Dive into the latest episode of Real Science Radio where hosts Fred and Ryan Williams unravel the intricacies of creation with discussions ranging from the marvels of peacock feathers to the collaborative nature of giant spider webs. This episode is packed with fascinating revelations about the natural world, as Fred and Ryan explore the rarely seen optical phenomenon in peacock feathers, the adaptability of spiders in unusual habitats, and the overlooked complexity of ear muscles.
Evolutionary scientists, when they discover these capabilities, they’re just left guessing. They’re like, oh, how could this be? It’s kind of cool to be on the side where we know that we have a great and powerful God who makes these things be.
SPEAKER 04 :
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 01 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams. And I’m Ryan Williams, creation speaker and software engineer. Well, welcome back, Ryan. But first, there are two all-time firsts for Real Science Radio, and we’re going to get to those in a second. But Ryan, I noticed you’ve got some new digs there behind you. You’re remote. You’re normally in studio, but you’re now remote. So what’s up with that?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, this is my new studio that I set up for a little show I’ve been doing with one of my friends about fantasy football mostly, but it’s been fun.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, yeah, and so for those interested, it’s called the Oil Boys Dynasty, and you guys are actually starting to get quite a following on TikTok, and you’re trying to build your YouTube audience. But anyways, so Ryan, you’re sitting in today for my co-host Doug McBurney. He’s on that proverbial assignment today. Which means you and I are going to go through the latest Creation magazine.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I’m excited. There’s some really interesting stuff in this one from a spider web with over 110,000 spiders and peacocks shooting laser beams. It’s going to be a really good one.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so… And Ryan, I just found out from Doug, I know people are going to want an update on Walt Brown’s ninth edition of the Hydroplate book. Well, unfortunately, it’s looking like mid-June now. And I asked Doug, you know, is this book, is it on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz? And he said it’s a printing problem. They had some kind of printing issue and it delayed production of the book. So, but that should be on target now for mid-June. We apologize for that. And appreciate the patience for everybody waiting on this long-awaited book by Walt Brown, the ninth edition.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, good things come to those who wait, so it’ll be really good. Yeah, and I know you’ve got to pre-order yourself. Speaking of books, I heard that RSR is coming out with a book that you could call me an editor on it.
SPEAKER 01 :
So yeah, we’re coming out with our first Real Science Radio teaching series book titled Jesus, Light, and Design. And we’re expecting that by the end of April. What it does is it pulls in a decent amount of material we’ve covered over the years with Real Science Radio. I think a lot of our listening audience hopefully will like this book. And we’re going to include a hardbook cover version for all of those who pre-ordered Walt Brown’s book and everybody who orders his book up through June when we finally can send those out. So… Again, we’re looking forward to that, and we’ll provide more details later on it. Ryan, that was one of our first, but the other one is super impressive. A first for Real Science Radio is we have a video that hit 1 million views. It surpassed 1 million views. It has well over 100,000 likes. And someone, Ryan, you know, did this video. Your sister did.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it’s an awesome video. Everyone should go watch it. It’s about the asteroid that a couple years ago everybody was freaking out about, thought was going to hit and destroy the Earth. It was about that and about its potential linkage to the Great Flood and the fountains of the Great Deep. So if you haven’t seen it, you should go watch it because it’s pretty good and interesting.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and we’re going to be doing more shorts hopefully coming soon. And we put out shorts all the time from our videos, but we’re going to start making more shorts that are actually produced just to be a short. And Ryan, I know you’re going to be helping with that. So we’re looking forward to that, plus a lot more from the RSR Media publishing arm, including we’re going to have in the next in the series of books is going to be the famous list of not-so-old things. We’re going to do that in book form. And while we’re on the subject, we’ve added two new books to our store from Ellen McHenry. And I just love her books. And we read everything we put on our bookstore. Everything we have on our store is endorsed by us. So her latest is Sun Puzzles. and it’s an alternative look at explaining the sun because the secular model claims nuclear fusion all these things that there’s a lot of problems with them so you can get this book and find out what those problems are and an alternative explanation it’s really while it’s technical it’s easy to read i mean ellen has a really good gift she has quite