G1 Conference Session 3: Dr. Dan Biddle "Testing the Theory of Human Evolution"

Good evening, thank you for coming again tonight. My name is Dr. Dan Biddle, we'll be covering one of my favorite topics tonight, looking at the idea of human evolution. And this topic is incredibly important for people who want to study faith and Christianity and understand the contrast between the evolutionary worldview and the biblical worldview.

Because when we surveyed about 600 people on a pollster, these are people who are checking out of the Amazon, they got paid a $10 tab to go through and do a survey. We asked them, these 600 people coming through the poll, what's the number one proof for evolution?

Regardless if you're a creationist or you believe in evolution or creation or not, what's the number one evidence that supports evolution? And 72 of those responses fell along four categories. It was human evolution, Darwin's theory proper, fossils and transitions, and science as an authority.

But the number one repeated evidence for evolution was the idea that humans evolved from ape-like creatures. So it's a really important topic to cover. Tonight we'll start with what the Bible says, we have it in Matthew 19.

Jesus’ Teaching on Adam, Eve, and Marriage

This is Jesus speaking, he says, so the Pharisees came, also came to him testing him and saying to him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for just any reason? And he answered and said to them, have you not read?

He who made them at the beginning made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh.

Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate. So in the covenant of marriage that Jesus is talking about here, he says at the very beginning, God made them, he made them male and female.

Not millions of years after creation, but at the very beginning of creation. So that's out of the words of Christ and he was, he was reflecting back and pulling from Genesis one and Genesis chapter two, verse 24.

And in Luke chapter three, we have a connection between Jesus and that goes all the way back to Adam. It goes through the line of David and Abraham and all, all the way back through and Noah, about 70 some plus generations is a connection, a narrative in Luke where he, where he weaves together and connects Christ, the second Adam, all the way back to the first Adam.

So we have a historical connection there, if you will, between Jesus and, uh, and Adam. So this shows that we have a foundation here and when we, for that foundation to stand, we need a real Adam, a real garden, a real tree, a real devil and real sin and death.

And that's what the gospel and the new Testament are standing on. So without those things being real and historical as provided in Genesis one to 11, the gospel itself really has no foundation to stand on because they are all based on those things that teach reading Genesis as history.

So and this is even recognized by atheists. Here's a famous quote by a leading atheist who, he said, no, Adam and Eve means no need for a savior. It also means that the Bible could not be trusted as a source of unambiguous, literal truth.

It is completely unreliable because it all begins with the myth and builds on that as a basis. No fall of man means no need for atonement and no need for a redeemer. So the historicity of Christ and the historicity of Adam being a real person who was made in God's image out of the dust of the earth is essential for the gospel.

It's a foundational matter. So let's review some of the evidence looking about the idea of if humans evolved. So evidence number one that I'd like to go over that supports the idea of we were spontaneously and instantly created by God is that we have interdependent, obviously engineered, simultaneously assembled body parts that could not come together without intelligence.

So first if you consider a lock and a key. So a lock goes into the key socket, which has these tumblers and springs, and a key by itself has no purpose, and a lock socket by itself has no purpose. The two of these things are connected in an independent or interdependent way.

You have to have one. If you're going to have one, you have to have the other. And you'll see that in the human body with respect to design. So consider also a car system, an electrical system in a car.

You have a starter and a starting wheel and a flywheel, and you've got the electrical system and the battery. All of these things need to be there at the same time for a car to operate. You have to have the battery to provide voltage, and it goes through the wires to the starter, and the alternator recharges the battery.

It's this big circle. Those five systems are interdependent and connected. Well, it's really the same thing with our hearing system. In fact, when I'm challenged sometimes when I speak at secular universities, I say, look, give me a chance.

