the flyer swatter out. Those, those are like blue bottles, green bottles, stable flies, house flies, CT flies. They look like flies. They, you know, they have that erratic flight. And we want to get that fly swatter out. That group of flies is a, has an incredible, I have to pull my glasses off because that has an incredible feature where it's got the big compound eyes. And it's got a nice parabolic crack. It looks like an upside down you right here. When they are an immature fly, which is a maggot, maggots will hatch from an egg and then live in refuse and squalor and they grow into a bigger maggot, bigger maggot, bigger maggot. Finally, they pupate because it's complete metamorphosis. They don't make a cocoon. They instead of a cocoon, like a catapult or like a moth, instead of a cocoon, they have their pupa inside their last maggot skin. Okay? The maggot skin dries into a brown crispy mummy bag around them. And on the one end of the mummy bag where their head is, there's a pre-weakened seam. There? A little perforated edge. Perforated seam. Just like, yeah, perforated so it's a weaken seam. When the pupa finally metamorphosis into an adult fly, it's totally encased in its pupal skin. It's encased in its last maggot skin. So it's got two things to crawl out of. Crawls out of its pupal skin. Then it's now encased in this mummy bag. And just pushing against the cap just doesn't cut it. It's full fly at this moment in there. It's a full fly, but it's not hardened yet. So it couldn't fly very well. And it's nudging, but what happens is muscles in their body contract and shove blood forward, big time head rush. And this seam pops open on their face like a driver's side airbag. And this, but it's not an airbag. It's a blood bag. So just it bulges out of its face. That inflated bag called a talinum exerts pressure on the cap. Pops it open. And then the fly comes out with this big bag hanging out of its head. And then it drains the bag. So the bag kind of shrivels up and goes back inside its head and then the door closes. And then they fly, well, they harden up their exoskeleton. They have to harden it because it's kind of soft and squishy. They harden it and then they take off. They land on a dung pile and then land on your burger. And so we can still take our fly swatter and kill it. But I just want you to know how amazing the engineering is on that thing. Now that's supposed to, I brought that up as a neo morph. It's an unusual neo morph because most people don't know about it. I bring it up just to say that it had to evolve from flies, lower, lower flies like mosquitoes that don't have that mechanism. They don't have the airbag. They don't have the face or bag. They don't have all of the physiological and anatomical equipment to do this amazing Houdini thing. And that's just one. And I could go an all day naming neo morphs where the previous supposed ancestor did not have it. And you have to build that up from just random typographical mistakes in the genome. Now this is where evolution, yeah, just is a bankrupt theory. But when you got 160 years of inertia and scientists or herd animals. And you can lose your funding and you lose your job and lose all sorts of things if you believe the obvious. There you go. You got to believe the most counterintuitive thing, which is life in all of its complexity just happened through random genetic error and natural selection. All right, I signal that we might get the primordial soup, but I don't think we're going to. But that just means hopefully we can have another conversation about like the back half of your book. But I do want to talk about this third category, which is the fossil record. So you start digging down there. Just give us the quick run around the fossil record. A lot of people say, well, that just proves evolution. But what if you take a very serious look at the fossil record, you see that groupings of animals and plants through their 10 year on earth, through the fossil record. Never mind about the age of the earth. Let's just even even grant them their geologic timescone. If you look at the fossil record, as Steven J. Gould said, pretty much different groups of animals stay the same during their 10 year on earth with no real significant change during their 10 year on earth. They up to the present or they go extinct, but they're pretty much stay the same while they're here with very limited changes as you look through the fossil record. And that goes for mammals, that goes for plants, that goes for reptiles, that goes for amphibians. I can show you diagrams. I include some of those diagrams that each, we don't see an evolutionary trait. Well, these are different now, but we would expect if you go through the fossil record that you would have these kinds converge into a common ancestor. And it's like you do, different groups, dinosaurs just stay, and again, limited change that could be even under the umbrella of microevolution. We might see that kind of change, but you don't get radical change. But you just superimpose your evolutionary worldview when it's really not a tree at all. It's a forest. All the different kinds of critters are just... They're pretty much