In this riveting episode, Dr. Joel Brown and hosts Fred Williams and Doug McBurney venture into the depths of what it means to do creation science. From the challenges of extracting dinosaur DNA to groundbreaking discoveries in soft tissue preservation, the discussion raises thought-provoking questions about the current paradigm in evolutionary biology. Explore the role of the Creation Research Society in leading creation-based empirical research and understand how science functions best when it embraces repeatable, measurable experimentation.
All empirical science is creation science because God made the world. Empirical science is the study of how the world works. So all empirical science is creation science. So even evolutionists do creation science.
SPEAKER 04 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 04 :
Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. Welcome to Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 06 :
And I’m Doug McBurney, science geek, amateur comedian. Fred, it is great to be back with you talking about real science on Friday.
SPEAKER 02 :
Today, we are honored to have with us Dr. Joel Brown. Director of the Creation Research Society, the oldest creation organization in the world. It was founded back in 1963, and it’s still going strong today. So welcome to the show, Dr. Joel Brown.
SPEAKER 03 :
Thank you, Fred and Doug. Thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
So, you know, full disclosure, guys, I have a long history with CRS myself. I served as their webmaster for, I think, 20 some odd years. So, you know, over the years, I’ve seen firsthand the quality of their research and the commitment to scripture. It was always such an honor to work with so many great scientists at the Creation Research Society. Yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, it’s funny you say that, Fred, because you have a much better, deeper understanding of CRS than probably I do. You’re probably the expert in the room right now.
SPEAKER 06 :
Now, we do need to clarify for some of the younger people in the audience. Fred was not the webmaster in 1963. I think that was a different guy, a much older guy.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for clarifying that for us, Doug. Yeah, definitely not 63. I think I started in 64. Just kidding. Yeah. I think it was probably around the 1998 timeframe, 2000, somewhere in there. So yeah, Glenn Wolfram, Dr. Wolfram kind of ran that part of the organization. And he reached out to me one day and said, hey, would you like to be our webmaster? And I’m like, yeah, sure. Yeah, it was great.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I’m the new kid on the block, and I’m sure I’ll kind of fill in some of these details as we go. But I have been a CRS member for a grand total of two years now. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, yeah, and let me clarify, I’m the director of the research lab here, director of the society, but We have a board president and those sorts of things.
SPEAKER 02 :
Gotcha. Oh, that’s right. You’re the director of the lab. You took over Kevin Anderson, the late, great Kevin Anderson’s role. That’s right. Yeah, huge, huge shoes to fill. I know his wife, Diane, and she still works for CRS. Yeah, you know, Kevin Anderson, the first time I heard him speak, it’s one of the number one arguments I still use today. And I learned it from Kevin. And it was about how… DNA not only, you know, sequences and builds a protein one way, but it does a whole nother thing when read backwards. And so I use that analogy all the time of try to write a book that tells a story and then write another, tells another story by reading the book backwards. Yeah. And I think Kevin was also a molecular biologist, I believe. And I think that’s your discipline, Dr. Brown.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s exactly what I would put it. My background is in molecular biology and genetics. And for the audience, that’s also known as tiny stuff, which you cannot see without a very expensive microscope.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And you’ve got some good equipment there at the CRS lab, and that’s in Arizona, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. You know, that was one of the big surprises for me and a pleasant surprise. Coming into this position, the Lord was doing some things in my life. I was actually very comfortable as a teacher. I was a high school science teacher in the St. Louis area, in the public school system. And life was good. But I had this, you know, sinking feeling that I needed to be doing more with the training that God had given me. I needed to be using that more for His glory. And then right around that time, I stumbled into CRS and joined the Society, the oldest, largest network of creation scientists in the world. So I joined the Society. And at the same time, they were looking for a director out here at the lab. The Lord worked in our hearts to move us out here. It was not a decision we took lightly because our family, it was a big move for us. But when I landed here, I was thinking in my head like, okay, boy, how do you run a lab from scratch? And it wasn’t completely from scratch because Kevin had started setting it up. And I was really impressed at the things he had already assembled. to be able to work, have a functional lab. Now, we don’t have all the facilities that you have at a place like Cornell University or an Ivy League research institution. but we have a very impressive functional lab space here.
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay. Now I, Hey, now I want to get to the lab because I want to hear about that, but let’s go back real quick. You’re teaching high school science in the St. Louis area. And it sounds like you were already a Christian. When did you become a Christian and what’s the story there?