I will do my best to prove the existence of a divine creator in one minute. And I simply lay out the year. I ask people, how in the world is it that our human hearing system has five separate distinct components that are all connected together in an interdependent way so that when I'm pushing around sound molecules in the room here, those sound molecules are trapped by the pinna, the outside of our ear that go through a canal that wiggled the little tympanic membrane that goes into the three little tiny ear bones that amplifies those sound waves by a mechanical force of 1 .7 that goes into a hydraulic system as the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup are pushing on the side of the fluid inside of our cochlea, and that amplifies the signal yet 22 times again that turn it into a chemical and then an electrical charge that it goes to a nerve that's wrapped around our brains that when I'm moving these sound molecules around, it gets heard as speech and interpreted all at the same time.

These are five interdependent systems that all work together. So if you were to take protein and electricity and whatever else you want in a bucket and store it for 5 billion years, you're not going to get five separate systems that are bolted together that each of which does nothing by itself, is of no significant value.

It takes a designer and a creator to take these five separate components, these five separate machines, if you will, and weave them together so that humans can have hearing. It requires a divine maker.

Evidence number two is DNA design. I think it's really incredible when you sit back and look at DNA, we have an uncountable number of these DNA molecules in our bodies. We can stretch them out. There are six foot long strand that could stretch, you add them all up, you could stretch between here and the moon several times over.

And DNA, when you take an honest scientific look at it, is not just scrambled letters. If you look at the 3 billion base pairs in our genome that code for genes and proteins that turn into make who we are today, it's not a just happenstance alphabet soup.

It's information that's coded and engineered in a way that builds useful life. So it's straight out information. What about the idea that humans evolved from an ape-like creature? We overshare, let's say, 98 .6 of our genomes.

We have a longer video on this you can take a look at. It's one of our most watched videos. The comparison when they came up with the, oh, well, humans are 98 to 99 the same as chimps with respect to our DNA overlapping, that's not actually true.

And a lot of the honest atheists that are looking at this stuff now go back and would admit that. Because when they made that comparison saying that 99 of our DNA is the same, do you know that they ignored 25 of the human genome and 18 of the chimp genome when they made that comparison?

They only took the strands or strings of our DNA letters that overlapped and then they compared those regions. The parts in the human genome that didn't fit, the parts in the chimp genome that didn't fit were cut out of the analysis.

They only made the comparison with the leftover parts that were very, very similar. But in order to do that, they had to ignore a quarter of our genome and 18 of the chimps. What about mitochondrial DNA mutations?

There's been some studies that have come out recently where they used, well, you know, the evolutionary worldview is, well, somewhere many people put about between 5 and 6 million years ago, we shared a common ancestor with some ape-like creatures and then the human line kind of spun off.

And we say, okay, well, how many changes in the genome would have to happen between them, between back then and now? Well, they used to base that on just theory. But now we can go and test using real observational science how frequently we get observed mitochondrial DNA mutations.

And the studies that have now done that using some pretty good science show that the DNA mutation rate of our mitochondrial DNA is 20 times higher than expected by evolutionary theory. So they expected about one mutation every 6 to 12 ,000 years.

What they observed was one mutation in every 33 generations. So just an amazing sped up observation when compared to the evolutionary theory. It doesn't support it at all. And that's why we have even magazine journals and peer-reviewed journals coming out.

This happens to be a science report that says, well, look, evolutionists are most concerned about the effect of a faster mutation rate. For example, researchers have calculated that mitochondrial Eve, that original Eve, the female that we came from, the woman whose mitochondrial DNA was ancestral to that in all living people lived 100 ,000 to 200 ,000 years ago in Africa.

But using this new clock based upon the observational mutation rates, she would be a mere 6 ,000 years.

Old.

Where have we heard that before? Well, it's in the Bible. That's what the biblical history would have was that Eve was drawn from Adam's side about 6 ,000 years ago. A friend of mine is one of the lead chief medical professionals at a huge health system here in the area.

And he's also a creationist. And I pegged him down once at my son's soccer game. And I said, what's the leading proof for you as a physician who's been steeped in the medical industry for years, just observationally from an evidence standpoint, what's the top thing that leads you to believe in a divine creator?

He said, that is easy. It's blood coagulation. And I said, well, what do you mean? He says, well, evolutionists can't explain blood coagulation because there are five separate steps that have to happen when you get a cut that all these signals and all these steps begin to happen to stop the bleeding.

