Traced – Human DNA’s Big Surprise

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When you don't look like what someone expects, that's going to lead to delays in diagnosis. We all have to take this constellation of symptoms, treat it the same each and every time, whether it's a young person, a Black person, a woman.

If someone presents to me with my heart racing and feeling winded, I need to get an echocardiogram 100 of the time, regardless.

I said, look at what's transpired in the United States in the last 40 years. It's basically illegal to teach creation science in the public schools. And the vast majority of people go to the public schools.

The vast majority of scientists are going to have a strictly public school, secular university education. There aren't that many universities, young-earth universities out there, period. And even the public ones, even if people wanted to go there, I guess is my point, and hardly any of them offer science PhDs.

So if you wanted to get a science PhD, you go through an educational program in which learning about creation science is effectively barred.

Introduction to the Interview and Dr. Jensen’s Background

Welcome to The Rap Report with your host, Andrew Rappaport, where we provide biblical interpretation and application. This is a ministry of striving for eternity in the Christian podcast community. For more content or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Well, welcome to another edition of The Rap Report. I'm your host, Andrew Rappaport, the president of Striving for Eternity Ministries, here with a guest. Today, we're going to have an interview show.

This is going to be different than we usually do, as we don't often have too many interviews. But this is going to be one that I've been looking forward to. I'm going to get to explaining why after our guest introduces himself.

But we're going to be talking about DNA. If you think that is something, well, I'm not sure what DNA stands for. Well, I'm sure you don't, but you've heard of it. But did you know that there is a big surprise within your DNA that will help us understand, well, something more of our creator?

And so, Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, welcome to The Rap Report. Thank you so much, Andrew. So you and I first met, as we talked, we first met in Jackson, New Jersey, when you came out with a friend of mine, Jason Lyle, you were speaking.

So you were, I still remember you were talking and you were explaining the difference between basically the human DNA and I think it was a rat DNA, and how close they were. And I was like, okay, I never heard that one before.

And the way you explain that, because, okay, so my daughter has a degree in molecular biochemistry. She tries to explain things to me and I just go, that's why you have the degree, dear. You explained it.

I was like, I understand him. It was a real joy to be able to see you, you know, explain things that were difficult for folks to understand at an easy to explain level. And I will tell you this, I didn't tell you this before we started recording, but I called up Jason as a friend of mine, who I know you worked for over at ICR.

I said, hey, listen, I'm going to be interviewing him, anything you can help me, because I don't typically interview people I don't know personally. And I said, any tips, anything you can help me out?

He goes, well, Nathaniel is about the smartest guy I know, and he's super down to earth. And I said, Jason, wait, that's what we all say about you. So now I'm a little intimidated. Because if Jason calls you really smart and he intimidates me, I'm really worried.

He's much smarter than I am.

So that's a kind compliment. He's actually a co-author in one of my papers, because I had to work out math, you know, biologists don't like math. So we had to work out some math of the genetics. And he was a kind collaborator, ended up being a co-author because of his material contribution to it.

So I go to him when I need help with math or anything along those lines.

One of the things that's always impressed me with Jason is you look at a guy, okay, he knows, you know, astrophysics, knows that well. But then you get him into scripture. And I've said this about him.

There's very few people I know who handle scripture as carefully. He's just as careful handling of scripture as he is handling of science. And he has said the same about you. So you have a book that's just come out.

And folks, we're going to be not only talking about the book, we're going to tell you how you can get a discount on it. It is, the book is called Traced. And you have a pretty bold claim with this book.

So first, give us just an overview what the book's about. And then what is it that you discovered within DNA? And I guess really, before we get into that, I should ask for you to give your background because it might help people to understand your background a little bit.

From Christian Upbringing to Harvard and Creation Research

Yeah. So I grew up in a Christian home in Wisconsin, born in Milwaukee, raised in Racine, southeast corner of Wisconsin. Dad was a dentist. Mother was a nurse until she had me. And then was a stay-at-home mom.

And we had, well, when they were making educational decisions, this is the 80s in Wisconsin. And sort of the ground floor of the homeschool movement, they were some of the early leaders or participants in it.

So I was homeschooled through eighth grade, strong Christian background, creationist background. Went to homeschool creationist conferences, World View conferences growing up. Still found my notes from a Ken Ham lecture when I was in eighth grade.

Have you been evolutionized was the opening question. I thought that's a good question. And then went to a small Christian high school that was one of the only, of the three Christian high schools in the area, that was the only one that was explicitly Young Earth in their commitment.