SPEAKER 03 :
Good question. So, you know, I was blessed to have been raised in a Christian home and, and, That’s the greatest blessing in the world. Now, I chose to serve and follow Christ and believe on Christ and become a Christian when I was about five years old. My dad was actually a pastor. So I heard the gospel like right out of the womb. But of course, you have to, and this is critical, you have to personalize it at some point. You have to make a decision for yourself. And for me, I did that at a very young age. And I I grew up with actually, it didn’t turn me off growing up in a Christian home. And sometimes it does to other people, but I had godly parents that just raised us in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And I mean, here’s the thing. They taught us to love God’s word, but they didn’t teach us to avoid the pursuit of knowledge or the pursuit of science or education and academics. And so it is very possible to do both. And I’m a big proponent of Yeah, you can love God, you can serve God, you can pursue God, and you can love science, you can pursue science. God made science.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah, well, he wrote a book that tells a story one way and then another way, and there’s probably 6,000 or 6,000 other ways we haven’t figured out yet. So, wow, that’s inspirational. And just for any young people out there who are thinking about having kids or maybe you want to go into the ministry, I’ve told a number of young men, The most effective ministry you can have in your life is to get married and have children and raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Just like you said, Dr. Brown, thank you to your parents and God bless them and your whole family. That’s awesome.
SPEAKER 03 :
Amen. And let me echo that. So I now am a father as well, and I have eight children. And I always tell people the family first, like that is my mission. Number one is my family. And to when I run into creation scientists out there and other young researchers out there who are building a young family, I always remind them family first in terms of our mission with God. let’s raise those kids and bring them up to be God honoring people in the future. Oh, awesome.
SPEAKER 02 :
Wow. So let’s, I want to get back to your lab. I’m really curious what, you know, CRS is doing right now. Do you have like interns come in? Like, you know, give us a rundown of your whole setup there in Arizona.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, good question. So about four years ago, we moved from a desert space, CRS, and this is called the Van Andel Creation Research Center. That’s our our fancy name for the lab. The lab was out in the desert in northern Arizona. And then an opportunity arose to move here to the Phoenix area onto the campus of Arizona Christian University. And really, this has been a godsend. It’s been a very great collaborative, symbiotic relationship between us and the university. But now we have this beautiful lab space, fully renovated, newly renovated, and it’s Most importantly, we now are on a campus with eager students that are just dying to do things in the laboratory to grind bone and all that fun stuff, which can get monotonous. It’s nice to have that young zeal in the lab. It’s been a really nice relationship. We are working with the students here. We’ll have five students in our lab starting this August. The most we’ve ever had. So it’s a growing program. I’m the full-time staff researcher. We also have some part-time techs or a part-time tech and some volunteers that help out in the lab to push the research forward.
SPEAKER 06 :
And now is everything you’re doing like top secret or is there anything that you can talk about?
SPEAKER 03 :
If I told you, I’d have to take you out back and shoot you. Oh, no. Let me show you one of the things we’re working with. This is a bone, in case you didn’t know. Okay. It’s an alligator bone. So we called up an alligator farm in Florida, and we said, hey, can you send us the biggest legs from your biggest alligators that you got? And sure enough, they send us, FedEx arrived a couple days later, and a box full of alligator legs. And so we dissected those legs and pulled out these leg bones. Now, the reason we’re interested in these leg bones is because this bone is dead. It’s no longer part of the living alligator. But it’s not just a mineral structure. Bones are made up of a mineral component, and they’re interwoven with protein. Actually, a protein that is the most abundant protein in your body right now. So these bones are loaded with collagen. And so now we can take it and say, well, this alligator died a year ago. Is there still collagen in this bone?
SPEAKER 06 :
I’m going to guess yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, yeah. Tons of it.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah?
SPEAKER 03 :
Tons of it. In fact, collagen is an extremely stable protein by design. You can see in the design of this protein that God designed it such that it would last a long time, and that’s good. Because when the collagen in your body starts to break down— you get these things called wrinkles. Collagen is designed to be very stable. It holds our body together. Sure enough, this bone is still loaded with collagen. Then we can take these bones, we can grind them up, and we can measure how long the collagen lasts. We’ve been doing these experiments over the last year. We did this in cow and ostrich and alligator. You might say, Who cares? It’s a bone with collagen. Well, here’s why it matters. Because collagen is found in dinosaur bones.
