Join Fred and Doug on Real Science Radio as they unravel the newly proposed theories on the origin of life, scrutinizing reports that claim to have cracked this age-old mystery. As they discuss science journalism and how it’s shaping public perception of these scientific breakthroughs, they remind listeners of the importance of looking beyond sensational headlines. Tune in for an engaging discussion on oysters, parasites, and the ongoing clash between creationist and evolutionary viewpoints.
Then he says, but give these chemicals billions of years to bounce around and anything can happen. At which point any real scientist would stop and say, wait a minute, did you say anything can happen?
SPEAKER 04 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune in to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 04 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 03 :
And I’m Doug McBurney, Bible student, amateur comedian. Fred, it’s great to be back in studio. I want to start with a story about, well, I don’t know if it’s about worms or oysters, but what caught my attention was the oyster part. And then we’ve got some really exciting news from the world of… evolutionary cosmology… Well, the story’s too big. I don’t even want to… That’s enough of a tease. I can’t give the headline, but this is really big. Big. But the worm and the oyster is where I want to start. For obvious reasons.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. So this is from Science Daily, and this is back in November 5th, 2025. So just, you know, not that long ago. Yeah, yeah. 480 million year old parasite still infects oysters today. And the subtitle, a parasite that plagued ancient seas still worms its way into modern oysters.
SPEAKER 03 :
Shocking.
SPEAKER 02 :
Half a billion years later. Okay, now… Half a billion. Half a billion. Half a billion years. What’s a half a billion between friends?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, right? It’s like you’re writing a budget in Washington, D.C., where a half a billion now is, that’s like a rounding error. You know, a half a billion here, a half a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money. Well, before we get to the story of the parasite that appears to not have evolved… Which is interesting that a story written by believers in evolutionary biology are pointing out that something appears not to have evolved. But all that aside, how do you feel about eating oysters, Fred?
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, eating oysters, you know, it’s funny you mentioned this because it was just a really literally this last weekend. Sandy and my son are like, somehow oysters came up. They’re like… I don’t think I’ve ever tried oysters. And they’re like, oh, you did. And I’m like, I did? When? And they told me when. And, you know, because I’m aging, I don’t remember when they said I did.
SPEAKER 03 :
Don’t remember what you ate.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And they said I actually liked them. Because I like mussels. Generally, I like seafood. And they said, you actually liked oysters. I’m like, okay, well, that’s good to know. Maybe next time they’re on the menu, I might order them. Okay. I think I like them.
SPEAKER 03 :
You think you like them? You’ve been told you like them, at least. Okay. Well, I thought it was funny that you said… Oysters came up because that’s kind of how I feel about oysters. They came up. Yeah, if I were to eat oysters, they would probably come up. But I was exposed first to oysters as a young man, and eating them was kind of a dare type thing. We’re with some guys who are from the South, and they’re implying that being able to eat oysters… Are you a man or not? Can you eat these oysters or not? And so, of course, all of us ate the oysters and pretended that it was great. But really, I was disgusted and I thought it was like the most horrible thing I’d ever done. Are they Rocky Mountain oysters? No, I don’t know. No. Okay. I’m not going there.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m never going to try those. Yeah, I don’t think I will either. That’s not really a seafood, that one.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s not seafood. No, that’s grass-fed from what I understand, at least in Colorado. So I went through the oyster eating trauma in order to prove my manhood to these guys from the South who I never saw again. And they had zero impact on my life in any other way. But then, so I wasn’t really a fan of oysters until I traveled to New Orleans. And I found out that you can deep fry the oysters, and then you can put them on this wonderful French baguette bread, smother them in mayonnaise, and it’s fantastic. It’s called a fried oyster po’ boy. Oh. A fried oyster, poor boy. So there’s one way I can eat oysters, and pretty much almost anything, is deep fried on a baguette with lots of mayonnaise. I can eat almost anything that way.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, I can guarantee whenever I had the oysters that they claimed that I ate, it would have been something like that. It would have been in some kind of really good sauce. Because I can’t imagine eating oysters right out of the shell. It’d be a slippery yuck. You would remember that. Yeah. No matter how bad you remember. I still have… Your hypothalamus is damaged.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, my hypothalamus was damaged from that, but I did go through it. Regardless of how we feel about oysters, and hopefully we haven’t hurt anyone’s feelings or offended anyone who is a really big fan of oysters, you have to be really careful these days because people are… very sensitive and you don’t want to tread on somebody’s somebody might draw a significant amount of their self-esteem from their relationship with oysters and we don’t want to hurt you in any way don’t and if you want we can create a safe zone so doug if i ever offend you over here is a little side room yeah you know that could be our safe room Okay, so we’ve got a safe zone. It has two sliding doors so that you can enter from the left or the right because we don’t discriminate. And then you can close yourself in and sit in the dark for a little while. All right.
