Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:17] My grandchildren are really interested in animals, the younger ones in particular.
[00:00:24] They're fascinated by all the different types of animals. And what I've noticed is we've watched some of the documentaries that around just this heavy push to evolution all the time, that this evolved, that that evolved, and the struggle for survival that's generated these pressures for evolution. And so it's no surprise that our community at large believe that we have evolved. And obviously from this we have the Bible account that God created this world in a very short period of time. Just six literal Earth days created the life on this planet in that time and created us. And the first people were Adam and Eve, not some ape like creature that has solely evolved into humans over millions of years or hundreds of thousands of years. Whatever scenario has been promoted, the evidence for creation is just so overwhelming, and yet people aren't being told this. And so, of course, one of the purposes of this program is to provide the overwhelming evidence that we have that evolution hasn't occurred and is impossible, particularly from the scientific evidence.
[00:02:06] I came across this little article the other day, and I wasn't aware of this, that horses, for example, when they're born, they're born with fold slippers. Now, what these are, these are temporary hoof capsules.
[00:02:28] They're soft, rubbery little coverings on their hooves. And they actually have a specific purpose, and that is to prevent damage to the mare's delicate tissues, particularly in the birth canal walls during delivery, because the horse's hooves are quite sharp, and they're meant to be quite sharp. They're the main form of protection. And also when the little foal is born, has to be up and running quite quickly. And the same applies to zebras and so forth. And so it's quite fascinating that these little soft, rubbery structures that cover the foal's hooves at birth, as soon as the whole foal is born, within minutes, they begin to dry out, decompose and break down so very quickly. The foals has its hooves. And it's quite fascinating. We've had horses at different times. My children were growing up, and I have one at the moment as well from my daughter at our place. But it's fascinating that this is something that is quite specific. Now, you imagine the chemistry that's involved in the DNA code to produce this particular rubbery material that's there, that covers the hoof, but it's just temporary to fall off once it is born. Just imagine. Now, just imagine the probability of all those amazing changes to construct the different material that these slippers are made of, to have them in a way that they break down very quickly, whereas the rest of the hoof doesn't break down as soon as it's born. The chemistry involved in that all has to be pre programmed in the code.
[00:04:34] This is just a very simple example that provides overwhelming evidence, in my view, for design, amazing design that is there. And again, that protects the mother and so forth. And the animals, zebras, donkeys, these sort of animals all have these sort of hooved animals are born this way so that the mother is protected during, during birth and also as the baby is growing inside her. And so there's so many things like this that we learn about. Another one, of course, is the Neanderthals. And of course, all the time it's promoted that we solely have evolved from some ape like creatures. Now, of course, of course, most of us have heard of Neanderthals, and these were particularly early on portrayed as like an ape like, well, sort of, yes, a very hairy sort of creature, apelike creature, with, certainly with some of the pictures that I've seen, particularly from the early 19 hundreds have, like a gorilla head on a very bulky bent, partly bent over human structure. But we've learned a lot about these DNAs, the Neanderthals, now particularly from DNA. So they were first discovered, of course, back in 1856 in Germany, in the Neander Valley.
[00:06:19] As I said, these drawings that were initially drawn because back in the late 18 hundreds we've got. Darwin's theory of Evolution has really taken off after his book was published, just a couple of years after the Neanderthals were actually discovered.
[00:06:40] And they were, of course, portrayed as haunched, hairy, subhuman, brute, beast type people. It was promoted, of course, that we evolve from these things. But of course, since Then, scientific discoveries have really Challenged the primitiveness of the Neanderthals.
[00:07:05] And one of the interesting things has that scientists have recently been able to reconstruct from skeletons the face of what the face would look like. And not surprisingly, particularly, there was one skeleton where they found almost complete, all the Bones for the face and of course, not surprisingly, comes out fully looks just like a normal human boy would look, 1112 Year old boy would look. And so these are some of the other ideas that Thandrils were slow and lumbering us out. Matter of fact, the evidence points now that they were quite Powerful, lean running machines actually, that they had quite superior fitness.
[00:08:15] The other fascinating thing is, of course, that the whole idea was that Neanderthals grew up in the Ice age sort of thing. But now, as we've studied the soil in which a lot of Neanderthal remains have been found, they have profiles typical of woodlands, and also the soils contain small mammals. And so the combined evidence actually suggests now a mild climate. So, again, the evidence that we're finding for these Neanderthals being just like us humans is powerful evidence that this evolutionary process didn't occur. They were just humans like us. And of course, anyone's interested in the face reference, it's Neanderthals and Homo sapiens had similar Auditory and speech capacities. AnD that was published in Naticole Evolution in 2021, Volume Five, page 609, on. And so when we look and summarize what the Neanderthals did, they buried their dead in graves. They had rituals. So, for example, I think with this boy's skeleton who was found, it was found with a number of specific sort of types of objects and tusks and horns buried with it, which suggest a ritual burying.