So I had that background. Lived at home when I went to University of Wisconsin, Parkside. And the living at home part, I think, was a great boon. Also being still part of my local church there, strong support background, many prayers of the people there, especially the older folks.

The older saints were active in mentoring or supporting students, which I can look back and have much gratitude for. Moved off to Boston for my PhD at Harvard. My interest at that time was cancer and Harvard is associated with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, 15 ,000 people apparently working on cancer.

So that was a great place to try to learn it. Ended up working on stem cells, the cells that sustain our body because there was a connection growing between stem cells and cancer, trying to understand normal biology to understand how biology goes awry.

In the back of my head when I went to Harvard, I thought, well, this might be useful apologetically someday, which I've looked back on recently and began to question just because you look at how the Lord works.

And there's that statement in the New Testament about, you know, not many of you were learned or God uses the weak things of this world as the point. And so I've wondered if, is this the right way about going about things?

Whatever it is, the Lord was kind to give me the opportunity then to participate in apologetics partway through graduate school. I had a, I don't know if I was born again as much as I gained a new perspective on the gospel or maybe the way I like to put it is it went from being old news because I'd heard it my whole life and didn't seem to be making a difference in terms of sin and such.

Though I wanted it to, to being good news where it was exciting and to see the beauty of holiness and the hope of heaven that awaits each believer and be able to finally connect the dots in a Protestant way between trusting Jesus and a changed life in godly living.

So one of the first things I thought about was doing overseas missions, using my degree to get into closed countries that fell through for in God's kind providence, because I look back and say, okay, you know, if you want to go overseas and do that, you need to be basically gifted as a pastor or elder or something like that, which I can say I'm probably not.

The whole people skills part is something I'm deficient in. But also in terms of spiritual maturity, that would have been, I think, disastrous. And the Lord kind of prevented me from going that direction, which I didn't, of course, see at the time, was upset about it.

And then at the end of graduate school, didn't know what I was going to do and considered going to seminary. There was just all sorts of open-ended things I was pursuing. I sent a resume to the Institute for Creation Research in 2009.

They responded. I thought, well, here's a way to, I guess once a scientist, always a scientist, right? Here's a way to experiment, to use my degree, perhaps for more immediate, eternal purposes than I had originally planned.

And I was at ICR from 2009 to 2015. Now I'm at Answers in Genesis, which has a museum in Arkencounter. We're here at the Arkencounter and have been here since May of, so seven years now, seven year anniversary for me.

And I'm the research biologist. And so now, now the connection to the book, there's a long-winded answer to what does this have to do with the book? Here's my background. And it's all connected in terms of ICR and AIG, my work here.

The first task I was given when I joined the Institute for Creation Research was to develop a biology research program. There wasn't a set of projects per se. It was the boss that at that time was Henry Morris III.

He had said, we've done a lot of research in geology, a lot of research in astronomy. We'd really like to bulk up what we're doing biologically. And of course, with the advent of modern genetics and the rapidly multiplying amount of sequences, DNA sequences that we have available to study, it made sense from that perspective.

So first task for me was find the questions that need answered. And they all largely ended up revolving around the origin of species, who they come from, and when they form, and how they form, and everything related.

Why they go extinct, these sorts of things, which the human question was a subset of the larger one. And a lot of the early work in that, you can see the papers I've published, revolved around that question of the origin of species in general, as an answer to Darwin's ideas about the origin of species.

One of the first major books I published, 2017 then, this is Answers in Genesis, but I basically continued the research that I started at ICR, then at AIG, and Replacing Darwin is sort of a summary of here's where we're at in terms of that larger origin of species question.

Now I learned in graduate school, I went into graduate school, I should say, naively thinking that what was lacking in the world was asking good questions. I had this crazy idea about cancer that I'd learned, now I view it kind of as a quack idea of cancer, but I thought, you know, here, I'm going to go to graduate school, we're going to cure cancer, because we've got the right questions to ask, and learn the hard way.

There's lots of people asking good questions, lots of good ideas. That's what I really thought it was coming down to, is a lack of good ideas. Now there's lots of good ideas, what we're missing is the tools to answer them.

And one of the, maybe the dirty ugly truths, or just the way the world is, I learned when it comes to research, is it's often, especially on the hot questions, and the most medically relevant and important questions with the biggest ramifications, it's not so much a who finds the answer, it's who finds the answer first.

Because there's so many people working on the same questions. And just as a side note, when I went to the Institute for Creation Research, my parents asked me, they said, what's the biggest difference, they said, between Harvard and now?

