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.

There's a third option. 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.

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 and 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.

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 we should, 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.

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,

Worldview 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, went, 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. We 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 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. 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 is a museum in Arkham Counter.

We're here at the Arkham Counter 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 of 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 a larger one. And a lot of the early work, and 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.

And 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 gonna go to graduate school, we're gonna 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, but 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 question of 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, publishers, you got to get it done before someone else does. I mean, it's thrilling, because you walk in a lab, everybody's 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 of, 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.

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. So 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 heart disease drug or 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 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 you have, 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, 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 C's of creation, corruption, catastrophe, confusion, and then, of course, the next

C's are New Testament. In terms of anthropology, and criticizing that approach, I was just saying, if you want to drill it down and say, okay, what else, when you think about it 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.

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.

And 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 transatlantic slave trade.

What about the rest of the family tree? Because if you say, yes, this is all 4 ,500 years, well, what about this

European lineage? What about the South Indian lineage? How do you explain all that? And that's, so this was probably 2017 -2018, that led me down a whole nother trail, which culminates then in this book,

Traced Human DNA's Big Surprise, where you can see all, really the point of the book is you can see stamped in our

DNA all throughout it that echoes of known history of civilization. The book, I 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, 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 become available, and we 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, is saying, 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 -evolution 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 in chinks of 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 creationist over here is 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,

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 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. 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. 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, 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, 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 mean, 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, and 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.

So maybe it's my own love of maps and the way my brain operates. But the other thing is, I guess the second thing that comes to mind is there's so much crazy history that emerges from this.

You almost have to see it to believe it. So just the way the book is organized, first four chapters, you got the intro chapter, but then the first chapters two through four are basically background.

Hey, get ready. What you're about to read is crazy, but let me explain to you why this is plausible. Chapter two, going with the history of human population growth, why you and I, Andrew?

I mean, I don't know your background. Your family history, but we have a 95 % chance of having the same common ancestor just 600 years ago, which is sure.

Young earth creationists have talked about. We all go back to Noah in some way. So we're all related in that sense. We're all one human race.

But to say, oh, because of the history of population growth, there's a whole lot of connections among various people, even different ethnic groups in ways we probably didn't anticipate.

That's kind of shocking, which again, it shows up in the family tree. The family tree reflects human population growth, this sort of crazy history.

Chapter three goes through another mathematical type argument, basic mathematical type argument, just multiplication such saying, and again, you and I have this strong chance of having the same common ancestor or to make it perhaps more uncomfortable and personal.

My wife and I have a 95 % chance of having the same common ancestor. My parents have a 95 % chance of having the same common ancestor, which we've done some genetic testing.

And so I can say that my wife and I are probably at least 25th cousins, if not closer, even though we didn't go into marriage planning on working out that way.

The research is gone. And then chapter four is just how quickly ethnic change can happen, which some of that's if you've been in creation circles, you've already heard that with basic Punnett squares and such.

We've talked about how you can go from a light -skinned person to a dark -skinned person in two, three generations. And I also throw in some of the math of how populations can multiply or how slight differences in population size can make a big difference, which people may not recognize.

They're probably already familiar with. People are talking about this in Europe right now. This influx of Middle Eastern refugees, often

Muslims, who come and, as Muslims, have big families, whereas secular Europe tends to eschew that, don't get married, don't want to have many kids, and so their birth rates are much lower.

And even secular demographers are saying in just a few generations that maybe you have Europe becoming dominantly

Middle Eastern descent. It's not intuitive, but when you see, hey, just a small multiplicative difference applied over multiple generations, boom, now you've got a big change.

So, that's background to say, now let's look at the history of the world through the lens of DNA. Again, it's based on the

Y chromosome, the male inherited DNA, and the next, so chapters 5 through 12, basically walk the reader around the globe,

Africa, Europe, South Asia, Middle East, East Asia, Pacific Native Americans, these sorts of things, and saying, can we figure out the history of the peoples in these places, looking through their

DNA and lining up with linguistic data, lining it up with political history? I've realized, having taken my last history class in high school, what many of us have probably taken in the

West is a history of Western civilization, where we touch very little on history of China, history of India, history of,

Middle East is covered, Persia, of course, biblical history covers a lot of that too, but history of the Pacific, Native Americans, these sorts of things, not covered as much.

