Join Fred Williams and special guest Sal Cordova as they navigate the world of evolutionary biology and engineering. From the incredible quantum compass used by birds for navigation to the sophisticated designs found in deep-sea organisms, this episode challenges prevailing evolutionary theories. With insightful examinations of genetic decay and peer-reviewed research, Cordova provides a fascinating look at why Darwinian processes may not be sufficient to explain the complexity found in nature. Don’t miss this exploration of science’s growing acknowledgement of design in biology.
This is Real Science Radio and I’m Fred Williams, back in our exciting new time slot where we get to enjoy the lunch hour with the brightest audience in the country. With me again is special guest and renowned creationist Sal Cordova, who recently spoke at a major evolution conference. Stay tuned as we continue our discussion on the failures of Darwinism and the latest cutting edge discoveries in science that point to an intelligent creator.
SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keepin’ it real
SPEAKER 02 :
I showed a peer-reviewed paper by Michael Denton that said proteins – the pre-Darwinian conception of proteins as platonic forms and the role of physics.
SPEAKER 04 :
So platonic forms. Is this for our audience? Do you want to elaborate on that?
SPEAKER 02 :
I actually don’t know the definition, but it’s kind of like – 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. 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 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. Yeah. And by the way, that’s a great show to look at. We have to have them from the beginning. Yeah. 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, right? 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? 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. Yeah. You have to go the other way.
SPEAKER 04 :
And so it’s really, if you want more copying efficiency… So they’re applauding basically de-evolution. Yes. Celebrating something going backwards.
SPEAKER 02 :
Going backwards. Now, before we had all 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… you know, 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER 02 :
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… 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?
SPEAKER 04 :
So what was the highlight of your talk? Did you come to a crescendo on any particular topic? Again, you had to jam a lot in 13 minutes.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, goodness. So we have this Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences paper in 2017. And 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 04 :
Oh, you and I have heard that too. 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.
SPEAKER 02 :
So here’s this paper. It says, ingeniously designed. And I repeated that four times. I said, as an engineer, I love that phrase. Ingeniously designed. Ingeniously designed.
SPEAKER 04 :
Or something that for years they claimed was backwards engineering and all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
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 in peer review, you could just cite this paper. 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 04 :
Far better designed, yeah. Not even close.
SPEAKER 02 :
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. He has made robots and all sorts of devices for spaceships and all sorts of things, like even the Olympic bicycle team for the UK, for Britain. He’s a mechanical engineer. And I did cite this by Daniel Dennett. Biology is engineering. So you’re seeing this. We can’t run away from it because we have here, for example, this one. and I quoted this in my talk, some superior technological secrets have come to light from deep sea organisms. Modern technology cannot yet compete with some of the sophisticated optical systems possessed by biological organisms. Is that telling you that something engineered at the nano level is done better than anything we can do? Shouldn’t that unsettle some people?
SPEAKER 04 :
I mean… Yeah, you got to wonder if, so this is kind of towards the end of your talk, right?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, this is, I opened up with it. You asked me what was my favorite.
SPEAKER 04 :
It was actually. Okay, so you actually opened up with this hard hitting.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, yeah. I was just saying, look, this is good stuff. And you can, I just kept going through all of this. I talked about the quantum compass. The quantum compass, the bird can navigate from Alaska, 14,000 kilometers all the way to Australia, point to point. And it uses a quantum compass. They figured this out. And there are various titles associated with this. Sustained quantum coherence and entanglement in the avian compass. And the way this is able to sustain it, it exceeds the durations achieved in the best way. comparable man-made molecular systems.
SPEAKER 04 :
We don’t know how to do this. This is so much better. It says entanglement. Is that part of quantum entanglement?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, it is. It’s using quantum entanglement. It’s using the entanglement to sense the spin of the electron. As the bird flies through the magnetic fields, it’s altering the spin of the electron. It can sense that. We can’t do anything like that. We can’t do that. And I’ll show you.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s instantaneous. So this, to me, I’m going to say, hey, this looks like information traveling faster than the speed of light. I’m just going to throw that out there, Sal.