And I hadn't thought about it up to that point. So I just reflected on it for a moment, and it struck me. I said, less pressure. Because there's this constant cloud, I don't know that you necessarily recognize it when you're in it, this constant cloud hanging over your head of, get it done, get it done, get it done.

Publish first. Publish it. You got to get it done before someone else does. I mean, it's thrilling, because you walk in a lab every day saying, we might make a discovery that wins the Nobel Prize, because that's the type of things the top labs work on.

And the one I was in is no exception. But it's also then this constant pressure of, you've got to produce. Publish or perish is really what it comes down to. You can kind of get away with not succeeding so spectacularly at the PhD level.

Once you get to the postdoc level, then it's, you know, publish or you're done. But ICR, we can still ask these big questions, but there's a lot less competition. So there was this, I didn't realize that I had finally escaped sort of this cloud of, and drumbeat, if you've got to get it done today, or else someone might scoop you on it, which is the constant undercurrent of everyone in the lab, whatever question they're working on, there's someone else's another lab who might get it done first.

So anyway, didn't lose the aspect of wanting to pursue big questions, just had less pressure to do it. And then went where the tools were, which at that time, I started working on mitochondrial DNA, which is a type of DNA that's passed through the maternal line, at least as best as we can tell.

And there were thousands of species with mitochondrial DNA sequences. So what a great, fantastic data set that some of the early papers, and we're able to learn a lot with that data set. Also with, there was an increasing number as we went on, you know, was there six years and then seven, eight years, a lot of what I'd say is nuclear DNA sequences.

This is the typical DNA you get from both parents. It's 99 of our DNA. We don't have as much of it because it takes that much more time and effort and money to get that sequence versus mitochondrial DNA, which is less than 1 of our total DNA.

It's only 16 ,000, 17 ,000 letters in humans. Anyway, those are the tools we had. I was able to make a lot of progress in that direction. I went towards the human side of the equation. In part, again, because that's where the data are.

There's, even if you just look in terms of budgets, look at the United States National Institutes of Health budget versus the National Science Foundation. National Institutes of Health, of course, is going to fund projects that seek to answer questions of human disease and medical relevance, whereas NSF is sort of the broad, general biological interest.

NIH, I think, in one of the last few years was probably $60 billion. NSF, I think, is $10 billion. NIH, of course, is funding a lot of genetic research then because that's where people are looking now to try to find causes of disease, potential cures for disease, these sorts of things, genetic predispositions or genetic, what's the term I'm looking for?

I'm forgetting it now, but sort of the buzzword then at the time was trying to find tailored genomic medicine. So, your DNA, you, Andrew, might predispose you to respond to, let's say, ibuprofen or even something like that, some general drug or cancer drug, differently than my DNA might.

And this is not something we've appreciated in times past. Or another bigger issue, of course, is what about, let's say, someone of African-American descent? How might their DNA cause them to respond to a blood pressure drug or a heart disease drug or a Parkinson's or whatever it is, diabetes, versus someone who's of Caucasian descent?

So, there's a lot of data out there, is my point. And so, there's a lot of tools then if you want to answer human questions. The way I got there in terms of questions then, because that's one of the other lessons I learned from graduate school in terms of how you do a research project is the first thing you should find is the question, and then you go find the tools, hopefully, that are available to answer it.

What I had done up to that point, let's say, 2015 or so, with, again, mitochondrial DNA, female inherited DNA, we had evidence that the rate at which that DNA changes, generation to generation, fit a 6 ,000-year origin.

Of course, the critics were guffawing at this and had loud condemnations of it and claims of how I'd gotten it wrong. Of course, the way you proceed in science is you make testable predictions and you keep chasing the evidence where it leads.

We also had found evidence that in the family tree based on this DNA, so the family tree of maternal inheritance, you could see near the base of that tree three basic nodes, which is interesting because what do you have in terms of biblical maternal inheritance?

You have Eve, ultimately, but if you go down to the flood, which the whole population disappears except for eight people, Noah, his wife, his sons, and their wives, the maternal inheritance goes back to three people.

Mrs. Noah passes on her mitochondrial DNA to her boys, but they don't pass it on, so it stops there. And we all come from the three wives of Noah's sons. Scripture is silent on what their ancestry is.

They may have been sisters. They may not have been sisters. My suspicion is that they were not because, or even daughters, let's say, of Noah and Mrs. Noah, because my guess is the scripture would say so.

