Fred and Ryan take a fascinating look at contradictions within scientific communities, spotlighting instances where staunch atheists like Richard Dawkins find themselves defending traditional biological concepts. Furthermore, they highlight the intriguing exploration of the asteroid Bennu, gleaning insights that challenge conventional theories on life’s origins. As our hosts move through cutting-edge research borrowed from the animal kingdom, prepare to be amazed by technological developments inspired by the humble desert ant’s navigation abilities.
It’s a broken clock is right twice a day kind of a situation.
SPEAKER 03 :
This is so dumb that even Richard Dawkins came out against it.
SPEAKER 05 :
design and DNA. Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune into Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 05 :
Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
SPEAKER 03 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in the country. This is Real Science Radio. I’m Fred Williams.
SPEAKER 04 :
And I’m Ryan Williams, creation speaker and software engineer.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s my old line, Ryan, and I’m glad for you to have it now. But we’re also glad to have you back in studio. People have been wondering, where have you been hiding? Where? Ryan Williams. People like this Creation Magazine segment that we do. You’re here with the latest Creation Magazine. So, Ryan, where have you been hiding?
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s good to be back. Out from under the rock I’ve been under. This is going to be fun. This is going to be fun. I’m excited to be back.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yep. Okay. So, yay. You know him. You love him. He’s here to do the latest Creation Magazine. And this is Creation Magazine, Volume 47, Number 3. So, Ryan, what’s on the cover of the magazine?
SPEAKER 04 :
We have the pangolin. The pangolin. Yeah, something I had never heard of before reading this. I was like, I saw it on the cover. I’m like, what is that thing? It’s kind of a cool little creature, so it’ll be fun to talk about it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Is that a – that’s not the musical instrument, the mandolin?
SPEAKER 04 :
No, no. It’s not an uninspiring instrument. It’s a real creature. Okay. The magazine describes it as a cross between a pine cone and a pineapple. So when I first looked at it, like this thing looks like an armadillo. So it sort of looks like that. If you have access to the magazine, you can see the pictures of it. It looks pretty cool. Maybe we can throw one up on here. But – It’s got some pretty interesting features to it. Like, it’s got, like, the scales are pretty strong, made out of keratin, which is just kind of what a lot of things on a lot of creatures, including some things we have in our bodies are made of. It’s got these claws in the front that it kind of, like, has curled like this, and it’ll… used to dig to get to you know it’s prey so you know like little ants or whatever it wants to eat when it’s threatened by a predator it can roll up into a ball then protect itself and they’ve got another picture of that in here it looks kind of cool when it’s rolled up into its little ball for defense but yeah I think it’s name comes from the word rolling up as a ball so yeah it means one who rolls up which is a melee word actually which is kind of interesting A what? Melee.
SPEAKER 03 :
Melee?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, that’s like Malaysian.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh, okay. Gotcha. Melee. I thought it was something different.
SPEAKER 04 :
Not like a fight?
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So, Ryan, did this thing evolve from something?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, so evolutionists thought that it had evolved from the same line as anteaters and armadillos and things like that. But then once we had more DNA research and… They found more things like, oh, no, it actually is completely unrelated genetically to those two creatures. So then they have to use their famous word of convergent evolution to explain how they have really similar traits. The fossil record is pretty limited before, like, there’s not really anything leading up to this thing. Like, they just don’t have much to go off of. And it’s just nice about being creationists is we know, it’s like, oh, we see it. means God created its particular kind and then you know over time there can be some variation like a there’s extinct fossilized ones that do apparently have a little bit more diversity than the ones we have now but that’s easy just you know small changes within kinds is we know can happen biblically
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so they just show up and they show up suddenly in the fossil record. And you said the word convergent evolution. That’s a major rescue device that they use when they can’t explain why this thing doesn’t fit into an evolutionary tree. So in order for it to be, hey, related to like an anteater that’s way over here. On the evolutionary tree. They say that it evolved all these same features independent of the other. I know that they say the eyeball has evolved 40 separate times during these 40 different creatures. Because our eyeball, for example, is very similar to an octopus’s eyeball. Yet evolutionists aren’t going to say that, hey, we’re a real close ancestor to octopuses. So it’s a rescue device.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Not uncommon.
