Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
Just recently, I read an article in the newspapers about Princess Kate in England having a, and I think she was actually, the picture showed her actually holding a tarantula and I think was someone's pet. And for me, the concept of having a pet spider just, oh, dear, I think, really, I'm an acrophobic. That is, yeah, I certainly don't like spiders where we live.
Of course, we have some quite deadly spiders. We live in an area where there is the Sydney funnel web. And we've had these shiny black spiders sometimes come into our house.
They seem to get under the door and I've caught them walking around the floor in our house. Of course, they can be quite deadly to humans if you don't get the antivenin in time and understand their bite is quite painful. We also have the redback spiders around our house.
In Australian literature, there's a lot of jokes and cartoons about redback spiders and the old fashioned toilet seats when toilets were outside. Pan type or drop type toilets. These, again, I understand, can give a very painful bite. They're usually not deadly to adults, but they can be deadly to children. And of course, we have another notorious spider that I never actually heard much about when I was a boy. But now, over the past 20 years, knowledge about them has become more well known.
And that's the white-tailed spider. This spider has sort of an elongated body with a little white tip near the end of its abdomen. And when they bite, they're not so much deadly poison, but the poison seems to cause the flesh or cause a wound where the skin just continues to deteriorate.
And the effects of the spider can last a very long time, can be very difficult to cure the bite. It just seems to continue to eat away the skin in the area and cause ulceration and so forth. And of course, other spiders, we have other spiders that, of course, don't inject venom.
Well, I've been bitten by spiders, fortunately not ones that are venomous. I remember one time splitting wood and picking up a piece of wood and there was a very large huntsman spider. Now, these are quite a large spider, not as big as a tarantula, but similar hairy brown spider that's found under bark of trees.
And they can grow quite large, the size of the palm of your hand, or even larger. And I remember when I was wearing leather gloves, thick leather work gloves, and I remember the spider bit in to one of my fingers on the glove and I could feel the pressure in the glove unfortunately, you didn't pierce the leather, but it was certainly a very strong bite. And of course, the other way spiders can affect us too, where I've been bitten by a harmon spider, again while gathering bushes, is that when they bite, even though they mightn't inject venom, they can have bacteria and that bite can get infected.
And I did get quite a severe case of cellulitis in my leg from a spider bite. But one of the things, as a chemist that fascinates me is that the chemistry involved in spiders, they have some really amazing chemistry. And quite recently I was reading an article by Dr. David Nelson. It was called Design, Spiders and "Integrated Wholes", and it was a chapter published in the book, I've mentioned it before, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature, and it is a really good book if you're interested in scientists explaining scientific examples for amazing intelligent design in nature.
And Dr. David Nelson is a biologist, and one of the things that he studies is how in nature, systems operate as wholes, like there are systems. And he points out that, as he teaches in the area of biology, that textbooks often fail to emphasise the fact that in biological systems, right across the board, we have integrated wholes.
So in other words, their biological systems are made up of many little systems, little factories, machines, but they interact to form a complex system that works. In other words, the living organisms are built up of a whole lot of functioning parts that work together to make the whole system work. And he points out in this chapter on design in spiders, that while most textbook, secular textbook authors favour a reductionistic approach which supports their evolution thing approach, that all these bits evolved in little bits, but really it can't work that way.
And also the probability of all these different systems just happening to evolve at the same time. It's just statistically impossible. And all living systems have these holes.
And he says, one of the really fascinating examples of this are spiders, and they possess amazing chemical systems. And this is something attracted me. So spiders, of course, are fairly unique among the anachronids in that they possess, and they use silk.
And of course, we talk about spiders webs and spiders producing these webs, but it's interesting that spiders have up to eight different silk glands and each is capable of producing a unique type of silk. And that's something I didn't realise before. And so you think about that and, you know, walking around the garden, you're brushing to spiders webs and parts are very sticky and parts are not sticky and parts are really strong.
He also says that almost every structure a spider makes from silk is composed of many of these different silk subtypes. Now, of course, I've recognised a couple of different types, but I didn't realise that there were so many different types of silk involved. One of the things that has fascinated scientists, and scientists really don't have an answer for, and that is that how particular types of spiders, particular species of spiders, weave a particular type of web, and you can often recognise a funnel web.
And then, of course, we also have another poisonous spider, it's not quite so poisonous, called a trapdoor spider, where this spider actually digs a hole in the ground and then it makes a little trap door, or makes a little covering, again, out of a type of silk and seems to cover it with dirt and so forth. And so when you're looking along, if you're very carefully in places, you can just see that, oops, there almost seems like a little circle, maybe centimetre, up to two centimetres in diameter, depending on how big the spider is. And of course, the spider will sit under that.