SPEAKER 02 :
So, Doug, imagine not changing your lifestyle for nearly half a billion years. I mean, that’s what they’re playing with these oysters. Yes, yes. It just never changed its lifestyle. And have you changed your lifestyle since you were born?
SPEAKER 03 :
I’ve changed my lifestyle significantly just since I tried those oysters. Yes, absolutely. So there are claims out there that I’ve heard since I was in third grade that everything is constantly evolving. Because I remember asking my teacher, how come I can’t see the monkeys evolving? And they say, well, it happens really slow. And then I would ask, how come there are still monkeys? Well, not every monkey evolved. What are you, a stupid kid? And I’m like, I’m just asking questions. I don’t know. I don’t get all this. So somehow this is one of those parasites, which is a little worm, that somehow got left out of the evolutionary event and just has stayed the same, according to evolutionary biologists, for nearly 500 million years. 470 million years. Yeah. And they say it’s not similar. It’s not somewhat like its ancestral form. It’s the same. It’s the same, yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
470 million years later. So these researchers, they were looking at these fossil shells from Morocco. And they found these distinct question mark shaped burrows. And they recognized that pattern immediately because guess what? That same parasite that never changed for half a billion years makes the same burrows today in modern oysters.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and you throw those ones away. You don’t eat them if they got that shape on there, right? It’s like that one’s got the parasite.
SPEAKER 02 :
And it says they are spiny worms. They bore into the shell, not the meat, destabilizing the oyster. Oh. And so the fossils showed exactly the same boring pattern, the exact same thing in what’s supposed to be half a billion years old. Same shape, scale, same behavior. And the headlines, Doug, of course, they’re trained. They’ve got this bias. They call it, this is an evolutionary success.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, oh, I get it. I get it. I bet I can tell you. They’re going to say that this thing evolved so perfectly that natural selection hasn’t had to make any changes for 470 billion years. Did I say billion? I’m sorry. I said billion. I meant million.
SPEAKER 02 :
And so this creature, I guess, him and his many ancestors, family, tree, from granddad all the way down to great-great-great-granddad, all these worms through time, they got to see the rise of fish. Oh, yeah, that’s right. Emergence of land life. Oh, wait. Are you reading from the article? I’m not, but dinosaurs come and go. Mammals evolve. Primates evolve. Humans evolve. They got to see all of this. Oh, wow. Not change a bit. I’m not changing. Right, right, right. I like his lifestyle. Yeah. worms like yeah no i’m good so yeah this isn’t evolution doug we i mean we kid around but this is stasis the bible says that living things reproduce according to their kind and they don’t change into new kinds this thing is the same as it was when god created it that’s we see that everywhere the entire fossil record is full of stasis that’s why i think it was stephen j gould who postulated punctuated equilibrium that everything happened so fast that we didn’t see it and That’s why you see stasis in the fossil record. In fact, he said that stasis in the fossil record was evidence for his punctuated equilibrium, that things happen so fast in small, isolated environments, you don’t see them. Silly. Circular reasoning. But that’s what you end up with when you try to cling to this view that everything’s millions and billions of years. They have this worldview. They’re indoctrinated. And they can’t just say, hey, you know, this is pretty good evidence that this is the same. This creature didn’t evolve for millions of years. And it’s all part of… the recent creation about 6,000 years ago.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, which was a success, by the way. We’re going to call this a creation success. God created this worm to do its thing with the oysters, and it’s been working perfectly for roughly… 5,864 years, or give or take.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and one of our new bylines that we’ve stolen, we’ve plagiarized rather badly. Yes. We could get in trouble. Well, no, we do give him credit every time. We do. We give him credit every time. Dr. Joel Brown. That’s right. Of CRS. He’s now the director of the Creation Research Society. We had him on. It’s been about two months now. It was a really good show. I recommend people go watch it. Really good show. Well, all science is creation science.
SPEAKER 03 :
All science is creation science. Dr. Joel Brown standing on the shoulders of Kevin Anderson over there.