SPEAKER 04 :
You have to get… extraordinarily lucky twice, or in the case of the eye, 40 times.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, exactly. So Ryan, the next one I thought was interesting, and this is from the focus section. It’s shark skin inspires fuel-saving airplane coatings. And it talks about how sharks have very rough skin because it’s covered with dermal denticels. These are tiny, flat, V-shaped scales that resemble teeth more than scales. And so right away, Ryan, you read that and you think, well, how is that going to make it fly better? You know, it seems like that’d be more…
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I don’t think it’ll help it fly better since sharks don’t fly. Seriously?
SPEAKER 01 :
Seriously.
SPEAKER 04 :
But it does make it swim better, which is kind of interesting.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, we may discover a flying shark, but anyway. Yeah, so to me that was super interesting because you would think that it would increase drag. It’s not a smooth surface.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, but it turns out that the way they’re kind of just oriented on the shark’s body, the water will go through the little, I guess, canals, for lack of a better word, that are in there. And it actually makes it more aerodynamic. Well, I guess water dynamic. And according to the article, it says it can reduce drag by up to 10%, which is pretty cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. It says it refers to micro vortices that help the water flow more smoothly around the shark despite being in a form of turbulence themselves.
SPEAKER 04 :
It turns out Olympic swimmers tried to steal this, and they made sharkskin-inspired swimsuits, but they were breaking records and too elite, so they had to ban those things and say you can’t wear any sort of full swimsuit. They can wear Speedos. Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, we had Dr. Michael Agnor on last week. And he talked about how doing his job as a neurosurgeon and just being in the medical field, you can’t do, you can’t actually study and know things without reverse engineering it. Now, you know about reverse engineering. You’re an engineer at Micron. And so here’s another example where in order, you know, they have to, they reverse engineer the shark skin and to improve on, you know, airplanes, the airplane coatings for fuel savings. And you have to look at God’s incredible design. You have to look at design. You have to look at something. In order to reverse engineer something, it has to be engineered in the first place. So this is another great example that’s covered again in Creation Ministries International Creation Magazine. It’s our favorite magazine. And we’re going to go through a few more articles. Now, one of the articles we’re going to come up upon is one that we don’t think that Creation Ministries International actually covered the topic like we would have wanted. In fact, we think they missed something very important. And that’s kind of a tease. We’ll get to that in a second. So, Ryan, what do you have next?
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, in the meantime, I know you’ve been itching for your interesting fact of the week. So, you just want to do it so you can buzz me and get it over with?
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, well, the interesting fact of the week. So, Ryan, this one is interesting because it’s actually… buried inside this magazine, and I’m going to see if you can actually get this right.
SPEAKER 04 :
It’s okay if I look at your screen? Okay, so… I’ll look away. I’ll look over there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Here’s the interesting fact of the week. What living creature can click out defensive sounds to confuse its predators, but is completely deaf and can’t hear the sounds it’s making?
SPEAKER 04 :
Hmm. Hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
And it actually was mentioned in this magazine. So it’s kind of a quiz of how much of this, you know, I know you’d like to go through a lot of the articles, but that one was kind of buried in like a, you know, certain section kind of towards the end of the magazine. So I thought I’m going to see if you, is it a bat?
SPEAKER 04 :
I didn’t know because, you know, okay, that probably wasn’t the best guess. I deserve that.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, bat isn’t bad, I mean, because it has echolocation.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, and I’m like, I don’t think it hears its echolocation.
SPEAKER 03 :
It kind of feels it. As far as I know, bats aren’t deaf.
SPEAKER 04 :
Dolphins aren’t deaf, are they?