SPEAKER 02 :
Just throw that out there by all means, definitely. By the way, we talk about the limits of what physics will allow. It says here biological magnetic sensing comes close to the quantum limit. We cannot even get that close. This is right at the limit. Man-made devices are not going to get better. It’s like there’s a designer here. What made this design so good?
SPEAKER 04 :
And this is just from this year, January 2025 from physics.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. And this is an example, by the way, of a man-made attempt to make a comparable quantum compass. Now, this is an accelerometer.
SPEAKER 04 :
It has, if you wonder why… four feet tall four feet by four yeah you need a van it’ll you need a van to be able to transport this baby uh you just see kind of the the core of the company that is somewhere in a bird’s brain i here it is there it is and it looks terrible from an you know from our as an engineer looking at this thing and comparing that to a bird yes it’s like okay if i’m a customer of a product i’m like I think I’ll take the bird version.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. And see, the bird is able to operate at warm temperatures with lots of liquid around it. I mean, water, water, liquid. The man-made version, you need a cryogenic refrigerator to generate cryogenic liquid, and then it’s going to be cooling down the system. And yeah, how are you going to put this inside any sort of, you’re definitely not going to put it on like little small aerial drone. And the idea was they wanted to replace GPS. So the bird had something that could navigate as precisely as GPS, even before we had GPS satellites. This is incredible. So I only had a chance to show some of these. And then there’s a quote by Natalie Angier somewhere that I quoted, and I said, it’s become fashionable in physics to say life is more perfect than we imagined. And this is a lecture that William Bialik makes. He’s from Princeton University, National Academy of Sciences. And let’s just look at some examples. The brain operates at 20, 25 watts. Whereas if we tried to do this with silicon-based VLSI transistors, it’d take 10 million watts. 10 million! Yeah. This is how efficient this is. I speculated this is probably at the limit of physics. Next, biocatalysts. Enzymes are biocatalysts. They catalyze reactions. They are so efficient that we can’t make anything from scratch that can operate this well. Like, for example, the topoisomerase, which I published in. We can’t even build a topoisomerase that operates at any efficiency, much less something as efficient as this. Now, we can take these things out of a biological context and make them run faster, but that’s really cheating. So these things are really well optimized. They’re close to the limits of physics. Next, the shark can sense electric fields probably at the limits of physics because it can sense the electric fields of its prey. When the prey starts to move its muscles, it generates an electric field. The shark can sense it. It’s just incredible.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, we had a show not that long ago talking about the electric field that humans have. A lot of people don’t even think of that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly. And the eye can detect a single photon, the nose a single molecule.
SPEAKER 04 :
If you go scuba diving and wear a lot of rubber, the shark won’t see you.
SPEAKER 02 :
I doubt it. It’ll see you. It’ll see you. Just don’t move too much because it can sense your electric fields moving your muscles. And so Natalie Angier, as she interviewed all these biophysicists, she concluded, as far as these systems go, she says, the system couldn’t get faster, more sensitive, or more efficient without first relocating to an alternate universe with alternate physical constants. And so I was pointing out, we can objectively say, this is probably what helped me get into I said, I have to give some credit to Darwin. Darwin used the term organs of extreme perfection and complication for biology. It’s funny, the modern Darwinist, half of them want to say it’s junky, it’s garbage, it’s bad. There’s another half like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett say, no, it’s good. So they can’t agree with each other. But I said, look, the physicists have affirmed Darwin’s view that there are organs of extreme perfection and complication. If there’s nothing else that I said, they ought to be able to walk away happy with that. We affirmed something Darwin actually said, and I did. I can, in good conscience as a creationist, say he was absolutely right. These are organs of extreme perfection and complication.