But I walk through all that. So, some of the book is also just filling in stuff we never learned in school. What's the, in a nutshell, real fast, in two, three pages, what's the history of China?

What's the history of India? And what should we be looking for in our DNA? And to me, the images then are central, play a central role in illustrating this political kingdom, that political kingdom, where these languages exist today.

And part of the reason I'm bringing that all together is there's a lot of connections among all this. One of the things when I did my study in 2015 -16 with this linguist was to look at, you look at the language family to which

Arabic belongs. We classify languages, brief aside here, thinking about the biblical history of languages.

You've got about 70 names, listen, Genesis 10, I think those are the names, the ethnolinguistic units that separate from Babel.

In Genesis 11, we've got over 7 ,700 languages today. How does that happen? Well, these languages have diversified with time.

And so, you classify them to try to figure out what were the Babel units. That's at least how I've done it. And language family seems to be like a good general rule of thumb for what may be an approximation.

That's backstory then to why we talk about Arabic and the Afro -Asaic language family. And you look at the distribution of it and you say, that looks a lot like the map of where the

Arabic Muslim conquest went. There's some history embedded in the languages that are spoken. And then, of course, there's also a branch of the

DNA family tree that seems to overlap this as well. So, to see it visually lined up like that, for me at least, is, wow, there's some really interesting clues here.

There's connections that form. It's also part of making the case. This branch corresponds to the

Arabic people, which of course, to be able to say this is legitimately the way the history played out, you have to get evidence.

Part of all these illustrations are, this is the evidence why I'm reaching this conclusion. So, that someone who comes behind me, a critic who comes behind me and says, well, how did you reach that conclusion?

Well, here's 174 pages or whatever of maps and charts and illustrations. But again, it's also a way to be able to summarize a lot of discussion in a way that it'd make my head swim if I had to put it all in print and all you had is words.

So, it's designed to make the book even more accessible to as wide a readership as possible. And part of the reason behind that too is, unlike Replacing Darwin, which talks about origin of species in general,

I feel like human history is much more accessible to the average person than the history of butterflies. Everyone's had to learn about the

Roman Empire and Genghis Khan's empire. And then you can say, hey, look, you can find the echo of this in our DNA. And only when you've got the

Young Earth Time Scale versus, hey, remember butterflies are the species in Brazil? No. Well, now what do you do? So, it's designed to be able to help the average reader follow it.

And it's designed also to be a book you can give away. So, I know you do street evangelism. And for whatever reason, this is always in the back of my head.

I'd like to have a book to give to an unsaved friend, to be able to give to an unsaved colleague where the book doesn't assume that they know anything about the

Bible or necessarily agree with me. And you start off, and actually, maybe a little bit to a fault, because some people have said, once you get to chapter 13, you see all this come together now.

And you can see the genealogical echo, the genetic echo of Genesis 10, right at the base of the family tree. I didn't see where you're going.

And, oh, boom, it came together. I said, well, that's partly because I'm assuming the reader doesn't agree with Genesis 10. I've got to derive the history in our

DNA with this Young Earth timescale independent of that. And then, lo and behold, it lines up point after point after point after point in Genesis 13 and brings it all together.

So, that background is kind of embedded in the structure of the book as well. Well, that was a neat thing. And folks, we're talking about the book

Traced by Dr. Nathaniel Jensen. You can get it at mastersbooks .com. We are having a coupon code.

You can use TRACE22 until July 4th. You do that, the coupon code will start on June 3rd when it's back in print.

But here was the thing that was interesting. In the layout of your book, you started off very... I mean, this is why

I think this is accessible for everyone. You start off saying, okay, we're going to start off slow. And you even warn people, okay, we're going to ramp up real quick.

But the first couple of chapters are just laying the groundwork for anybody to be able... You don't have a background in sciences?

That's fine. That lays that out. Then you literally go around the world, area by area.

Basically explaining the same thing. It's the same repetition. So if you didn't pick it up in the earlier chapters, you're starting to pick it up as you're repeating and showing the same pattern.

