Episode Transcript
Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Dr. John Ashton.
One of the examples of evolution that Darwin talked about and in the origin of species s was the different shapes of dog skulls in particular. And I think dogs are one of the most common domesticated animals probably around the world. Many cultures had pet dogs.
And of course, there's all the different types of dogs. And when you go for a walk in a park or along a beach where dogs are allowed, you see all the different types of dogs. And owners are very excited about their dogs.
And with our children, we've had quite a few dogs from Jack Russell terriers and Dalmatians and kelpies, and some of the dogs have been. You can certainly get very attached to these dogs. Of course, we've had friends that have a range of all different types of dogs, from tiny little dogs to great big dogs.
It certainly would worry me. And of course, we know that there are breeds, from the little Pekingese breeds that can weigh just two and a half kilos, to a big bazoe breeds that can weigh more than 45 kilogrammes. And of course, there's huge variation in between with these dogs.
But one of the interesting things is that dogs have been bred for a long period of time. And it's interesting that, for example, St Bernards, that we associated rescuing people in the Swiss Alps with their little cask of. I'm not sure what sort of alcohol was in the cask, but it was apparently to help revive the people in the snow, which is quite interesting, actually, because spirits, of course, can help you feel warmer by causing this flush of circulation to the skin, but they also promote, if I recall, more rapid heat loss.
So it was based on feelings rather than science, I think. But I was reading a really interesting article on the Extreme Plasticity in the Skull Shape of Dogs by Rebecca Greer, who has a doctorate in veterinary medicine. And this was another article in that very interesting book, Design and Catastrophe, published by Andrews University Press back in 2021.
And according to the study, for example, of St Bernard's, she points out that their skulls have been evaluated over 120 years and they've undergone quite a lot of. Of transformation during that time. And it's been suggested the absence of survival pressures on dogs and their selective breeding and feeding have allowed all the different shapes to occur, as particularly some breeds would not survive long without human protection.
It was interesting, I was reading about the english bulldog, and of course, the pure bed bulldog has been bred and it's reproduction controlled by humans for a long time, and it's got to the point that the females have to be artificially inseminated, because their bone structures are such that they can't really hold up the weight of a male during breeding. And the pups are delivered by caesarean section as the pelvic canal is too narrow now for natural birth of the large shouldered offspring that has been bred to have those very large shoulders. And there's been other changes in the bulldog core as well.
There's an airway disease in which the soft palates elongated and can drop into the upper larynx, causing part obstruction. This results in a number of airway problems for these dogs. So they have noisy breathing, they can't tolerate much exercise or heat.
So there's a whole lot of diseases then that have accumulated in these animals, and so in these bulldogs in particular. And so it's unlikely that now a bulldog would survived. And so all these selection traits have resulted in reduced vigour and the viability of the english bulldog.
So, of course, this is the antithesis of evolution. But as the author points out, it hasn't resulted in the bulldog becoming something than other dog. It's still a dog with all these extreme breeding changes that have happened.
And it's interesting that the plasticity of the dog's skull is claimed, under the evolutionary model to be the removal of selective pressures in wild survival. But as the author points out, Dr. Greer points out, but even in the absence of those constraints and in the presence of the most extreme breeding changes that can be implemented by humans, the domestic dog remains a dog.
And this is, I think most of us are familiar with dogs. We see them around and all the different shapes. When you just imagine in your mind all the different shapes of the skulls that dogs have, and there's a huge variation there.
And the author here points out that the different skull shapes all seem to point to different examples of design. And she uses the example. She points out, for example, a word processing programme allows for books, pamphlets, letters, et cetera, to be produced in different formats and layouts.
But no matter how the settings are adjusted, a word processor programme does not become a video game. And so the domestic dog, or potentially the entire canis group, seems to be designed in a similar fashion. From her veterinary experience and understanding, she points out that the different shapes and size potentials are in the system, such as the skulls of the various dogs, may not even appear to be of the same order of animal, and yet it remains canis domesticus.
And I think this is an important thing. If you look at, there's huge differences in the shapes of dog skulls. And I can remember looking at a chart of the different skulls, and they look so different when you see these skulls, that to someone like myself, I'd say, well, they're completely different species of animals, but they're not.
And it's interesting, this doctor of veterinary medicine points out that it seems that the system was so designed that a domestic dog can be bred to have a long nose or a short nose. It can have an upward or a downward facing nose, it can have a large head or a small head. It can have a long or a short body, it can have long or short legs, all sorts of other variations.