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, I look at this quote, and boy, they love to appeal to alternative universes, many worlds theory to get around. It’s like it’s in their subconscious that somehow she had to refer to this.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. And so, yes, I’m sure it’s in the back of her mind because Natalie Angier is a stark raving atheist. I think at the time she wrote this in 2010, she still believed in the Darwinian viewpoint. And it was still kind of a thing back then. It’s continuing to decline now. There’s some diehards who are still holding on to it. It’s like holding on to a zombie. And so then the next part was, well, Darwin got this right. Give him credit. But the problem is… His theory says that Darwinian processes ought to maintain this. It can’t even maintain it. So if you can’t even maintain this, much less are you able to build it. That was kind of the logic. I mean, if you can’t maintain something that’s working, how much harder is it going to be to build it? So then I showed a whole bunch of slides. This is one of my peer-reviewed publications with John Sanford. We actually covered this, but we weren’t saying anything new. And for example, Lenski, 2017, genomes decay despite sustained fitness gains. This means that these organs of extreme perfection and complication are decaying away, even though the supposed fitness is increasing. I said, there’s gotta be a problem with the way you define fitness.
SPEAKER 04 :
And this was with bacteria, which they- This is bacteria. Reproduced rapidly. So it’d be a perfect thing to look at for evolution, right? But they don’t see anything.
SPEAKER 1 :
Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then so I showed they said, well, when you take this and you take these strains, try to test them in other environments, they utter fail. And it was Lenski himself who was involved in that study. So you could see that on the left panel in that one restricted environment, The mean fitness, really the measure of reproductive efficiency, it kept increasing. So that’s what it means. The fitness was increasing. But if you look at the effect of losing all those genes and you take that bacteria to like, say, 100 different other environments, you could tell it’s just not coping well. The mean fitnesses declined. So I said, this is more the real picture. And this obviously should make one think, well, what does it really represent? If you’re only going to represent one environment and not capture its effect on others, isn’t your definition of fitness kind of like at least complete?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yep. Pretty fuzzy.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes. But I was pointing out, this is a genetic decay. And I was arguing, this is pervasive. This isn’t an isolated instance. It’s not an isolated instance. This is the rule. There may be a few exceptions, but this is the rule. You can’t be citing exceptions to pretend that that’s…
SPEAKER 04 :
Again, you’re using something that has rapid reproduction in bacteria. Even there, they can’t get evolution. They get decreasing ability to function in other environments when you’re mutating it like that. Is that what you’re saying, pretty much?
SPEAKER 02 :
That is exactly it. And then also, for the human genome, now it doesn’t reproduce as quickly. But we’re more complex. And we know when we deal with more and more complex systems, there’s more places for it to break. So there are many ways to break, few ways to make. And humans are so complicated. A bacteria could probably tolerate 80% change of its genome if it’s in the right environment it lives. That’s unimaginable for a human. Totally. I mean, even one gene. could wipe, if it’s wrong, could wipe out a human system. I mean, humans dead. But for humans, I cited the fact that all studies are showing… We’re decaying over time. We are decaying over time. I didn’t want to rub it in, but… I had a debate with Dr. Dan Stern Cardinal five years ago, and I gave a list of all these evolutionary biologists that expressed concern about the human genome decaying. And he said, no, that’s an appeal to authority, Sal.
SPEAKER 04 :
We’re appealing to your authority.
SPEAKER 02 :
And then I said, Dr. Dan, can you name one? Can you name one evolutionary biologist or geneticist of any repute that thinks the human genome’s improving? He gave that like deer-in-the-headlights look for five seconds, silence. And then he said, no, and then changed the subject. Oh, man, that’s classic. So I pointed this out, not the whole conversation. I said, look, there’s decay in the human genome. And I cited a study… I think it’s by Kanazawa, I think is his name. I don’t have that slide here, but it says intelligence and childlessness in women. Very intelligent women have a 28% higher incidence of childlessness. They have fewer kids. Many of them are childless. And what does that mean? They said the implication is, so a Darwinian process is going to be getting rid of… I said, look, this is undeniable. We have experimental evidence. IQ tests are debatable, but we can measure nerve conduction speed, which is a proxy for intelligence. So as we get older, our conduction speed, sadly, starts to go down. Our mental faculties are not as sharp. So that’s an objective measure. The nerve conduction… Oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t heard that before. Oh, yeah. They wanted to have… It’s a measurement of… It’s NCV, nerve conduction velocity. Wow. Okay. And so, well, you can kind of see it like, I mean, when I see baseball players that could be able to read pitches and react as they get older. So that’s part of the mechanism. Yeah. Never thought of it like that. The reflexes, yeah, they said like the ping pong players who are like high caliber, after about age 25, you know, the reflexes are just not quite there. Yeah. you know, their ability to react. And I think that’s related to nerve conduction speed. And they’ve been doing a lot of longitudinal studies on people as they age. And then also these studies cross-generational, it’s like the nerve conduction speed has decayed.