the gift for writing books the other one is the genius of glenn lair james clerk maxwell you know he was a christian from the 19th century. And it says here, a reader-friendly biography with suggested activities by Ellen Johnson McHenry. So I read this one also, and it’s just really good. I mean, she just, again, has a gift for writing. Those you can find at store.rsr.org. Those are new products. And of course, she’s done in the past for us. We’ve also got You know, this book here, Plasma Astronomy in the Bible, that is so well written. It’s a really interesting idea on alternative explanation for the secular cosmology model. So I encourage you to check those books out. They’re just awesome. So, okay, Ryan, I guess we should get to the Creation Magazine, the latest edition. Yeah, that is really cool, though. A lot of great stuff to read and watch. Yeah, we have RSR Media. You know, we’ve got a lot of things in the works. So now today we’re going to go through Creation Magazine. And this latest edition is Volume 48, Number 2.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and there’s a lot of cool stuff in here. As we mentioned earlier, we got the peacocks and the spiders. There’s also some blue radiation Chernobyl dogs, or at least so they think. So it’ll be fun.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, so this blue dog from Chernobyl. Now, everybody remembers Chernobyl is the nuclear power plant that, you know, was a disaster. And it’s just a disaster zone still, as far as I know. And so that’ll be interesting to talk about these blue Chernobyl dogs. You’ll want to stay tuned for that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, but before we hear about that one, there’s something else we can hear about, which they say is a useless ear muscle.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. You know, that’s a good story to start with, Ryan. And I wanted to start with this one because your wife, Haley, is a PhD doctor in audiology. And so you kind of have some inside baseball on this maybe, perhaps, huh? Yeah, I do.
SPEAKER 03 :
I actually told her about this one and she read it and she actually hadn’t heard of these uses for those muscles. So even doctors have something they can learn. Oh, there you go. So what’s up with this so-called useless muscle? Well, it’s pretty cool. It’s a classic. You’ve got these things that are so-called vestigial structures that they say is useless and is left over from past evolution and just is still around even though it’s not used anymore, and that’s an evidence for evolution. I remember being in class in college, and they used this as one of their big evidences of evolution, that, oh, there’s all this stuff that’s worthless. Well, in the ear, they thought these muscles were, except for like wiggling your ear a little bit. But actually, they found they have some potential pretty important uses, like being able to distinguish sound in like a room where there’s a whole bunch of different things going on. And they help you be able to focus on certain things, which is kind of cool.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so what you’re saying is like if you have competing sounds… These ear muscles kind of help you tune in to those sounds so you can kind of decipher between all the chaos that’s happening, basically?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. Yeah, pretty much.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I know mine get quite the workout, especially when I’m driving and, you know, with the wife in the car. Yeah. And, you know, maybe there’s a sports event on and she’s trying to talk about maybe something her and her friends are doing. So maybe my muscle, those muscles are really trying to sink in on the radio probably. So anyways. Okay. So, yeah, you know, there’s this long history of vestigial organs. And it’s really just scientists that, you know, they have this worldview. They go to college and they learn all about evolution. And the next thing you know, they’re taught how these certain organs are useless. So they do really bad things like take tonsils out when they shouldn’t. And, you know, they claim the appendix was useless. And now we know that isn’t. And here’s just yet another example. This is really cool because I had never heard of this one either. I’ve heard of a lot of so-called vestigial organs that turned out not to be so. But yet here is another one. The muscles on the ear. That’s really cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and it’s interesting how they ended it, too. They said that more research is needed and more work is needed to figure out more, which would be kind of great if they used that kind of honest science earlier on, saying, hey, we don’t know what this does, but let’s try to learn more about it instead of just saying, oh, this is worthless, stamp vestigial, evidence for evolution, and moving on.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yep. So those listening to KLTT in Denver, 1230 every lunchtime hour in Denver every Friday… So as you’re driving down the road, if you’re listening to the radio and you’re getting distracted, hopefully those ear muscles are tuning you into the radio show and also focusing on your drive. Or if you’re at work at lunch, enjoying a good real science radio, the bottom line here, Ryan, design just keeps winning.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep, it always does.