And then, as you said, by chapter 13, it's, oh, wait, now I see how that's coming together. It really is a book that is accessible because if some people go, okay, it's too much, those first chapters lay out really a groundwork.

You and I were talking before we started recording. As an open air evangelist, I used languages to prove the

Tower of Babel, because evolutions have no explanation why there's 13 proto -languages, first languages that can't go back.

You can study languages and see how people move around. And I've always used that as an argument. You're doing the DNA, which is even more specific.

Because as you said, languages, we can change languages. I mean, my bride spoke Cantonese.

She grew up speaking Cantonese. She had to learn English when she came to America. She didn't know any

English, even though she's technically British. That's where her passport was from. So she was a Brit that didn't know how to speak

English. But you can change your language. DNA, we can't change. I understand there's some people in our generation don't get that.

You know, they think they could just change an X chromosome to a Y and raise it. It's just a feeling.

They could just, oh, well, I feel a woman today. But you've made this accessible. Why do you think that this book is...

This wasn't an apologetic book in my reading of it, as you had said. It really was just going through and saying, let's lay out the way the world is and why this ends up revealing it has to be a young earth.

So why is it that you think that so many in the secular world, the secular sciences have missed this?

And this is a great question to bring up again, what the evolutionary community has told us.

So let me lay maybe a broader foundation, a bigger background. I'll take your question and I'll put it now in the mouth of an antagonistic journalist, because I'd like to ask this question too.

They'll put it more aggressively and say, if what you're saying is true, why does so many in the scientific community disagree with you?

And they like to give me two options, neither of which, of course, are attractive. So is there...

Are you the only one because there's some vast scientific conspiracy to suppress the truth? Or are you just anti -science in some way?

Whatever it is, however they lay it out, whichever way you answer this, you're going to be lampooned in the newspaper by readers.

And I guess I've learned to be prepared for this question. What I usually say to a secular reporter, I said, neither of those.

I think there's a third option. 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 through 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.

You're forbidden from learning about it. So evolution in, evolution out, why would you expect any different outcome?

It's just a natural consequence of the legal victories that the evolutionary community has won.

So this isn't really some big puzzle. It's been forced to occur. Now, a potential objection to this is, what about the small handful, because there aren't that many, the small handful of people who actually try to pay attention to creation science, or claim that they do.

Some of the critics who will say, I read this book and here's why it's wrong. They're not ignorant of what's going on.

Basically, my answer, option number three is, there's tremendous ignorance by design.

So many people disagree because they've never heard of this. They've never been exposed to this. And oftentimes, in my experience, when they are, it's very jarring because they've taken so much for granted and suddenly they're like, wait, you're causing me to question everything

I've built my life on. It just, it's a visceral reaction, like any of us have. Anytime we have a core,

I've seen it in my own life, when people challenge core ideas, let's say even theological ideas that I take for granted, which

I assume to be true, but I haven't bothered to sit down and fully justify per se. I'm not interested in sitting down and fully justify, but if they start challenging me with things

I've never thought about, I often react viscerally because I'm unprepared for it. And it's rocking me to my core.

So, I've seen that as well in some examples of my own life, where people hear about it for the first time, they're scientists and, oh, wait a minute, what?

And, ah, I just can't handle it. Those, so what about this potential objection? Those who've heard about it and say, nope, you're wrong, here's why.

What's sad is, well, I'll just have them answer it. And I've got documented examples of this on our website where I've written this up.

One of the most recent examples would be when, I think it's called when creationists, when evolutionists help creationists make their case.

It's a three -part article series. A sad article series, because there was a peer -reviewed article published reviewing, in a sense, the creationists and what's wrong with them, multi -author, three guys writing it, in which they basically lie.

They say that, and what I'm talking about is not things we disagree on, where, see, they say evolution, therefore, they're lying.

No, my point is, they say that we say certain things. And, in fact, we hold to the opposite view.

And I have it all documented in print. I'm like, you know better. You've read this paper. You know how papers are organized.

You know, actually, I mean, supposedly, you know what we hold to. And, again, it's three parts where there's, I describe the initial article.

There's some response from them. And they have opportunity after opportunity to say, no, we've said this. You've accused us of the opposite.

