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Series Code: GFF
Program Code: GFF000005S
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00:01 ♪ ♪ Dr. Subodh K. Pandit
00:56 Welcome again. This time we're in session four. We are moving 01:02 away a little bit from the earlier topic and this time it 01:06 is about evolution and the theory of evolution. There is a 01:12 difference between those two and that's what we're going to 01:14 look at. What really is the theory of evolution and if we 01:19 looked at it carefully would it stand scrutiny and examination? 01:23 What we are going to do once again is to ask and place the 01:29 whole argument and the whole discussion on premises, the 01:34 first principle on why we are doing this at all. So here are 01:38 the four that we will look at. (1) The reason to study and 01:43 examine evolution. (2) The meaning of the word evolution. 01:48 (3) Biological classification as we know it and (4)The concepts 01:55 of evolution. Let's look at each of those. The reasons to study 02:00 evolution. Why should we look at it when everybody in the 02:04 scientific world says it's right and okay and it's the thing that 02:09 is happening all over the world? Well, some people still question 02:14 as to whether those basics of the claim will stand scrutiny. 02:19 So here's the context in which we are going to look at this. 02:23 If the Theory of Evolution has a reasonable/scientific base, then 02:30 the study of "nature" and nature's principles could show 02:37 that God is not needed because the creator of evolution says 02:40 that it happened by itself, natural selection got into play, 02:44 and formed all these spectrums of biological organisms that 02:50 we have today. So if that is true, we don't need any other 02:55 agency to really bring us to this point in our human history. 03:01 Number two: If it is not reasonable, not scientific then 03:08 those events did not come to happen and if that's the case 03:12 then the "nature" and it's study could endorse the claim that we 03:18 do need a supernatural agency, we'll call him God, to actually 03:23 do the stuff that we see around us and to bring us to this point 03:29 in human history. So that is the context in which we are going to 03:33 look at the theory of evolution. Number two: The meaning of 03:38 evolution. Most people when they use the word evolution they 03:44 think everybody else means the same thing. Not really. The word 03:49 itself, evolution, means gradual changes resulting in improvement 03:55 over a period of time. So it's gradual changes becoming better 03:59 and better. That's all it is. Whereas, the Theory of evolution 04:05 is a specific type of evolution described by Charles Darwin. 04:11 He said that the starting point was one simple organism and then 04:17 it multiplied and made some changes and those changes became 04:22 so different the original one that that was supposed to be 04:26 classified as another species or another genus and then it went 04:32 on and on from species to genus to the whole spectrum of 04:38 biological classifications we have on earth today. So those 04:41 two, they seem similar but they really are not Evolution meaning 04:49 change for the better over a period of time is acceptable. 04:53 In fact, it's observational data that allows us to say that. 04:58 Yes, evolution does happen. The question now is the Theory of 05:04 Evolution that clear. So we go to the spectrum of 05:09 classifications. The Spectrum of Classification of biological 05:14 organisms, living beings on earth. Number (1) there are 05:18 Species. Those gradually change to form variations and some 05:23 species and races and breeds. And the theory says, the theory 05:31 of evolution says then those changes became so great that you 05:36 had to classify the later organisms as different 05:39 from the previous 05:41 organisms. So it became from species, genus. And then they 05:47 multiplied and a group of genera became so different 05:52 from the original that it had to have another classification. So 05:57 from species to genus, family, order, class, phylum, kingdom, 06:03 and domain. Domain is really not what you see. It has to do with 06:09 the nuclei of the cells. If a cell had a nucleus well it was 06:13 classified as this domain and if it did not have a nucleus it was 06:17 classified as that domain. For our purposes kingdom is good 06:22 enough. But if you notice I've highlighted the word phylum 06:26 because we're going to look at it later on. Look at where 06:29 phylum is in the classification. Way up there very close to 06:35 kingdom. So when you look at the spectrum of classification it is 06:39 quite broad and big. So when we talk of organisms being 06:44 classified, this is what we mean And the theory of evolution says 06:50 starting with one organism they branched out and became 06:55 different until you have all these organisms that can be 07:00 classified in this manner. Similarly when we look at the 07:05 word evolution it means so many things to different people. Some 07:11 of them use it for a certain part of evolution and some of 07:16 them use it for say the beginning of the whole universe 07:18 and some them use it only to deal with how one organism 07:23 became another species. Let's clarify that a little bit. So 07:28 let's look at the concepts of evolution because people use 07:34 this word in quite a few different ways. So here are the 07:38 concepts. Number one: Cosmic evolution. That would refer to 07:43 how the universe came about and evolved. It is not Darwinian 07:48 evolution. We'll come to that in a moment. Number two: Stellar 07:52 evolution. How did galaxies and stars form. In the beginning 07:56 it was just radiation and those radiation got gasses and some 08:00 early elements. But how did stars and galaxies form? That is 08:05 stellar evolution. Then comes Chemical Evolution. How did the 08:11 chemicals join together and synthesize themselves into 08:15 what we know today as all these stuff around us, chemical stuff. 