SPEAKER 01 :
Another example. Okay, the next one is peacocks shooting lasers. Now, what is that all about? Peacocks shooting laser.
SPEAKER 03 :
Laser light, right? Yeah, it’s interesting, but it’s not… They’re not like Superman shooting lasers out of their eyes. It’s actually… These scientists applied a fluorescent dye to the peacock tail feathers and then illuminated it. Under those conditions, the eye spots in the tail feathers… showed previously unknown optical properties and emitted low-intensity laser light, specifically strong orange at 583 nanometers and weaker green-yellow at 574 nanometers.
SPEAKER 01 :
So there’s this interference pattern going on with these really elaborate structures. And so the peacock, Ryan, it’s not walking around zapping the barnyard, right? It’s not as if Scotty was yelling, we need more power, Captain! No.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it’s not like you’re at the Denver Zoo when those peacocks are lighting people up.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, they have to have a glass enclosure to keep people from, you know, like they do with poisonous snakes and stuff.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, yeah. So it’s not quite a Federation weapon. But it does mean that these tales are super sophisticated, and they were already really beautiful, and that was a wonder. But they’ve even got more stuff that we’re still learning about. Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, and you know, we’ve talked about the morph butterfly before, and I’ve got some specimens in my house, and it’s really cool when you look at them at different angles, you know, there’s that iridescent light that you see. And it’s a similar thing, and they’ve got these structures on their wings, and if you look at them through a microscope, they’re almost like little Christmas trees connected together. And so light hits into these crevices in the wings that are really precisely designed to And it causes an interference pattern, which is so cool. And then it’s, you know, pretty much this nanostructure design of these peacock feathers. It’s the same concept, but in this case, there’s actually laser light coming out from these eyes inside of the feather, you know, the part that’s solid. And it’s just amazing how it just bounces light back and forth and then aligns specific wavelengths to create these laser lights.
SPEAKER 03 :
Makes you wonder, like, how can that be explained? We often hear that beauty in nature is explainable by selection, which I still think is a pretty big jump. But something like this, these really complex nanostructures that emit low-frequency laser light back, like, that’s… How does that come from random mutations over time?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, exactly. And you know, I mentioned the morph butterfly. We talk about that in the upcoming book, Jesus Light and Design. That one’s already in production. It’s already with a book formatter. And too bad I didn’t know about this story because this would have been a good one to add to that section. Yeah. The book talks a lot about light and how it’s so important to life in general, how it ties to Jesus and design. So again, we’ll have that book out hopefully by the end of the month.
SPEAKER 03 :
I guess now you’ve got something for volume two in that book.