That's demonstrably untrue. It's factually untrue. And they will not retract it. This is a paper from,

I think, two years ago now. And one of the authors is a professing Christian, PhD professor, Presbyterian elder,

I think, who should know better. And I don't have reason to question his salvation, but to have that sort of blatant misbehavior.

And, again, this is not, there must be some conspiracy, or I'm coming up with some crazy. I'm like, this is what they're doing.

You don't have to take my word for it. It's in print. And going back to what we discussed a little bit earlier about the response to this book,

Traced, there's a second element of what we can see that's going on now. Again, creationists have talked about evolution being a religion, and that's largely been dismissed and marginalized.

And just those kooky guys talking about things that fit their worldview. Evolution is obviously science.

They're obviously working on the questions of the natural world. There are survey statistics showing that about 60 percent, this is

Pew survey, forum survey results, I think, 60 percent of scientists and the members of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science, AAAS, cannot positively affirm belief in God. So, the questions are, you know, are you an atheist?

And maybe, I think it's maybe a third of the scientific community. Yes, we are. Another chunk is, I believe in some sort of vague higher power.

Another answer on this survey question is, I believe in God. So, that's what I'm saying. Sixty percent of them can't even say,

I believe in God. That's how secular the scientific community is. If people want to discuss as a religion, that's relevant data,

I think. My point is, no one has to take my word for it. The responses to this book are, essentially, there are dogmas you can't question.

That's almost verbatim a religious profession. It's an article of faith. It's, by their own standards, antithetical to the process of science, because we're supposed to be questioning everything and constantly testing things.

So, there's that element that I guess I've been surprised to see, because, I mean, these are people I've worked with, not necessarily these.

I'm thinking of three specific critics for this book. I haven't worked with them personally, but I've worked in the secular world.

And these people are smart. They're not dumb. They're skilled researchers. They make discoveries.

They're interested in the natural world. And so, for the person who's ever experienced this, they might find this idea of, well, they're just religious.

Ah, I just don't buy that. And so, to have these critics then say no and put in print or in recorded videos, you can't do this.

This must be wrong, because it contradicts what we've all taken for granted. It's like, well, you said it. I didn't say it.

You're basically espousing a religious profession. You can also see in some of the critics, and I'll have some videos on this in the future that will release three answers in Genesis.

Some of it is just blatant, basically lying. Well, Jensen didn't cover this. So, I'll give one example here.

They'll say, all my analysis is based on the DNA from the living, which is what the book covers.

But they go beyond that and say, Jensen ignores the DNA from fossils. They literally think that I've completely missed this and I haven't discussed it.

And the reason I do this, of course, is because, again, creationists fit facts to conclusions. They start with the Bible.

They know it's true. And then they just kind of glom on evidence that fits to support their ideas and reject evidence that does not.

And so, well, if you would take DNA from Neanderthals or from Denisovans or some of these other fossil humans that, again, we would say, young earth creationists would say are descendants of Noah.

Well, there's this dirty little secret that there's too many DNA differences to fit in 4 ,500 years. They think this is this big trump card that will refute what

I'm saying. And, of course, I'm aware of it and must have been aware of it based on the history of the publication of these DNA sequences and the fact that I haven't covered it and deliberately ignored it.

You know, this, ooh, we've really got them now. Well, the fact of the matter is, and again, it's publicly available data. I cite the papers in this book.

I actually scientifically tested that hypothesis at the end of 2019, which, again, if you're not in the scientific community, when you're reviewing something, if you're a scientific reviewer or you're evaluating an idea, science 101 is you look up the references and you look up all the data.

It appears that these reviewers found the electronic version of this book, or at least one of them did. I think then they spread the talking points and others just repeated it.

That also seems to be a possibility. Someone took the electronic version, hit Ctrl -F to find

Neanderthal, because they talk about this too. There's only three references to Neanderthal in this book. True, which is what you'd find if you just did a simple

Ctrl -F search function. If you bothered to look up the references and the history of publication and scientific experiments that lead up to this, you'd know that I actually dealt with this explicitly and found legit scientific evidence against legitimacy of these sequences.

The reason I didn't use them is because the match to history is actually a whole lot better if you just do the

DNA from the living. I think there must be something wrong and it's not because I have to say it that way.