SPEAKER 03 :
That was a question. You want to try another one?
SPEAKER 04 :
Um, hmm.
SPEAKER 03 :
I don’t know. What is this thing? Okay, so this thing, I hope I can pronounce it. It’s eponomyota. I was so close. I was so close. It’s a eponomyota moth. It’s a moth. Wow. Huh. And you’re probably a big fan of moths, huh?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I love them. They’re great.
SPEAKER 03 :
Okay, so, Ryan, what’s the next?
SPEAKER 04 :
You just picked that one because it was impossible. You just wanted to buzz me.
SPEAKER 03 :
If you would have said moth, I would have given it to you.
SPEAKER 04 :
okay i didn’t even know moths to collect in the first place okay so ryan what do you have next in creation magazine um i thought the um forest from a warmer period one was pretty interesting okay yeah that is a pretty good one and why is that what is does that have anything to do with uh global warming well it’s kind of relevant for today they basically in wyoming they found that because of you know the the article obviously didn’t say it but i’m sure that the uh researchers would say, oh, global warming is causing this snow patch on the top of some mountains in Wyoming to melt and reveal what’s below. And when they looked at what’s below, they found a forest that didn’t really look like a forest from a cold, frozen mountaintop. It looked like a warm forest. So that’s why the article’s titled A Forest from a Previous Warm Period, is this forest was pretty… reminiscent of what you’d expect for a warm force to be, which pretty much a takeaway from the article is it shows that there have been warm periods in the past too. And I’m going to go on a limb and say that, you know, there didn’t have super high carbon emissions during that warming period. So I don’t think that you can blame humans for that. Maybe it just shows that the earth goes through cycles and there can be warm cycles and be cold cycles. And You know, it’s not all because man is causing global warming and, you know, we have to fearmonger everybody into thinking that we’re all going to be underwater in 10 years or, you know, then 10 years and they have to say it’s 10 years later again because their prediction has never come true. There’s these places that our current warm period is kind of revealing to us that show things from the past that we didn’t even know about, which is kind of cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we’ve had Dr. Paul Homan on. He was the head meteorologist for the Air Force Academy. And we’ve had some great shows on this whole notion of global warming and climate change and all the nonsense, the greenhouse gases, which is mostly water vapor, by the way, so not man-made problems causing the environment. Now, we need to still be good stewards of our environment, but this whole global warming thing has been blown out of proportion. And people die because of it. There’s a lot of people starving because of these stupid policies they do for global warming.
SPEAKER 04 :
A lot of countries want to develop, but they can’t develop because they have all these rules they have to follow by these global committees that don’t actually care.
SPEAKER 03 :
Exactly. And so a lot of that we cover in the shows with Paul Homan, and we hope to have him on again, hopefully in the fall. So, Ryan, the next article that I wanted to talk about that I kind of got a kick out of, so this is again in the focus section and it’s atheist reaping what he has sowed and this has to do with the old good old buddy old pal richard dawkins so he’s long fought against god we most people in creation and even most evolutionists know who richard dawkins is i think it’s supposed to be a spokesperson yeah he’s the media guy for evolution well anyways So along with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, he has actively promoted atheism. But recently, this organization published an article advocating gender ideology, that an individual’s gender is a personal preference, which is just so dumb. It’s remarkably dumb.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, just completely dumb. Just completely anti-science.
SPEAKER 03 :
How anti-Genesis can you get? And that’s what it all boils down to.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, I was shocked that Richard Dawkins was also against it. That was what I found extra shocking from this. It’s a broken clock is right twice a day kind of a situation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, this is so dumb that even Richard Dawkins came out against it. So he came out along with other atheists, including Jerry Coyne, and they were outraged. And they said it’s impossible biologically for humans to change sex. Thank you. I mean, that’s so obvious. And so guess what?
