Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
When I was a little boy, I can remember collecting the little paper cards that came in real packets, and they'd often be on different topics, like there might be different kinds of animals or different kinds of aeroplanes, or they might be about the history of the Pacific. They were all different topics. But I was a really keen card collector and used to put them in albums.
And I remember there must have been a series of cards on all different types of fish. And one of the fish that I was quite interested in was the anglerfish. Of course, one of the things that attracted me was that they had this little, like, protrusion, this long sort of stem that came out of the front of their.
Just above their mouth, that was sort of like a bit like a fishing line and was sort of a trap to lure other fish, or it was something they dangled out that lured other fish. But it was only recently that I looked into it again because there was an article on it, a book that I've just bought, actually. It's called A Defence of the Bible. It's by a Dr. Gary Baxter. And I found it quite interesting.
I think possibly one of the things that attracted me to buy the book was that he has a PhD in synthetic chemistry from Monash University. And, of course, Monash University is one of the top uni's in Australia, located in Melbourne, competes with the University of Melbourne. And, of course, myself, being a chemist, I was very interested to see what he had to say.
But his book presents a lot of evidence for creation, and he has this section in, I think it must be chapter three. Is there scientific support for biblical creation? And he has a whole section on the evidence for amazing intelligent design, amazing evidence for a designer behind the creation, all the different species. We talk about it and he lists a couple of examples of amazing design, and one that really caught my attention was the anglerfish.
And I'll just read what he says on page 75. It's the third edition of his book and it's really beautifully illustrated, too. So people that interested in a very easy to read book on evidence or a defence for the bible, evidence that supports the accuracy and historicity and so forth of the Bible and what the Bible recounts.
I think it's an excellent book. Beautiful coloured illustration. So it's by Dr. Gary Baxter. And so I'll just read what he says about the anglefish. And he said, this is an ugly looking fish with the female of the species having a long filament protruding from the middle of its head with a fleshy growth called anesca on the end.
And I didn't realise that it was only the females that had this long filament at the end. And when you see a picture of the anglefish, they have these huge, very long teeth and a very, very big mouth, too. And I think that's what really attracted me, too, as a young boy.
It's a particularly ugly looking fish, I think looks quite savage, and that's probably what attracted me to my interest in it back in those days. But he goes on to point out that when an inquisitive fish approaches the fleshy growth, it's immediately seized by the creature as its enormous jaws are triggered in an automatic reflex by contact with the tentacle. So there's an automatic reflex where it just closes up.
Both jaws are equipped with rows of long, pointed teeth facing inwards. So a fish may move into the mouth relatively unimpeded. However, the return journey is a lot more difficult.
And, of course, anglerfish are found throughout the world's oceans. There's more than 200 species, and some of them grow up to a metre long, 3ft. But most of them are only about a foot long, 300 millimetre song.
So I think to meet a metre long anglerfish with its huge mouth would be pretty scary, actually. But it's interesting. The deep sea variety has a population of light emitting bacteria, photobacterium luciferium, which colonise in the little fleshy growth at the end of this filament that grows out of the head.
So it's quite fascinating. And I remember that's one of the things that I remember reading on the card, too, that one of the things that attract the fish, particularly down deep, is this little glowing light. And I found that quite fascinating.
And it's quite interesting, isn't it, that we have this light emitting bacteria. The bacteria give the esca a soft glow in the darkness of the deep ocean. And as and the fish wiggles this lure to attract a curious prey.
And one of the really fascinating things about this fish is its reproduction system. And it's saying, he points out, Dr. Baxter points out that reproduction for these fish in the total absence of light could be quite difficult.
And the way that it happens is most unusual. And it says, at birth, the male fish are equipped with an extremely well developed olfactory organs, that they can detect the faint sense in the water. And so when the male angler fish is mature, its digestive system degenerates, making it incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates it quickly finding a female anglerfish.
Isn't that interesting? So its digestive system is programmed for a particular length of time, and then it stops working. When the male fish finds a female, by following the scent, or the ferro hormone that she gives off, he bites into her skin and simultaneously releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, thereby fusing the pair down to the blood vessel level. Oh, isn't that amazing? The male, which is considerably smaller than the female, then decomposes into nothing more than a pair of testes, the gonads, the reproductive organs there, which remain appended to the side of the female.
Now, when the female's eggs are ready to be fertilised, the testes release the sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream. Now, this extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that the female is wet, that when the female is ready to spawn, the sperm is readily available. Now, when you think about this, how could such a system arise by chance? Now, just think of what's involved here when you think about the different things that occur.
So firstly, you've got this programming that switches off the male's digestive system. And then the fact that he has these chemical receptors in his body, which we call olfactory nerves, that can detect, at extremely low concentrations, special chemicals, pheromones that the female has emitted way down deep in the ocean. And so these are mixing in the ocean.
And of course, as they spread out, they become more dilute, more dilute, more dilute. But yet his detection system can pick these up and not only just pick them up and detect them, but detect a concentration gradient, because otherwise, just finding them floating around there doesn't tell the male fish where the female is. He has to follow a concentration gradient.