08:19 Gold, granite, silica. How did those occur? That is that 08:25 would be called 08:27 chemical evolution. Then the next thing that should have 08:31 happened as these chemicals say like rock, granite, sandstone 08:37 maybe became a very specific structure called cells, cellular 08:45 structure so that inorganic matter became organic so now it 08:51 is organic evolution. How did cells come about? How did those 08:56 structures evolve into what we know today as cells. That would 09:01 be organic evolution. After organic evolution, after the 09:06 cellular structures came about is what I would call Zoonotic 09:11 Zo means life. How did that structure which earlier had no 09:16 life at all come about to now become a living organism? That 09:22 zoonotic evolution. Then comes Darwinian evolution in which 09:29 this one organism or creature multiplied, kept multiplying, 09:35 kept differentiating until you have the whole spectrum of the 09:41 biological classifications you have today. The one that's 09:46 at the bottom then of the list is called Micro-Evolution. 09:50 Micro-evolution is small amounts of evolution in which a species 09:55 does become a variation or a sub-species or a breed or a 10:01 race. Micro-evolution has been scientifically established. 10:07 Nobody disputes that. In other words, evolution as a change, 10:13 yes. Acceptable. The question is did Darwinian evolution really 10:19 take place, and if it did, do we have good evidence that it is 10:25 what it's claimed to be. Is it really that kind of clear-cut 10:31 process that happened? Now we come to the fundamentals having 10:36 set this as a premise. The fundamentals of evolution 10:41 require certain factors to be present and to involve 10:46 themselves in the play of what happened. So here are three 10:51 and then we will do another three. So the Theory of 10:55 Evolution requires at least these three: Number one: Chance: 11:00 Probability: In other words, all the events are 11:04 claimed to be only chance events There was no question of any 11:09 intellectual intelligent activity that put these things 11:12 things together, the process together. Number two: Time: 11:17 We require time because Charles Darwin mentioned a lack of the 11:24 creative said: Nature non facit saltum, meaning nature does not 11:30 like leaps. It likes only small steps. So if it is small and the 11:37 changes come over a period of time it would require huge 11:42 amounts of time, called deep time, running into hundreds of 11:47 millions and even billions of years. The third factor that is 11:51 required is the question of Series. In other words sequence. 11:57 This and then this and then that There is an order. If you go 12:04 backward then you'd be going backwards in evolution so it 12:07 has to be a series in which a sequence is maintained. Let's 12:12 look at each of these and see if we scrutinize and examine them 12:18 that they would stand up to scrutiny. Number one: Chance: 12:21 We discussed that in the previous session. The question 12:26 of chance and the question of probability. Chance events means 12:33 it occurred arbitrarily. There is no pattern to it there is no 12:37 sequence, real sequence, and it occurs in an unpredictable 12:40 manner. Rules do not apply over there. Hence, we do want that a 12:47 number of chances are given so that this would occur. These 12:52 many chances, this would occur. And we saw that it can be 12:56 mathematically calculated. The calculation is called 13:00 probability. Therefore, the claim of a chance event can be 13:06 put into a scientific study, mathematical study. If the 13:09 number of chances required is too big, then the event 13:14 didn't occur 13:16 by chance. Rather, it was an agent, intelligent 13:20 agent or agency 13:21 that actually performed that event. We saw that to establish 13:25 law of the chance is 10 to the power of 50. Ten to the power of 13:30 50 is a big number. So the chance event requires more 13:34 chances than that then most probably it didn't occur by 13:40 chance. We saw how big that number was. Let's state it once 13:44 again, give it a little context. If 10 billion humans performed a 13:51 test at one per second then from the beginning of the universe up 13:58 to now we would have performed about 10 to the power 14:01 of 28 chances. 14:03 That's all. So 10 to the power of 50 is a huge, huge number. 