SPEAKER 04 :
At least Richie can know basic biology.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So this association, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Dawkins accused them of denying science. So then the FFRF, they censored Dawkins and Jerry Coyne. And so these guys resigned from this organization. So… It’s funny, though. What’s the great irony here? And they mention it here. That Dawkins and Coyne and these guys, they’ve been denying science their whole lives. Yeah. Because the scientific evidence for evolution has become so overwhelming that you’re without excuse, you know, from Romans 1, to deny that everything is created by God, intelligent design. It’s without a doubt they will be without excuse. And in fact, they mentioned that here, that people suppress the truth and so become fools. And this is the Bible calling them fools. And so Richard Dawkins, he’s seeing the fruit of rejecting God.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s interesting. Okay, Ryan, so this next one, this is the one I referred to earlier where we don’t completely agree with Creation Ministries International, the way they approach this one. And this is on the asteroid Bennu. So, you know, Kevin Lee’s been saying for a long time that one of the great arguments for the hydroplate theory, we have all this evidence from space that really supports the theory. But one of the things that answers is these things that have life on them, like Bennu, this asteroid. And the secular evolutionists, they like to say, well, hey, this is how life came to Earth.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, because you see some little things on this asteroid. You’re like, oh, look, there’s little… They’re not proteins, but even the small amino acids. They’re like, oh, look at that. It can just be there.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and so they think, well, that’s seeded life on the planet. Well, guess what? We’re finding some of these things that really do… Have life on them. The evidence is pretty, in my opinion, it’s becoming more and more overwhelming. And so we think this is a weak approach, a weak argument that they’re using against this. And so the article mentions Bennu and how NASA launched a spacecraft and it brought back these samples. And so it notes in the article, this one in Focus section of Creation Magazine, that many secular scientists were excited since these included some of the building blocks of life. including, for example, 14 out of the 20 amino acids used in proteins. So, what this magazine notes, what Creation Magazine notes, is that the amino acids were racemic. So, in other words, they were 50-50, left hand, right hand. So, in life, everything would be left-handed in this particular example. So, when something dies, then it becomes racemized. And that’s always been an argument for creation because why is all this life that we find that’s been extinct for millions of years, why is the amino acids racemized? But guess what? They can be racemized in like 4,000 or 5,000 years easily. We would expect that. And so… We think they’re missing out on the important argument that we think Bennu actually came from Earth as part of the fountains of the great deep. But unfortunately, we’ve been kind of battling the major creation groups because they’re more lockstep with catastrophic plate tectonics, something Real Science Radio has opposed for decades, really. And we just think it’s become more and more untenable over time. and the hydroplate theory has become more in line with what we see scientifically, what we observe. So Ryan, I quickly want to play a clip, and I know we’ve shown this before on Real Science Radio, and it’s from Astro Alexandria, but it really drives the point home. Here’s a secular person who does these really cool shorts from stuff discovered by NASA. It’s a one-minute clip, and you’ve got to watch it if you haven’t seen this. You’ve got to ask yourself, Is this evidence that perhaps all the asteroids and comets came from the Genesis flood? Let’s roll this one minute short from Astro Alexandria.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is the most insane space news in a really long time. This asteroid called Bennu is 63 million kilometers away. That’s 160 times farther than the moon is. Over the last few years, this spacecraft called OSIRIS-REx traveled all the way there, touched its surface, grabbed a sample, and brought it all the way back to Earth. And what they found in that sample is insane. It’s rich in carbon, nitrogen, and organic compounds, all of which are essential to life as we know it, but we’ve seen that before. The asteroid is also covered in a mineral called serpentine, which looks like this. And these samples look just like the type of rock that we find here in mid-ocean ridges. This is where the stuff from the mantle of the Earth comes up and touches the water. It’s underwater. Scientists think that this asteroid could be a chunk of an ancient small ocean world. This could be a piece of an old watery planet that’s been traveling through space for billions of years and we just took a sample of it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Wow, Ryan, so what did you think of that? Have you seen that clip before?