In this first part of a fascinating discussion with Dr. Andrew McIntosh, Real Science Radio delves into the principles of literal biblical interpretation and the marvels of the Bombardier Beetle’s defense mechanism. Our exploration touches on the beetle’s unique ability to deter predators using an intricate chemical process, showcasing the wonders of creation. Dr. McIntosh provides a clear and compelling presentation that underscores the clarity and historical narrative of scripture while unraveling the complexities of nature’s ingenious designs.
00:00:00 Introduction to Combustion and the Bombardier Beetle
This is true combustion within a little insect. And being a combustion engineer, I realised that there was some very sophisticated chemistry and physics going on with this beetle.
SPEAKER 05 :
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SPEAKER 02 :
Greetings to the brightest audience in creation. This is Real Science Radio, and I’m the co-host, Doug McBurney. Fred Williams is on assignment. And this week, we are excited to welcome a brilliant mind in science and design, Dr. Andrew McIntosh. He’s a professor of thermodynamics and combustion theory, and he’s here to help us understand one of the most sophisticated combustion engines ever observed, Dr. McIntosh, welcome to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 01 :
Lovely to be with you, Doug, and very good to have met Fred on occasion. So it’s a privilege to be with you. That’s right.
SPEAKER 02 :
You met Fred and you spoke at the Rocky Mountain Creation Fellowship. Is that right?
SPEAKER 01 :
I did, yes, some while ago. In fact, I also knew Bob Enyart when he was doing Real Science Radio, a little bit.
SPEAKER 02 :
Oh, fantastic. Fantastic. Well, it’s great to have you back then, Dr. McIntosh. Now, you state in your biography, quote, at Bangor University in North Wales in the early 1970s, you say, quote, at that point, we only had Whitcomb and Morris’s book, The Genesis Flood, and a few others. But to us both, the issue was clear. What is in the Bible must determine all our beliefs. The straightforward interpretation is, 99% of the time, the way to interpret Scripture.” Dr. McIntosh, decades later now, do you still believe that?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, very definitely.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, that is encouraging because so many people have fallen away from a literal interpretation of the Bible. And it’s encouraging to have someone with your credentials. I was talking to Dr. McIntosh off the air for you folks in the audience. I said, Dr. McIntosh, we’re gonna cut down the introduction to leave out your credentials because it would take up too much time. But it is exciting to hear someone with your credentials advocate for a literal interpretation of Scripture 99% of the time. I think that about nails it on the percentage very good. Tell us, let’s jump right in. For those who haven’t heard of the combustion engine that we described, can you tell us where it was found, how it was observed, and just tell us all about it because it’s something I want to know more about.
SPEAKER 01 :
I will dive into the slides very shortly, but let me just say, maybe some of your viewers might be wondering, what on earth do you mean by the 1% then? Well, all I meant by that was that there are obviously occasions where you do have to take account of context, and it’s not always literal, every verse. is not always open to a literal interpretation can be poetry, but that’s certainly not the case in Genesis 1. That’s the point I’m making there.
SPEAKER 02 :
Absolutely, absolutely. That’s fantastic, Dr. McIntosh, and I want to encourage If you didn’t understand how there could be 1% that’s not taken literally, that just means you need to read the Bible more. Because if you read the Bible more, it becomes obvious. And the Holy Spirit actually helps you understand where there are figures of speech and analogies. There’s even hyperbole in the Bible. And you can understand. And I think you’re about right, Dr. McIntosh. It’s about 1%.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, it’s obviously good. People will argue about that. But what we’re saying is that the Bible, the complicated term is it’s the perspicuity of Scripture. That means the clarity of Scripture. Scripture speaks clearly. very clearly on the historical timeline, Genesis 1 to 11. I’ve written a book called Genesis 1 to 11, and it is clearly history, and it’s meant to be taken as history. And so creation is in the historical part of the Bible. Yes, the Psalms refer to it, which is poetry, but actually some of the Psalms actually is to be referred not regarded necessarily always as poetry. Sometimes it’s historical. So that’s what I was getting at there. Let me dive into the talk, Doug.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, no, no, wait, wait. You talked about the perspective, the purpose.
SPEAKER 01 :
Perspicuity. P-E-R-S-P-I-C-U-I-T-Y. The clarity of Scripture. Scripture is not a fog. There are places where there are difficulties. I’m not saying there aren’t. But there are places where you come to mountaintops. For instance, in Isaiah, I don’t understand all of Isaiah, but then you suddenly come to a mountaintop where clearly he’s speaking about the Saviour who is to come. Isaiah 40 is a wonderful mountaintop. Isaiah 53, where he talks about the cross, where Christ would die. There is absolutely… There’s a clear timeline running through Scripture. Genesis 1 to 11 is just history, and it’s very clear what the Lord is saying. It’s not that everything is absolutely crystal clear, because otherwise we wouldn’t have to study the Bible. But there are areas where it’s very clear what God is saying, and we can’t argue against it. That’s really what I’m trying to say.