I'm saying I've got independent scientific refutation of the validity of these sequences, which apparently they never bothered to see.

I mentioned the possibility that I think this may be them lying about it. It could be they're just that bad at doing their homework.

That's possible too. Again, it's not an insult to their intelligence. They're intelligent people, but their worldview is creationists are dumb and they fit facts to conclusions.

And then ironically, they fit facts to conclusions to advance the hypothesis that I fit facts to conclusions.

They can see what they perceive as confirmation bias in you. They just don't see it in themselves.

And we live in a generation right now of highly intelligent people that can't answer basic questions.

We have a Supreme Court justice that can't define what a woman is because she's not a biologist. Actually, you are a biologist.

Can you define a woman for us? I've been shocked, I guess, surprised by how many scientists willingly throw away their credibility.

This is biology 101. You're XY or XX and you can't change it. You can change the external features, but you can say whatever you want to, but you can't say that it's scientific to say you can change your gender.

And to have that many in the scientific community go along with that because it's politically convenient or because of political pressure is amazing to me.

And maybe I'll bring up a controversial subject. I guess this struck me as well with COVID. And I'll say this very carefully.

I'm not trying to advance one position or another. Whatever your view of COVID is, how lethal it is or not lethal, or masks or not masks,

I don't care what your view is. What struck me during 2020 was how many professing scientists went out and said, somehow the virus would affect this protest, but not that protest.

Which again, I don't care what your politics are. I don't care what your view of the virus is. You can't say it's science, that the virus somehow scans what a person's political views are and decides to infect or not.

To have that many people say, I'm going to throw my credibility as a researcher, as a public health official into the wind because of political pressure, that to me was astounding.

Because again, reputation, even myself having worked with secular scientists, I'm like, y 'all know better.

Y 'all can do good science and at the snap of a finger say, forget it all, we're now going to become politicians.

So it's fine, be a politician, have a political view, but don't call it science. Say, this is my political preference and I'm going to pursue it.

So COVID, gender ideology, all that sort of thing, that's been, I guess, shocking to me.

Because again, I know these people, they know better and they're throwing it away, not caring that it should be obvious to everyone that they've completely destroyed their scientific credibility on an issue that's not difficult.

This is not something where it's ambiguous and we don't know what to do. The data are clear and unambiguous.

And again, they all know better. But to kowtow to this, and I'm not trying to minimize the pressure because there's intense political pressure to bow to the ideology.

But still, you're a scientist and your career rests on being able to speak authoritatively about data.

That's what makes you a scientist versus just a layperson or whatever else. You're supposed to be trained in weighing data objectively and carefully to find the answer.

That's ultimately what science is. It's a pursuit of the truth. And it has to be that way if you ever want to make progress.

NIH budgeted 60 billion and cure disease. You can't be swayed by political opinions. I mean, it's reminiscent of, if you know anything about the history of science, the

Soviet Union in the 1950s, I think it was. There's a guy espousing, I think it was Lysenko was his name, espousing some crazy view of genetics.

And held the Soviet Union back scientifically because he got the politician's ear and they pushed it politically, which is what you do in communist countries.

And didn't make, you know, you look at all the technology that the West advanced when the Soviet Union did not.

You think about China, how much technology they've stolen from the West, because again, these ideologies hold it back.

And then to see this is what's going on now in the United States. We've got ideology trumping the objective evaluation of facts.

That's sad. It's also scary because the whole scientific enterprise depends on the ability of these people to objectively, unbiasedly, dispassionately evaluate the facts and say, this is the way it is.

I don't care what you think. This is the way the world operates. And we have to live in light of it. And they've said, forget it.

And you're referring back to the protests that occurred just before Black Lives Matter when people were saying, open everything up.

And we had people like Fauci saying, this is bad. This is horrible. People are going to get sick. They're going to die.

You can't do this. And then next day it was, oh, this is going to bring herd immunity. I remember sitting there going, wait, wait, just two days ago, you were saying this is going to kill people.

Now it's going to bring herd immunity. And I think the thing that for someone like me that frustrates me is the fact that the argument they're putting forth is follow the science, the scientific community, as if the scientific community can't have a political agenda, that they're always going to do the process.

And yet we end up seeing they're guilty of the very things they accuse creation scientists of, that we're trying to push a belief before the science.