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, I have. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty cool. You just have the cracker on the earth, just like a baseball at Mid-Oceanic Ridge. They look close near the Serpent’s Night on there, and they find the same thing on Bennu. It’s just pretty cool. Really, really interesting. And just… It makes it easy to explain. It’s like, oh, how’s their life on… How’s their these building blocks of life on Bennu, these amino acids? It’s because it came from Earth. Even if those left-hand, right-hand percentages aren’t the same, it’s still just too… It’s just pretty overwhelming that that came from Earth. It’s…
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and it’s funny because it mentions in the video, too, about how it shows this watery planet at the end. And it’s like Kevin Lee says, let’s call that Earth. And so you’ve got, again, evidence that the global flood, that there’s a breaking up of the Fountains of the Great Deep, which she shows in her short, you know, the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. And guess what? Where they mostly find serpentinite is along the Mid-Oceanic Ridge. And we’ve got so many other examples of the evidence in space for the hydroplate theory. We’ve got two great shows that we’ve done with Kevin Lee. I’d highly encourage you to go back and watch those if you haven’t seen them, and we’ll link to those from this show. And we do plan on having Kevin Lee back in the fall sometime, and he’ll give us an update on the hydroplate theory and other things that they’re finding out in space. It’s super exciting. We kind of hope we’re working hard to get the major creation organizations to come on board. They kind of got locked into this catastrophic plate tectonics, which we’ve talked about that before on Real Science Radio. Just honestly, I think the odds of that one being true are less than a half a percent. I’d be shocked if that’s a viable theory. It’s based on modeling that… You know, models, you can’t rely on models. It’s so abstract. And the type of model that’s done relies on miracles. You know, I could go on and on about the problems with catastrophic plate tectonics. And if you haven’t seen our book, 20 Reasons to Question Plate Tectonics by Ellis Hughes. And you can get that at rsr.org slash store. All right, Ryan. So what’s next?
SPEAKER 04 :
You know, I thought the dire world de-extinction was pretty cool.
SPEAKER 03 :
That is interesting. So a dire wolf, you know, that’s something… When I hear dire wolf, I think of like a Hollywood movie or something.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, you think of like some fantastical thing. And it’s kind of interesting because they did sort of take… Hollywood almost inspired because they looked at Jurassic Park and how, you know, in the movie they, you know, use genetics to bring back dinosaurs. And they pretty much tried to do a really similar thing with the extinct dire wolf, which is kind of cool. So it is sort of, the dire wolf itself sounds very Hollywood-y and fantastical, but, you know, the movie kind of inspired the research too.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, and so what the article talks about is how there’s been attempts to bring back extinct animals, including the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. So now a biotech company claims to have successfully de-extinct the ice age dire wolf. So that’s pretty cool. So they use this CRISPR technology. I know a lot of our listeners who are familiar with the whole genome project and CRISPR, they’ll know what that is. CRISPR technology, they edited the genome from gray wolf blood cells to match. They did things like replacing the nuclei of the gray wolf egg cells. They did a whole bunch of stuff, and they produced three healthy puppies with the characteristic thick white coat of dire wolves.
SPEAKER 04 :
There is some criticism for it.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, yeah. And it says here, some scientists think photos and press releases are inadequate evidence. And calling these dire wolves are premature. So we’ll see.
SPEAKER 04 :
And they think it’s, they say that it’s like, the scientists will say it’s just a gray wolf that they…
SPEAKER 03 :
gave a white coat to make it look like what they think a dire wolf would look like but it’s still kind of interesting nevertheless yeah it’s interesting and you know i don’t know on this one you know um but they claim to have achieved this and here’s what the director of this australian center for ancient dna he says that all the company has done is create a genetically engineered gray wolf that looks like what the company thinks a dire wolf might have looked like so So all of this is up for debate. I think it’s interesting and scary, too. I’m not sure you have to worry about the kind of stuff that the minds of men will come up with and what they’ll try to do next with humans or who knows what.