And some people that don't have these steps could bleed out if they don't have the proper medical attention. But he says, look, Dan, there's no way that that just could have evolved because all of the predecessors in any evolutionary line would have died out if you don't have all five steps in the blood cascade lined up like they do in that process.

So then you also have to think, well, what evolved first, the heart or blood or veins? You kind of have to have all three at the same time for our circulatory system to work. The next evidence that we'll look at is just really the weakness of the case for human evolution when you take a look at it objectively and you look at the lineup that they have for ape to human evolution, it's a really weak, we have changing stories.

We have a very scant and scattered and sifted fossil record with huge inferential leaps or big gaps that are requiring a lot of guesswork. We have consistent exaggeration and contradicting and overlapping icons.

The Changing Human Evolution Tree

So the first one we can take a look at is a changing story. So if you were to open up a textbook that's about 100 years old, 1915, and look at the idea that they shared back then on the idea of the human evolution tree, we can see it looks like this.

We even have a couple of icons on this tree that were shown to be frauds or have been exaggerated in different ways that have since been removed from the tree. But in 1915, that's what it looks like. In 1927, we have some changes.

We still have Peltdown Man and a couple other figures on there that scientists have later.

Removed.

In 1931, we have yet more changes that have gone on. 1951, we have a different idea of human evolution, 1965, and then 1985. So there seems to be a new human evolution tree idea for every generation. About every 20 or 30 years, it changes significantly, and this generation is not exempt from that.

We can look at the most modern human evolution trees. This one just came out by paleo expert Richard Klein, and the thick vertical bars that you see here show the actual fossil evidence that they found.

And the dashed lines and thin lines indicate the evolutionary relationships that are based on guesses. So they're trying to fill in the gaps here with guesswork. But if you look at the yellow circles here, all of these are question marks.

They don't know how in history these different evolutionary characters line up. They have estimations on when they think they lined up based upon dating the strata that these things came from or evolutionary designs that they perceive.

But look at all the question marks, and this is the latest cutting edge theory here on the human evolution tree. Here's another one that was published in the Scientific American, same thing. Look at all of the broken branches.

These all are based on inferences and guesswork from one particular icon to the next to the next. It's not a complete tree. In fact, most experts today call it a human evolution bush, where they have all these kind of connections.

And if you ask one paleo expert and a different paleo expert, they're gonna give you a different conjecture, a different way that the tree's gonna show up for them. But here we have tons and tons of broken branches.

So if you browse through the headlines and follow this topic like I do, you're gonna find time and time again magazine articles, peer-reviewed journal articles, lay articles that are coming out saying things like this, we have still not found the missing link between us and apes, or the human ape is still missing, or things like the oldest fossils of our species push back origin of modern humans.

These things go on time and time again. They're consistently redrawing the tree of human evolution. Our happy 350 ,000th birthday study pushes back homo sapien origins yet again. The next thing I'd like to look at is this scant, scattered, and sifted fossil record.

Darwin’s Own Objection to Transitional Fossils

So Charles Darwin said that as by evolutionary theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed. Why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? And he also said, why is not every geological formation in every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geology assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain. And this is the most obvious and serious objection that can be urged against his theory, against the theory. So Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory, believed that subsequent decades and centuries of digging would reveal more and new and more convincing transitionary fossils.

But that has not been the case. In fact, we've gone backwards. We're not finding more evolutionary transitions. We're finding more stasis in the fossil record. So today we have over 7 billion humans on the planet.

There are less than 1 .5 million primates, and we have really nothing in between. We've got millions of primates. We've got over 7 billion humans. Where are all the in-betweens? Because you would think if we did evolve from ape-like creatures, there ought to be more of those running around than there are today.

But there's a huge missing middle here. We have apes and humans, but not a lot in between. So Dr. Ian Tattersall from the American Museum of Natural History has a saying here where he says, look, you could take all of the supposed evidence that humans evolved from ape-like creatures, and if you didn't mind how much you jumbled it up, you could put it all into the back of a pickup truck.