So, my guess is they were somewhat unrelated. I mean, not that unrelated because it's only a few generations back to Adam and Eve. So, the fact that you have these three nodes seems to be eerily suggestive of the flood.

So, I thought, well, what's the next major biblical event? Babel is what comes after the flood. So, let's go looking for the genetic signature of Babel in our DNA. That was my thought because, again, for humans, let's say, human origins, there's so much scripture-wise versus, let's say, butterflies, where you've got some major points, but you don't have as much detail.

So, then I initiated a collaboration with a linguist who, a PhD linguist, actually a relative, then, of the CEO, who was working at Wycliffe, or the Summer Institute of Linguistics, at least, was connected with him, which is an affiliate of Wycliffe, trying to see if we could overlay the linguistic language map of humanity with the genetic map of humanity.

Long story short, which, of course, you say, well, duh, in retrospect, is you can change your language, you can't change your DNA. So, there's many spots where the language map doesn't match in terms of mitochondrial DNA, the DNA map, but there are also places where it does, and these tended to be places of the world who, as best we can tell, have been isolated for thousands of years since Babel.

New Guinea, South India, China, you can see some isolated languages, you can see some isolated genetic lineages. The bigger thing that appeared to us, and definitely to me, was that I had approached this all in a biblically short-sighted way.

The Bible isn't creation, to use the Cs of creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, and then, of course, the next Cs are New Testament. In terms of anthropology, and they're criticizing that approach, I was just saying, if you want to drill it down and say, okay, what else, when you think about biblically, you could add a C for the Old Testament conquest, and if no other example, the nation of Israel.

They come out of conquest, or probably there's a better C that I can come up with, but Israel itself was not a genetically homogeneous, ethnically homogeneous nation, and it's from the get-go. You've got two whole tribes who have an Egyptian mother, Manasseh and Ephraim, come from Joseph Mary's Egyptian lady.

So, there's other national blood coming in there. When they exit Egypt in the Exodus, there's a mixed multitude that comes up with them. You have explicit statements in the book of Judges, when the nation fails to conquer the Canaanites, about them giving their sons to the daughters of the Canaanites, and the sons of the Canaanites marrying the daughters of Israel.

So, you've got intermixing there. Of course, by the end of Judges, you've got one whole tribe nearly going extinct, because they're slaughtering one another. Then, of course, the northern tribes conquered by Assyria, southern by Babylon, and this is hundreds of years before Christ, and if this is what happens to a nation who's supposed to stick together for religious reasons, how much more so the rest of the nations of the globe.

So, that's a long way of saying what changed my research perspective at that time was to reverse it and say, instead of looking for Babel, why don't we start at the present, look for the genetic echo of recent historical events, and work our way backwards, unraveling the history that's happened post-Babel to go back to the beginning.

And so, one of the first things we began to pursue with a collaborator, Rob Carter, was the genetic echo of the transatlantic slave trade. Sad, ugly history, but well-documented. We've got extensive databases of exactly how many boarded ships in Africa, how many didn't make it, how many exited in the Americas, and we could compare it then to data that was available.

We had DNA from African-Americans, we had DNA from indigenous Africans, and we said, okay, can we genetically pinpoint, can we line up the genetics with these historical records and say, okay, look at genetically the family tree based on their DNA.

Here is where the African-Americans separated from the Africans, and it should line up then with what we know. And it will be a product then of which timescale you have. So, this was an explicitly Young Earth project where you say, okay, if the total family tree represents only a few thousand years of history, that's going to change the dates you assign to when the African-American lineage separates from the African.

And conversely, if you say the whole tree represents hundreds of thousands of years, as evolution might say, or maybe even old Earth creation might say, depending on how they work it out, then you're going to get a very different set of dates for this.

And we got to the point of almost publishing it, this is a really long backstory to my book, but I think it's relevant especially for skeptics, and we can talk about some of how the skeptics have responded and they've missed this long success story, which is really what it is, a remarkable success story, which is a testament to the scientific accuracy of scripture and its scientific strength.

We got to the point of almost publishing, and I, as I do when I publish papers, and every person should do if they're doing research, you become your own worst critic. You say, okay, what are the reviewers going to say?

What are the critics going to say? And really creationists have to be even more critical of themselves than your typical researcher because it will get blasted by the evolutionary community in a way that, you know, let's say a medical question might not.

Yes, it'll get reviewed harshly, but anyone, of course, who's been in the creation-evolution debate knows there's a lot more at stake in this debate than in health questions. There's a lot at stake in health questions, but there's even more, you know, there's eternal questions, eternal fates at stake in this question.