SPEAKER 06 :
Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
which are reportedly 66 million years old, and yet we’re finding collagen. So that’s one of our main objectives right now is to study the degradation at an empirical level, so a measurable level, not theoretical, but can we measure the degradation of collagen and project how long it should last? And we can. I’ll give you a spoiler alert. It’s less than a million years.
SPEAKER 1 :
Ha, ha, ha, ha.
SPEAKER 02 :
So, Dr. Brown, is this part of the iDyno project that Kevin Anderson started? Is it still under that moniker?
SPEAKER 03 :
It sure is. And don’t ask me what that stands for because I always forget. Investigating dinosaur and natural osteotissue or something like that.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I had to put that on the website and I don’t remember what it stood for.
SPEAKER 06 :
I thought it was just because it started back when they first launched the iPod and so everything was iDyno. It comes across like that. Oh, that is so cool. You know that here at Real Science Radio, we have a page on our website that’s one of the greatest repositories of dinosaur soft tissue news articles, clinical papers. We link to as much as we can on dinosaur soft tissue. And so it’s the creationists who are investigating an empirical hypothesis What’s the word I’m looking for? A decay curve? Yeah, yeah. An empirical model by which we could actually… So how many evolutionary biologists are involved in this type of work to examine the empirical rate of decay of collagen?
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s interesting. There is actually a field of science around this topic. It’s called bone diagenesis. How a bone converts into a fossil. And so there’s It’s not a very big field, but they actually have a conference of bone diagenesis, and there’s a couple big names that are the experts in the field. And it was actually these folks that were the biggest critics when Mary Schweitzer found the soft tissue and collagen because they were crying foul like, no, no, no, no, no. We are collagen decay experts, and collagen does not last 66 million years. Oh, man. So they were the biggest critics of it back, you know, 20 years ago when this stuff started unfolding. Now most of them have come around to the idea that evolutionists are pushing that. Well, we just, we don’t understand how collagen decays.
SPEAKER 1 :
Hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
It must last 66 million years.
SPEAKER 06 :
Isn’t that odd how a group of experts who have been studying a subject for years, maybe decades, would suddenly say that they don’t know? That seems odd to me. I think they would know.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I mean, they certainly knew 20 years ago.
SPEAKER 06 :
Yeah. And so will your research confirm what they thought they knew 20 years ago?
SPEAKER 03 :
It does. In fact, you know, so they publish kind of their theoretical models of how long collagen should last. And there was even some empirical work done. And our data using a different approach matches their data very nicely. In other words, it’s just another point of comparison to say, yeah, collagen does not last 66 million years under these conditions.
SPEAKER 06 :
And by the way, I appreciate the fact that our audience is hearing you say, we know that evolutionary biologists and scientists, we know they do real science. We know they know how to do real science. And we don’t discredit everything they say just because…
SPEAKER 03 :
we’re creationists your research is going to confirm maybe it will help with their self-esteem that they won’t have to admit that they were a failure they’ll say you know what we actually we actually got that right well and this is by the way how science is supposed to work yeah where things are repeatable where what you do in one lab in arizona matches what somebody did in the uk and you kind of get this multi-points of reference to say all right here’s what we know at an empirical level, what’s happening with collagen. Now, I want to make a distinction between empirical science, which is what we do, which is what even evolutionary scientists can do. They can do empirical science. And all empirical science is creation science because God made the world. Empirical science is the study of how the world works. So all empirical science is creation science. So even evolutionists do creation science. The difference is when they make the historical interpretations. And now you’re getting into historical science, which is non-empirical. It really shouldn’t even be called science.
SPEAKER 02 :
CRS pioneered the way with this whole dinosaur soft tissue along with Kevin Anderson, Mark Armitage all started this. And then Harvard and Stanford, they kind of came on board here a little bit later. And you know, it’s interesting. So my daughter, when she was in college, she had a tutor. And she mentioned to him about all this dinosaur soft tissue. And he said, that’s not true, blah, blah, blah. And so she gave him that list that we keep at RSR. It’s rsr.org slash dino. And I think Dr. Brian Thomas now manages that list and all these scientific papers. And he just, he didn’t know what to say. I mean, cause he’d said, oh, you don’t have any, you know, where’s your peer reviewed papers? You know, as you get that from that stock answer, a lot of times from evolutionists go, where’s the peer reviewed studies? Oh, here you go. Here’s this really big, long list from Stanford, Harvard. I mean, the guy had nothing to say. I mean, how, how can you respond to that? So it’s like you said, I love how you put it, you know, really evolutionary scientists that are doing creation science. I think that’s the first time I’ve heard someone say that. I like that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Hey, and I appreciate you guys putting that list together because I stumbled across that list, I think, through Brian Thomas. And I was like, this is fantastic. Now I use it too. Awesome.