SPEAKER 02 :
No, no. Dr. McIntosh, I have said for many years—I’m a preacher, and I lead a Bible study, and I’ve said for many years when I introduce someone to the Bible— The Bible is primarily an historical narrative.
SPEAKER 01 :
Exactly.
SPEAKER 02 :
Primarily. And it’s so great to be talking to someone from the UK where the Bible that I carry was originally published 400 years ago. 400 years ago yeah 1500s anyway and i just want to when you talk about the historical narrative nature of the bible and you talk about early genesis a lot of the modern bible translations have altered The construction of the first verses of Genesis, because in the King James, the first few verses, I think from 1 to 23, all the sentences start with the word and.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah.
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And so modern readers found that to be a bit cumbersome because… They want to make the Bible easier to read or more relatable to suburban housewives or whatever they’re trying to do with the Bible. But the reason the first 15 or 20 verses of Genesis start with the word and is because in the English language, starting a sentence with and… gives the sense of an immediate progression of events, which is exactly what the author was trying to portray. And so the perspicuity of the Scripture… is inspirational and it shouldn’t be altered. And I appreciate you bringing it up. And what’s the name of your book, Genesis 1 to 11?
SPEAKER 01 :
There’s two books. The first book I wrote was called Genesis 1, Genesis for Today, sorry, Genesis for Today. That’s the very first book that came out initially in 1997, but it’s still available in its sixth edition now. You can get it from day one. You can also get it through a distributor who does have distributing rights for day one in the USA. And that’s the Cumberland Bible Bookshop, which is, where is it now?
SPEAKER 02 :
I think it’s in… Well, we’ll link to it.
SPEAKER 01 :
You can find it. Cumberland Bible Bookshop.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, awesome. Genesis for Today, published originally in 1997. You said there’s another book.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yet Genesis 1 to 11 is a sort of a verse-by-verse commentary, as the title says, for Genesis 1 to 11. Then there’s another book which I’m putting up on the screen here, which is called The Wonders of Creation, which I produced with Stuart Burgess. and edited by Brian Edwards. And that deals, amongst other things, with the Bombardier Beetle, which I’m going to talk about now. So there’s a whole chapter on the Bombardier Beetle. And that’s a big book, the one that I’ve got on the screen now. And it’s a coffee table book full of pictures. And you’ll find it very interesting. Any reader who wants to get hold of that, I think you’ll find it very helpful. Well, as I said, day one through Cumberland Valley Bible Bookshop. Yeah, CVBBS, that’s right. You’ll find it online and they distribute these books. And master books have also got a right to publish this particular book, Wonders of Creation. So you can find it online quite easily.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, fantastic. We will provide links if, and this is the challenge, Dr. McIntosh, now that you’ve introduced three titles, can you give a presentation that compels our audience to go buy your books?
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, we’ll see. I just want to glorify God.
SPEAKER 02 :
Amen. I love it. Oh, that’s what it’s all about. Yeah. Oh, by the way, just so you know, folks, we were not planning on selling any books, but Dr. McIntosh and I have been chatting off the air since Fred has gone off on assignments. I’m a bit of a loose cannon today. And so we have a little bit of fun before we started and had a conversation going, and it just kind of naturally led this way. But tell us, Dr. McIntosh, I have probably referred to, and Bob Enyart did too, and Fred, we’ve probably referred in passing to the Bombardier Beetle for the better part of 30 years on the air as an example of design. And to hear more about it from someone who’s put as much effort into it as you have is exciting. Tell me all about it.