[00:09:57] There's evidence they could hear and speak like they counted. They created symbolic engraved art. They made cosmetics, they produced beautiful cave paintings, they crafted musical instruments, they made shrines and obviously had capacity for religious thought. They wore clothes, they wore jewelry.
[00:10:23] They actually had invented glues and so forth. So there's a very interesting article summarizing all this in terms of. This was published in Thejournalcreation.com in 2023, Volume 45, number four.
[00:10:51] And in particular, though, what's fascinating is the face, the reconstruction of the face that showed a very human.
[00:11:01] These people were just like us.
[00:11:05] And of course, now with the DNA, we recognize that so many people that I know that have had their DNA checked, it comes back with a percentage of nathandrils in their DNA. In other words, they were just humans like us. They're not part of some evolutionary train.
[00:11:27] And talking about faces, an amazing face. Another challenge for the evolutionary enigma, or is blushing, or another evolutionary enigma, I should say, is blushing. And of course, so now we know that Nathandrils didn't have these ape like faces. They had human like faces. And blushing, of course, is another thing that actually fascinated Darwin and was a real challenge to Darwin. So blushing is saw the reddening of the skin of the face. That's caused by dilation of the facial blood vessels, which become engorged with blood, usually due to embarrassment or shame. And this is something that is very difficult to explain from Darwin's survival of the fittest approach. And it's interesting that it bothered Darwin, for a lot of his working life, because it was a factor that powerfully differentiated humans from apes.
[00:12:43] In fact, it's another trait that is unique to humans. There's no evidence for blushing in any other animal. And to quote Darwin, blushing is the most particular and most human of all expressions. And that was quoted on page 310 of the book that Darwin wrote that many people may not be familiar with, called the expressions of emotions in man and Animals.
[00:13:18] And that was on page of the 1896 reprint. John Murray reprint, London.
[00:13:26] So that's quite interesting.
[00:13:29] In his book, the Expressions of Emotions in man and Animals, Darwin talks quite a bit about the blushing.
[00:13:39] It's interesting.
[00:13:41] In fact, he devotes an entire chapter to it, Chapter 13, a memory in the book. So Darwin concluded that Blushing was a human characteristic that appeared to defy evolution for several reasons.
[00:14:02] And one of those was that no one had been able to explain why something like blushing, which most often doesn't help and may even hurt the blusher, why would it evolve?
[00:14:13] Because one of the challenges is, you see, in contrast to most of our emotional responses, blushing is not a conscious behavior.
[00:14:25] We can't cause a blush. And Darwin recognized that it's produced by the autonomic nervous system, which is sort of beyond our control.
[00:14:35] It's interesting, of course, that back in Darwin's time, blushing was thought to be part of God's design to expose human shame. And of course, Darwin rejected that explanation and attempt to produce another reason, but he couldn't. And he actually correctly concluded that the tendency to Bush is inherited, and so it could not be explained away due to learning again.
[00:15:16] And the same reference there, page 312, Darwin talks about that.
[00:15:21] So this is one of the challenges that evolution has had to try and explain blushing.
[00:15:35] And a lot of research has been done in this area, actually, to try and formulate an evolutionary explanation.
[00:15:45] For example, Darwin asked questions, do children blush? From what age do they start to blush? And so forth. And it's interesting, the research that has followed on. For example, infants don't blush, but children do.
[00:16:03] Mentally retarded people seldom blush, but blind people do.
[00:16:09] We tend to not blush when we're on our own, but we can nevertheless blush an embarrassing memory.
[00:16:19] These are some of the observations and research now suggests that our cheeks are part of the face that is most likely to expose one's true feelings, because emotional feelings are predominantly displayed there.
[00:16:41] And that was an interesting book that people may be interested in. Although it's called the Evolution of the human face or about faces, the evolution of a human face by Tulando that was published by Double day back in 1989. And in that edition, page 156, there's quite an interesting summary there, and talk about how the role of our cheeks, of course, at a physiological level, blushing is explained by simply the release of adrenaline in response to an emotional trigger. The adrenaline causes the dilation of the capillaries that carry blood to the skin. Well, all parts of the body, but to the skin. And the increased blood closer to the skin surface is what causes the blush. And, of course, as people have thought about this, the positive side of blushing is that we are communicating something important about how we feel. The other thing is that blushing is an honest response, because it is a distinct signal of sincere regret. It signals to others. So you acknowledge shame or a mishap or a social wrongdoing, embarrassment and so forth. And so, in actual fact, it promotes trust and probably positive judgment by observers.
[00:18:21] This, again, was, and they were some of the observations that were published in another book called the Human Face that was published back in 1974 by J. Liggett on page 261 there.
[00:18:43] So there's been psychological research that's concluded that embarrassment caused by blushing services and appeasement function and is used creatively in complex social interactions to facilitate producing trust, forgiveness, and succulents.