SPEAKER 04 :
And so it’s like, well, you know, the… So instead of saying, I just had a senior moment, I had a nerve conduction velocity change. You could. Reduction.
SPEAKER 02 :
I used to say I had a Joe Biden moment. So I thought that was mean. So I was pointing, I said, look at all these examples. I said, well, you know, this is, but I said, the bottom line is, all right, whatever you may think of Joe, And I’m being quite a bit more verbose than I was in my presentation. But whatever you all may think of the hypothesis I put on the table, this is experimentally testable. You can test whether there’s genomic decay in the human species and then for other species. And I did throw out a little slide. I said, we’re in the middle of the sixth great extinction, according to the consensus viewpoint. And you can’t run away from that. I didn’t use this term, but I’ll elaborate a little more. In statistics, we call this survivorship bias. If you only focus on the things that actually survived a process, you’re kind of skewing the odds of how well your theory really applies. Because if the environment changes and you have all these creatures that don’t adapt, why don’t you include that to talk about the efficacy of Darwinian processes? Because a lot of them are not able to adapt. Lots of them. And then the ones that, quote unquote, do adapt, they’re losing genes. The genome decays. There’s a sustained fitness gain, which in many evolutionary papers they interpret as, oh, these creatures got more adapted. And I’m just like, yeah. I saw a peer-reviewed paper, by the way. It said gene loss is a key evolutionary force. Yeah. And that wasn’t from The Onion. That was a real peer-reviewed paper. Oxford University Press.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, you know, I’ve mentioned before on the show, I’ve had evolutionary biologists tell me, PhD scientists, that cancer is an example of evolution at work. I mean, a third grader could see how silly that is to use that as an argument for evolution. Of course, there’s the whole malaria, sickle cell thing. But anyway, Sal, so you crammed all this stuff in 13 minutes. How did it end? I mean, were you kind of cut off or do they have a timer?
SPEAKER 02 :
I cut myself off. All the other presenters, all of us, because we were under a 15-minute hard time constraint. And they said, try to stop talking at about 12, 13 minutes and leave two minutes for questions and set up. Yeah. So I cut myself off at 13 minutes. Did you have questions? One was like, can you give me citations for that? And I was like, and I really want, I didn’t realize that they didn’t post my email. I said, you can email me. I’ll give you a list. But I said, right now, the best is in those slides.
SPEAKER 04 :
And that’s the reason why I reacted that way is because, as you know, just years of debating evolutionists. If you say anything, where’s the citation? Where’s the peer reviewed? I mean, it’s like a stock answer for them.
SPEAKER 02 :
So we did have a slideshow where I would just talk through it. And you could actually see the papers. And she was interested. And I have this… She’s going to be in for a shock. Because over the next… I was just at a recent conference. I got to talk to a microbiologist. And after I spoke, I gave kind of a similar talk like this. He came in. He said, well, Sal kind of took some of my thunder. But I have even more examples of… And I asked him after he talked, I said, how many? He said, I have like 50. I have 50 peer-reviewed papers. And I’m like, I kind of went out on a limb with my few. Those are the best I could. You’ve got 50 of them.
