In this episode of Real Science Radio, Dr. Robert Stadler challenges long-held assumptions in the field of evolution. With humor and insight, Dr. Stadler presents a framework of six essential criteria aimed at scrutinizing the very foundation of scientific claims. His incisive analysis exposes the questionable nature of certain evolutionary assertions while providing listeners with a toolkit for critical thinking in the modern age of information overload. Tune in and prepare to reevaluate the science you know.
00:00:00 Introduction and Background of Dr. Stadler
Unfortunately, these criteria aren’t taught so much in school, but I learned them through 28 years of being a scientist.
SPEAKER 04 :
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 :
This week we’re excited to welcome Dr. Robert Stadler to the show. Dr. Stadler is a true expert in engineering, biology, and medicine, and epistemology. And Doug, I mean an expert from back when an expert was someone you actually could trust.
SPEAKER 03 :
Oh yes, I remember those days, Fred. And you know, researching Dr. Stadler, I was reminded of why Experts are good and they’re very necessary, especially experts who are not afraid to be challenged with real hard questions. Dr. Stadler is the author of The Scientific Approach to Evolution. what they didn’t teach you in biology. He got his PhD in medical engineering from the Harvard MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. He’s a scientist in the medical device industry, Fred, where he’s made things that actually work for over two decades. He’s contributed to cardiac devices implanted in millions of people all over the world. He’s been elected a fellow of the American Institute of Medical and Biomedical Engineers. His 20 plus articles and papers appear in a host of peer reviewed journals. And he’s approaching 200 U.S. patents. Dr. Stadler, welcome to Real Science Radio.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you very much, Doug. Great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity.
SPEAKER 01 :
Dr. Stradler, you’ve got a presentation for us, and you’re going to tell us about your book. So would you like to go ahead and dive into that? But before you do that, Dr. Stradler, I’ve got to ask you, what’s your favorite invention that you’ve made for the medical industry? Is there one that stands out?
SPEAKER 02 :
My favorite invention? I focus on heart failure. And people with heart failure, when they get into trouble with heart failure, they retain fluid. You know, they kind of blow up with fluid in their body. And so we have a device that measures the impedance across the chest. And the impedance is inversely related to how much fluid is in your body. So we can track the heart failure status by this measurement every day and tell us when people are getting into trouble or not. Wow.
SPEAKER 01 :
That sounds pretty cool. Now, since you said the word impedance, I have to ask, is there some kind of electrical field involved or is that a different kind of impedance? You know, you talk to the electrical engineer.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I always say it’s hard to resist a good explanation of impedance. Yeah, you’re putting a little electrical field across the chest that you can’t feel. It’s very small and it does the job. Okay.
SPEAKER 01 :
Wow. Cool. Okay, so let’s go ahead and dive into your book, The Scientific Approach to Evolution by Dr. Rob Stadler. Yeah. What they didn’t teach you in biology.
SPEAKER 02 :
Well, thank you. So I gave this the quick, easy title, which is, Is Evolution Good Science? But because we’re here on Real Science Radio, we can also say, Is Evolution Real Science? Yes. for your show. But I’m gonna start off with a little bit of a dramatic beginning here that we are currently in the midst of what we call the information age. And each day there’s this deluge of information coming at you in all kinds of directions. And each of us is surviving the information age by filtering out, you know, in other words, focusing on some forms of information that you trust in and then rejecting or pushing aside other forms of information that you don’t have the time for or you don’t trust you don’t like. So surviving this deluge is all about this filter we have and the filter we’re developing over time as to what information you focus on. You’ve probably heard the old saying, you know, you are what you eat. And in the information age, I think you are the information that you digest, right? Because it defines who you are. And today we’re going to talk about how to decide what is trustworthy information and what isn’t in the focus on the field of science. What kind of science gives you confidence and you should trust it? And what kind of science is really not giving confidence and you shouldn’t trust it? And in doing that, I want to zoom in on the topic, everybody’s favorite topic here, which is evolution. And when I mention evolution here, I’m talking about the big scale evolution, where a single cell over billions of years has become all of life that we know today. Everybody’s familiar with that. We’re all taught it in school. But that is very much in contrast to what the Bible teaches. which is more of a forest of life, or some people call it an orchard of life, where you have many different trees, not one tree, and each tree represents a kind of life. And Genesis 1 mentions the word kind like 10 times. So it’s very important, very emphasized here that creatures reproduce according to their kind and so forth. So we have the very familiar dog kind where a wolf over time has produced the whole diversity of dog breeds that we know today. but they’re all still dogs. They’re all still part of that tree. This is way oversimplified, of course. It’s kind of a cartoon, but it gives you the idea. So to just dip our toe into this and we think of what is science telling us as far as which of these two is correct? That’s what this is all about. What does