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. So we had a recent news show and you should go back and watch that on science. And we talk about that with the immune system. So that episode.
SPEAKER 03 :
All sciences, creation science, even this parasite that… Now, I wonder if… Now, this is an off topic, but… You know, you think of the creation, and at the end of six days, everything was good. And then it was very good, which… That’s better than good. That’s perfect. Right? So, were there parasites infecting oysters before the fall? No. That’s that. I’ll save that one to ask God when I get to heaven.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, well, you know, I would say that there was some symbiotic relationship, perhaps.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, and maybe that relationship isn’t what it used to be because of the fall. But it’s quite possible, you know, and this could be with… With viruses and bacteria, the chances are there were symbiotic relationships that were all good before the fall that are just now flawed. Yeah. Anyway, it’s all interesting stuff to look at.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, speaking of interesting, I think this is the right time for Interesting Fact of the Week. The question I have to ask you, the interesting fact, actually plays into this. okay so let’s let’s take wait a minute have we finished with this worm i mean this worm’s been hanging out for 400 yeah 180 million years and you’re gonna do like 10 minutes worm about five minutes of justice 500 million year lifespan he’s been hanging in there for so long waiting for his big break All right. Okay, so here’s the interesting fact of the week. What actually causes a pearl to form inside of an oyster?
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, that’s too easy, Fred. Although, this is one of those things that I’ve always assumed I knew. Okay. That I might end up being wrong about. Okay, but I’ve always assumed… that what happened was a grain of sand gets inside the shell and the oyster is moving around trying to get the sand out and it rubs all up against the mother of pearl and eventually gets bigger and bigger and bigger until it becomes a pearl. That’s not right. I had such a sophisticated, there were several events that I’ve all had in my mind this whole time about how a pearl forms.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, think about how with the creation, the fall of creation, how God can still take something that’s bad and kind of make something good out of it. So we were just talking about a parasite. So it’s a parasite or irritant. What forms the pearl. So the parasite helps do it. So next time, does your wife have a pearl necklace? Mine does, but she doesn’t wear it. Because I guess they’re out of style. Yeah, my wife has some pearls. Say, hey, you know that pearl necklace? That was made by a bunch of parasites. Yeah, a bunch of parasites. That’s a parasite necklace. Oh man, that would not go over well.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so there’s a parasitic involvement that I was not aware of, but at least I was on the right track with these irritated.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, maybe it’s possible that sand, maybe occasionally, but apparently from my research, And you know what? We could be wrong. Check us out, because I had to look this one up pretty quickly, because I forgot about the interesting fact of the week, and so I did a quick… Well, I was only… Interesting fact related to pearls. So I’m relying on the internet telling me correctly. It may not. Sometimes we find out it doesn’t.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you know what I’ve noticed is that there are a lot of good biology and naturalist researchers who are out there doing good science, and my guess is… We might know something about pearl formation now that we didn’t know 50 years ago when I was told how pearls formed. I think my kindergarten teacher might have told me how she thought pearls formed. Chances are we’ve discovered some things since then. Another interesting, deep topic that we could get into. We can either do it here on Real Science Radio or we can save these notes when we get to heaven.
SPEAKER 02 :
So next, Doug, is they’ve figured out, and I think your teacher told you this too. One of your teachers, the origin of life, they figured it out, Doug.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is the big news. Scientists say they may have just figured out the origin of life. So they may have. May have just figured out. But I remember my sixth grade science teacher saying, That he told me they had figured it out back then, which was quite some time ago. But here, it seems like they may have just figured it out.
SPEAKER 02 :
It’s like when they say they found the missing link. So they’re admitting the link was missing all that time. And then they find out it’s not a missing link. But later on, you’re going to find out they finally found the missing link.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. And someone needs to point out that you can only find the missing link once. Yeah. That’s it. Then, okay. Anyway, so this is like… Is the missing link that they keep finding, is it the missing link? And is this theory, the latest theory that we’ll talk a little bit about here, about the origin of life, is it… Really? Have they really figured anything out? Well, that’s why they put may have in the title of the article. They ask, how did the building blocks of life come together to spawn the first organisms? It’s one of the most longstanding questions in biology. And scientists just got a major clue. First of all, So we have a book that tells us how the building blocks of life came together. So they didn’t just come together. First of all, where did the building blocks for life come from? Forget about how did they come together? Where did they come from? Well, it hasn’t been a longstanding question here at Real Science Radio. But out there in the world, there are actually smart, intelligent people who Who earn a living serving their fellow human beings. They’re obviously functional people in the world who are pursuing these questions. These poor people. I pity them. Me too. To be expending so much valuable energy on such silliness. Yeah. Anyway.