SPEAKER 01 :
OK, well, here’s a picture of the bombardier beetle. You can see that it sprays against anything which is deemed by the beetle to be perhaps attacking it in some way. And I want to explain what all this is about. Is it sort of passing air after a big meal? No, it’s not doing anything like that. It’s got a very simple system which is actually not as simple as i might have given the impression it’s got an incredible blasting system where is it found this is a picture of the african bombardier beetle found in asia found in africa obviously And it’s found in some places, even in North America, even in Europe. But they’re generally a bit smaller, usually under rocks, close to water. And what does it do? Let me explain it to you, Doug, and all those who are watching this. Let me explain how it works. It ejects a mixture of chemically heated steam and nasty noxious chemicals out of its back end. This, as I said, is not passing air after a big meal. It’s a separate system to its digestive tract and it’s warding off predators such as ants, birds, spiders and frogs. The beetle generally wins and stuns its opponent. It’s got a movable turret, a bit like a tank turret, which can, unlike a tank turret, come right over and point in the opposite direction to which the turret has originally come out. So it is a very movable turret, which a tank doesn’t have. A tank like that, like sadly they’re using in Ukraine and Russia at the moment, that cannot sort of bend right upwards and over, can it? whereas the beetle has a turret which can bend right over and point in the other direction. Let me play you a video of the beetle in the laboratory of a gentleman called Professor Tom Eisner who did a huge amount of work in Cornell University, a real expert on the biology of insects. In fact, he wrote a book and he signed it for me. He’s died now, but it’s a book called For the Love of Insects. And this is in his laboratory when I visited him some years ago. That’s what you actually hear in the laboratory. I’ll play it again. This is what you actually hear. And you think, well, that’s just a squirt. But it’s much more than a squirt, as we shall see, because there is a lovely film that the BBC did, which is called Alien Empire. And in that film, you can see there is a lot going on that Tom Eisner discovered. So I just hope that you’ll be able to show this bit. You may have to, on the YouTube, you may need some special permissions to show this, but I’ll show it now so you can see what I’m talking about.
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Few creatures will risk annoying a bombardier beetle. It mixes a cocktail of deadly chemicals in a special chamber. They react and explode at boiling point from its rear end.
SPEAKER 01 :
Now that is playing quite slowly, but not slowly enough. So now the BBC, a bit further on in the same film, had, this is many years ago, this is back in 1980s, maybe early 90s. What they did is that they were interviewing Tom Eisner, this gentleman who did all the work, And Tom Eisner had, yes, he had videoed it, as you’ve just seen, or filmed it in his day. He wasn’t really using video cameras. And they now filmed it at a very fast speed, as this film will describe. So let’s just play these two clips and you’ll get the sense now of some of the intricacy of what the Beatle is doing.
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One of the really amazing things about this animal is its ability to spray in a very beautifully aimed fashion. And that shows up very nicely when you put the animal on indicator paper. And what I’m going to do now is I’m going to pinch very lightly one leg after the other, just as if I were an ant biting these legs. I’m going to start with the right hind leg. Right front leg.
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left front leg wow now now watch this now we’re playing it at a much higher 400 frames per second the action has been slowed down but not enough to see the individual 400 frames a second
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So they went to a lab and filmed the beetle at an even faster speed, at an incredible 4,000 frames a second. There were the pulses, each one corresponding to the individual bursts of sound.
SPEAKER 01 :
So when I saw that film, which is another film, it’s not Alien Empire, this is Secret Weapons. That was inspirational to me because I suddenly realized that this is true combustion within a little insect. And being a combustion engineer, I realized that there was some very sophisticated chemistry and physics going on with this beetle. So I began to discuss this with Tom Eisner and went to see him at Cornell in New York State, upstate New York. And I had the privilege of seeing some of his electron micrographs. Some of these are published in the literature. And this is one of them. And this, again, was a light bulb, inspirational moment for me. Because in discussions with Tom Eisner, and I must give credit to him because he did a huge amount of dissection work. Obviously, sadly, this beetle had to be sacrificed in order to do it. But, you know, he had plenty of these beetles in his laboratory. And we were discussing this very picture together. And I said to Tom Eisner, it looks like you’ve cut through the way you see the orange arrow pointing, that you’ve cut through the exhaust of the system. He says, no, I haven’t. I said, well, tell me more. And he then said, look, that is an exhaust valve where you’ve not only got an inlet valve, which the yellow arrow, which I’ll explain more, is pointing to, but you’ve got an exhaust valve where the little bit of a membrane is actually, I’ll show you another diagram in a moment, but that membrane is sitting against the wall, which is the hard cuticle wall, and stopping any fluids coming out or any air and combustible mixture coming out. He says that lifts up that membrane, the bit that the orange arrow is pointing to, And it lifts up, so that is what we call a balloon valve, a pressure relief valve, the orange one. And the yellow one is an inlet valve which closes under pressure and the orange one opens under pressure. So it’s a twin valve system. When I realised that you’ve got a twin valve system, I began to realise what the physics of this was, Doug. And this is what I’m showing you here. I’ll try to be simple as possible so that people can understand it. So normally that valve, as I said, the membrane is sitting on the hard cuticle, the white bit. And the red bit, which is the membrane, is sitting on that. But then under pressure, it lifts up. This is the exhaust valve, the outlet valve. And that was a light bulb moment to me because I realised that really this was a bit like a pressure cooker. Some of the older people in the audience will know what a pressure cooker is. We don’t use them now because we have microwave ovens. But in the old days, you would actually boil things under pressure and you could cook them much more quickly. Well, what’s really happening is that These gases are reacting in a liquid, really, and it wants to boil. The liquid is essentially water. When I say gases, it’s actually a reactant which is in solid form and even in liquid form, and then it wants to boil the water and come off as a gas.