14:09 What is the total chance afforded by the whole universe 14:12 from the time it began the number of seconds 14:17 multiplied by the number of particles in the universe 14:21 multiplied by the number of interactions that could have 14:24 occurred per second, mathematicians have come up with 14:29 a probable number. The total chance afforded by the universe 14:33 is 10 to the power of 122. Wow! That's a big number. But 14:40 remember we saw Michael Denton saying that just 100 14:44 proteins coming together would require 10 to the power of 2000 14:48 chances and what about a whole cell coming together, 10 to the 14:53 power of one hundred billion. Way beyond what the universe 15:00 can afford. So the number of chances is simply too big to 15:07 state that it occurred by chance If it did not occur by chance 15:11 then life began and it is perpetuated today had been done 15:19 by an active agent, not by chance. Number two: Requirement 15:24 of time: You know in those days people thought that the earth 15:30 was young, the universe was young. Then this is what George 15:36 Levine in the introduction to Charles Darwin's Origin of 15:39 Species says: "It was (Charles) Lyell (in Principles of Geology) 15:44 who supplied Darwin with the essential notion of geological 15:47 time, stretching for millions of years during which a 15:50 gradual transformation of species into varieties into 15:54 subspecies into new species could unfold." But these 15:59 postulated times, they say billions, hundreds of millions 16:04 of years, billions of years actually is not enough to do 16:10 what they say it did. The debate is not whether the universe is 16:14 young or old but it's whether the old universe which has 13.72 16:19 billion years of age provides sufficient time for the theory 16:24 of evolution. Look at one calculation. G. G. Simpson 16:30 is a renowned evolutionist "Thus as G.G. Simpson's calculations 16:37 of rates of evolution show, the bat's wing, if evolved by 16:41 'normal' Mendelian mutation and selective pressure, would have 16:44 had to begin developing well before the origin of the earth." 16:48 Just one part of one animal required more than the whole 16:52 age of the earth - 4.5 billion years. Number two: The Origin 16:57 of Species by Charles Darwin has only one diagram and it's 17:01 lines going across the page meaning that each line 17:06 represented about a million to a billion generations. Now he 17:15 had 10 lines so after 10 it became a variety. If the age of 17:22 the elephant or the generation of an elephant is 30 years and 17:27 each of those lines is a billion then we would need 30 billion 17:33 years to change an elephant just to one of its varieties. Not 17:37 enough time. Number three: Astronomers have told us of 17:41 12 billion light years away have been detected. And that is 1368 17:48 trillion kilometers. Now how do you get that far? We know the 17:52 galaxies are moving. Our own galaxy is moving at the rate of 17:55 19 billion kilometers per year. Even at 10 times that speed that 18:00 speed that galaxy would have required 7000 billion years to 18:06 get there. How does it compare with 13.72 billion years of the 18:11 universe that we have today? Then the correct sequence. First 18:15 the species then the variety. Species is the parent then 18:20 variety. But look at what Charles Darwin's own words are: 18:24 He "was...struck how entirely vague and arbitrary is the 18:28 distinction between species and variety." The species, or the 18:32 parent, was at times whichever was (a) "first discovered" or 18:36 whichever was (b) "more common," whichever was (c) "greater in 18:38 number" or whichever was (d) "wider in distribution." That is 18:42 not a sequence. That's another factor put in. So if that's the 18:46 case then it's possible that the parents were not really the 18:50 parents of the daughter or the daughter was really the parent. 18:53 If that's the case well the theory of evolution could 18:56 have been going in the reverse. Now three more fundamental 19:01 factors. The claim is that similarities show a relationship 19:08 between father and son, mother and daughter. Number two: It is 19:14 structural changes that are required so that we can survive 19:19 better or the organism could survive better. Number three 19:24 of the second set which will be number six: Darwin's natural 19:27 "selection." In other words, something had to be selected. 19:30 So let's look at these three. Does similarity actually denote 19:37 genealogy meaning birth giving rise to the next generation? 19:42 Relatives, blood relatives. "We have no written pedigree..." 19:47 says Charles Darwin. "We have to make out community of descent by 19:51 resemblances of any kind." In other words, none of the fossils 19:55 that are buried there are buried with a birth certificate. So how 19:59 do we know which one is related to which? Well, we look at 20:03 similarities, said Charles Darwin. Now scientific data does 20:09 show something. It shows that an organism which has a genetic 20:15 code. Specific, let's say organism A has a genetic code A 20:19 which gives us its features, we'll call it A1. Organism B has 20:25 a genetic code BB which gives rise to its features called B1 20:31 We do know that the genetic codes if they are close together 20:35 will give rise to features that are close together. That is 20:39 accepted; everyone recognizes that. And so they say that shows 20:45 that well they did change, but no. AA producing A1 is one set. 20:55 Do you agree? BB producing B1 features. Agreed? But that 21:00 doesn't mean A became B. For A to become B we require a 21:07 smooth series of intermediates to show that A became a 21:11 little different and a 21:13 little different and then became B. That has never been shown. 