But it's as if these codes were already there in the dog to have this huge amount of variation that can be bred in. All the different dogs can be bred that way. And so again, it points to the biblical model of back in Noah's flood with the ark.
Just one type of dog going into the ark carrying all these genetic variation. And then due to the different climates and situations and terrain and so forth, we had over time, very quickly, all the different sized dogs and shapes of bred. It's interesting that, again, with all the breeding that we've done, we haven't been able to breed a different type of animal.
It's still a dog, and this is with deliberate breeding. And it reminds me of the Richard Lensky's experiment with bacteria, where he bred E. Coli bacteria.
And they're through over 70,000 generations, and they're still E. Coli bacteria bred over that 70,000 generations. They haven't changed.
So there's this constraint within the DNA to keep these organisms true to their particular kind. The author, Dr. Gear, points out another thing in her article on dogs and dog skull plasticity, that extreme changes in a domestic dog's skull and formation give rise to an interesting interpretation in terms of the fossil record.
She says, in many cases, we only have fossils to tell us of an extinct species or animal. We don't have DNA or other data available to make decisions on what species or group that fossil may fit into. And if we did not know the plasticity of a dog skull and found a fossil skull of both a pekingese and a bozoi, or a chihuahua or a greyhound or other very different dog breeds, we would be unlikely to consider the two fossils as individuals of the same species or able to interbreed.
And she posits that this is an example of the limits of information that can be gathered from the fossil record. And it's interesting, she concludes her chapter by saying humans have pushed selection to the extreme in the various domestic dog breeds, yet they've been unable to create any species other than a domestic dog, an indication that different kinds of animals are not the result of evolution, but were created originally as described in Genesis. So I thought that was a very interesting, insightful observation by a person who trains vets, has a lot of experience in veterinary animals.
Dr. Greer, trained at the University of Missouri. I think quite for something that we have around us all the time.
But when you think about around the world, how many millions and possibly billions of dogs have been bred and so forth over the past thousand years, a few thousand years, and they're still dogs haven't changed, haven't evolved, despite all this breeding and cross breeding and so forth. I thought that was quite relevant, actually. Another interesting article thinking about very common animals is the differences between saltwater and freshwater fishes.
And because one of the arguments that comes up then, of course, if you have the Noah's flood and you have massive changes in the salinity or so forth of the water at that time with the fresh water or the water from the fountains of the deep, what about the survival of things like fish? And it's interesting, and I found it quite fascinating that some fish can live in saltwater and then go into fresh water, and of course, vice versa. On my property, we have dams. We have a lot of eels in the dams, and we know that those eels then go out to sea and migrate north in saltwater.
And they're quite fascinating creatures in that they can travel across the land overnight. Don't usually see them during the day, but understand they will have to travel across land to get into our dams. But this is quite fascinating, of course, the whole idea of the salmon that live in the oceans and then travel upstream.
So it's quite fascinating to read a very interesting article on the design and the evidence for design in fishes. And the article I was reading was by a Dr. Noble Donkor, who's a professor of biology at Berman University, and he holds a PhD from the University of Alberta in Canada.
And one of the fascinating things is, of course, that the body fluids of these freshwater fish are more concentrated than the water in which they live. So, for example, in freshwater bony fish, the blood osmotic pressure averages about 300 milli osmolar higher than the osmotic pressure of freshwater. And so these fish tend to gain water by osmosis and they lose ions, biodefusion across their gill membranes.
And so this passive flux of water tends to dilute their body fluids. And so to avoid the excess water, the kidneys of freshwater animals and freshwater fish produce copious amounts of urine. And I thought it was quite interesting that for many folkap goldfish, that goldfish might excrete urine each day equivalent to one third of its body weight.
So it's interesting that these freshwater animals have to take up the ions like sodium and chloride and calcium through food intake. But when we look at the body fluids of marine fishes, they're far more diluted than the seawater in which they live. And so such fish have a blood osmotic pressure of only about 300 to 500 milliosmolar.
And, of course, the osmotic pressure of seawater is much higher, more than double, almost triple and up to triple. So therefore, these fish tend to lose water by osmosis, and of course, they're gaining ions for diffusion. So when you think about, we've got two systems that are quite opposite here.
So this is quite complex, not only quite complex biochemistry that is involved here, but we've also got quite complex and quite different physiology requirements to enable this different biochemistry to occur. So it's interesting, and these fishes in the saltwater, they absorb water from the seawater in their gut, and they must actively take up sodium chloride and thereby increasing their problem of salt loading. Therefore, their kidneys make urine that is approximately similar osmosis to osmotic pressure to blood plasma, but is very rich in some of the ions that are excreted across the gill.
