Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
[00:00:16] Of course, the standard textbooks proclaim that we on, you know, Biology and Evolution proclaimed that we evolved from some apelike animal. And it's interesting that one of the arguments for this in the past has been that our DNA was very similar to that of chimpanzees. So it was claimed, for example, that there was an article, there was only about 1% difference between the genomes of chimpanzees and humans. However, a few years ago, back in two seven, there was an article published in the journal Science, which is one of the world's top science journals along with Nature and it was titled Relative Differences the Myth of 1%.
[00:01:16] And essentially this article details how in 1975, also published in Science, a couple of scientists, Alan Wilson and Mary Claire King wrote an article claiming that there was a 1% difference between the genomes of chimpanzees and humans. Actually, to be precise, they showed approximately 1% difference between the coding regions of selected genes. But nonetheless, a myth was born and that 1% myth served to reinforce in the minds of people this evolutionary process.
[00:02:03] As I said, that was published back in 1975.
[00:02:09] But of course, since then there's a lot more research has been done.
[00:02:18] And by the way, the reference for the article back in 1975 was Science volume 188, pages 107 to 116.
[00:02:31] But it's interesting that the author of the two seven Science article, Jay Cohen, points out that according to another study that was published just a year or so earlier, in two six, the human genome has over 1400 genes or six and .4% of all genes that do not have orthologues in the chimpanzee genome. And so that means for these coding genes there's zero correlation.
[00:03:13] And so even if you're talking about just coding genes, you've got to multiply these factors together which gives us a similarity in the coding genes of less than 90%. So less than 90% of the coding genes between humans and chimpanzees are similar.
[00:03:40] And in fact, now that virtually the entire genetic code for both chimpanzees and humans is available using computer programs, looking at the whole genomes, they come up with an identity of only about 84% as similar.
[00:04:01] So we can see that the original claim that we're 99% the same is very inaccurate.
[00:04:12] So why does the myth persist? And this is one of the problems that we have in that rather than looking at the data that we can actually measure and updating things according to what we now know, I think it becomes very clear that there's an agenda behind our education system to keep God, and particularly the Bible and the Bible account out of our education system. People. There are groups of people that want to relegate the Bible to a mythical book, to not a book that is in actual fact a true account of our history. And yet when we consider the archaeological evidence, when we consider the evidence from history that has been recorded, all the areas that we can check seem to line up really, really well. Now, of course, we get some fuzzy bits when we go into Egyptian history. But we need to remember there's great arguments over Egyptian history timelines because of the way they dated things back then. It's very hard to correlate with an accurate chronological system.
[00:05:31] But again, we find that there's a number of markers. And a colleague of mine, David Down and myself have written about this in a book unwrapping the Pharaohs how Egyptian History confirms the Biblical Timeline. And we point out there's a number of markers in Egyptian history that we can archaeological history that line up very well with the biblical accounts. And also the fact that Egypt itself is named after Noah's grandson Egyptus or Mizram in the Hebrew. So Egyptus was just the Greek translation and so many of the towns in that area are named after the descendants of Noah.
[00:06:22] We have this amazing historical correlation there.
[00:06:26] But again, evolutionists are trying to pull back these longer ages. But now as we look at the genetics, we're finding more and more evidence that fits a young Earth and that is a biblical account. An Earth life on Earth being 6000 years old or thereabouts, and also humans being created at time. So in other words, humans being that old. For example, according to the textbooks, as we have the talk about humans evolving from some apelite creature, they assume that the population of Hominids never or human like people beings never dropped below about 10,000 and that there was never a first man or first woman from whom anyone descended.
[00:07:19] And also they want to claim that the story of Adam and Eve is a myth. Well, it's interesting that as we look now at our genes, and particularly as we look at the accumulation of mutations in our genes, which we're doing a lot more research on now, because this can help us with a lot of the genetic diseases and understanding these genetic diseases which seem to be increasing.
[00:07:47] The current understanding is that our mitochondria system is inherited for practical purposes solely from our mothers and that we go back to one particular woman. In other words, all the other female lines essentially would have to be argued, must have died out. So originally, and this is why you may read about this, this original female progenitor is dubbed Mitochondrial Eve.
[00:08:19] And so, again, when we look at this, science assumes that this particular woman lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago.
[00:08:31] And so we now have estimates of rates of mutation.
[00:08:39] And if we assume rates of two to 4% per million years, the common ancestor of all surviving mitochondrial DNA types should have existed about 140 to 290,000 years ago. That's what they want to claim happen.