SPEAKER 02 :
Okay, Dr. McIntosh, hold on just one second. I just want to point out… when you started the presentation you said this is a relatively simple system or you said it was simple but i just then i contradicted myself no no no it’s it’s this is what happens when you study the amazing design of our creator is that it is simple in the simplicity of its working and its function and then when you try to describe it You find yourself having to stop and realize that what you’ve just said doesn’t fully describe. And then you have to stop yourself from getting too technical because you’ll lose everybody. It’s just fun to watch. And you’re doing a fantastic job. Please tell me more.
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, I’m trying to make it such that people can follow me. Obviously, this diagram is pretty complicated, but there’s three main stages. What we call in combustion terms, the reactants, that is the stuff which is going to burn, comes in, right? And the chamber isn’t necessarily heart shaped. That’s just due to the diagram. But it’s not far off right. It’s a simple diagram. It’s simplified diagram. OK, so now those two little openings of the top top right diagram, they let the reactants, they let the stuff come in. which is in a tiny tube. It’s only a few microns wide diameter. It’s very, very small. And hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide are coming in. If you know any chemistry, hydrogen peroxide is highly dangerous. And hydroquinone, well, it’s not going to do much unless there is heat. Now that I’m coming to that in a moment. Now, under pressure, when the combustion takes place, look at the bottom left diagram. Then those doors close. Right. And there is burning going on. And then that opens the exhaust valve. So it’s a very, very small chamber, less than one millimetre long. And it’s got this inlet valve and an exhaust valve. And that makes it a very sophisticated valve system. And by the way, that’s the only thing that I’ve copied at the moment. I haven’t copied the chemistry, but the chemistry is very interesting. I’m going to play you this. I’ll explain it in a moment. Wait for it. That was what Hitler sent over the English Channel in the Second World War called the V1. And the V1 was powered not by hydrogen peroxide. It was powered by gas. You call it gasoline. We call it petrol and air. Right. Which were exploding. and just by a very similar system to what I’m attempting to describe in the Bombardier Beetle. The person who invented this horrible machine didn’t know, by the way, about Bombardier Beetles, but the Bombardier Beetle is doing exactly the same. It’s taking two things which put together explode, which is what the V1 does, petrol and air, gasoline and air, given a high temperature from the earlier explosion, then explodes again, closes the inlet valve, opens an exhaust valve, and in the doodlebugs case, pushes this horrible missile forward, right, across the English Channel, runs out of fuel, and then bombs London. Many people died as a result of these horrible things, okay? But the point I’m making is that that is what we call, get this term, We call it pulse combustion. There is an explosion pushing out of an exhaust, pushes the object forwards as a result, then there is a drop in pressure, in comes more fuel and air together, they explode and again go through the same cycle. Now, the beetle is not being propelled like a missile, although it does have a bit of reaction to what goes out of its backside. But it’s exactly the same system. Right. So there is an explosion. Then there is low pressure. And then it comes again. And so there is a repeated explosion. explosion going on and that’s what Tom Eisner, it’s not credit to me, this is Tom Eisner, found this and also another chap in Germany called Schildknecht, he was a Nazi by the way, Schildknecht before the war, He actually understood the chemistry of the bombardier beetle. Tom Eisner knew of him. And Tom Eisner was a very clever man who built on the work of Schildknecht. Now what I need to point out to you, and I’m leading up to an interesting point here, is that the chemistry of this involves catalysis. That means the chemistry won’t work unless there are other chemicals present which encouraged the reaction of hydroquinone and hydrogen peroxide. OK, so I know I’m getting into a bit of depth here.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, so you’re saying it’s not just two chemicals. There has to be something else present.
SPEAKER 01 :
There is. And these these are the two chemicals. Those who are experts know that it’s hydroquinone on the first one. and hydrogen peroxide on the next one. They react and become benzoquinone, C6H4O2, and so it loses two of the hydrogens.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thanks for listening to part one of Bombs Away with Dr. Andy McIntosh. We’re out of time for today. If you want to hear the rest of part one, go to rsr.org. That’s Real Science Radio, rsr.org. And stay tuned for part two. And tune in next week for the conclusion as we continue to bomb the darkness with the light of our creator’s amazing design of the bombardier beetle.
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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