So, I began to ask myself then, and think through what the reviewers might say, and say, okay, they're probably going to say, fine, you've been able with the Young Earth Time Scale to accurately date the sad history of the separation of African Americans from Africans and their DNA, and, you know, genealogically and so forth, given this history of the transatlantic slave trade.

What about the rest of the family tree? Because if you say, yes, this is all 4 ,500 years, what about this European lineage? What about this South Indian lineage? How do you explain all that? And that's, so, this was probably 2017 -2018, that led me down a whole other trail, which culminates then in this book, Trace to Human DNA's Big Surprise, where you can see, really, the point of the book is, you can see stamped in our DNA all throughout it the echoes of known history of civilization.

The book, I could probably get in trouble for this, the book isn't primarily an apologetic book. It's a history book, which tries to answer the question, what is the story of the peoples of the world?

The history I learned in high school, last history class I took, was largely a political and religious and cultural history, because that's the tools we've had for a century, or however long we've been doing history.

Now we've got DNA to add to it. We haven't had that before, so that's why we didn't have these answers. Now we do, and it just so happens that it works extremely well only when you've got this Young Earth timescale.

You can see stamped all, so, the apologetic side. It's not primarily an apologetic book, it's a history book, but it has these massive apologetic ramifications. Because the point is, and what you see all throughout the book, what I show the reader is you've got stamped throughout our DNA, all these echoes of the history of civilization, only when you've got the Young Earth timescale, and that is to me one of the strongest arguments in print then, for the recent origin of humanity.

And part of the reason I've gone through this long backstory is, it's also the culmination of more than a decade of research, where we've followed the evidence where it's led us, we've followed the tools as they've become available, and started with the maternally inherited DNA, and it seemed to be working, critics said no it doesn't.

We then went to the nuclear DNA, which is the 99 of our DNA we get from both parents, this is 2016, I published a paper working there as well. And now what this book focuses on is the male inherited, the Y chromosome, which I hadn't focused on before, but again it's the culmination of other compartments, genetic compartments, of years of research where we've made predictions, they've been fulfilled, the critics said no, well we kept going, we made more predictions, they were fulfilled, the critics said no, and we've made even more predictions now.

And what's remarkable, just to sort of give away some of the answers to the critics' objections, what's been remarkable to me is, what we're seeing now is a radical reorientation of the creation evolution debate.

Just the fact that we're making predictions and fulfilling them is a massive step, it's a massive step forward for creation science, a massive maturation of creation science, but the critics have given us this tremendous gift in showing that it's an even bigger step.

One of the main things the critics have said, you can find the videos and articles online, this disagrees with the textbooks. That's basically point one, full stop, end of discussion. It disagrees with the textbooks.

If you know anything about the creation evolution debate, that's been, in a sense, the embodiment of what the critics have said about the creationists. If you look at, let's say, Doug Futuma, one of the major authors of evolution of knowledge textbooks, major participant in the creation evolution debate in the 80s, I think in court cases, he's written books against creation science, one of the main things he says is creationists are basically anti-science.

It's an antithetical way of knowing the world because creationists insist on authority, on certainty. They are not questioning things. Science is based on questioning established dogmas and poking holes and chinks in the armor, that's almost a verbatim quote from one of his books, you know, finding chinks in the armor of established ideas.

Everything they've accused us of doing now, this embodies the criticisms of this book. I thought, what a tremendous gift. I can sit here and stamp my foot and pound the pulpit and say, well, evolution is just a religion.

People just sort of dismiss it as, yeah, yeah, you kook. That doesn't make any sense. Now, they're literally basically saying, yes, this is what it is. There are established ideas you can't question. The textbook says so.

I thought, well, wow, what a tremendous role reversal. The creationists over here are saying, let's do science. I've put ways to falsify my ideas in this book. There are more predictions that follow from it.

It fulfills predictions that it made in years prior, put in print in years prior. And just the fact that we put predictions in print is a refutation of decades of attacks against creation science. But now they're working and we've made even more.

And instead of taking us up on the offer to test creation science scientifically, it's, no, the dogma. So, I don't want to use the word dogma, but the textbook says so. The received idea said so. This is not how you're supposed to do it.

Never a passing thought of, maybe we should question whether the way we've been doing things is actually working, because there's this mountain of evidence accumulating against it and not just against Darwin, but replacing Darwin with better ideas that are working on their own, standing on their own two feet.