[00:09:04] But when we actually go and measure the actual rates of mutation and do back calculations we actually get a very different picture. And so, for example, if we note that the mutational rate for mitochondria was originally calibrated by the standard geological time scale when calibrated to actual history. In other words, when we measure the rate of mutation against actual history, in other words, we analyze historical samples, it turns out that the rate of mutation is much higher than expected. And this is a very interesting article that was published in Nature Genetics back in 1997 by T. J. Parsons and co author. So it's in Nature Genetics volume 15, pages 363 to C 68. And this paper points out that there's a high observed substitution rate in human mitochondrial DNA control region. Now this is very, very interesting because this gave rise to the calculations this is using to the data, looking at the data that we can actually measure.
[00:10:36] And he said taken together, our data indicate a remarkably high substitution rate one in 33 generations. So assuming a generation time of 20 years this extrapolates to a substitution rate of about 2.5 sites per million years. But when we work down this observed substitution rate here is very high compared to the rates inferred from evolutionary studies. And so the rate that they're observing is roughly about a 20 fold higher rate. And using our empirical rate to calculate the mitochondrial DNA molecular clock would result in an age of mitochondrial DNA for our most recent common ancestor of dating back to just six and a half thousand years. And of course they comment clearly incompatible with the known age of modern humans. And I thought that is so interesting that when we actually look at the and measure the actual rate of mutations and calculate back we have this mitochondrial eve date only six and a half thousand years ago. And it's interesting in a paper that was published in Science back in 1998. So this is in the journal Science, it's volume 279, pages 28 to 29 by Anne Gibbons and this is what she wrote regardless of the cause, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that mitochondrial eve, the woman whose mitochondrial DNA was ancestral to that in all living people who supposed to have lived 100,200 years ago in Africa but using the new clock, she would be a mere 6000 years old again. She covers herself by saying no one thinks that's the case but at what point should the model switch from one mitochondrial time zone to another?
[00:12:53] So this is really, really interesting.
[00:12:57] Really, really interesting.
[00:13:00] What it's saying is that when we use the most accurate data we have and do the calculations the first woman was 6000 years ago.
[00:13:10] And of course that's exactly what the Bible is telling us.
[00:13:15] And I find this is really interesting. And as I said, these are research papers published in the top science journals in the world, science and Nature. In my view are the two top science journals in the world.
[00:13:29] There's so many false claims have been made in the past in attempt to prop up the theory of evolution. Of course, one of those was this whole concept of pseudogenes or false genes. And this was a term that scientists coined for things that they were finding that looked like protein coding genes but were not used to make proteins. And so in the evolutionary mind, as you know, gene is some sort of broken gene which once coded for a protein.
[00:14:08] And so they assumed that mutations in the past crippled the gene at some time. And so these pseudogenes were considered to be a form of what they then became called junk DNA. And many of us have heard of this term junk DNA and of course they found this junk DNA in humans and chimpanzees and gorillas and some of them, quite interestingly, shared the same these three groups shared the same of these junk DNA and for a long time evolutionists argued that they must have come from a common ancestor. And also it was claimed that yeah, this is evidence against creation because would the Christian god have intentionally created purposeless genes in humans?
[00:15:08] However, these pseudogenes have actually been discovered, of course to be extremely functional. And that's again where this shared mistake argument all collapses as well and we find wow, instead we have more powerful evidence for creation. In many ways the pseudogene argument is like the old vesticle organ argument.
[00:15:40] And so again, it was once claimed that the human body was filled with many functionless organs which were left over appendix, tonsils, these sort of things. But of course since that time we found, well, hang on, these are quite important organs and they play an important role. And again, the old junk DNA argument was essentially an argument from silence or a classical logical fallacy because we don't know what something does doesn't mean that it does nothing. And I think one of the surprising things was of course that the codes and these particularly junk DNA portions of our DNA play extremely complex roles that took us a long time to actually discover and work out what they did. And yet again we're still sticking to the claim that the amazing DNA system arose by chance random mutations. We know it's absolutely impossible, the codes are so complex. But yet in our schools we're not changing what we're teaching to the young people.
[00:17:04] Now nearly all the genome has been demonstrated to be functional and that came out of the Encode project. If you google capital E, capital N, capital C, capital O, capital D, capital E project and it found that at least 90% of human DNA is actually transcribed into RNA and that RNA, for example, land on matching DNA strands and prevent a gene from being read. Or this is one, and this is one way a cell controls gene expression. That is how much of a particular protein is produced.
[00:17:48] And also they also found out that the genome is even polyfunctional, in other words, a given DNA letter. And we know that these letters are chemicals that we abbreviate. Act and g can be part of multiple sets of instructions, a particular letter in a particular pace, because there's codes within the code, so to speak. And it's really interesting when you think about the argument that is often used, that if we taught creation in schools that God created this amazing DNA system, that God created the amazing micro machines that are involved in untwisting DNA and so forth, and reading the DNA code and assembling amino acids into proteins and all this sort of thing.