SPEAKER 04 :
Well, it’s kind of like what the movie got at, too. Like, you know, especially the first Jurassic Park movie, although, you know, riddled with, you know, evolution. It was kind of the theme of the movie was how ethical is it to be genetically engineering all this stuff to do what you want? Like, you know, when… Yeah. Like, once you start doing this stuff, it’s like, well, where does it stop? That’s when you start… That’s where the question’s got to go. But…
SPEAKER 03 :
And when was that? When did Jurassic Park come out? Wasn’t that like the 80s or 90s? So 1993. And the reason why I checked that is because it really wasn’t until the late 90s when stories started surfacing of finding… Soft tissue in dinosaur bones. Really the paleontological discovery of the century and still a lot of people don’t know about it. And what it does is all these discoveries is it’s pretty much refuted that dinosaurs are millions of years old. And so, you know, you could possibly… manipulate DNA from even a T-Rex and they, cause they have extracted DNA, but DNA is so fragile. I mean, how much can you really do? But the fact that they even find DNA in some of these dinosaur bones with as fragile as DNA is, it’s remarkable.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
It’s fun being a creationist because we’ve got tons of evidence on our side. It just keeps piling in. Okay, Ryan, is there another article you want to cover from the magazine, from the focus section? There’s a lot of good ones.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, the focus section, I thought it was really good this time. The ant eyes one I thought was kind of interesting. Just you get another example of how just all these creatures have – these really cool structures. And then as we’ve, you know, as science progresses more, we realize how cool these are. And then we end up, you know, based trying to copy the idea, steal the idea.
SPEAKER 03 :
Again, reverse engineer it. Yeah. It’s exactly what they did here. Reverse engineer something that was remarkably engineered.
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah, so in this case, it’s ant eyes, which you don’t think are that special. But it’s especially about desert ants, because we’re wondering, when these ants are in the desert, how do they know where they’re going? Because in the desert, there’s not really any landmarks. I mean, you can’t really look at that dune over there and say, oh, I recognize that one. So like… wondering how it knows where to go and it turns out that the ant eyes have really good polarizing mechanisms so they can kind of see where the sun’s coming from and then knowing where the sun’s coming from you know they know what direction they’re going innately and it’s just kind of interesting how they use it and then scientists have like we currently have some polarization photo detectors that are useful in many areas but they’re all big and bulky and they take up a ton of space You know, an ant eye is like that. So in 2024, so last year, Chinese researchers tried to develop a new version that is modeled after the desert ant eye.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah. So this thing is incredible. So they can accurately perceive polarized sunlight that you’re talking about. And they do it. It’s a vibration in a single plane. Its orientation helps ants work out the sun’s direction even when not visible. Now, isn’t that cool?
SPEAKER 04 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 03 :
So it’s not like, well, okay, there’s a cloud covering the sun and all of a sudden the ants just stop, you know. Actually, you know, a lot of times humans might stop because we’re like, oh, cool, it’s shade, let’s rest. You know. So anyways, so like most insects, ants have compound eyes, right? And they have many independent light receptor units. In fact, they have about 400 facets. And each has a specially aligned light receptor cells. And it makes them very sensitive to this whole polarization effect, the polarization direction. It’s just super cool. And again, you mentioned these Chinese researchers. In late 2024, they’re developing something. They’re modeling this whole thing off the desert ant eye.
SPEAKER 04 :
And they say that their version is apparently 100 times more effective than the existing ones, the big bulky ones. And it’s kind of cool what they use it for because they’re not using it like the ant does to… navigate around the desert but they use it to enhance images they use it for finding cancer and tissues without staining which is pretty cool yep and as the article concludes the humble ant had this amazing technology first yeah it’s a copycat league yep hey we’re running out of time in this broadcast so go to our website to catch the rest of this program realsignsradio.com
SPEAKER 05 :
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