In other words, he's got to be able to detect the smell is stronger in this direction, the smell is stronger in this direction. And remember, the female fishes, I don't know how much they move around, but he is going to be got to follow that gradient and find the fish there. And of course he has to be programmed to do that instinctively to do that.
And then this whole idea of biting into the skin of the female. And of course, I guess he would have to miss being allured by the little angler, shiny baits wiggling around too. So he'd have to know, not go up that end or he'll end up getting eaten.
And then once he bites in to the skin at the same time, he then releases an enzyme that digests both the skin of his mouth and the skin of her body. So again, you've got to have a special enzyme produced by chemical reactions that has the ability to dissolve the skin at that time and release it at that time. Now, for an enzyme to have that ability, it has to have certain chemical characteristics, very specific chemical characteristics.
It has to be stored in the body in such a way that it doesn't dissolve the material that's storing it. Otherwise, yeah, it's just going to leak out. And it has to be pre programmed.
That amount of enzyme has to be pre programmed. And so there'll be a number of chemical steps to synthesise that particular enzyme in the living system of that fish. And so all that biochemistry has to be synchronised together and designed for that to happen.
There has to be designed, it has to be all those particular chemicals, the intermediates all have to be there, they have to be stabilised, they have to be in the right place at the right time, in the right concentration to synthesise that chemical. And this just illustrates, this is just one of millions, probably trillions, of examples of biochemical systems that exist in nature. And remember, this is very different, say, to the chemistry that's going on in your raspberries.
That's very different to the chemistry that's going on in a eucalyptus tree. Yet all these different living systems have all these complex biochemical pathways going on. And I've mentioned this before, you put up something to support creation on the Internet, and the naysayers will come along and they'll say, what does Ashton know about this? He's a chemist.
But the thing is that chemistry underpins these amazing reactions. They're chemical reactions and they're not easy to make happen. And to say that because it's chemistry and it's not biology, you can't comment on creation.
And evolution is just, in my view, absolute rubbish. The claim that evolution occurs requires absolutely fantastic chemistry to arise by chance. Absolutely fantastic chemistry.
Chemistry that has taken, for example, and I mentioned, I think, just recently, the synthesis of cholesterol takes multiple steps, about 25 steps in the synthesis process to make cholesterol. And you have to make the right form of cholesterol out of 256 possible forms. We're just talking about one little system in mammals that takes place.
And there's so many examples, as I said, there's probably a trillion examples of these different biochemical systems in nature, of all the different specific kinds of chemicals that have to be required and made in just the right way. And then again, as the male's body breaks down, it diffuses, his body just decomposes, except for the testes. And the testes, which now have been connected via blood vessels, which have fused together as the skin tissue around them has been dissolved by this special enzyme.
But yet the blood tissue remains, the testes remains. The testes aren't destroyed by these enzymes, the sperm and so forth aren't destroyed. We can see the specificity of this system.
It requires amazing design and like I just mentioned before, so with cholesterol, because it's closer to the area that I work in every day in relay to food chemistry and so forth. But when you look at that, the guys that first synthesise, a team of science, won the Nobel Prize. And yet we can't attribute a super creator God to this creation.
Our children in our schools aren't being taught. This is overwhelming evidence for a super creator, intelligent mind, super intelligent mind God. And I think it is just amazing.
And again, this system enables the sperm to be preserved. And just there, just at the right time, when the female's body is ready to release the spawn. And as Dr.
Baxter points out, this form of propagation is very difficult, more to the point, impossible to explain from an evolutionary viewpoint, which holds that mutations, which are corruptions of DNA genes, bring about every function and characteristic in an animal by a series of small changes. You can see a series of small changes isn't going to produce this system, it's going to fail. How do they reproduce in the meantime? It's crazy.
And he points out each change has to be beneficial to the creature, or else it would be eliminated by natural selection. And this is the other important point. Natural selection eliminates genetic information, doesn't create it, it eliminates it.
And he points out, how then could a progression of changes turn off the male's digestive system that he has to, in total darkness, find, and then sink his teeth into a female, and then for an enzyme to be released that is specifically designed to dissolve her skin and the flesh of his mouth so that their blood systems join, and then for the rest of the male's body to rot away, leaving only its testes, which do not rot, but remain ready to receive a hormone from the female. And once received, that hormone causes the sperm to be released from the testes to fertilise her eggs. Now, isn't that amazing? And that's amazing.
Pre programming. And again, when we look at the complex chemistry of this to design the hormone that will have this ability, that it will then trigger the release chemical reactions within the testes little gonads that will then release the sperm. And that's going to require, again, a whole series of chemical reactions that then need to take place, that are triggered by this hormone.
So it has to be a specific hormone that does this. And secondly, not only have you got to design this system, but then you've got to design the system that makes it in the body. And so if we believe in evolution, we believe that this amazing system not only is designed, but also the whole chemistry to make it so that it will work arose by chance.
And this is just one example of the innumerable systems that are in the living systems in the world around. Know, as Gary Baxter points out, the obvious conclusion is the whole system was designed by a master. Know, there are many examples of amazing systems like this.
