Join Fred Williams and Sal Cordova in this captivating episode where they unravel the challenges faced by evolutionary biology in defining core concepts like fitness. Sal discusses the widespread acknowledgment of modern Darwinism’s limitations within the scientific community and how engineering perspectives are revolutionizing our understanding of biology. From biophysical benchmarks to peer-reviewed research supporting intelligent design, this episode is a compelling exploration of science inviting criticism and fostering dialog across ideological divides.
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SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio.
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SPEAKER 02 :
Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams, and today I’m flying solo. Well, not completely. I’ve got Sal Cordova in studio. What a pleasure that is. Anyways, my co-host, Doug, he’s on assignment, but we’ve got a great show lined up. I can’t believe I have Sal here. He’s traveling from Seattle back to Washington.
SPEAKER 03 :
From Washington to Washington. Yeah, Washington to Washington. Back to Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER 02 :
So I know a lot of our listeners are familiar with Sal Cordova. We’ve had some of our, what I think are some of our best shows on Real Science Radio. and he’s just on the cutting edge of a lot of the latest creation science. And he was just at an evolutionary conference, right? A conference on evolution.
SPEAKER 03 :
It is the number one conference to my understanding. It is organized by the Society for the Study of Evolution, the American Society of Naturalists, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. So this is kind of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, so to speak. And on their official website, you can even see stained glass windows there. on their banner as if it’s a church event. And so I got to be there. It’s a long story how I got to be there, but it’s probably not as interesting as some of what I think what I tried to bring to the table. I was in fear of being canceled from day one. I mean, if someone just Googles who I am, They could figure out who I am. I could have been canceled, not even admitted to the conference. I was scheduled to present. I was first in line on their session on population genetics theory. So you were first up? I was first up. All right. And you’ll see my handsome face on their official YouTube channel. When you look for the most popular videos for what we call the concurrent sessions, mine was number one. You were number one. I was number one for the year 2025. Now, for all time, it’s a different one that’s number one, if you want me to mention which one.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, man. Yeah. So you mentioned to it off air. And yeah, we might as well. So it’s not surprising. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
So for the number one attraction for all the years that they’ve been organizing this was from 2022. It was a drag queen. That was a big event. And it is the most watched of the events on their official YouTube channel. But for 2025, Yours Truly, A Creationist was number one on their YouTube channel. I got an official letter from them. And I’ll read it here. It said, Salvador Cordova, your participation and expertise made the conference a great experience for attendees. And we hope to see you again in future years. So this is after the conference. This is after the conference. So I think this is an act of God. They could have canceled me. There are probably some people in that conference that hated my guts. And so I do want to credit the organizers for really, they rolled out the red carpet and said, you know, let’s hear views. We’re here to talk. science and science invites criticism of even theories that are orthodox and they were true to the scientific enterprise. I really, I do want to thank the hosts and organizers. And it’s kind of tough because I’ve said some pretty mean things about evolutionary biologists in the past. And as a code of conduct, you know, I have to kind of tone that down. If I name names, even if I have a lot of hostility to them, there’s a certain level of collegialness that is expected of me. And even if I never attend another conference in the future, I still feel like as part of the reciprocity, I have to show a little bit of decorum in the future. And I have to set my feelings aside and say, hey, you know, I have to I have to set an example for other creationists.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Well, I was surprised when you told me that you actually were invited to an evolution conference. And my first thought was, well, how’d you pull that off? Are you posing as an evolutionist? Well, there’s so much censorship, but so it’s great that they did allow you to come on and give what turned out to be the opening presentation. And right now, the one that gets the most views. That’s right.
SPEAKER 03 :
So how did this happen? I was talking to Dan Strewn-Cardinale. He’s the one, if you’ve seen some other shows where… He comes on and says, you know, we both agree there’s no universal common ancestor for all proteins. And I know that when I first put that on the table, it was almost hard to believe that I said it.
SPEAKER 02 :
And he’s an evolutionist. He’s got a fairly popular YouTube channel, Dr. Dan Cardinal, and he’s had you on several times.