SPEAKER 04 :
So I missed something here. So 50 peer-reviewed papers that are Kind of pushing ID, intelligent designer. What did I miss here? Decay of genomes. Oh, decay of genomes. Okay. Which might as well be, that’s as brutally almost fatal to evolution as you can get, right? They’re going to be more. I’m being nice by saying almost fatal. It really is fatal.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it’s like, can you give me one example of a complex? And I specifically said, this is the requirement for, you know, I said, there’s some, all these transcripts that may be junk. So a cancer cell can easily generate new genes. All right. This is like taking a… a sledgehammer to a nice car and just beating it up and said, hey, we have a new car. It changed. And I said, no, what I want, the measure of this would be a new protein that has what we call a quaternary structure that its functioning depends on its multimeric quaternary structure. That’s a fancy way of saying it, but that’s a term they use in biochemistry. You need to have something that has multiple parts, at least two, And it’s critically dependent on two parts because just like having a piston fit exactly in the engine block, the probability of two random parts being able to so well fit like a lock and key, that’s very difficult. You can just claim any random cancerous transcript is a new gene. That doesn’t count. You need something where you have interlocking parts, lock and key, and they would know exactly That this is not easy. You do not get that. You don’t get a random lock and key. You can just make up a key and say that’s sort of functional, can kind of work like a hammer. Not very good. But to get it to work like something that opens a lock, that’s very improbable. And so I threw that out there. You could tell I crammed in a lot. I know that that would be a problem. And that was specifically what Dan Stern Cardinal was saying. You know, that’s a really good problem, Sal. Why don’t you pose that to the audience and see how they react? Of course, as I said, you know, there were so many presentations, I got drowned out in all the presentations.
SPEAKER 04 :
Did you get any feedback on that one? Either during the show or after the presentation, the conference or later?
SPEAKER 02 :
I haven’t seen it. There have been shows that I just haven’t had time to watch and I’m not that interested. I can almost predict what they’re going to say. And I actually had so many other things on my plate. I have like three peer-reviewed papers kind of in the pipeline with a deadline from an editor. And there’s so many other things going on. I just didn’t have time to waste. That’s a testable prediction. I could almost write a critique of myself because I’ve been around them for 20 years. I could almost say, you know what they’re going to say. Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
Okay. So do you have anything major in the works that you can share with us now? So moving past the conference.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I did talk about excitons. Oh, you were mentioning that off.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yes. Super interesting.
SPEAKER 02 :
So I mentioned excitons in the talk and I just showed a slide. I said the exciton transport. is near 100%. I used the word 100% efficient, and Dr. Dan corrected. That was the one critique I did here. He said, it can’t be 100%. I said, okay, nearly 100%. And what an exciton is, this is the new frontier of biology, the biophysics at the nano quantum scale. So you saw with the quantum magnetic compass, that’s one taste of it, the quantum entanglement. There is this thing called quasi-particles. Quasi-particles are there is a new view in physics that all particles are quasi. And they kind of emerge out of, even possibly relativity comes out of the quantum foam. And this is, there were four Nobel prizes shared among 11 physicists, at least. on quasi-particle theory. So when you look at a diode, for example, it takes an exciton and it annihilates it. The proper term is recombination. So when you look at a diode, a light emitting diode, it uses excitons.
SPEAKER 01 :
Stop the tape. Stop the tape. Hey, this is Dominic Enyart. We are out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of this program, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org.
SPEAKER 03 :
Intelligent design and DNA Scholars can’t explain it all away Get ready to be awed By the handiwork of God Tune into Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That’s what I’m talking about
Join Fred Williams and special guest Sal Cordova as they navigate the world of evolutionary biology and engineering. From the incredible quantum compass used by birds for navigation to the sophisticated designs found in deep-sea organisms, this episode challenges prevailing evolutionary theories. With insightful examinations of genetic decay and peer-reviewed research, Cordova provides a fascinating look at why Darwinian processes may not be sufficient to explain the complexity found in nature. Don’t miss this exploration of science’s growing acknowledgement of design in biology.
