Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Welcome to faith and science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Just recently I saw a newsfeed about a Canadian school school that had removed from the library all the books that were published before two eight. And the basis of this was that they wanted students to only read material that made them feel inclusive. Now, I thought, wow, this is a bit extreme. So I had a look around on the Internet, and it was certainly reported on CNN News and Sky News in Australia, but it made me think about the increasing control that seems to be being implemented, particularly on what young people learn. So at the present time, of course, in state schools and even many religious schools or church based schools, the students aren't taught the overwhelming evidence that we have for creation and for a creator God.
[00:01:34] And what makes this even more disturbing, in my view, is that just recently also the head of the armed services in Australia gave a talk about his increasing concern about the use of artificial intelligence and other means to get out false information and the ability now to have, for example, a politician or a leader making statements that they're actually not making. So, in other words, making a film or a video of making statements that they're not actually making. And also the use, of course, of social media and so forth to change people's views and particularly influence young people's views. And we see this happening at the moment, particularly in regard to gender and the people that and young people having access to the Internet at an early age on their phones and the social media aspects that are influencing young people to think, oh, what gender are you really? Well, instead of just seeing them be a child, grow up and enjoy being children. And it doesn't really matter whether they play with boys or girls, they're just playing. And as I spoke about recently on one of these programs, the whole issue of adolescence involves cognitive and psychological developments as well. And so there seems to be this attempt to influence people and what they know. But what this boils down to is that the difficulty in discerning what is true and this is something that the head of Australia's armed forces pointed out, that it's going to be increasingly difficult for people to ascertain what is true?
[00:04:01] What are the facts, what is really happening? And I think this is something that is very alarming to me in that the push, particularly by atheists and so forth, to remove the evidence that we have for God and hence these programs that you're listening to now programs like this where I'm looking at the over and want to discuss the overwhelming evidence that we have at the moment for a creator god, for a super intelligent mind that has created the amazing living systems, whether they be in plants, animals, fish, insects, bacteria. They're so complex that it's absolutely impossible for these systems that are all coordinated, that work synchronistically to make the operations of and the life giving functions of these organisms to function smoothly is amazing in its complexity. And it's obviously absolutely impossible to have by random mutations have occurred so that all the required processes synchronized. And we also see the effect of disease and certain when unexpected extremes occur in the environment and produce changes, these damage the systems.
[00:05:49] And so again, this is powerful evidence that seeing these environmental factors are there for a system to arise in these conditions and not be broken as well. The evidence from so many aspects of looking at it points to this Creator. And it's very concerning that this information is being the information and the evidence for a supernatural Creator is being kept from young people. The other aspect, of course, is the Bible itself and the evidence we have from history, from archaeology, from other records and also the personal testimony of Christians down through the last couple of thousand years.
[00:06:43] And before that the evidence from the prophets that were recorded and the holy men that were the evidence that was recorded in the Bible. There we have this overwhelming evidence of testimony to the truthfulness of the biblical account and the reality of the supernatural world. And it's interesting that Paul points out that we are warring against supernatural forces, the forces of demons that are out to destroy God's people and God's kingdom.
[00:07:21] And of course, many people reject this standard psychology textbooks and so forth would reject this. But the evidence is there and it's very, very important in my view that we understand and preserve the evidence that we have for God. And hence, as I've mentioned, one of the reasons for this program is to provide the evidence from science for a supernatural Creator that we can believe in and who loves us. The Bible describes a God who created us in his image so that we can have fellowship with him. And God has an amazing future plan for us now that sin and evil entered the world supernaturally in the beginning and God's plan to recreate this world and life on it and a system that would last eternally.
[00:08:29] And this is amazing and this is the hope that we have that if we become stricken by disease and eventually all of us will die, that we will be reunited with loved ones. It's not the end. God has a plan for us. And it's so important that this message get out to young people because another issue just in the newspaper the other day was mental ill health among young people is a growing concern for teachers. It's the number one priority listed or number one problem I should say listed among young people at school was mental health. And I think we can see young people are under enormous pressures and influence. There's political pressures, there's environmental pressures associated and a whole lot of fear mongering in so many different areas that is out there in the media on so many different topics. And the Bible message, of course, is a message of hope that young people are special, that God has a plan for them. And again, this is very concerning because we understand so many young people and people are taking their own lives now because they don't see hope. But there is hope and this is the important message. And so to counter the growing push to remove God from our education system, from our political system is one of the reasons that I'm giving these talks. Now, when the talk that I've chosen today is centered on our respiratory control system or our breathing control system and when we look at the standard pictures of evolution sort of different very early forms of life evolving into fish and then fish evolving into from Gill type respiratory system into a lung type respiratory system. We see this as oh, this is just something that has evolved. But the amazing and huge amount of chemistry that is involved to make these changes and produce the specific compounds that enable our respiratory system to work is enormous and they're extremely complex. And I want to just talk about this and explain some of the complexity because often the charges made against Dr. Ashen's, a chemist, what would he know about biology? The thing is that biology is underpinned by chemical reactions and chemistry chemical compounds. And so chemistry is fundamental and the whole claims of evolution are underpinned by supposed chemical reactions which in actual fact don't happen. And this is one of the important points to really understand that a lot of the claims that particular compounds could form by random mutations and changes to the genetic code are just not going to occur in nature in a natural environment. Scientists have enough difficulty making some of these reactions happen in the laboratory. And in some cases reactions we actually at the present time can't replicate exactly in the laboratory. Under laboratory conditions. They require a living cell type environment to replicate. So when we come to breathing the respiratory center, of course is located in the medulla oblogata and the ponds which are parts of the brain right at the back of the skull section there that are part of the brain stem where our brain actually joins the spinal cord there. And the respiratory center is made up of three major respiratory groups of neurons. These are sort of brain cells and there's two types in the medulla and one in the pond. And in the medulla they're the dorsal respiratory group and the ventral respiratory group. And in the ponds and the pontine they have the pontine respiratory group which includes two areas known as the pneumotoxic center and the aphenistic center.