SPEAKER 03 :
And then so I posed these kind of questions to him and he said, you know what, Sal? He said, what I don’t like about what goes on in your side, you never come to these conferences. He said, maybe you should go there and speak and just see the reaction. And I said, okay, I think that’s a good idea. At least I could clear my conscience and say, I tried. And if they canceled me, I could just report back. I say, hey, do you see how their conduct? This is why nothing is happening. So I decided to go. And I’m going to tell you a little backstory also. there are a lot of evolutionists that are switching sides. If not full-blown, they’re saying there’s a problem. So in the last 20 years, you know, this is like the 20-year anniversary of Kitzmiller versus Dover, and also the 20th anniversary of when I appeared on the cover of Nature. And people are really angry about that. And Yeah, they’re really angry that I had appeared on the cover of Nature. And a lot has changed since then. A lot has changed. So I was there with Stephen Meyer, Carolyn Crockers, Casey Luskin. And recently on the Joe Rogan Experience… I saw one of your guests, Emily Reeves, pointed me to this. And on that show, we had Brett Weinstein saying, modern Darwinism is broken. My colleagues, that is his Darwinist colleagues, are lying to themselves. They’re lying to themselves. And ID proponent Stephen Meyer is a scientist who’s actually quite good.
SPEAKER 02 :
So if we want to talk about this ID proponent scientist is quite good. This is great. Great stuff. Modern Darwinism is broken.
SPEAKER 03 :
And apparently some people are not getting the memo in the evolutionary community. So if you want to talk about climate change, this is a cultural climate change that I have sensed. And I personally know, and I felt I also needed to show up if for no other reason, that I personally know of at least six evolutionary biologists or professors of evolutionary biology who have either, well, most of them are quietly, have switched sides. And one of them was Richard Sternberg. Now, how could this possibly happen? One of the cases I know of personally, this lady, when she was a young lady, her boyfriend died of an overdose. And then she went, you know, when she had to clean up his room, she found all this pro-Darwin stuff. It was very dark. And she felt that Darwin took away the love of her life. And, you know, at least it began to change her view of what she was doing. She became an evolutionary biologist.
SPEAKER 02 :
Was she an evolutionary biologist at that time?
SPEAKER 03 :
I actually don’t know all the details. She’s a published evolutionary biologist. But somewhere along the way… The scientific evidence started to persuade her. She said, this is all wrong. So you have kind of the very personal experience there. I don’t know that that changed her mind. You know, it’s like, well, maybe that, you know, you can’t deny the science. But then she realized it wasn’t science to begin with. And then she’s been on a quiet mission, but she’s under the radar. And I know a lot of stories like that. I was reading something on population genetics theory by an evolutionary biologist. I said, this is the best stuff I’ve ever seen. And then I met the guy and he’s like, he’s an ID proponent. So you have a lot of people that in the course of their career, they’re like, you know, they begin to see the light and then they’re stuck. I think it’s just reassuring to say, hey, you’re not alone. You’re not alone. I can’t maybe help fix where you are now because you have a profession that you might have to try to figure out how to navigate. And maybe when you figure that out, you can help other people because they’re more and more every year. And evidence of that is Brent Weinstein coming out and say, you know, my colleagues are lying to themselves. I mean, if that’s his colleagues, how many more out there are like, yeah, we are lying to ourselves. We have to come to terms with the evidence. So there’s been a climate change of sorts. It is cultural. Yeah. Not meteorological.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And you know, with the internet and just so much information coming out now on creation and just the evidence, intelligent design. It wasn’t that long ago we had Dr. Aaron Shoulders on the show. He’s a molecular biologist professor at Colorado State University. So more and more people are either coming out of the closet or they’ve been out of the closet and there’s less fear because the evidence is just growing. We are really making headway. Really thankful for people like you. So I want to dive into what you got into at this Evolution Conference. But before we do that, what kind of reaction did you actually get afterwards? I’m kind of starting at the end and then working backwards. Did you feel like you had a lot of scolding eyes at you or…
SPEAKER 03 :