[00:18:45] If we had a belief that God created these things, I think there's an argument that in many cases, our science would have progressed much beyond where it is.
[00:18:56] I think there can be a case given that the early scientists like Newton looked for laws in nature because they believed in God, a creator. They believed that God would be ordered, that there would be laws, physical laws. And of course Newton discovered those laws that govern nature and so it fitted a creator mind and this blind chance mutation, random theory, trying to account for the amazing complexity of living systems.
[00:19:32] We have overwhelming evidence now that that is impossible. And yet we're still teaching Darwinian type evolution in our schools.
[00:19:43] It's interesting that some significant discoveries have been made concerning the pseudogenes in humans and ape like animals.
[00:19:56] And it's interesting that the same pseudogenes in different species are far more similar than that would be expected if they were useless. For example, the beta globulin pseudogenes in humans and chimpanzees are nearly identical.
[00:20:12] And so a mutation in a useless gene would not have been subject to natural selection because they would not have affect survival and therefore reproduction and thus functionless gene.
[00:20:31] So why are there so few mutations actually seen in these pseudogenes if they were useless? So, in other words, the more and more we delve into this, the more and more evidence we see that everything is being designed, carefully designed to play a role. It's interesting that due to the lack of study, because people thought these pseudogenes were junk, the function of many of these pseudogenes remains unknown. And this is largely because evolutionary assumptions about pseudogenes are the major reason why it's taken so long for scientists to discover what pseudogenes actually do. There was quite an interesting paper published in 2021 in Science Direct.
[00:21:31] It's Science Direct, volume 56, number four, pages 478 to 493 by Y Ma, surname Ma and others. And it was titled genome wide analysis of pseudogenes reveals Hbbp one's Human specific Essentiality in the erythropoesis and Implication for Beta thalassemia. Well, that's its title. But essentially what they say is possibly due to the traditional view that pseudogenes are functionless evolutionary relics. Only dozens of human pseudogenes have been functionally characterized further on they write in conclusion pseudogenes represent a new layer in the flow of genetic information.
[00:22:25] The highly integrative framework implemented in this study provides a prototype for determining the functions of pseudogenes under normal and pathological conditions. Exploration of species specific regulatory functions of pseudogenes or even studies of population specific pseudogenes are expected to blossom in the future. So here we can see that if scientists had have believed these genesis had have initially believed in creation they would have been looking for these codes, they would have been exploring and assumed that yeah, God doesn't make junk. It would have all had a meaning and we would be so much further advanced in possibly combating genetic and other diseases than we are because we initially just assumed that they were part of evolutionary mutations.
[00:23:22] And it's really not surprising that many of God's creations have similar structures in their bodies or similarities in their genetic blueprints. I mean an engineer often uses the same parts in different designed objects whether it's cars, motorcycles, bikes and airplanes.
[00:23:41] If you think about if every organism were completely different it'd look like life was designed by many different designers. Instead we have powerful evidence from the design that there was this one amazing design of the creator God.
[00:23:58] So as with the entire junk DNA argument we have this is just one more case of evolution hindering scientific process and many evolutionists of course have tried to use the shared use of genes as a magic bullet argument against intelligent design. However their case depended crucially on the belief that the genes did nothing. And so again, we find that that was an old argument that was used against intelligent design. And I know years ago there was an effort to promote the teaching of the evidence for intelligent design in schools parallel with the current biology syllabus. And it was just politically rejected by the biological teachers associations and so forth against this. But now here we have overwhelming evidence again more in the favor of intelligent design and again powerful evidence against evolution.
[00:25:08] As you've been listening to this program and this program's Faith and Science remember if you want to re listen to these programs just google 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the Radio Listen button and look for the program Faith and Science. And please I would like to encourage listeners to share links to these programs on your own social media pages to tell people about them. There's another link in the radio listen section called Science Conversations where I go through and discuss the individual chapters in my book evolution Impossible twelve Reasons Why Evolution Cannot Explain the Origin of Life on Earth. And as well as that of course if you go to the TV section and click on the TV catch up there is another program there Evolution Impossible where I answer questions again on the topics discussed in the chapters of my book Evolution Impossible. And remember, of course, to my book in six days why 50 Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation.
[00:26:36] All the individual chapters of those PhD scientists are available on thecreation.com website.
[00:26:47] If you just enter in the search engine, there Insects Days preface, and then when that page comes up, down the side, there's a list of names. And if you just click on a name, the chapter of that scientist and these scientists give powerful arguments from their own perspective of why they believe in a literal six day creation as described in the Bible.
[00:27:15] I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:27:30] you've been listening to a production of three ABN Australia radio.