science say about these things? Well, science fundamentally is about making observations. And in order to make an observation, a human has to be there and to make observations and learn about how natural processes work, how do natural laws work. And they have to be able to pass that down to the next generation so we all learn from it and understand how natural laws work. But on this tree of life, humans here only existed for a small amount of this tree. And before that, there really is no way to make any direct observations because humans weren’t there. That doesn’t mean that science has no place going back in time here. It just means that it becomes more tenuous. It gets cloudy and foggy back here, and it’s pretty hard to discern what actually is going on. We have to admit that, really. Now, if you do this and look at what part we can observe, humans have observed, The tree of life and the forest of life are basically identical for what we can observe and have observed. And I think that’s very telling. So what we are here to look at agrees with what the Bible says is the key. But we’re going to go a little deeper into the science now. And that was kind of a cursory overview. We’ll go a little deeper. So according to science, which of these is correct? That’s really the question we have in mind. And if you’re a good scientist, you keep an open mind and you consider both possibilities. You accumulate evidence through observation, through experiment, and you decide which of these two hypotheses is better supported by the evidence. That’s how science should work. So that’s what we’re going to do. Now, most scientists up front, of course, they’ll say that the evidence for evolution, the tree of life, is just overwhelming. And you’d be a fool if you would disagree with that. That’s what they would say. The evidence is all stacked up in favor of the Tree of Life. But there’s really two problems with that. And the first problem is that up front, they block out the other possibility. They say this isn’t science, it’s pseudoscience, and science can only address natural processes, and so we have to only consider evidence of natural processes. So your biology textbook basically is kind of like a sales pitch, a sales brochure. It only talks about one side and is very positive about the evidence for that one side. And I think we’re all aware of that, but this is an incredible form of bias in science. If you’re so biased that you exclude another possibility upfront, that’s really bad bias. That’s the worst bias and a sign of bad science. And the second problem we face, this is more subtle and this is what my book is about. is that in doing this they’re actually prioritizing weak evidence or what I call low confidence evidence and they’re prioritizing that over stronger evidence or higher confidence evidence in order to make this claim and that this is what we’re going to focus on because I know this is kind of subtle and we’re going to try to make sense of this statement here and that’s what my book is about. So I’m going to focus on my particular area of science just as an introduction to this idea, and that would be medicine. And medicine, I think we can all agree, is very important. I would argue it’s the most important application of science because it’s life and death. It determines if you’re going to live or not. And when you take a pill or you go through some procedure, you really want good science behind what you’re doing there in medicine. It doesn’t mean it’s perfect, it doesn’t mean there’s no errors, but it’s important and society has put a lot of pressure on it. And because of that, or as a result of that, doctors have gotten together and agreed on a way of prioritizing evidence, medical evidence. And we don’t need to look at the details on this table. The point is, I just want to show you that doctors have agreed that evidence up here is given high priority. This is credible, high confidence kind of evidence, where evidence down at the bottom is low confidence evidence that’s not prioritized. So in other words, if I invent some new pill and I claim that this is going to cure cancer, right, I have to go to the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, and and try to convince them that my pill can cure cancer. Well, the FDA is going to be looking for evidence up here at the top of the chart. And if I only show up with evidence at the bottom or near the bottom, they’re going to kind of laugh it off and push me aside. That’s how this works. And notice at the bottom is consensus of expert opinion. So if I bring in a few experts and they say, I think this pill is going to cure cancer. that’s not considered good evidence, right? That’s not going to solve, that’s not going to get me through the FDA and get my drug approved. So when I bring this up, some people get all twisted up thinking, oh, my criteria here only apply to medicine. Well, that’s not true. That’s not my point. I’m just using this as an introduction. My point is that all forms of science should be able to prioritize the best evidence on top of lower quality, lower confidence evidence. Everybody should be able to do this and I applaud medicine because they’ve done it. So how do we broaden this out then to apply to all kinds of science? And that’s what the book is about. And here I am proposing six criteria. These six criteria helped you to separate confident evidence versus low confidence evidence. And I don’t mean to make it sound like it’s one or the other. It’s actually a spectrum. You can have high, medium-high, medium, medium-low, low confidence, depending on how you address these six criteria. And I’m bringing this up also going back to that filter of the information age. that I hope everybody can get familiar with these six criteria. And then tomorrow when you hear news, some new science discovery, you can apply these six criteria to say, how much do I trust? How much confidence can I place in what I just heard there?