SPEAKER 02 :
Complete waste of time. Yes. Complete waste. Dr. James Tour, we’ve had him on the show several times, and he does a tremendous job refuting all these guys that come out and claim they found the original. They figured it out. So here in this case, they’re referring, Doug, to amino acids that have been found. So they talk about how they’ve been found longer than life has been on our planet. They’ve been around longer. Why? Because they’ve found amino acids plus all the five major ingredients of DNA and RNA called nucleotides on asteroid samples. Oh, plucked directly from outer space.
SPEAKER 03 :
And so for them, this proves that the amino acids must have been around before there was life because, of course, the comets and asteroids have been flinging around in space since the primordial formation 4 billion, 13 billion, I forget how many billion, but it’s several billions of years.
SPEAKER 02 :
And the secular idea is that, well, that’s how life got seeded here, from asteroids. Right. And unfortunately, there are even, you know, there’s creation scientists who have opposed the idea that they found amino acids. Well, now we’ve actually plucked them right off of asteroids. And this supports the hydroplate theory. That all these rocks that are in space floating around, all these rock piles, dirty snowballs, all these, they’re ugly too, Doug. These things are ugly.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 02 :
God didn’t create those things as just ugly garbage he’s going to put in space flying around.
SPEAKER 03 :
That might hit something and hurt something.
SPEAKER 02 :
It came from Earth. Yeah. It came from the mountains of the great deep. The best evidence I’ve seen. Oh, absolutely. That they come from the Earth. And you find a rock on the moon. I’ve mentioned this many times, but in case you haven’t heard it, find a rock. Alan Shepard finds a rock on the moon that came from 20 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface in a watery environment. That’s NASA. Wow. That’s NASA, people. That isn’t us trying to promote the hydroplate theory.
SPEAKER 03 :
No, although we do promote the hydroplate theory relatively.
SPEAKER 02 :
But it’s not us here. That’s NASA saying they found a rock on the moon that came from the Earth’s watery environment 20 kilometers beneath the Earth’s surface. Mm-hmm. And if they found one rock, if Alan Shepard stepped on one rock, is that a fluke rock? Just super lucky that he won the Earth rock lottery by stepping on the one rock. There’s actually this piece of rock embedded in this other rock. It’s like, no, there’s a lot of rocks from the Earth that came from a watery environment because the front side of the moon is peppered as it would with this event that occurred. Hydroplate theory explains it wonderfully.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep, check it out. In the beginning, the 9th edition will be available, hopefully for Christmas. Pretty soon, yeah. We’ll be selling it here at Real Snacks Radio. Absolutely. Yes, and so we want to… Oh, by the way, I believe it aired not too long ago with Kevin Lee. There will be a prediction. There was a prediction made, I’m sorry, about what will be observed when researchers take a look at Dimorphos and the effects of that DART mission where we smacked that little satellite into what turned out to be a flying rock pile, by the way. There is a prediction time stamp, date stamp. We’re not going to be able to deny it. If we’re proven to be wrong, it’ll be right out there, hanging right out there. But if we’re proven to be right, it’ll be out there. We put it out there because this is the best evidence we’ve seen for why things look the way they do. And Dr. Brown started with the Bible. And so that’s a great place to start when you’re trying to explain why are things the way they are. Good place to start is in the Bible and in Genesis. In fact, you should start with this sentence. If you’re starting a research project in the beginning, that’s the best sentence. In the beginning, God. There you go. Start there. All right. So now, do we have anything more? Oh, I do want to talk a little bit about journalism. Because the way the article is written here in, I believe this was picked up by Yahoo News, which, what is that? To even say Yahoo News, I feel like I’m in a cartoon. But Yahoo News, it’s basically what’s left of parts of the Associated Press and parts of Newsweek magazine and some other… Aging liberals who… Anyway, they edit for Yahoo News and they hire young journalist reporter types, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think they even call themselves reporters anymore. They call themselves journalists… Because reporter just isn’t fancy enough. But reporters are valuable because reporters go and they get the facts. Hey, headline, headline, here’s what happened. And they tell you what happened. But journalists are more storytellers. Which if you’re going to report on stories like this, you really want to be a storyteller. Listen to how the Yahoo News… He says, the curious thing about amino acids, though, is that they don’t easily link together. Something has to kickstart the chemistry that allows life as we know it.