And when an insect goes past, when it senses this vibration on the top, it will sort of pop the lid up and jump out and grab the little insect or lizard or whatever that a little lizard or whatever is going past. And again, though, how do spiders know to weave these particular types of webs? Like, we have all weber spiders in our garden as well, and you can recognise their webs and the pattern in their webs, the way they meet with their webs, is the same. So how does little baby spider grow up and know that that's the sort of web that it needs to weave? And when you think about it in the chemical process, so if you have the evolution of these different glands and the chemistry that is involved to make the compounds, like for stickiness and so forth, and how does a spider, how did it, by process of random selection and this sort of thing, weave these webs, use the stickiness in the right part and didn't stick itself up and so forth? And how come they're all the same? And how does this ability to weed the same? There was a scientist at Cambridge University a number of years ago, wrote a book called, I've just forgotten the name of it now.
But anyway, Dr. Rupert Chadrake, he talked about how he called it morphogenic fields, how there must be something that some non material factor that is involved in guiding spiders to make their webs. And he said the same thing.
How does, say, a European cuckoo that lays its eggs in another bird's nest and then the parents fly to South Africa. How does that little bird raised by some other species of bird that perhaps stays local in England or Europe and grow up and then know to fly to South Africa where it meets up with all the other cuckoos and its parents down? You know, there's some fascinating things there in that that, again, scientists can't answer and you can't really explain in terms of evolution. It's interesting, too, when talk about spider venom.
And we know, for example, the funnel web spider is quite deadly. But it's interesting, the funnel web spider isn't deadly to dogs and cats. So dogs and cats have a metabolism that will break down the venom very quickly, whereas, and it's quite fascinating, of course, that dogs and cats can't eat chocolate. And one of the reasons for that, particularly dark chocolate, which has a compound in it, theobromine, which is a heart stimulant. Now, in humans, when we eat it, we break down theobromine quite quickly. And so it's not usually harmful to us.
I mean, for some people, chocolate can affect them in that way, cause rapid heart rate and so forth. But it can be quite deadly to dogs and cats, whereas the funnel web toxin is very deadly to humans. But again, because our body doesn't break down the toxin very quickly, whereas in these animals it does.
So there's some fascinating chemistry involved in all these things. As a matter of fact, spider venom is composed of hundreds and possibly even thousands of different types of proteins and amines and different other components. And this is really, really fascinating, the chemistry that is involved in these different venoms and the fact that they have different effects.
In fact, there was quite an interesting book on spider ecophysiology that was published by a number of authors. It's a textbook, spring of egg leg, published in 2013. And on pages 191 to 202, some scientists, Nentwig and Nentwig, they have an article there on the main components of spider venoms.
It's quite fascinating. There's another very interesting paper, too, that was published in 2015, and the authors involve Dr. Nelson, the author of this article, and Cooper and Hayes.
And it was an article published in the strategic use of venom by spiders, and that was a chapter in Evolution of Venomous Animals and Their Toxins. So, of course, it's interesting, and this is an interesting case how, again, when biologists publish papers, they've got to publish it in the context of evolution, even though in actual fact, personally, they may not believe in evolution, but it's not going to be published if it's published from an intelligent design area. So there's some fascinating references there.
That one on the spider venom, of course, just to go over that again, that the name of the book was Evolution of Venomous Animals and Their Toxins, and that's published by Springer in 2015, it was pages 1 to 18. It's interesting that, of course, the venom and the silk do their work often when they're combined. And so we know that, for example, some venoms of spiders.
So if the spider captures the animal in its web and it quickly wraps it up, it then injects it in with something that preserves it. So the animal, my understand, doesn't necessarily die straight away, but it's sort of put in a state of unconsciousness, sort of thing. So the other fascinating aspect of spiders is how they acquire their information and they have a number of specialised sensory organs and chemosensory hairs that are on the outside of their body.
And these amazing sensory organs are integrated with the hydraulic muscular system. And while in this particular article in the book, design and catastrophe, the author, Dr. Nelson, doesn't go into the detail, he makes the point that every behaviour in the spider is the outcome of sophisticated integration among all of the spider's individual system.
And he points out as an interesting observation with spiders, that a spider can choose to inject venom. And that was something that came out in that article that I just referenced, last one that I referenced. And if it chooses to inject venom, it can actually control the amount of venom injected, which is quite astonishing.