SPEAKER 01 :
There you go. A volume two or a second edition. Yeah, exactly. And Ryan, it reminds me. This whole thing about peacocks and natural selection, the evolution is trying to explain it. They try to figure out how does this help it survive. It’s just so goofy. But when we look at it, we know we see elegance, precision, and just excess beauty. And it reminds me of a verse that I have on my saltwater tank, a little plaque that says, God made his works to be remembered. And that’s Psalm 111, verse 4 says, And I like how it ends that verse. So it says, he has made his wonderful works to be remembered. The Lord is gracious and full of compassion. So he kind of ties those together. Really cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
Exactly. And it’s fun to know this cool stuff is from the Lord. Instead of evolutionary scientists, when they discover these capabilities, they’re just left guessing. They’re like, oh, how could this be? It’s kind of cool to be on the side where we know that we have a great and powerful God who makes these things be.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, absolutely. So the takeaway here, again, you look at even the peacock feather, the more we learn, the more we find it’s not some crudity, but craftsmanship. So Brian, the next topic is, wow, giant spider web. This one is amazing. It’s 110,000 spiders. Now what’s up with that?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it sounds to me kind of like a nightmare, but it is interesting. Yeah, there’s this cave where there’s these two different species of spiders, and there’s 110,000 of them. And they’ve got this massive elaborate web that covers 106 square meters, which is about 1,100 square feet. And it’s just a patchwork of thousands of individual funnel-shaped webs. And 60% were one species of spider and 40% were another species.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Okay, so two different spider species. And they’re both usually solitary. And they’re now living together in what this article basically calls a giant spider megacity. And I Googled, I tried to come up with an analogy and I thought, okay, we’re talking to Ryan Williams today. He always does our creation magazines. He’s recently started a podcast on fantasy football. So I looked for an analogy with football. It’s the same as 2,500 footballs laid side by side. That’s how big this web is. So take 2,500, 2,500 footballs, put them side by side. And that’s how big this spider web is. Now, how would you like… We’ll have to get right on talking about that in the next show. Well, yeah, there you go. So on your next podcast, I expect to see the Oil Boys Dynasty talking about these giant spider webs. We will. We will. You know, we live in Colorado. And for five years, I lived in Missouri. I call it misery. One of the things I didn’t like about Missouri or Missouri is if you were walking out in the woods or even by your house or something, I don’t know how many times I walked through a spider web. And you’re like, man, I know that guy’s on me somewhere, you know. Can you imagine walking into a spider web that’s the equivalent of 2,500 footballs? I mean, walking through that thing? And 110,000 spiders. I mean, yeah, that’s like an Indiana Jones-type movie scene right there.
SPEAKER 03 :
I know. But the explanation of it is pretty fascinating. Basically, this cave environment has a bunch of hydrogen sulfide gas, which is the one that smells like rotten eggs. And there’s these bacteria that thrive there, and that bacteria is food for these flies, which they call midges. So these flies go and get this food, and the spiders built the web in between so that these flies all get caught in their web, and then they basically got endless food.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. So, yeah, sounds like the abundance of food kind of changes their behavior pattern, right? It does. Yep. Okay. Well, the article also suggests natural selection has worked against solidarity for these spiders. So, in other words, this isn’t an example of molecules-to-man evolution. It’s an example of creatures exhibiting flexibility and And response to a very unusual setting. And I did want to make an important distinction. This is adaptation. This isn’t, again, some kind of long, over billions of years evolution. I want to circle back to natural selection. There’s another article that references it. Ryan, was there anything else on this spider web?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. I thought flexibility was a good word to describe it because… It doesn’t really seem like something where you need new genes. So we need a cool mutation of this happening. It seems like flexibility. This is stuff that’s programmed into these creatures that most of the time they’re not going to do. But in the right situation, they will. And they’ll coexist with these other spiders to get some food. But one other angle I thought was interesting the article had was it talks about how the hydrogen sulfide that was in there. A lot of times it comes from decaying organic matter, which creationists have long suggested rapid cave formation that hydrogen sulfide would be evidence of. So just kind of another layer of this story in these cave systems that also back to the Bible has to say. All right.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so from spiderwebs to Ryan, it’s time for the interesting fact of the week. Are you ready? Oh, and you know, this particular segment is sponsored by Lawrence in Republic, Missouri. So again, if you want to sponsor an interesting fact of the week or sponsor a show, go to Just go to store.rsr.org and then click on the sponsor link and there’s different sponsorships you can do. And we’ll mention yourself on the air unless you explicitly reach out to us and say, hey, I want a sponsor show, but don’t mention my name. You know, every now and then we get a few that just kind of want to be anonymous. And so anyways, we thank Lawrence in Republic, Missouri. And so Ryan. This one’s for Lawrence. Living like Larry. That’s right. So here’s the interesting fact of the week. Why do higher frequency sounds tend to be harder for older adults to hear first? Oh, I actually know this one. I think. And Ryan, you can’t phone a friend. You can’t phone Haley, who I think is probably at work now. Because I know she would know this answer for sure.