in their category. And when you start digging down there, you're not going to find these hatches. And then you'll find some weird stuff like Tick-to-Lick and you'll find some archaeopteryx and some weird things that evolutionists could claim as being something that looks a little intermediate. And creationists, where I think creationists would be behooved the creationists to say, listen, I understand how you think that's a critter that is a transitional thing. But God is not beholding to our categories. So for example, we've got things alive today that an evolutionist could easily call transitional form, like a seal. I mean, you've got creatures that can be on land and have their pups on land and live in the water. And they God designed them for two modes of life. And an evolutionist will look at and go, we've got it right now in the snapshot of it, either evolving into the ocean and maybe another 20 million years is going to be fully aquatic like a whale, the seal, or vice versa. But we can just say, hey, it looks transitional. And we're too worried that we're going to give them points. So we're very quick to shoehorn it like archaeopteryx, which is a weird bird that has claws on his wings, teeth in his head, extinct. It's got a long ponytail. It's got a lot of features that an evolutionist will hail it as this great transitional form. And your main point about it, the falsar goes, even if you dig down there, you would find a seal, a seal false, or whatever. You don't see this slow progression from lower forms of life to higher forms. You basically do have groups. You have a lot of groups like bats. You look at bat fossils and you get all the way back to the very first bat. It's a bat. Might not be a bat. It's alive today, but it's a bat. You don't have a slow evolution from some arboreal tree mammal that's getting long digits that eventually it's front long slender digits and then you get membranes connecting all those digits. Now you got a wing. It's like, no, you don't see a progression toward bat them. Our last question included in the falsar record would be this whole ape gorilla man, homo sapiens, these classification. So not just the falsar record in general, but particularly related. Particularly zooming in on just the falsar record of humans. You just have, it's very easy with an evolutionary bias to look at various ape-like forms and they classify them, are to pithicus or australipithicus or whatever. And they're very ape-like and then you've got other things that are human-like. With artistic license and a cobbling together of mixed bone beds and a bias, an evolutionary bias and national geographic artistic license, you can cobble together a very broken, broken skeleton that might even be a mix of australipithicus bones and human bones. And with your evolutionary bias and artistic license, you can make something that looks very, very transitional. That's a quick overview, but if you do an objective assessment of all of the fossils of humans and ape-like ancestors, they fall into two groups. Homo and even Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalenses, Homo sapiens neanderthalenses, all of them just fall in the range of human. And there's reasons for any kind of brutish aspect that they may have, whether it's reductive evolution or inbreeding depression or all sorts of non-evolutionary factors that can give them some smaller, cranial capacity or whatever. But you've got your ape-like critters and you've got your human-like critters and an objective assessment is basically that. And even the paleo-experts, when you get them honest with the data, say, yeah, is what we're doing. Well, Gordon, this has been fantastic. That's only covering like three major topics that you jump into right in the front half of your book, but you get an irrediscible complexity and other issues. So maybe we could do this again sometime. I would love to. I had, even though Michael B. He is not a young earth creationist, I'm on a list serve with him and I sent him chapter eight, which is kind of a summary of his thesis. I call it micro machines, but it's basically a quick overview of irreducible complexity. I sent it to him as a Google doc and Michael B. He got right back to me a couple days later and said, looks good to me. Nice. Nice. Well, this has been great. I Darwin Sandcastle by Gordon Wilson. And I would classify this as like this is not just a surface level cursory. You're getting down there into some real arguments. Doesn't cover everything, but I try to cover what I cover. Well, yeah. So if you want to answer the question of evolution, evolution's failure in the light of scripture and the scientific evidence, Darwin Sandcastle by Gordon Wilson. Gordon, thanks for joining me today. Thank you. You're, it is been a pleasure. My name is Gordon Wilson. I'm a college professor and a biologist, but underneath that, I'm just a kid exploring God's raucous, handy works wherever and whenever I can. I want to meet as many of my fellow creatures as I can before I die. And then I want to meet some more. Join me on the journey, meeting some of God's bravest, strangest and most noble creatures. This is The Riot and the Dance.