[00:13:03] And of course the respiratory center, which is very complex, is responsible for generating, maintaining the rhythm of respiration and also adjusting this in a balanced response to physiological changes like whether we're running uphills or we've suddenly been frightened and we want to get away from a snake or we want to relax, this sort of thing. And the respiratory center receives input from a whole lot of sources. There are chemo receptors. They react to chemical responses. Then there are mechanical receptors and then there's also the influence of the cerebral cortex and the hypothalamus, of course, which is the system that regulates the rate and depth of breathing. And so input stimulated by, again, different levels of oxygen, of carbon dioxide, of our acidity, of our blood, the PH level of our blood and also hormonal changes that occur as a result of stress and also anxiety.
[00:14:22] And so this input is regulated by the hypothalamus and it is also affected by signals from the cerebral cortex. And this gives us our conscious control of respiration. So, for example, it might be an exercise class and the instructor says, right, I want you now to take a deep breath and hold it. And so we have this conscious override to a degree.
[00:14:52] But a few years ago, in 2017, in the Journal of Physiological Sciences, volume 67, number one, pages 45 to 62, there was an interesting paper published called the Respiratory Control Mechanisms in the Brain Stem and Spinal Cord integrative Views of the Neuroanatomy and Neurophysiology. And this was a paper from memory researchers from Canal University in the US. And it's interesting when you read the abstract it said the respiratory activities are produced by the Medullary respiratory rhythm generators and are modulated from various sites in the lower brainstem which I've just said, which are then output as motor activities through the premotor efferent networks in the brain stem and spinal cord. But this is the important bit. Over the past few decades, new knowledge has been accumulated on the anatomical and physiological mechanisms underlying the generation and regulation of respiratory rhythm.
[00:16:06] And so what they're saying there is that these systems are so complex, so interconnected and so integrated that scientists are still working out how the system works. And it goes on. In this review, we focus on recent findings and attempt to elucidate the anatomical and functional mechanisms underlying respiratory control in the lower brain stem and spinal cord. So what I'm saying here here we've got a top journal reporting a major review that was published in 2017 and they're saying an attempt to elucidate or understand the function of the mechanisms underlying the respiratory control system.
[00:16:54] And these systems just are taught to our students that they evolved, they evolved by random, blind mutations. But we don't see this continuing to happen. We see there's systems that are working that are working really well.
[00:17:14] And I think this is one of the aspects that we need to remember when we glibly talk about something evolving into something else. And lungs of fish and lungs evolve from gills and all this sort of thing. And people refer to the queensland, lung, fish and all these sort of things. And they paint this really, really simple picture. They don't realize the extremely complex chemistry that's involved the very complex, not only physical structures and neuron structures that are extremely complex and have really complex parts, but also the particular chemicals that carry some of these signals, that stimulate these signals. These chemicals also have to be synthesized in the cell, in the living organism, by a whole series of chemical reactions. You just don't produce the chemical bang, there it is. You've got a set of chain reactions to produce a whole lot of intermediates to end up with these particular chemicals that are involved in regulation. And this is all controlled by a code, by the genetic code that is in the DNA.
[00:18:22] And this code, as I've pointed out, when it talks about a particular hormone, it's a code just like the word hormone, H-O-R-M-O-N-E right? That's a code involving particular it looks nothing like a hormone chemical, right? But it's interpreted by my brain.
[00:18:46] And as you listen and my brain then can read that word, I can say that word out now before cause of the connections and you can hear that word. And if you've learned what a hormone is, you can picture what I'm talking about. But to code it doesn't look like so the code requires intelligence. And the words for different things are different in different languages. An apple is apple in English, palm in France and so forth. And as I mentioned, we talk about fish.