SPEAKER 03 :
Because I’m almost positive she’s told me this before. So I should know it. I just can’t remember off the top of my head. Let me see. Hold on. I’ve got my finger on that red button. Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
They hear high frequency? Is it high frequency they have a lifetime hearing?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yes. Why do higher frequency sounds tend to be harder for us older codgers to hear?
SPEAKER 03 :
Is it because of the shape of the ear canal? Maybe it gets a little… Oh, I enjoy doing that.
SPEAKER 01 :
High frequency hearing loss often happens when the tiny hair cells in the inner ear get damaged.
SPEAKER 03 :
Really? Interesting. That’s almost counterintuitive because old people have all sorts of hair in their ears.
SPEAKER 01 :
I resemble every mark. Okay. Well, on that note, let’s lead into the next story here. which is this one’s kind of humorous. It’s Chernobyl’s blue dogs. You know, this one got some evolution that’s excited because we’re like, hey, dogs have evolved. Some dogs can evolve into the color blue. So what’s up with this one?
SPEAKER 03 :
When Chernobyl was weak, you kind of teased earlier. There’s the exclusion zone, and people can’t be in there, or else, you know, you get all sorts of issues. But there’s some animals that have been in there. So there’s different theories of these wolves that maybe or maybe not are immune to cancer or something. But the researchers recently saw these three blue dogs walking around. And as you alluded to, they get all excited. They’re like, oh, no, this might be some sort of evolutionary innovation. The radiation… cause rapid mutations in their cells and now they’re blue. But the article’s explanation is a lot less glamorous. It turns out the dogs had tipped over to porta potty and that nasty blue water they have in there got all over them. They might have been rolling around in it or something. But
SPEAKER 01 :
So they eventually found out, oh, hey, wait, you know, they’re trying to figure out, they’re doing genetic studies, whatever they’re doing. And oh, look over there, there’s a porta potty. It’s got blue. They find out that the dogs tipped it over and that’s why they’re blue. Hilarious. Oh, man. Yeah. I couldn’t resist including that story. That was in the latest creation magazine. That’s pretty funny. So this one captures kind of the problem with science reporting. We see the same thing with the mainstream media. People get eager for some dramatic narrative, and it’s just another worldview where they want to believe this mutation leads to evolution story. But in this case, once again, they’re wrong, and it was just an ordinary, messy, port-a-potty episode. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
I think at least for those dogs’ sake, you know, hopefully, you know, there weren’t any people near there for years, so hopefully it was just blue and nothing else.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay. Okay, so Ryan, the next story is solar system traveling faster than predictions allow. And Ryan, here’s one for the astronomy buffs. Researchers say the solar system appears to be moving through space about 3.7 times faster than than the standard cosmology predicts. So, you know, this kind of ties to last week’s show. So we talked about the Apollo model. It has a lot of promise. And that model, we talk about how space isn’t just emptiness. There’s something there. And you don’t need relative Einsteinian special relativity for this stuff to work. It’s a really interesting show. I encourage people to go back and watch that series. There’s a lot of technical stuff. But if you watch part three that ends the show, we get more into this Ebola model. So it kind of ties with this whole thing about, hey, they’re looking at something that shows it 3.7 times faster. And what’s this article? How does it deduce that, Ryan?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so it essentially takes signals from distant radio galaxies and similar results from quasars. And they, I don’t know exactly they do it because I’m no expert, but they use that to measure the speed that the solar system is traveling in. And they can use that to determine that it’s traveling 3.7 times faster than they expected. And it’s interesting because one of the researchers said they need to question fundamental assumptions about the large scale structure of the universe, which it seems like that’s something we hear all the time. They always have to change something. They always have some idea as a result of the Big Bang or whatever new theory they like. And they notice something different and they’ve got to change the whole thing again.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, how many times we’ve seen this phrase, question fundamental assumptions. Yeah. You know, of course, creationist angle is that the universe isn’t as smooth and tidy as the Big Bang cosmology expects it to be. And, you know, findings like these just keep putting more and more pressure on these guys. And again, I’d like to refer people back to last week’s show on the Apollo model. Really interesting stuff. So, you know, every few years, cosmology has to patch another leak. I’d say every few weeks, it seems like. And, you know, we’re not embarrassed by that, Ryan. No, we’re not.