Not at the end. It was friendlier than I expected. There were two components. I really wanted to go to the in-person, but there were some issues that prevented me from going. And so I decided to just do the online experience. And so it wasn’t that I didn’t try. And the online makes it possible for people all around the world to appear. So there’ll be people from Singapore and they don’t have to fly all the way here and then just talk for 15 minutes and then fly back home. There were like a thousand evolutionary biologists at the conference. A thousand. This was a month-long affair. And so they had to kind of just hurt us and say, look, there’s so many of us. We only allocate… 13 minutes to talk, 12 minutes preferable, 13 minutes to talk, two minutes Q&A, and then you’re gone. So there was no opportunity for anyone to react to anyone. So in that sense, I was saved by the bell. So there was a lot of negative reaction after the conference. There were YouTube videos made about what I had to say. But as far as interacting with the other people, they just said thank you and moved on to the next person. And then I got that letter. You’re welcome back next year.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. Cool. Well, let’s see if they go through with that. And you’ll go back too, won’t you? So much great stuff to present.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is if I have, I’d like to go back with some experimental stuff. We might have peer reviewed papers published by then. And I definitely would. And so that’s the other thing that helped me get I’m one of the few creationists that have published stuff critical of Darwinian evolution in Secular Peer Review. I’ve also published on other things in the secular press, like at Oxford University Press, Springer Nature, some… the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. So when I posted that, and then I said my co-authors, one’s a famous geneticist, John Sanford, another’s a emeritus professor of mathematics, another is a professor of mathematics and population genetics, and an award-winning mathematician who won the highest award for the nation in Sweden, that’s Ola Hoster. They’re like, well, you know, this would look kind of bad if we if we didn’t allow some people of this caliber to present at this conference. So I think that helped me get through the door. They saw the abstract ahead of time, and it was very anti-Darwinian. I put it in the most polite language. But I think ultimately it’s God’s grace that got me through the door.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and like you’ve said, though, there’s a lot of evolutionary biologists. They’re still, I’m sure, committed, either atheists or agnostics, And they admit that the modern Darwinism, neo-Darwinism is basically dead. They have to come up with other ideas and they’re trying to, but what else is there to have a naturalistic explanation? So I’m curious, what did you present at the conference? So you said you had to jam this stuff into 13 minutes. We’re not going to have a clock here and make you do that in 13 minutes.
SPEAKER 03 :
It touches on things that I’ve said on the show. And one of the main, the title of the topic was incorporating biophysical benchmarks into the notion of fitness. So we know that the notion of fitness in evolutionary biology has a lot of problems. Even Richard Lewontin said, it’s not entirely clear what fitness is. And there’s no, and this is a quote from him, I’m doing this from memory, he said, no concept in evolutionary biology has been more confusing than And then fitness. And he’s saying it’s not entirely clear. And then Andreas Wagner, who’s also a very respected evolutionary biologist, said, to get an unassailable measurement of fitness does not in practice exist. It’s hard to define. And I’m like, how can you do science if you cannot adequately define your central quantity? Yeah. And if you can’t measure it, can you do any science if you can’t measure it?
SPEAKER 02 :
This is a catastrophe. And they base a lot of stuff off of, would this be population genetics and…
SPEAKER 03 :
A lot of population genetics is based on fitness. Now the math works out, but you have this thing called like W, capital W is like in some books, absolute fitness and little w’s relative fitness. And all it measures is reproductive efficiency. That’s all it is in a given context. And the problem is if you don’t give the context… It’s relatively meaningless. All your equations, it’s like, well, if you don’t incorporate the context, it’s going to be meaningless because you’ll just say fitness goes up or down. But the thing of interest is, how does it, going all the way back to Darwin, is how does this evolve organs of extreme perfection and complication, origin of species, chapter six. And so Darwin postulated that this process of getting the most reproductively efficient, in one generation to be more represented in each in the process of what we call fixation. This is how you make organs of extreme perfection and complication. And I went first to great pains to show what are organs of extreme perfection and complication. And I have some examples here from the scientific literature. So they do exist. Now, what I want to point out is one reason I went through the trouble of showing this. There is a segment of the evolutionary community that’s very uncomfortable with the idea that there is exquisite design in biology. That makes them uncomfortable. What would really make them uncomfortable is if… Those designs are better than all the scientists in the world put together. If they cannot make something that we see in biology, that would really make them uncomfortable.
SPEAKER 02 :
So they must be super uncomfortable because we know that. Yes, yes. Now, were you presenting this type of argument?