When I was indoctrinated by public school as a high schooler and through college, gosh, I thought that they had, you know, bulldozer trucks full of transitionary fossils because that's the way they seem to make it appear in the textbooks.

But when you go and you start looking at the actual fossil collections, you can take the whole lot of it and put it into the back of a pickup truck. And many estimate even smaller than that, maybe just a wheelbarrow full of fossils that supposedly show this ape-to-human connection.

Ardi, Lucy, and the Problem of Missing Evidence

The next one is having big inferential leaps, consistent exaggerations, contradictions, and overlapping icons. So let's take a look at this by looking at some of the oldest human evolutionary icons going to the newest.

We can start with Ardi. They found Ardi in Ethiopia in 1992. She was a scat of scattered fragmentary bones found in about a 30-foot excavated area. It took them about 17 years to reconstruct Ardi to the point where they put this digital reconstruction on the front of Science Magazine here.

And none of the bones were found connected or in any way to each other, found over about a 30-foot radius. And many of the, even the leading finders of this Ardi skeleton called it like Irish stew or mush or roadkill.

So they're dealing with very, very scant evidence here. And Ardi's claim to fame was that she was supposedly an upright walker or on her way to becoming an upright walker. And they guessed that in part based upon the bottom of her skull, a part called the foramen magnum.

It's the base of our skull where the spine comes up to the middle there. And they only had about half of her foramen magnum. And you can guess just by looking there about how the degree of reconstruction that was necessary to take these scattered 100 bones squished about an inch and a half thick and reconstruct it into a skull that had to be done digitally.

And here's what it looks like when they did that. And you can see here at the base of her skull is largely missing. They had to take all these 100 fragments, put them together and reconstruct what they thought her skull might've looked like.

Her spine, it was another thing that they used to base the idea that she was an upright walker from. Dr. Lovejoy inferred from the pelvis that her spine was long and curved like a human's rather than short and stiff like a chimp's.

And these changes suggested to him that Ardi had been a bipedal or an upright walker for a long time. In fact, Dr. Lovejoy said that, well, we think Ardi had this thing called lumbar lordosis or curvature of the spine.

And we'll take a look at that in a minute here. But Lovejoy did acknowledge, the discoverer of Ardi, said that chimps and gorillas do have three to four lumbar vertebrae, but he inferred that Ardi must have had six lumbar or lower vertebrae.

And this is important because all of the lower lumbar, all the lower vertebrae from Ardi were completely missing. He was inferring based upon a complete absence of data. So they didn't find any of her lumbar vertebrae.

And here's a simulation showing Ardi walking. Well, we can see that this is a quick glimpse of her hip or her pelvis region. And they're thinking that she's walking like this, and they will draw on her a complete curved spine from start to finish.

But you can see here, they didn't find any of those parts. They had to infer the whole thing. And it's based upon that inference, based upon a little tiny bump on the pelvis. They think the rest of it should be constructed like this.

So this is really a high degree of inference. They even put a curve on her spine there. And that's all based really on guesswork. Apes have one long curve, kind of like a shallow C. Humans have four curves to our spine.

We have the cervical, thoracic, lumbar, and sacral. And that's to facilitate upright walking, whereas chimps are hunched over. So they just have one long curve that they have. They're kind of forced into a stooped over position there.

And they're inferring a human-like lumbar lordosis, or a curved spine, on Ardi based upon nothing but a slight bump in the hip. We can also take a look at the other parts of her body. I mean, here is an artist's rendition of a baboon that's, I'm sorry, a bonobo that's right next to her.

She really does look like a bonobo, which is a cousin to a chimp. But based upon this limited data, based upon a bump on her pelvis, completely missing lower lumbar vertebrae, having no spine really to speak of at all, including a missing foramen magnum, only had about half of it, where her spine entered the base of her skull, and a really smashed up skull, they're believing that she walked upright.

So there's a lot of inference and guesswork going on here. And then when you look at even her toe and her hallux, many apes have an exaggerated hallux, or they use their hands or their feet like hands.