When we think about spiders, there's so many fascinating aspects of this. When you think about spider silk, it's one of the most fascinating of natural structures. And scientists have been impressed not only by its structural properties and chemical composition, but also by the way the spiders control its synthesis.
And this has come to the attention of a guy who studied material science at one of the Max Planck's institutes in Germany, a Dr. Riverlino Montenegro. And he writes about the fascinating material that makes up spiders webs and how spider silks are among the strongest and toughest fibres known to science.
And it's again, these silks use a really wide array of proteins, and so the proteins are synthesised in the spider's body. The spider is able to construct these silk fibres that can vary tremendously in their mechanical properties, ranging from a type of ampulet silk with a tensile stress rivalling that of steel, to a flagelliform type silk with a stretchiness approaching rubber. And again, as we mentioned before, it talks about all these different types of silk that can be of spider silk that can be produced.
But it's interesting that spiders not only know how to change the chemistry of their silk, but also the diameter of the thread. So spiders can dramatically change their own weight and size by, I guess, and they can actively control the diameter of silk thread spun under different environmental conditions, increasing the load bearing capacity of their drag lines. I mean, this is amazing.
And so evolutionists have to believe that all these amazing systems arose by chance. And one of the things that fascinates me is when you think of the proteins that are involved in making these different types of silk, right? So the codes to make these proteins are in the spider's DNA. And so the spider's DNA has this code made up of, we know, four different letters that we abbreviate the names of the chemicals to act and g.
So combinations of these letters, right, enable, when they are carried by the messenger RNA into the ribosome, the ribosome uses that code to assemble amino acids to make the proteins that make these fibres. And so this amazing code, these structures of these fibres, the structures of these proteins, which are made up of chains of amino acids, are encoded for in this DNA code. Now, really, scientists today can't write a code to make a new spider silk.
And so evolutionists have to believe that the codes that made these amazing spider silks all arose by chance. But hang on, in order to make these silk, they've got to be the little reservoir. You've got to have the little spinnerette that enables the silk to be stored or generated and then released the muscles and the control system to vary the diameter and then all the nerve fibres back to the little brain of the spider, to be able to control all these things, all has to be encoded for in the DNA, all this design, I think it just becomes so clear when we drill down and just study the detail in biological systems, it just overwhelmingly just screams out super intelligent design, way beyond anything humans can come up with in design.
Because we can make mobile phones and we can make watches and we can make televisions and we can make jet planes, but they don't reproduce and make themselves. The living systems reproduce and they make themselves. We have to construct them each time.
And so to think that you can have a living system, so the little baby spider develops inside its mother's body and then hatches out, or. I don't know if most of the spiders I know of give fly birth to spiders that form from those little cells, from the gamete cells in the male and female spider and grow into these spiders with the ability to do all these different things. It's interesting that a fundamental question about spider silk is not just the physical chemistry basis of its fascinating properties, but the origin of the sophisticated silk synthesiser inside spiders, and which, again, is able to fine tune the desired silk composition and thickness for a variety of applications.
And they list them hunting, sheltering, flying or ballooning. So we have these amazing structures in spiders. The silk is crucial for the survival of the spider.
And so which came first, the silk or the spider is the point the author makes. It's interesting. He talks about the DNA analysis. This is Dr. Montenegro. He says the analysis of the DNA sequences coding for the c terminus, also known as a carboxyl terminus or the CWH terminus of spider silks. Proteins from a range of spiders shows a high level of similarity, which is usually interpreted to suggest that many silk sea terminals share a common origin. But similarities among different spider silk genes may suggest they share a common ancestor, but the evolutionary relationship among functional homologies are unclear. And so this is the way evolutionists think.
They think that because there's these similarities, that they all evolve from a common ancestor. But we need to remember that engineers use common design systems, levers, cogs and so forth, in lots of different things that are totally interrelated because they work well. Evolutionists don't have an answer for the origin of spider silk, and silk spinnertes are not found in any postulatory evolutionary ancestor, and they're only found in certain insects and in spiders.
And so we have overwhelming evidence for unique design in spiders. That, to me, points to a creator, an amazing creator God. And that creator God, if he can create these amazing creatures, can recreate us after we've died again to new life.
And that's what the Bible promises, that this life isn't all there is, that there's a bigger picture. There's a bigger picture involving the supernatural creator who is outside space and time, who has a plan for us. And that plan for us was revealed through Jesus Christ the Saviour.
You can read about it in the Bible, especially in the New Testament. 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.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