SPEAKER 03 :
I was presenting. I said, look, this is Eugene Kunin, who’s the best evolutionary biologist in the planet. He said biology is the new condensed matter physics. Biology is the new condensed matter physics. So we know that in Thedosius, Dobzhansky said, nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. That’s wrong, but it’s now wrong on many levels because evolution If biology is the new condensed matter physics, then nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of physics and engineering, because that’s the best description of it. If you want to understand how biology operates, you don’t need any more phylogenetic trees that are conflicted and probably useless anyway. What you need is you need engineers trying to figure out how the parts connect. First, identifying the parts. How the parts connect and why the parts are there and what do they do? Structure and function.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it seems like to me we’re seeing the word engineer engineered more often. Yes. And if something is engineered, doesn’t that mean you need to have an engineer? Yes. Some of them have got to just cringe when other evolutionists use the word engineer. This thing was engineered. Yes. But we’re seeing more of that.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it’s getting embedded. Okay, so from the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency and the National Academy of Science, it’s forgotten. In 2006, they had this book, Computing and Biology, but it had a section in it that said, an engineering perspective on biological organisms. Biological organisms as engineered entities. Engineering insights can be useful in understanding biological organisms as engineered entities. And it goes far beyond that now, because as we have probed biological systems, we’re seeing that it solves problems at the nanomolecular level and at the quantum realm that we don’t know how to solve. And it’s like biology is several orders of magnitude advanced technology. And I was just sharing that. I said, look, if you want a metric for what fit is, why don’t we use biophysics to determine? Now you have an objective standard to say this is good. This is not quite as good. And so I was giving examples of biological systems that operate at the limits of physics. I said, that’s as fit in the engineering sense that it’s ever going to get. Nothing can do better. So why don’t we use that as our metric? So if you want to try to maximize the fitness of something, now you have an objective benchmark to do that rather than this nonsense metric of evolutionary fitness. I do have an anecdote since I worked at the Army Night Vision Labs and And we were building automatic target recognition systems that would… Now, this is before AI to the level it is now. This is like 20, 25 years ago. Aircraft would fly with their infrared cameras and looking down, and one of our automatic target recognition systems was supposed to detect… Minefields, minefields. So it would be flying over, you know, over there in Serbia and in that area during the, you know, when the U.S. was involved in those wars. And it’d fly over cow pastures and we’d get a lot of false positives. Wow. You realize it was picking up cow pies. Yeah. which are shaped about like landmines. So I mean that you can’t really blame the detector. So what I call- This isn’t classified. No, this is not classified. So cow pies weren’t the real thing. And what I call evolutionary fitness, it’s a cow pie. It’s not the real thing. And that’s, of course, probably a euphemism for a more vulgar word for what I really want to call it. So I just say, okay, cow pie fitness. And I know I have a little picture. There is, by the way, a candy company, the Baraboo. They make cow pies as a candy. I just thought that was… So I call this cow pie fitness. I said, well, I didn’t use this at the conference. I was far too polite to actually say that. But I said, why are you using… In my head, I was saying, why are you using this cow pie metric? Why don’t you use biophysical metrics? Now you can actually tell… if you’re reaching that through an evolutionary Darwinian process. And I argued that you can’t. The evidence, the experimental evidence, first off, is showing that it doesn’t agree. Darwinian process do not make this. And I actually used that little graph that I did when I said proteins are platonic forms. And that’s why Dr. Dan Stern Cardinal said there’s no common ancestor for all proteins. I said, look, a Darwinian process cannot reach this. It just kind of pops out of nowhere. I managed to sneak that one in at the conference. But I showed a peer-reviewed paper by Michael Denton that said the pre-Darwinian conception of proteins as platonic forms. and the role of physics.
SPEAKER 02 :
So platonic forms. Is this for our audience? Do you want to elaborate on that?
SPEAKER 03 :
I actually don’t know the definition, but it’s just kind of like the idea you have a piston and you have a battery in a car. They’re not the same thing. We see that a lot in engineering that you could say a piston or a key or a lock and engineers would understand, even ordinary people would understand these are kind of like, these are idealized objects that you can make. And so, you know, if you say a battery that has a certain construction to it, And we have all sorts of varieties, but underlying that is kind of a certain construction that has certain elements. And that’s the way it is with proteins. You cannot evolve, like, say, one class of proteins, and we have motor proteins, to be other kinds of proteins, like structural. It just doesn’t work. And we had a whole show on that. And by the way, that’s a great show to look at. You have to have them from the beginning. You have to add them from the beginning. And I threw that on the table and I said, you know what? Darwinian processes do not, one, they are challenged to maintain them to begin with because I showed all these experiments like Lenski’s where it says genomes decay despite sustained fitness gains. And I said, look, it can’t maintain this. And the reason is, by the way, I didn’t have time to explain, it’s metabolic efficiency. So way back in 1965, they had Spiegelman’s experiment where they had an artificial, quote unquote, artificial life form. It really was just a string of RNAs, okay?
SPEAKER 04 :
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
It started out with several thousand. And after 74 generations, it was only 218 long. And everyone was saying, look, that’s selection at work. This is Darwinian processes validated. Selection works. It evolved it. And I’m like, thinking to myself, you’re actually celebrating this? You went from a long genome into a reduced one. You have to go the other way.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so it’s really, if you want more copying efficiency… So they’re applauding basically de-evolution. Yes. Celebrating something going backwards.