We really have seen in the last two years, I think for many, their eyes are now open to the fact that everything they've been told, this is science, this is provable, has an agenda behind it.

And I think that's the thing when we look at your book Traced, which folks, again, mastersbooks .com, you can get a copy of Traced, mastersbooks .com,

use the coupon code TRACE22 to get a 10 % discount. The thing with this is, when

I was reading through it, I'm looking at this going, okay, this is kind of irrefutable. What are they going to say?

So hearing that the response you got is, well, we're just going to lie about it and say, the argument of, well, you're just religious is one that we always get thrown as if that automatically, it's a poisoning the well fallacy, right?

You're religious, therefore, anything you say is anti -science. That's the argument they always make.

Have anyone tried to actually engage with the material you've put forth?

I'll give one more example here that I failed to mention earlier, that is yet another illustration of how the tables have been turned.

So, I guess the short answer is no. I can name three critics here and then we'll have some more documented responses to this with videos and you'll find the answers in Genesis YouTube page in the coming weeks and months.

Three main critics have been, there's a Rutgers virology professor, Dr. Dan, he goes by, he's got a

YouTube channel, Creation Myths, and one of his first points is, it disagrees with, and he's got in his video, literally, pictures from the textbook and references to the textbook.

This is not how you do it, I thought. Okay, I mean, you said it, you're holding up the textbook as unquestionable dogma instead of saying...

Textbooks have never changed, right? That's right. Well, just the whole principle of there's this written word that you're disagreeing with and you can't question it, that's what they accuse us of doing with the scripture.

So, for that to be his argument out of the gate, and he's got about six points, and three of the six points are basically that concept of, this is amazing.

He also talks about this ancient DNA and claims I don't deal with it, which, of course, I did two and a half years ago and put it in print and did an experiment, lo and behold.

There's a professor in Krishna I refer to as this guy, gentleman, Joel Duff, which, when evolutionists and self -creationists make their case, three parts deal with, he's a co -author on that paper, he owns it in the acknowledgments, you know, who did what, they all reviewed it and approved it, and they basically lie about what creationists say to try to advance a cause, and it's been out there for,

I think, a couple years now and still they haven't retracted it or corrected it, because I checked in the last week or two. Joel Duff, he's a professor at the

University of Akron, Ohio, but another biologist, so Dr. Dan is a virologist, biologist, excuse me, biologist.

The third guy, Herman Mays, is a guy I debated a couple years ago on replacing Darwin, and apparently now has it out to refute whatever

I come up with. I guess he strikes me as a sad case, because he's not dumb, but he wrote an article in 2014,

I think, called In Defense of Ridicule, whatever the title is, it's something along those lines, and his basic point was, it's long past time to take anything that the creationists say seriously.

We should stop trying to engage their ideas and simply make fun of them, ridicule them. And if you look at the debate

I did, which I feel like was largely a waste of time, I had picked him as a debater, the topic of the debate was for him to peer review, evaluate replacing

Darwin, and you can see he insisted he had read the book, he gave little evidence of being familiar with its contents, and just tried to kind of insult and do things that are consistent with someone whose position is we should just ridicule.

There's no point actually reading it or taking stock of it. He kind of does the same thing with this book as well,

I mean, just one long screed of he's dumb, but he also brings up the textbook, anyone who's familiar with basic textbook methods would realize he's done this wrong.

I'm like, okay, you said it too. But what I want to get to is, he had another blog post, he thought he had found an error, and this is actually, there's two points

I want to make here. In the book I talk about the history in the evolutionary community of measuring the rate at which the

Y -chromosome, male inherited DNA, changes from generation to generation. Of course, this male inherited DNA is the central focus of the book, where I say you can see all this history.

And the rate at which this DNA changes, I say it, based on what's published in the literature, is about three changes from fathers to sons.

If you compare my Y -chromosome to one of my son's, there'll be about three differences. You compare my son's Y -chromosome to my dad's, his grandfather's, there should be about six.

So, these differences kind of act like a clock. So, if you compare my Y -chromosome to yours, Andrew, and you count the number of differences between us, we should be able to get a sense and an estimate for how many generations ago we had a common male ancestor.