21:17 So here's what Heribert Nilsson from Europe, a big scientist, 21:23 a scientist who is well known there, he says: "We have 21:26 also proved that a morphological similarity between organisms 21:30 cannot be used as proof of a phylogenetic..." or evolutionary 21:35 "relationship." In other words, just because they are similar 21:39 does not mean one came out from the other. One was the daughter 21:44 of this parent. How about Austin Clark? Look at his words: "There 21:50 is not the slightest evidence that any one group of the major 21:55 groups arose from any other." This idea that did arise was 22:02 based on the theory, hoping that the theory would be established. 22:07 What if the theory is not established by actual 22:12 information and data that we get from the fossil record which is 22:17 called paleontology. What if you don't get it. The fact is we 22:22 still have not got the data. The fundamental principle that 22:27 similarity is based on genealogy not yet substantiated. How about 22:35 when a structure changes affect survival? Here are Charles 22:39 Darwin's words: "The slightest difference of structure or 22:43 constitution may well turn the nicely balanced scale in the 22:47 struggle for life and so be preserved." In other words, what 22:51 he's saying is that when some organism changes a little bit 22:57 and if that little bit change is really beneficial then that is 23:02 held on and passed on from generation to generation. And 23:06 then as those structures are passed on to the next generation 23:10 another good beneficial change comes in you add it on to that 23:15 and so it goes on adding until you get another organism that 23:19 really is much better than the previous one. That is the 23:22 meaning of structural changes helping survival. But these 23:28 "slightest differences" that Charles Darwin said have never 23:32 been described. Why? Because those slight changes may not 23:39 have affected survival at all! Look at another statement that 23:43 he has made "...habits have changed without a corresponding 23:47 change in structure." So if habits change to help survival 23:56 we really don't need structural changes to help survival. Can 24:01 you see that point? So what we are looking at now is a claim 24:09 that there are structural changes. But a small change in 24:14 behavior itself could do the trick. For example: They say 24:19 that the neck of the giraffe was stretched out longer and longer 24:23 as it reached up higher and higher for the foliage that was 24:29 higher and higher on the tree. Really? Can you see how a little 24:36 change in behavior could have compensated for that so 24:39 really a small giraffe with not that long a neck and it's eating 24:44 the leaves at this level and then the leaves at this level 24:48 were maybe eaten up. So it had to reach the upper level. It 24:55 didn't have to grow, become a longer neck. It just had to lift 25:01 up its nose and its mouth and pick up leaves higher. And if 25:05 leaves even higher than that had to be eaten then it would 25:09 have gone on its hind legs and put its forelegs up onto the 25:12 tree and reached up. There's no need, in other words, to change 25:17 the length of the neck. The fact really is we can look around and 25:24 see long necked giraffes, short necked guerrillas and even other 25:30 other organisms with no discernable neck like centipedes 25:36 living in the same environment. So obviously you don't have to 25:40 have that long neck. Therefore, changes really in structure were 25:45 not required. How about natural selection. Nature selects only 25:51 for the benefit of the being she tends. Does this selection make 25:57 the aggressor more likely to succeed or the victim more 26:02 likely to escape? Now we have to agree that nature is blind. It 26:07 cannot see which is the aggressor and which is the 26:09 victim. So it has to help both. 26:11 So if it selects both of them really can you call it selection 26:17 If it selects all the whole of nature that is not really 26:22 selection of any kind so the word natural selection really is 26:28 in question. Did nature really select or did something happen 26:34 by which they were all given those attributes and they are 26:38 still producing their behavioral patterns and their offspring 26:43 because of the pattern that they were given, to begin with? So 26:48 here are the fundamental principles supposed to be in the 26:52 theory: Chance. Not enough chance. Requirement of deep time 26:58 We don't have enough time. The correct sequence has not been 27:02 set because the daughter could be the parent, the parent could 27:05 be the daughter. Similarity denotes genealogy. That has not 27:09 been established. Structural change really causing survival. 27:15 That also has not been shown clearly. Natural selection. 27:18 Really selection went on? Not a single fundamental principle has 27:24 been satisfactorily established. We'll go to the 27:28 next one in the next session. 27:30 If you have enjoyed this presentation with Dr. Subodh 27:35 Pandit and wish to watch more of this unique 13 part series for 27:39 free online visit the website GodFactOrFiction.com. That's 27:44 GodFactOrFiction.com. If you would like to order this 27:48 fascinating series on DVD it is now available from White Horse 27:52 media... 27:58 Dr. Subodh Pandit has written two eye-opening books entitled 28:04 Come Search With Me: Does God Really Exist? and Come Search 28:08 With Me: The Weight of Evidence which further explore the topics 28:11 of evolution, theism, atheism, and religion. 28:17 ♪ ♪ |
Revised 2021-08-17