That's been one of the biggest surprises for me. I remember the book saying human DNA is a big surprise, which the publisher made it a singular subtitle. There's actually many surprises, which we can get into about going back to Noah and these sorts of things.

Maybe the biggest surprise is we've got a generation by generation family tree for global humanity based on DNA in which it works only within a young earth time scale, where you can test against known history and it works.

You can test against the history of human population growth and it works, and then we can turn around and make new discoveries about the world. So, I'd say that's the major apologetic significance of this book.

It's not just that we're rebutting Darwin, and I actually don't do much rebutting Darwin in this book, because you can find all sorts of other stuff that's been done. There's some really good arguments, some of them not even from creationists.

I mean, look at some of the intelligent design community, where they say, yeah, we don't care about the age of the earth. We don't care about whether we would have common ancestors. Michael Bay, he says, it doesn't matter to me if we have a common ancestor with chimpanzees.

He's got a fairly airtight case against the evolutionary mechanism, which no one's refuted. I mean, I've watched the literature and I've followed the critics. I read what they say and they cannot refute it.

There's great rebutting Darwin that's out there. The book four and a half years ago, almost five years ago now, Replacing Darwin, says now we're replacing Darwin's ideas. What this book represents is a new milestone, where now creationists are making major scientific discoveries because their ideas are working and we can take them into the field and test them and explore the world around us.

One big example, I guess, in the realm of history, which is what this book deals with is there are new discoveries about the pre-Columbian Americas that no one has had access to before, no one's uncovered before.

Well, I should say, there are native accounts that seem to describe exactly this. And in a sense, we're giving the natives their history back to them that the mainstream community has rejected. That's a whole other story.

But there's new discoveries only the creation scientists are making because we've got the framework, the timescale that allows us to uncover all this. So, it's a watershed moment in the creation evolution debate.

If you look back at how things have progressed over the last 40 years, and the evolutions are helping me make this point. That's the great irony of what's going on.

Getting the Book and the Role of Illustrations

So, we're talking with Dr. Nathaniel Jensen. His book is Traced Human DNA's Big Surprise. Folks, if you want to get a copy of this, let me just let you know, you can go to mastersbooks .com. They have set up with us a promo code that you could use.

The coupon code that they have is TRACED22. That is going to be until... Now, folks, this book already sold out once. So, even at the airing of this, I was told that the coupon code will not take effect until June 3rd, and it runs out July 4th.

And so, you want to make sure you'll get 10 off. So, go to mastersbooks .com, get the book Traced by Nathaniel Jensen. TRACED22 is the coupon code. One of the things that was interesting, because some people may be listening to you and saying, okay, a lot of this is going over my head, but you have...

When I first got the book, I was like, okay, 300-page book. But there's like 100 pages of illustrations that throughout this book... And this is tremendous, folks, when you go through it, is throughout your book, you're explaining things, and then it's okay, go to this illustration, go to this illustration, and you're mapping everything out.

The thing that was interesting with what you said is it is usually... You said you started with questions and then came to the conclusions, which is usually what the evolutionists say that they do. And they say, we start with religion.

I remember when Ken Ham did the debate with Bill Nye, the science guy, or really Bill Nye, the not-so-science guy. He's an actor, more of an actor than a science guy. But his whole thing was, we can make predictions, we can make predictions.

So, it was interesting reading through your book, and I'm like, prediction, prediction, prediction. And so, to hear them go, well, no, no, no, textbook. They don't change the textbook. Even when we've history of things that have been pointed out as wrong in the textbooks, and they're like, we're not going to change that.

So, first off, the thing that was really helpful is all the illustrations. Because some of this stuff, folks like I who don't have a background in DNA, I mean, my study of DNA is really in an apologetics view.

I'm going to try to share the gospel. I'm more of a theologian. So, you walked everyone through that with all the illustrations. First off, just explain, why was that so important, the illustrations? And not only why the illustrations, but why is it that we need them, being non-scientists like yourself?

There's a couple of reasons that come to my mind. Maybe the first is because I'm a mapophile, I guess, and I love visuals. And they say a picture is worth a thousand words. But in many cases, it really is.

You can pack so much information in one illustration and sit and look at so much data in one illustration. I can talk about, hey, there's a particular branch in the family tree that exists at 50 in the French and at 75 in the British.

And if you told me that, I'm just listening orally to the numbers, I'd already start my head to start to swim. But if you show me a map, like here, I hear this circle represents this much. At a glance, I can see patterns and these sorts of things.