SPEAKER 02 :
So imagine a Scrabble board. You got all these letters and they’re scrambled. Yeah. And that’s what they have. And so they need to somehow make those things come together and form coherent words, basically. Yes, yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
And you’re not supposed to notice that in the headline were the words origin of life. but they don’t want you to, where did the letters come from that are scattered all over the board? No, you’re not supposed to ask that. We’re talking about the origin of life. It’s like, well, but that’s the word origin. No, you’re supposed to keep going on and listen to this. There’s a new study and it’s published in the journal nature. Oh, there’s supposed to be like violins and the big kettle drums to go to do. A team of biologists threw together a watery stew of pantothene and amino acids. The amino acids reacted with the compound to create aminoacyl thiol. This thiol combined with free-floating RNA in water at a neutral pH to start a reaction that transferred the amino acids to the RNA, linking them together. Okay, so I want to object to the phrase, threw together a watery stew, because you can’t then describe the watery stew in as much detail as you just described it and still call it a watery stew. And you can’t say they threw it together. That’s not… That would happen. They put this all together very carefully in an experiment to try to make something happen. And guess what? They made it happen. Why did they make it happen? Because they were intelligently putting things together to try to make something happen. They didn’t throw together a watery stew. Thank you very much, Mr. Journalist.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, so the article does mention this Dr. Nick Lane. He’s an original life chemist at UCL who wasn’t involved in the study. First of all, why would anybody be an origin of life chemist? It’s a complete waste of time. Can you imagine going through your entire life? You’re going to meet the creator of the universe. And what would you do? You know, you come to the pearly gates. Bad analogy, but you’re facing God, Jesus, the creator. Yeah. What was your job? Because God will ask questions like that. He knows what the answer is, obviously. But he wants to give you a chance to explain yourself. What did you do for your career? Oh, I was an origin of life chemist. By the way, I was the origin of life. I originated everything. So do you know anything about me? Well, no, I think it was a stew of amino acids. Well, no, by then they’re going to be so frightened. I mean, you’re in the hands of the living.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, that’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, there won’t be any smart aleck answers. There won’t be. So Nick Lane said this. He cautioned to the magazine that the amino acid chains being produced are random and chaotic, unlike the orderly arrangements produced by ribosomes, the ones that God creates.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes.
SPEAKER 02 :
And remember, we’ve had Dr. Royal Truman on. We’ve had Dr. James Tour. Well, Royal Truman, he was a professional chemist. He did it for a living. I believe he got his PhD from Michigan State. And he said, we asked him, what do chemists, you know, all your chemistry engineer buddies think of origin of life? They’re like, they kind of just ignore it because it’s silly. There’s no evidence for it. And I remember one of the things he said is they’ll alter the experiment to stop at just the right time because if you run it, slightly even slightly right along yes yes everything dies off so they have to control this experiment where is that really how things happen in this premortal soup it knew right when to stop no so there’s no way you can do this this guy nick lane said they still have not cracked that problem and then here it is they do they say they’ve found you know they’ve solved the original life
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, they do put in the art. This is why you have to read things like a lawyer. They may have just figured out. Please don’t assume that we’re making any assertion that anything has actually happened. We’re just reporting on what may have happened.
SPEAKER 02 :
And like you said, they just figured it out, but they keep just figuring it out every time. A couple months.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes, yes, yes. And then the author of the article, whose name I did not take down, which I probably should have because he should be embarrassed in front of his mother for writing this at the end of the article. He literally writes, the author of the article at Yahoo News, he writes, well, they haven’t cracked that problem. He quotes the scientist, Mr. Lane. And then he says, but… Give these chemicals billions of years to bounce around, and anything can happen. At which point, any real scientist would stop and say, wait a minute, did you say anything can happen? Because there’s a rule in science that you eliminate things that are absurd. And I think that somewhere along the line in the origin of life research community, the idea of eliminating the absurd had to be eliminated itself. You’re no longer allowed to eliminate the absurd because the absurd is necessary to try to form your science, a foundation for your science. Instead of eliminating the absurd, deleting the absurd, you have to assume the absurd and start with the absurd. And it’s all very absurd.
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 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away. Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God.
SPEAKER 1 :
Tune into Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real. That’s what I’m talking about.