And that's the basic principle throughout the book. And then you can assign dates to the various branch points in the tree, and this is how you can get the tree in the first place.

Well, the history, very briefly then, in the evolutionary community of attempts to measure this rate,

I just said three, well, I sort of gave away the conclusion. The history is, there was a paper in 2009 that compared the

Y -chromosomes of two Chinese men who shared a common ancestor in the 1800s, and they found a rate of change that seemed consistent with evolution.

Then there was another paper in 2015 that looked at a whole bunch of Icelandic men, I think about 700 or more

Icelandic men that belonged to about 274 pedigrees. Extensive data set, again, found a rate of change that seemed consistent with evolution.

Well, the quality of the data, the technical term would be the coverage, sequence coverage, which we can get into if you want, but it was low quality data.

Then there were two other papers that came out, 2015 as well and 2017, that were much higher quality data, high coverage would be the technical term.

And what's remarkable is in the 2015 paper, that was high quality. The point of the paper wasn't to measure father -son differences.

The point was to look at 300 men from around the globe and reconstruct a family tree and understand history. But as a control, they said, let's look at these,

I think it was 31 father -sons or brother -brother pairs, just to make sure we're doing things right. And high quality data, and they found a rate that was way too high for evolution.

And they say this explicitly in the paper, in the supplemental text, they say, we found a rate that was inconsistent with evolution, so we invented a filter to literally filter out the data until it was brought down to something consistent with evolution.

You can't make this up, which you do have to filter Y -chromosome data, it's sort of a tricky chromosome, about five -sixths of it, whatever the percentage is.

There's 60 million letters in the Y -chromosome DNA letters, only about 10 million are stuff we can access with current technology in a reliable way.

And so you do have to filter out that stuff. But that's been published, that's been done, it's been done in an objective way to say, hey, given the technology, here's the limitations, and let's focus on this.

That's what they did. But despite that, they said, this is too high, so we're going to invent a filter that no one else seems to use, just to bring this number down.

So that's crazy in and of itself, literally. They have the conclusion, they just got to make it work. That's the very definition of confirmation bias.

The second paper, 2017, was explicitly focused on measuring the rate of change. This is a great study in the journal

Nature, one of the top journals in the world. 50 Danish families, we have a father, mother, and an offspring.

So in some cases, it was daughters. Of the 50 families, about 17 were sons. Now, the major focus was on the

DNA we get from both parents, and measuring how fast or slow it changes. And they were extensive, comprehensive in analyzing this.

How fast does it occur in fathers? Because some dads tend to pass on, older dads pass on more

DNA differences than younger dads, less so for the moms. There's a biological reason for this. They looked at single -letter changes.

They looked at chunks of DNA, they're called indels, an abbreviation for insertions and deletions. So two letters, five letters, ten letters that just get deleted or inserted into a sequence.

So they did those types of analyses for the DNA inherited from both parents. They looked at the Y chromosome, and they looked at the chunk differences, which aren't that relevant.

You know, the DNA, the analysis in my book, and for most of what we look at from human history, is the single -letter changes. Not a word about the single -letter changes.

What did slip through was a family tree based on these single -letter changes.

They used a filter. They looked at about almost nine million letters of sequence. It was a fairly conservative filter.

Again, this is by objective standards. Here's the sequence that's reliable, where we don't get ambiguity. The authors apparently later claimed that it wasn't a very conservative filter, but by all objective standards, it was.

And I was able to extract from that published figure, which has a scale bar from the 17 closest men on the tree, the mutation rate, which again matched the data that was filtered out in the study two years prior.

So all that to say, when you have high -quality data, you get a rate that's consistent with creation. When you have low -quality data, you get a result consistent with evolution.

And so the authors in these two studies either filtered out data to make the high -quality data match the low -quality data, or they didn't talk about it at all.

So now back to Herman Mays' backstory. So he emails the author. So he says, I'm going to find an error. They confirm that, yes,

I did actually find the 17 father -son pairs. They claim that the differences are due to sequencing error.

Now, again, if you know anything about science, if you've ever published a paper, it doesn't matter what you say.

When the reviewers criticize what you're doing, they don't say, make a statement. They say, show some data.