So it's a very different biochemistry that is involved. So how can they swap? How can they change? It's interesting that most biologists describe these salt water, the freshwater salt relations in fishes as an evolutionary vestige. In other words, their body fluids have evolved as they've adapted to their origins in the ocean, and then later invasion to fresh waters and then reinvasion to the oceans millions of years ago.
And so they say that these changes occurred over millions of years. But it's very interesting that in modern fish, in the fish that we see today, these changes can occur actually very rapidly. It's very interesting that Dr. Donkor suggests that marine and freshwater fishes were actually created with the different designs for different water salinities. In other words, they were pre programmed to cope with both these salinities. And he points out that some species are designed to be able to adjust their gill and kidney function to enable them to move between environments with radically different salt levels.
So fish that hash in freshwater and migrate to seawater when they mature and then return to freshwater to spawn. They're anodromus fish, of course, and they can spend one to several years at sea, feeding and growing, and then return to their natural stream, where they were born to breed. And salmon are a classic example of this.
And so these fish, like salmon, they can tolerate really wide swings in salinity as they migrate between the fresh and salt water. And when these fish swim into the freshwater, the major physiological challenge, of course, is coping with the salt loss across their gills, because that's what they're designed to do. But they adjust relatively quickly.
They adjust in a period of weeks, not millions of years, and this is often spent by spending some time in brackish water. So water where the salt levels have been diluted with the mixture of incoming freshwater. And so we have what they call catadromus fishes, which migrate in the opposite direction from seawater to freshwater.
So they mature in streams and migrate in the oceans to breed, such as eels. And again, these fish change over a few weeks, not millions of years. And he argues that Anodromus and Catodromus fishes illustrate how the interventionalist hypothesis of creation of fishes, in other words, that God created fish with these abilities, living in streams and seas and the subsequent global flood, explains the data much better than the hypothesis of gradual evolution.
And what he says is the creationist or model proposes that design was already in place to permit them to survive in a variety of environments because they could adapt to rapid changes in salinity, including those that may have occurred during the flood. He concludes, it's quite interesting chapter, it's quite technical in some aspects. Again, in this book, Design and Catastrophe: 51 Scientists Explore Evidence in Nature that was published by Andrews University Press.
Dr. Donkor concludes, if we believe that fish were created, they could have been designed with the genetic information to adapt to changing water conditions. And on the contrary, random processes seem utterly incapable of producing the molecular structures responsible for gill and kidney function in waters of different salinity.
And he says, I conclude that the manner in which fish regulate their water balance and internal iron concentrations points to an intelligent design. And I think this is another important factor. When we look at how the complexity of the biochemistry that controls the regulation of salt levels within the fish, whether they live in salt water or whether they live in freshwater, they need these ions, sodium, chlorine, calcium and so forth, as part of their metabolism, as part of the biochemistry of their living organisms.
And these levels have to be maintained a level with a very tight tolerance, otherwise the animal will die. It's just like if we get significant levels in the change in those ions in our blood plasma, we'll end up very quickly. We'll have very high blood pressure or very low blood pressure, and if this goes on for any substantial length of time, we'll die.
And of course, if there's too wide a swing in that level in our blood, we'll die very quickly, such as we change a level in potassium ions, which is a method of legal execution in some countries. So this is one of the important factors that the chemistry involved in enabling these changes and enabling this adaptability is impossible to have evolved over millions of years, and particularly since the requirements for survival mean that these changes have to occur just in weeks. So, as I thought about these articles, I thought some common things that we see around us point to a creator, point to a super intelligent creator that has made so many interesting forms of lives.
Just in the examples of all the different types of dogs and their skulls, just in the classic examples of fish that we buy, perhaps in the supermarkets, there are tins of fish, tins of salmon, these sort of things are sold around the world. And these fish illustrate these amazing design characteristics that point to a creator. And of course, the Bible tells us that this creator is a loving God that wants to have a relationship, that we are the pinnacle of his creation, that we were created with minds that can communicate with God.
And the Bible speaks about this point very clearly, particularly in the book of John in the New Testament, that God and Jesus explained this himself, that God desires to have this relationship with us and that we shouldn't die, that we should have eternal life by choosing to him, believing in him. It's a wonderful promise. So I encourage you all to read and become familiar with the Bible.
If God can design the amazing fish and dogs, he can certainly give us eternal life as well. So you've been listening to faith and science. And remember, if you want to relisten these programmes, just Google 3abnaustralia.org.au all one word au and click on the listen button.
I'm Dr. John Ashton. Have a great day.
Your been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