SPEAKER 03 :
We’re not embarrassed for them. It’s like the worst boat of all time. Always springing leaks in new places. Exactly.
SPEAKER 01 :
Okay, so Ryan, is there another story you want to cover?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, I thought the anteater one was pretty good. It was interesting. The question was… Did anteaters evolve a dozen times independently? And the evolutionist claim is that there’s like 12 different anteater species, and they all had to evolve independently, individually, because they weren’t close enough to each other to have a common ancestor. So they call it, I think, convergent evolution.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yep. Yeah, that’s their magic wand, just so story. They like to throw, you know, grab words out of a hat. Oh, convergent evolution. So, you know, and then they try to explain this By saying that ants and termites became much more abundant, so these lineages, these mammal lineages, repeatedly evolved into anteaters, because there’s more of them. Well, I’m going to evolve into eating ants, and I’ll be an anteater. And so they got 12 different independent paths of evolving into anteaters. It’s just… It’s remarkable to me, Ryan, how people, when they’re clinging to a worldview, how they can say this stuff with a straight face.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, it’s crazy how your move is, you see these things couldn’t have evolved from a common ancestor. So your next move is saying, oh, they just all did it independently on their own. This major distinction, this huge thing that’s pretty unbelievable to have in one. So no, it actually happened 12 times. You’re going to cling to that instead of maybe thinking there’s a creator? Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, they say that the eye has evolved down 40 separate independent paths. And you just look at how complex the eye is. It’s remarkable, again, the gesso stories and, you know, how they just, again, how they say this with a straight face, but they’re so used to believing the fairy tale.
SPEAKER 03 :
I was going to say, eating these ants isn’t, you know, like the most simple thing of all time either. It’s not like they have dietary changes. These anteaters have lower body temperatures than most mammals, so they can… live in the areas that they’re in. They have these long, sticky tongues and specialized claws and stomachs. So this isn’t just something that’s a dietary thing that they, it’s evolved 12 different times, the desire to eat ants. There’s actually a lot of physical structures that they need to have in order to effectively get their food.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah. And I’ve always said, as you look at something that man has made, like Ryan, the chips you make at Micron, you know, the NAND storage devices, as you look at them under a microscope, they become more and more simple. It’s just like there’s more air, there’s more space. They just become more simple. But when you look at something that God’s created, they always become more complex. So I guarantee you, if you look at this sticky tongue, it’s going to get more and more complex as you look closer and closer at it. In fact, what good is a sticky tongue, you know, without the right feeding behavior, um, You know, the coordination of this whole thing matters. You mentioned the specialized claws. All of these things, reduced teeth, altered metabolism that these guys have to have. And they have to have digestive adjustments. This is all an integrated system. It all has to work together. And somehow this evolved 12 different independent times. Unbelievable that they think that that happened. Their faith is blind, unlike ours, which is an intelligent faith. I mean, you have to have a lot of blind faith to think this happened 12 different times, as complex as it is. It’s remarkable.
SPEAKER 02 :
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 in to Real Science Radio Turn up the Real Science Radio Keeping it real That’s what I’m talking about