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, Dr. Stadler, first of all, I’m sure you realize that there’s a significant segment of the population that thinks you’re awfully presumptuous to assert that the average person should be allowed to develop their own filter to judge what’s right and wrong. Simultaneously though, each one of them in choosing a medical procedure or a medicine for themselves would agree with everything you just said.
SPEAKER 02 :
I totally agree with that, yes.
SPEAKER 03 :
Fascinating.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, and I do hope that everybody develops their own filter. My filters become really acute, I think, so that when I listen to the news in the morning, often a little red flag pops up because it doesn’t meet these criteria. And I’m like, I don’t trust what they’re saying, you know. Yeah. So I hope people can use that and benefit from it. That’s the point of this. So you might be asking, what are these six criteria? So let’s get into that. The first one should be super obvious to everybody that evidence that is repeatable gives you higher confidence, right? So if, you know, I like the simple example of let’s use science to find out how fast an object falls when I drop it. I just take an object and drop it and I measure how fast it falls. And I can do that again and again and again. And every time I repeat it, my confidence goes up. And if someone else repeats my result, the confidence goes up. Someone in a different country repeats my result. It’s obvious. So things need to be repeatable in order to give you more confidence. It doesn’t mean that if you can’t repeat it, there’s absolutely no value to it. It just means you admit that this is a bit tenuous as a conclusion, right? I don’t have total confidence in this. Number two is things that are directly measurable give you higher confidence than things that are indirectly measurable. And that’s a little more subtle. Let me give you an example that when I was a kid and I felt like I was sick, my mother would try to measure my temperature and the indirect method she would apply was to put her hand on my forehead and say, I think you have a fever. It’s indirect because it’s measured through her hand and her subjective decision process, and her hand might be cold or hot when she does this. It’s not very accurate. I think you get the idea. The more direct way, of course, is to measure my temperature with an instrument directly to the source at the core of my body, right? That’s how you do it directly. Another example of this might be like if you want to study a black hole out in outer space. We all know that black holes don’t actually emit light and everything, you know, they’re just, they’re sucking everything into themselves. So you can’t make direct measurements on a black hole. It all has to be very indirect. And that gives you lower confidence. If you could bring a black hole into your laboratory and you could poke it and prod it and measure stuff from it, then you’d have much more confidence, but we can’t do that. It’s just a fact. Number three, you have more confidence if your study is conducted prospectively And that means that you plan ahead how you’re going to do the study, and then you conduct the study according to your plan. So why is that so much better than just a retrospective study where you look back into the past? Well, with a prospective study, you can develop your plan in a way that blocks out anything that’s confounding, anything that’s going to confuse or get in the way. You could plan ahead to block that out and to get at the truth, right? So for example, if I’m dropping an object and seeing how fast it falls, I can plan ahead that I want all the air out of the room because air inside the room, or maybe wind or something in my room is going to interfere with my measurement. And that’s a problem. So I want to plan ahead to get that out of the way. That’s prospective. Okay, number four is avoiding bias. And I think everybody can agree with this, that we all have bias. I have bias, everybody has bias. And it’s kind of like glasses that you wear and you’re looking through those glasses through your bias and perceiving everything according to your bias. So in science, bias is just devastating and you gotta, you can’t just say, I’m trying not to be biased. You gotta work at it. You know, you got to have some techniques in mind that pushes bias out of the picture or else it’s going to corrupt what you’re doing. Next one is avoiding assumptions. Assumptions in science are kind of like taking shortcuts. They’re often used to save money or time. or to fill in something that you really don’t know. And that’s really dangerous, right? Cause you’re making assumptions, gets you into trouble. So in my example of dropping an object and seeing how fast it falls, I mentioned that the air in the room is kind of interfering, but you know, getting the air out of the room is gonna cost like a million dollars and I have to take six months to do it. It’s gonna delay the project. So can’t we just assume that it’s not a big deal to have air in the room? So this is the kind of thing that happens all the time in science. It’s unavoidable to get rid of all assumptions, but the assumptions you make, you should openly disclose, freely talk about them, and admit that they might be causing some trouble. All right, all that makes sense so far? You guys good? Yeah.