And so they have this hallux that sticks off to the side so that they can grasp things for climbing. As shown here, they have this huge thumb that sticks out to the side. That bottom clip there is actually that chimp's thumb hanging on to a branch, but it's a thumb attached to her foot and not on her hand.

So Artie was very well equipped for hanging out in trees. Next, let's take a look at Lucy. Lucy is the leading human evolution icon that's used in sixth grade textbooks around this state and around most states in the country.

Let's start with a quick clip from Donald Johanson, who's a discoverer of Lucy. He has this video on BBC where he talks about the number of Lucy's kinds that have been found are Australopithecine or Australopithecus afarensis, which means ape from afar.

So let's give this a quick listen.

We now have 400 specimens of Lucy's species Australopithecus afarensis, named after the Afar region. And we know that there are very large individuals, which were males, and the smaller ones are certainly females.

Okay, so we see here that while this video is playing, Dr. Johanson says we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind. And while he's saying we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind, we see this parade of full, complete, upright skeletons marching across the screen while he says we have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind.

But when you look at what he's talking about, he actually, they don't have 400 complete upright walking skeletons like they show on the video. They have this picnic table, and that's what they mean by 400 specimens.

In fact, about 380 to be exact, and 35 of these specimens are just teeth. So while on the video he says we now have 400 specimens of Lucy's kind, he's talking about bone chips and bone fragments and teeth as specimens, not complete upright walking skeleton, as is exaggerated on that video.

They just have these 380-some bone pieces and fragments that they found in the Hadar region. So not complete upright walking skeletons. But every time we see Lucy in museums and school textbooks, you'll notice that every single time, I think we found once where there's an exception, they show her with complete eye whites, and only humans have eye whites.

Apes do not have eye whites. There's a couple of species of apes that have a little bit of white rim around their eyes, but for the vast majority of ape species, do not have eye whites. But it's done to exaggerate her human-like appearance.

Here we can see now they've even taken the fur off of Lucy and given her a family and a husband. So she's walking along there, no fur, with completely white eyes. And here we go again, another one with Lucy with white eyes.

And now we have Lucy in deep thought. Looks like she's philosophizing there. And when you look at the context in which Lucy was found, they found hundreds of pieces scattered around a three-meter area of a hillside, 50 square meters or 20 tons was sifted to find what resulted in only being about 20 of her bones.

So all this work, lots of people, 50 square meters, 20 tons of sediment sifted, and they only found about 20 of her bones. And in this collection, just a few years ago, they learned that her thoracic vertebrae actually didn't belong to her.

It belonged to an extinct creature called a theropithecus. So we know that at least one or probably some of her bones are from a mixed-up species of different kinds, didn't even belong to her ape species.

Homo habilis, Human Toolmaking, and a Stone Hut

Okay, the next icon in the lineup is called Homo habilis or handyman. So if you were to open up a sixth grade textbook in world history that goes through human evolution, we have Homo habilis is next.

But even the leading evolutionists, this one here, Dr. Richard Leakey, says, look, of the several dozen specimens that we have been said at one time or another to belong to this species, at least half probably don't belong to Homo habilis.

But there is no consensus as to which 50 should be excluded. No anthropologist's 50 is quite the same as another's. Let's just start from the big picture on Homo habilis. They don't have a single one.

They have 100 bone pieces and fragments and a collection that they've labeled the taxon Homo habilis, but they don't have one complete Homo habilis specimen. They just have a bunch of bones, random bones from different places that they're categorizing into the Homo habilis category.

Well, why did they call this creature Homo habilis? Because it means handyman. And these bones were found, the majority of Homo habilis bones were found in an area where they found thousands of butchered animal remains from bovids or cows, catfish, all kinds of different creatures that had been butchered using choppers, polyhedrons, discoids, and scrapers.

So they also found that these scrapers and these rock tools had to be harvested from a place that was a couple miles away that had this special type of rock called quartzite. So whoever was taking these stone tools and using them and putting them together and butchering these animals had to learn what kind of rocks to go to and go quarry.