SPEAKER 06 :
Well, and I’m sure we’ll be adding more to the list as people crack open more dinosaur bones. By the way, is that something that you guys would be interested in doing at the lab? Is that something you can do? Is that something maybe members of our audience could help you get your lab up to being able to do?
SPEAKER 03 :
And what specifically are you referring to?
SPEAKER 06 :
Like cracking open dinosaur bones and looking for collagen. Could you do that right now?
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay. Yes, absolutely. But we are looking to the next stage now. And let me like pull the curtain back a little bit and tell you kind of the next stage. In fact, you might be able to guess the next stage. So we’re finding collagen in dinosaur bones, not just us, secular labs as well. If there’s proteins present, could there be… DNA. Okay, yeah. Fred, you’re right on. Now, this is another one of those things where evolutionists have been saying for years and years and years that DNA is… I mean, protein is a really big surprise, but DNA is impossible because DNA is more fragile than proteins. Proteins are designed to be more stable. DNA is designed to be read and unwound and recreated and copied. So it’s a lot more fragile. So they have said we have a good track record of them saying it’s impossible to get DNA from dinosaur bones, impossible to get DNA from dinosaur bones. And so it might surprise you. It surprised me when I first realized, you know, in light of all the Jurassic world and all the Hollywood around this, there is no dinosaur DNA known. It has never been sequenced. And so this is a good opportunity for us as creationists to say, wait a second. Our worldview would actually predict that in some, in the right conditions, dinosaur DNA does exist. And so we need to find it and sequence it.
SPEAKER 06 :
Absolutely. And so if it seems to me, even if the dinosaurs died 5,000 years ago, fighting dinosaur DNA is going to be pretty difficult.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s right, because we know that the half-life of DNA, they say, is 521 years. Now, that’s based on evolutionary estimates, 520 years. Our timeline would compress that a little further because they were basing it on radiometric dating and such, and our creation interpretation would compress that. So it’s less than 500 years, the half-life of DNA. So even 5,000 years is a long time. And we expect the DNA to be almost completely gone, to be highly degraded, to be very fragmentary. But here’s the thing. Under the right conditions, which would be either a very dry condition or a very cold condition, then that degradation process is going to slow down a lot.
SPEAKER 06 :
on a planet as big as ours with a catastrophe as big as the flood and 4,500, 5,000 years of history, chances are those conditions exist somewhere.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. I mean, we know that there are dinosaur bones in Antarctica, in Alaska. So you asked, is this something that the listeners could help CRS with? The answer is yes. So right now, CRS is not working alone. CRS is a society. So we have members in several different labs. We are creating kind of a team that’s going after dinosaur DNA. And There are two sides of this. One side is figuring out the lab techniques, the approaches that we need to use in the lab to be able to extract and sequence the DNA. And then the other side of this is to go out into the field and find fresh samples that we can try to get the DNA from.
SPEAKER 06 :
That sounds fun. I wish I was 20 years old and going to college and I’d love to go.
SPEAKER 03 :
We’ll send you to Antarctica.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, you know, I seem to recall, and I was looking here and I couldn’t find it. In the journal Bone, I thought they had reported finding dinosaur DNA. And then I did find a Scientific American article from 2020. And a Chinese lab claimed that they found signatures of what is DNA. There’s a page on Rational Wiki. You know, it’s against creationists. And they mentioned that… Pretty much, if you find DNA in dinosaurs, you’d expect if creation is true, if young Earth is true, that you’d find DNA in dinosaurs, but none has been found. It’s like, you guys better be careful because we kind of have found it, and yet they still have that little blurb on their rational wiki. At least last time I checked. Every time I do a talk, I go and I double check so that I can show that. you know, in my presentation, here’s what they said. They gave a criteria, you know, for dinosaurs fitting in with the Bible and they say, well, you should find DNA. Well, guess what? I think we are. And Dr. Brown, so what’s your take on that? What’s, do you know exactly what has been found as far as dinosaur DNA? Is it still a little bit in the speculative area or has there been hard proof yet? Or is that what we’re really trying to discover?