In the same chapter, Dr. Baxter talks about the bombardier beetle, this tiny little beetle that defends itself from attacking predators by firing an explosive mixture which is at 100 degrees centigrade into the face of its attacker. And this is another chemical system.
It's brought about by the beetle storing a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone in a pouch in its rear end. But there's also another chemical inhibitor to stop the two chemicals from reacting with one another. But the moment of danger, the creature sends the mixture into a reaction chamber, where not only is the inhibitor removed, but simultaneously two catalysts are added, and oxygen, which is released from the hydrogen peroxide, which reacts explosively with the hydroquinone.
And the hot mixture is then fired out of pressure out of twin tubes, which can be rotated in different directions out of the rear of the little beetle. Now, Ken, we just got to think of the chemicals that are involved here. You've got to make the hydrogen peroxide.
You've got to make the hydroquinone. These have to be synthesised in the little beetle there, right? It's not as if he goes and sucks on a leaf, and there it is. These chemicals there, these have to be made in his body.
But at the same time that he makes them, his body is making them. He has to make an inhibitor. Inhibitor.
And how the chemicals are stored in pouches and stopped from reacting one another. But then he sends the mixture. Wenzergi has to have a reflex reaction that involves nerves, that control muscles, that control little sphincters and so forth, and little pumps that pump this hydraulic fluid through into the reaction chamber.
You think about all the design that is involved in those structures, in building those structures. Those structures all have to be built just like they have to be assembled. They have to be assembled according to a blueprint, which is encoded for in the genes.
The mechanism to assemble them has to be encoded for in the genes. And at just the right time, you have to have a system that removes the inhibitor, and at the same time, two other chemicals, catalysts. Now, these are chemicals that speed up a reaction, are added.
So you've got to have a little mechanism to add that. And the hydrogen peroxide provides the oxygen, and then you get this explosive mixture fires out. It's amazing design.
I work for a company, and we produce a whole range of foods. One of the foods that we produce, the medical food that lowers cholesterol, and it lowers cholesterol by the fact that we add exactly to a serve of this particular cereal, Weet-Bix, we add exactly two grammes of phytosterols. And that's been clinically shown to help people lower cholesterol by about 10%.
But I know the amount of design that went in to design the machines in the production line, that enabled us to add exactly just two grammes of the phytosterols to the serving, to that exact weight of serving, because that's the required amount that people have to eat. If there's too much added. Well, I don't think it's going to be that harmful, but it's very expensive, and so it's going to be costly in a waste.
And if it's too less, then again, the people aren't getting their dosed, and we're breaking the law. We're making a false claim. So it had to be exact.
And the amount of engineering that went in to be able to do that in a mass production line where you've got the servings of Weet-Bix coming through at a great rate, to be able to add just exactly that right amount at that time, took amazing amount of design and effort by highly intelligent engineers. And then there had to be a whole lot of design aspects to choose the materials to make the different mechanisms and the different parts of the different mechanism that was used to do that as part of the production line, and have it included in a high speed production line. And it's amazing here, all these things have to occur very quickly.
You can't have it. Whoa, there's a baddie there. I've got to mix these chemicals together.
It all has to happen in a matter of seconds. And so, again, to design chemistry that reacts that quickly and define reagents that are going to happen, and to work the claim that this evolved, and again, this is just another example. And as Gary Baxter points out, common sense tells us that this little insect cannon, which can fire four or five bombs in succession, could not have evolved piece by piece.
Exposive chemicals, inhibitor, enzymes, glands, combustion tubes, sensory communications, muscles to direct the combustion tubes, reflex nervous systems, all had to work perfectly the very first time, with all hopes of the existence of the beetle and its offspring would have exploded. There's so much evidence there. And what really gets me that with particularly young people being taught that these stuff just evolved by random mutations, is that it's taking the credit away from the creator God.
And this has life implications, eternal life implications, because we know, as we know about the Christmas story, that God himself, the creator, came to earth as Jesus Christ and lived to teach us once again, because the world had fallen into such sin and degradation, what God was all about. But the thing is, too, the message that Jesus is going to return again and there's going to be an end to this sinful, corrupt world. And young people need to be warned of that.
That's a very, very important message. Not only is Jesus our saviour and has taken the punishment for our sins, if we choose that, if we choose to want to be in his kingdom, but the other part is that there is going to be a judgement too, for wickedness, and God's going to put an end to it. And those who choose, who want to live in a kingdom where there's peace and joy and love, those people will be saved.
And this is an important message of warning that needs to go out to the world. And the whole evolutionary story is just blurring that and taking the emphasis away, that there's an amazing creator God who loves us, who came and showed what he's really like as he lived at the life of Jesus. But one day he's going to come again and there's going to be an end, an end to wickedness.
And that message needs to get out. And, of course, we can read about that in the Bible, in the gospels, and of course, the end times in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible. But of course, it's warned about, of, in Paul's letters, too.
So I would encourage you as soon as possible, if you don't read the Bible regularly, take it up and read it regularly and learn about the amazing God that created these amazing systems. You've been listening to faith and science. And remember, if you want to relisten to these programmes, just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the listen button.
And remember to forward the link to to friends and tell them about these programmes.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