SPEAKER 01 :
This is very valuable stuff. This is great. It’ll be interesting to see how you apply this to the theory of evolution.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, that’s coming. Okay. All right. I got one more. Number six, the final one, is about making reasonable claims. And this is more about when the experiment is done or when your study is done and you have to write it up and say, here’s what we learned. You got to make reasonable claims. I like an analogy here of don’t get out over your skis, right? You got to stay on top of your skis, which means only conclude stuff within the area that you studied and not extrapolating off to some other area. For example, if I measure how fast an object falls here in this room, I shouldn’t be assuming my conclusion applies to the top of Mount Everest or if I was on the moon. because that’s not true. It’s not the same force of gravity up on Mount Everest or on the moon as we have here. So that would be an unreasonable claim if I were to do that. And I like to use this can of nuts also as an example, because these nuts, they want you to buy more, of course. And so they say they’re heart healthy and they’re approved by the American Heart Association. But the FDA always has to step in and say, well, what are you claiming here about how healthy these are? And they want to make sure that you’re accurate in your claim. So on the can of nuts, they were required to write this statement, shown here, that scientific evidence suggests but does not prove that eating nuts may reduce the risk of heart disease. Right? Yeah. And I appreciate how honest this is. It has these hedging terms, suggesting and may, and that’s what the real evidence says. So they did a good job making reasonable claims. I appreciate that. Got it. So the next time you eat nuts, make sure you check the label, right?
SPEAKER 03 :
And Dr. Stadler, I just want to thank you because these six methods or mechanisms that you’ve introduced, these are valuable for assessing… pretty much everything that we get through the avalanche of information that you described earlier because we often see clickbait headlines that appeal to our pre-existing biases and then we click through and we read and it’s good to have this guidance to help us to avoid going down rabbit holes that are attractive to us and But besides just being deceived with lies, but also just chasing foolishness, this is very good stuff.
SPEAKER 02 :
And, you know, clickbait is all about breaking this rule here of making reasonable claims because they want to amplify it. They amplify everything to call your attention. And amplification is a big problem when it comes to claims, right? If I have a 0.1% improvement, I can’t say, great results, best ever result, you know. That’s what you’re going to see in the clickbait. So I want to contrast that with this statement right here came out of my son’s biology textbook shown here. So this is a direct quote. For example, organisms as dissimilar as humans and bacteria share genes inherited from a very distant common ancestor. So you can see in this statement there is no hedging language like you have over here. I think it would be a much better claim if they said, we think or suggest, you know, some evidence suggests that this is true or something like that. But no, no, no. They’re saying with absolute confidence. They’re telling you that we have genes shared from a very distant common ancestor. I don’t think anybody debates that humans and bacteria have some shared genes because that we can directly observe. We can measure it again and again. Nobody doubts that. The part that you doubt is were they inherited from a very distant common ancestor? That’s the part that you can’t observe, you can’t repeat. And making a strong claim about that is disturbing to me. So, you know, looking at these two statements and the contrast between them, you’re kind of left scratching, I’m left scratching my head wondering why, why is our society more concerned about claims that we make about nuts than claims that we make about evolution? I mean, which is more important? Okay, so let’s step back again. So I want to show you an example then of, we were talking about this example of how fast does an object fall? I want to answer this question. And that can be done while meeting all six of these criteria. If you do a good job, you’ll meet all six, and you can just knock this out of the park, right? Science can give you great confidence in answering that question. I think we can agree. So to contrast that, we can take this statement out of my son’s biology textbook. What this statement is doing is answering this question, do humans and bacteria share genes from a common ancestor? That’s a question you can ask of science, and you hope science will answer it for you. But the problem is, trying to answer this question, you can’t meet any of these six criteria. because it can’t be repeated. You can’t go into a laboratory with some single-celled organism and then watch it evolve into bacteria, watch it evolve into humans, and show that the genes actually have been inherited all the way down their line, and you have common ancestry. You can’t even come close to repeating