SPEAKER 03 :
So in the secular world, it’s still a little bit in the speculative area. Like I said, they’ve already chosen sides and said it’s impossible. So that kind of biases what they believe will be found. But there are still a couple of secular labs that are interested in it and pursuing it. Mary Schweitzer. is all kind of dabbling in it. Although she’s not a biblical creationist, she has been dogged in her determination to find these biomolecules in these ancient fossils. And so she’s still interested in pursuing it. They haven’t been successful yet. But what they have found is there are these dyes that you can use in the lab. And these dyes, they stain DNA. And so they can section these fossils and find bone cells in them, and they can stain them with this dye, and sure enough, it lights up. These dyes are binding something in there, and it’s probably DNA. But what we want, and this would be the gold standard, is actual sequence, to be able to sequence the DNA and build some dinosaur genes, maybe a whole dinosaur genome down the road. Wow.
SPEAKER 02 :
If you do, they could do a Hollywood movie like, oh, wait a minute, they already did.
SPEAKER 03 :
And we’ve seen how that ends.
SPEAKER 02 :
Exactly.
SPEAKER 06 :
Be careful. Hey, so Fred, make a note to the producers. We’re going to send Mary Schweitzer a link so that she can watch this video because whether Mary knows it or not, her place in scientific history is already established. It doesn’t matter that she tried to back away. It doesn’t matter that she’s kind of shrunk from it a little bit. Her place in scientific history a thousand years from now is already there. And so I do hope she does continue to pursue and to work because she should get the credit that’s due for her initial discovery. And someday she will, whether in this life or the next, she will.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I have to be, you know, we have to be a scientist, kind of this cautious optimism. That’s the approach we take to science because this is not trivial. This is the sequencing of Neanderthal DNA, which was post-flood. dna it was done but it was very hard to do and so we we’ve got a long road ahead of us but i’m cautiously optimistic that we’re going to be able to get something oh absolutely so i want to ask you about collagen and something else but before we do that i gotta hit doug with the interesting fact of the week
SPEAKER 02 :
oh okay all right well fred please ask me something about collagen because i i might know a little bit about college okay here we go about collagen what’s the fastest growing plant on the earth sorry it’s not about collagen what’s the fastest growing plant on earth
SPEAKER 06 :
Okay, well, you had me on that one, Fred, because I was starting to think collagen in a plant. I hadn’t heard that, although I know there are a lot of plant-based skin creams that we rub on our face, supposed to help with the collagen. Let’s see, the fastest growing plant on Earth would be Microsoft’s new AI power plant down in Texas. Is that close?
SPEAKER 02 :
No, just kidding, Doug. All right.
SPEAKER 06 :
So I’m going to guess it’s that black fungus in my shower.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s the bamboo. Grows up to 35 inches per day.
SPEAKER 06 :
What? 35 inches a day?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, up to 35 inches per day. Wow. Bamboo. Bamboo. Okay.
SPEAKER 06 :
That must be why those little bamboo rugs are so cheap at Walmart. Because, I mean, this stuff’s just out of control.
SPEAKER 02 :
All right. Pretty cool, Fred. Bamboo. All right. So back to collagen. So we interviewed Dr. Carl Baugh, I don’t know, a couple years ago. In their lab, I believe, and Doug, refresh my memory if I’m remembering this wrong, but I thought that they had found collagen in trilobites. Do you recall that? And Brian Thomas was, I think, involved in that a little bit. Joel, have you heard of that at all?
SPEAKER 03 :
There’s certainly talk of finding soft tissue in even, quote-unquote, older organisms. In our worldview, they are early flood. And I visited the Creation Evidence Museum, Karl Maas Museum. lab in Texas, and it’s a great place. They’ve got a really nice facility there and are able to do a lot of good work. So we collaborate with them. I would be cautious, though, about, you know, it requires multiple points of evidence before we can claim there’s collagen in a trilobite. But it’s a worthwhile thing to go after. But now, here’s the thing. Collagen, we would not expect to be in a trilobite. But there could be other proteins there. Collagen is a vertebrate protein. It’s in mammals and dinosaurs and things like that. But there would be other structural proteins like potentially chitin, which is abundant in exoskeletons of modern arthropods and insects.
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 04 :
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 Keepin’ it real That’s what I’m talkin’ about