So they had to quarry certain kinds of rocks. They had to flake it with precision, form into several different types of tools that can be used for butchering animals, which was a several stage process.

And thousands of bones from other animals were found pulled apart and not attached. So we have what we really have here where Homo habilis was found was a human animal killing and butchering site where they were using humans that were smart enough to go a couple miles away, get special kinds of rock, bring them back, forge these rocks into different types of tools for different processes, and then use them for butchering and eating animals, including ape-like creatures just like Homo habilis.

And here is a quick video that talks about where they found the Homo habilis bones and a living structure that they found not too far away.

The evidence that humans were actually the inhabitants of this site is also confirmed by a 12-foot circular foundation made of lava stones for a hut shelter they found in the same archaeological bed where Homo habilis bones were found.

Paleo experts even described this circular stone foundation as having a striking similarity to the dome-shaped hut shelters still made today by nomadic people in the same area. But it gets even better.

They actually found the stone circle in a layer beneath Homo habilis bones. Now, that's not faring well for the theory of evolution because whoever was there working with tools and building huts was on the scene before Homo habilis even showed up in the fossil record.

This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect if evolution was true. The 348 animal bones they found scattered around the hut included species from the croc, cow, hippo, elephant, horse, tortoise, giraffe, and pig families.

And do you know how many they found inside the stone hut circle? Only 11 small fragments, which were mostly toes and teeth. Seems like the leftover pork chops were being thrown outside the living area.

The other clue that this site was being inhabited by humans is that 48 of the 50 pieces of debitage which are the leftover pieces of rock that get removed when stone tools are made were found outside the stone hut foundation.

Sounds like a human living area to me.

Okay, so there we have Homo habilis. And it's amazing to me that they found this 12-foot circular stone hut foundation that obviously had to be built by humans. And humans in the same area are building the same type of structures today.

And yet they say that this Homo habilis creature built it. The next in the lineup is Neanderthals. And from the 1900s to 1960s, so if you go look at my grandpa's version of a Neanderthal, my dad's version of a Neanderthal, my version of a Neanderthal growing up, if you look at the school textbooks in those eras, you'll find Neanderthals as a brutish half-man, half-ape creature cruising around with clubs.

That's how it was pitched to us in anthropology classes. But Neanderthals today, after collecting more bones and doing more research and more analyses, they were completely human. Their genome lines up over 99%, the same as humans are today.

They had families with Homo sapiens. They buried their dead using ceremonies. They made weapons. They made arts. They buried people with flowers. They had all kinds of things, including musical instruments, that indicate that they were fully human.

Now they've even learned that these Neanderthals were combing beaches and diving down for certain shells at certain depths to make tools for harvesting meat off of animals. So they were completely human.

But that was certainly not the way they were pitched to me when I was a high schooler. So in summary, we have four to five million years ago, we covered arty. Then we went on to Lucy's kind, to Homo habilis, Homo erectus, and Homo sapiens.

This is the way it's laid out in a sixth grade textbook. And we have these different fossil icons that we talked about going along each way. These were just extinct apes. Homo habilis, fewer than 100 bone pieces represent that taxon.

And did you know that from the time period that evolutionists put between 2 million and 3 million years, they only have enough fossil evidence that they claim from ape to human evolution between 2 million and 3 million years to put inside of a shoebox and still have room left for putting the shoes back inside.

So they supposedly say we branched off from ape-like creatures starting about 5 million years ago to present. But they have this huge window between 2 and 3 million years ago that they believe where they have literally almost no evidence, enough to put into a shoebox and still with room left to put in the shoes.

And then the last thing I'll cover here on this is that this is from Dr. Rupp's book. Called Contested Bones. They've actually found from evolutionist material that a lot of these evolutionists who are excavating these bones now say there's a huge degree of overlap with these animals or these ape-like creatures coexisting at the same time.

So my question is how can one supposedly evolve from this creature to the next to the next if evolutionists say, well, they were all living at the same time or in the same era. And there's plenty of sites and quotations we have from evolutionists about that point.

Okay, so we'll end human evolution here and go on to the next section.

Thanks.