[00:19:20] F-I-S-H. But in Latvian it would be zivers Z-I-V-I-S. So, again, these are codes, and you've got to know the language. And of course, I've talked previously about our code reader. And so this is one of the things the complexity of these changes that we glibly say evolve something evolved into, are so complex, it's absolutely impossible for these coordinated, synchronized changes to occur that work by random chemical reactions. But it's interesting just getting back to the amazing breathing system that we had. One way in which breathing is controlled is through feedback by chemoreceptors. There are two kinds of respiratory chemoreceptors. There's the arterial ones, which monitor and respond to changes in the partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the blood in our arteries. And there are also central chemopressceptors in the brain that respond to changes in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in their immediate environment in our brain. And so the ventilation levels behave as if they were regulated to maintain a constant level of carbon dioxide, partial pressure, and to ensure adequate oxygen levels in the arterial blood, in the blood in our arteries. And so increased activity in these chemoreceptors caused by an increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide. In other words, if we're producing a lot of waste products and the carbon dioxide builds up, that changes both the rate and depth of breathing, which restores the partial pressure of oxygen and carbon dioxide to their normal levels. So as that level of carbon dioxide goes up, we're then stimulated to bring in more oxygen and obviously to expel that carbon dioxide as well.
[00:21:23] On the other hand, too much ventilation depressures the partial pressure of carbon dioxide and that leads to a reduction in chemoreceptor activity and the reduction of ventilation. So we have these amazing chemoreceptors that are there.
[00:21:43] So again, when we go to very high altitudes, we can have problems because the air is very thin there.
[00:21:55] And so, for example, people going to getting ready to climb very high mountains and this sort of thing need to adjust to the lower density or lower concentration of oxygen at those levels.
[00:22:13] And this situation stimulates the carotid and aortic bodies, which are the principal arterial chemoreceptors. And the carotid bodies, they're small organs located in the neck where two common carotid arteries actually meet.
[00:22:35] This organ is an organ set up to respond to changes in the partial pressure of oxygen in the artery blood flowing through it, rather than the oxygen content of the blood, which is the amount of oxygen chemically combined to hemoglobin. So we need to understand, again, with the blood, there's two ways. There's actually a small amount of oxygen that is carried as oxygen in the blood. And of course, it's this that this level of air, for example, that can cause the bends in divers if they come up too quickly from very high pressures. But also there's the oxygen that is actually carried by the blood bound to hemoglobin. And this is the main amount of oxygen that is carried. And so it's interesting that the sensory nerve from the caroted body, the crotin body, increases its firing rate hyperbolically. So it's quite rapidly as the partial pressure of oxygen falls.
[00:23:50] And so what we see is there's these amazing control mechanisms and there's a lot more that we could talk about. All the different types of cells that are involved in these detectors that measure the different types of oxygen and the partial pressure and so forth. But we still really haven't touched on some of the other chemoreceptors. There are chemoreceptors, a central chemoreceptors, for example, for carbon dioxide that involves and responds to that.
[00:24:27] And some of these bodies that affect our breathing also help regulate blood pressure.
[00:24:38] But it's interesting too. Then the whole thing relies on our lungs to bring the air in and out. And so this energy expended on breathing moves the lung and it normally amounts to about 1% of our basal energy is required, but it rises during exercise and sometimes during illness. And this pump of our lungs is capable of increasing its output 25 times from a normal resting level of about six liters of air per minute to up to 150 liters per minute in adults.
[00:25:24] Of course, this gas that we the gases that we breathe in oxygen, carbon dioxide eventually have to enter the blood. And so there's this respiratory exchange between the air and the surfaces of the lungs. And this human lung provides an immense internal surface that facilitates this gas exchange. The area in adult human is in the order of 50 to 100 m² in area. It's huge. And, of course, the gas exchange is between the avioli and the capillaries. And this is enhanced by a very thin nature of a membrane that's only about 0.5 micron or 100th the diameter of a human hair in thickness. And it's interesting that to stop these airspaces in our lungs, which are covered with this fluid from sticking together, there's a very special phospholipid surfactant that is produced and is contained there, that reduces surface tension and keeps the walls separated. So here again, we see these amazing dentine features involving the chemical systems.
[00:26:48] Not only that hemoglobin binds not only to oxygen, but to other substances, such as hydrogen ions, which relate to the PH of the blood, and consequently, foods that affect our blood. PH can affect our ability to carry oxygen. So the higher the PH, or the lower the hydrogen ions, the more oxygen we can carry. And that's why alkaline foods, what we call the alkaline foods, foods that help the blood become more alkaline, can increase our physical fitness and exercise capability. And that's, again, why the original plant based diet in the Bible is so ideal for health.
[00:27:37] The respiratory system is an absolutely amazing system, but the control system is even more amazing in its complexity and powerful evidence for a creator designer.
[00:27:52] You've been listening to Faith and science. And remember, if you want to relisten to these programs, just three ABN australia.org Au, click on the radio button and then the different programs will come up, such as Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
[00:28:34] You've been listening to a production of three ABN, Australia radio.