[00:19:04] And that was an interesting article that was published in current directions in Psychological Research back in 2000.
[00:19:16] Yeah, volume nine, number six, page 187 on. So it's quite fascinating. I think we can measure all these today. We can measure the facial capillary blood flow and the temperature of the rosy cheeks.
[00:19:34] But there's still no scientific explanation to why humans should blush and not other animals. But I think it points to the fact that, again, we didn't evolve from apes and monkeys or some ape like creature at all. We were uniquely created by God. Another aspect of our face is that the expressivity of the human face is quite fascinating as well. And researchers have now identified 21 distinct facial expressions, and not just the six long recognized basic emotions of happy, sad, fearful, angry, surprised, and disgusted, but 15 other combinations of these, such as happily surprised, angrily surprised, et cetera. And it's interesting that each of these 21 facial expressions is produced by a unique combination of muscles that is very different from that of all other expressions. What I'm saying here is that it's the combination of 21 different muscles. So you can have lots and lots of combinations of those muscles. In fact, the human face has approximately 50 muscles in all, with about half being needed for functions such as eating, speaking, and closing the eyes. But the rest are dedicated to making facial expressions. So just about half facial expressions. And about 20 of these muscles are unique to humans and they're not found in gorillas and the other apes. So this is very important. About 20 of the. So about out of our 50 muscles, about half of them are used for everyday functions. But there's half that are used for making facial expressions.
[00:21:32] And of these about 20, or matter of fact, most of them are unique to humans and they're not found in the other apes. And so really have these muscles all evolved by a slow step by step process? Of course, there were survival advantages in having facial expressions. No, there's no evidence for that evolution. Secondly, these muscles require distinct a whole lot of new genetic code to produce these muscles. A lot of new code because these are additional muscles. These are muscles that are not found in the ape kingdom. That requires a lot of DNA. You got the nerve function, you got the blood supply function, you've got the associated tendons, muscle structure and so forth. You've got the associated brain connections. All these things have to evolve in this period of time.
[00:22:34] No, they're so complex. Matter of fact, if we look at the complexity of just these muscles alone evolving, the probability of occurring is so astronomical that it just wouldn't happen, particularly in such a coordinated way that enables these additional communication expressions.
[00:22:58] Our incredible facial expressivity instead points to us having being overdesigned, which implies a designer who did so. And of course, this is perfectly in keeping with us being specially created in the Bible. You know what's interesting? God talks about that we've been created in his image. Now, we don't believe in a literal image, perhaps as such, but in my view, it's more in the potential of a mental image that we can understand God's creation because God is spirit, God is nonphysical. But we have this ability in our face to be able to have this additional communication and to have these emotions to be relatively emotional, creative, spiritual beings.
[00:23:53] And particularly in contrast, you've got evolutionists like Richard Dawkins, who claimed that we're mere survival machines, such as in his book the Selfish Gene. And, you know, it's interesting that this amazing structure, the human face, is causing major problems to engineers who are trying to design robotic faces. So the robotic faces tried so far have been composed of flexible elastic skin with internal deformation mechanisms, motors strategically positioned to pull wires attached to the inside of the face. But the researchers are powerfully constrained by mechanisms and material available and limited space in the head. So one of the robots that they developed a few years ago now back in, I think, around 2012, had 32 separate motors to control the muscles in its head and upper torso.
[00:25:03] But again, people could pick. It was very difficult to portray the complexity of emotions that humans can. Basic emotions could happiness, anger and sadness. But they couldn't get the robots to identify robotic fear, disgust or surprise.
[00:25:29] And so this gives us some of the interesting, again, evidence. We've got teams of engineers working on these things, and yet evolutionists claim that the muscles in our face just arrived by chance mutations, you know, just something that is sort of in our face, so to speak. Our face is such powerful evidence for amazing creator is powerful evidence that we did not evolve from apes and monkeys.
[00:26:05] The Nathaniel story, the amazing ability that we have to blush, the complexity of our muscles to display all these additional emotions are powerful evidence that we are specifically designed by God. And the Bible tells us that, that God wants to have a relationship with us, that he loves us, that he longs for us to come to recognize him and to choose to be his child.
[00:26:42] And the Bible talks about that. And we can learn how to do that by reading the Bible, which is the history of God's interaction with mankind, and in particular the New Testament. As God came and lived among us as a human, as the human being, Jesus Christ, as the last resort, demonstrate his love to us. And we can read about that in the New Testament of the Bible. And in my view, it makes so much sense. We have so much archaeological and written evidence that supports the Testimony in the Bible and in the Scriptures.
[00:27:22] I really hope and pray that as listeners, you will come to know God as your friend and Savior, and that loving a supreme being that wants to have you live eternally with him.
[00:27:38] You've been listening to faith and science. And remember, if you want to relisten this program and the other programs, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au All one word and Click on the radio button and the listen button to the faith and science programs. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:19] You've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia Radio.