SPEAKER 03 :
Going backwards. Now, before we add all the genome, the cheap genome sequencing, the price of genome sequencing has dropped a million times. So now any laboratory studying any organism, if they have even a moderate amount of money, they can send it off to get a gene sequenced. And so now they’re counting the genes before… something evolved. And they’re like, well, gee, under extreme environmental pressure, the first thing to do is like dumping a backpack full of all your gear. If you don’t immediately need it, dispose of it. So now what ends up happening is you’re maladapted to work in other environments. And we call that loss of versatility. So what we had shown, what we had assumed is, oh, we’re evolving something to be more of a specialist. But what happens when you’re becoming more of a specialist? You become less of a generalist, and now you’re maladapted to all these other environments. And we started to do more broad-based experiments. It’s like, oh, it’s quote-unquote more cap-high fit in this environment. It’s totally unfit in all these hundred others. So was that really an improvement? You’ve lost all this versatility. And this is being borne out by experiment after experiment. And I was just pointing that out. And it’s like, you know, you can’t really give me pushback for just saying the facts. I mean, you might want to, but this is your own literature. So my strategy is I’m just going to quote your own literature. I quoted Lewontin. saying your definition doesn’t work, I quoted Wagner, you can’t measure it. And the other thing is Darwinian processes destroy all these genes. So that’s anti-correlation. How can you argue with that, you know?
SPEAKER 02 :
So what was the highlight of your talk like? Did you come to a crescendo on any particular topic? Because, again, you had to jam a lot in 13 minutes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, goodness. So we have this Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences paper in 2017. They’re specifically addressing the backward-wired retina. And this has been often used by evolutionists to say, you know, the designer’s incompetent.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, you and I have heard that for years. We’ve heard that. I know, I know. I know. Bob actually interviewed a guy who wrote a book on the evolution of the eye. Yeah. And there wasn’t one part in his entire book about how the eye evolved. Think if you’re going to write a book about how the eye evolved, you have some evidence in there or even mention how it evolved. Exactly. So here’s this paper.
SPEAKER 03 :
It says, ingeniously designed. And I repeated that four times. I said, as an engineer, I love that phrase. Ingeniously designed. Ingeniously designed. Ingeniously designed.
SPEAKER 02 :
For something that for years they claimed was backwards engineering and all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I didn’t want to rub it in too much. But I said, if you take that acronym, that’s ID. I said, there’s ID in biology. I didn’t rub that in. But I said, you know… for ID proponents who want to publish and peer review, you could just cite this paper. You know, this is an ingenious design. And just put that little citation. So there you have it. Now, there are a lot of engineers that are still… into the darwinian paradigm but they’re at least saying this is ingenious this is just amazing and then i quoted emmanuel tadarov who is a professor of robotics and in far back as 2010 he said well you might say the human body is sloppy but no we’re better designed than any robot You just can’t get around that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Far better designed, yeah, not even close.
SPEAKER 03 :
And that agrees with Stuart Burgess, who has numerous peer-reviewed papers, peer-reviewed by the community of robotics and biomimetics and bio-inspired designs and the Institute of Physics. You can’t run away from this. Stuart Burgess, is he a creationist? He’s a young earth creationist, but he is so respected. He’s an editor of a secular peer. He’s co-editor of Secular Peer Review Journal.
SPEAKER 01 :
Hi, this is Bob Enyart. If you are enjoying this Real Science Radio show, well then please tune in next week for the conclusion. And right now, if you go on our website, realscienceradio.com, or for short, rsr.org, you can click on the store and you will help us to stay on the air by making a donation. subscribe to one of our monthly services, or just browse the science department. I think you’ll love the audio, the videos, and the books there. So this is Bob Enyart for Fred Williams and Real Science Radio. May God bless you.
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Scholars can’t explain it all away.
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Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio.
Join Fred Williams and Sal Cordova in this captivating episode where they unravel the challenges faced by evolutionary biology in defining core concepts like fitness. Sal discusses the widespread acknowledgment of modern Darwinism’s limitations within the scientific community and how engineering perspectives are revolutionizing our understanding of biology. From biophysical benchmarks to peer-reviewed research supporting intelligent design, this episode is a compelling exploration of science inviting criticism and fostering dialog across ideological divides.