it. It’s just the opposite. Nobody witnessed the actual event. That’s the opposite of directly observable. There’s nothing directly observable about sharing genes from a common ancestor over such a billion years. It’s extraordinarily retrospective looking back into a billion year past. You can’t get much more retrospective than that. That’s the opposite of the prospective kind of study we like. Does anybody think that there’s any bias involved here? The people who write our biology textbooks and so forth, do you think they have any bias? Like I said, we all have bias, but I think it’s really standing out here. It’s rather blatant and obvious. What about assumptions? Honestly, I think this entire statement is built on an assumption. They’re assuming that if I see a gene in bacteria and a gene in humans that are pretty much the same gene, then I’m assuming that must have come from common ancestry. I mean, another option would be a common designer. A designer put this gene in bacteria. A designer put the same gene in a human. But that gets excluded upfront. We’re assuming that away. That can’t exist. So basically you’re assuming it’s common ancestry. The whole thing is built on assumption. And then finally overstated claims. We already went through that with this not having any hedging terms and being built upon assumptions. So this statement really belongs way over here in the very low confidence bin. And when you see statements like this tomorrow in the news or so forth, you should have a little red flag going up in your head that it’s not giving you confidence because it doesn’t meet any of these criteria. Does that all make sense?
SPEAKER 01 :
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think number five too leads to, isn’t that kind of circular reasoning too? They assume as naturalists, they want, you know, naturalism to be true because they have a bias against God that they assume it’s true. So then they make what you, you know, what you point out here is an assumption and as if the assumption proves naturalism and it’s just circular.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah. And it’s very important to disclose your assumptions. It’s when, when assumptions are hidden, that’s when you really trick people, you know? So you always have to question what assumptions people are making. And if you get those out on the table, then it becomes more More clear, right, of what’s going on here.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah, so are there disclaimers at the front of the ninth grade biology book that declare the assumptions and the biases? Not that I know of. Well, there wasn’t in mine. I remember that. Right.
SPEAKER 02 :
It would be nice if they were a little more open, a little more candid about that. I would appreciate that very much.
SPEAKER 03 :
So I wonder if it’s wrong to assume, since the biases and assumptions are not declared, when I would assume, Doctor, that most of the people who write these books are familiar with the concepts that you’re taking us through here. I mean, they’re scientists, some of them. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER 02 :
I think, unfortunately, these criteria aren’t taught so much in school, but I learned them through 28 years of being a scientist. Oh. I wish they were taught in school.
SPEAKER 03 :
So are you saying that, forgive me because I’m not a scientist, but I would have assumed that everyone who’s had a scientific education would be familiar with this, and you’re saying that’s not necessary. I shouldn’t make that assumption.
SPEAKER 02 :
I would say these are not directly taught, but they’re kind of inferred. Like everyone knows repeatable is a good thing, right? And prospective study, people get the concept. But here’s where the problem lies. If you decide to go into a field like paleontology or anthropology, right? You go into that because you’re interested in it. You have a passion for that.
SPEAKER 01 :
And there you have it, Dr. Rob Stadler walking us through the six essential criteria that help separate real science from speculative storytelling. From repeatability to reasonable claims, it’s a powerful lens for evaluating the claims we hear every day, especially when it comes to evolution. In part two, we will dive deeper into Richard Lenski’s famous E. coli experiment. What high confidence evidence actually tells us about evolution and why the gap between humans and apes is far wider than you’ve been led to believe. Don’t miss it. It gets even better.
SPEAKER 04 :
Scholars can’t explain it all away.
SPEAKER 1 :
Get ready to be awed by the handiwork of God. Tune in to Real Science Radio. Turn up the Real Science Radio. Keeping it real.
In this episode of Real Science Radio, Dr. Robert Stadler challenges long-held assumptions in the field of evolution. With humor and insight, Dr. Stadler presents a framework of six essential criteria aimed at scrutinizing the very foundation of scientific claims. His incisive analysis exposes the questionable nature of certain evolutionary assertions while providing listeners with a toolkit for critical thinking in the modern age of information overload. Tune in and prepare to reevaluate the science you know.