So round one, in the initial paper, they could have shown the data, which they didn't. I'm a little bit slipped through in this figure, and I was able to extract it out.

Round two, Herman Mays says, what's going on? And he won't even publish the full correspondence, by the way.

There's still stuff being hidden. He says, here's what they say. They say they think it's due to sequencing errors.

Still don't publish the data. They could resolve this very quickly by publishing the data. And that's full stop for Herman Mays. They said so.

Therefore, Jeanson is wrong. I'm like, do you realize what you're doing? You've criticized us for years for trying to do science based on authority instead of experiments.

And for you, it's sufficient to say, this is what the authors said. So therefore, you're wrong.

So that's crazy. Again, they're still hiding of the data. They could publish it, release it in a transparent way.

Still not doing it. Number one. Number two, he's saying, because they said so, that's good enough, which is about the most anti -scientific statement that there is.

And number three, again, well, doesn't this mean it's in question? No, we already have it. I've done the experiments, taken those implications, tested them further.

And it's working. That seems to be the rate. We already have independent confirmation that what

I've extracted in terms of the mutation rate is valid. And this is the state of affairs. This is the best that the evolutionary community has done in response to this work.

And I think that's remarkable. Again, vast majority of the scientific community probably isn't even aware this book exists. They're not even aware of there being scientific creationism, people who do science from a creationist perspective, test hypotheses, do experiments.

And the small subset who are aware of this and have tried to respond to us, this is the best that they can muster.

And they put it in print for everyone to see. That's what blows my mind. Again, it's a great gift to say from their own lips, you're wrong because of authority.

You're wrong because of the printed word. I'm like, okay, that's what you accused us of. But if that's where you want to go, have at it.

Let the world see where the debate is at. So we're talking with Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, the author of Traced.

This is a book you're going to want to get a hold of, especially for those in my audience who are apologists.

You are going out there. You're sharing the gospel. You're going to be challenged. You will want to get a copy of this book.

Go to mastersbooks .com. Use the coupon code TRACE. Now, I'm going to end up asking one last question with the importance of predictions.

Why is that so important? I want to do that right after we give a word to our sponsor, which is MyPillow. So folks, if you want to get yourself a good night's sleep,

I'm out here at the Truth Matters conference, sitting in studio here, sort of studio. Dr.

Jensen and I found a room that we can record in. So we're here and I have brought my pillow with me.

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Now, back to Dr. Jensen. Here's the question. You've brought this up earlier. This is a challenge that we hear often from the secular community.

Why are predictions important? Why is it so important for you to be able to say, I made predictions, predictions fulfilled, made more predictions, predictions fulfilled.

Why is it the claim that we can't do that from the secular? They say we would not be able to do that in creation science. Why is it so important that you were able to do that in both this book and your previous book and the fulfillments of that?

All right, so there's a couple of reasons. First, I just want to stamp my foot on what you had said, which is if for no other reason, they've demanded it for 40 years.

This is what is in federal court decisions. They say creation scientists are not scientists. Creation science is not science because it doesn't make, and if for no other reason, it doesn't make testable predictions.

And going back to what pseudo quote from Doug Fatuma, because I don't have it memorized, but basically saying science is built on questioning things, questioning established wrong while constantly evaluating things.

That's the way science works. So, number one, they've demanded it. Full stop. This is what the evolutionists have said. This was written in court decisions.

And so, for creationists now to reverse that should have major apologetic and legal ramifications.

Because what happens now if we meet the standard of science that they say we don't, should we not then be allowed to teach this in public schools?

That's a whole other discussion, which has, you know, there's a lot of other things that go into it. But from a purely legal perspective, now this question gets raised again.

Secondly, the reason the evolutionists have brought up this point is because it goes to the basic nature of science, the philosophy of science.

Science as a inductive or hypothetical deductive way of knowing the world. It gets into fairly detailed philosophy, but the point is, we don't have premises or dogmas in science from which we can deduce conclusions.

It'd be great if there was a premise out there that said chocolate cures cancer. Some other premise like that, we know this is true about the world, therefore this is the cure for cancer.

If we had that, we'd have the cure already, but we don't. So then how do you find the answer? You have to propose a hypothesis and test it.

That's basically what we're left with. That's the defining nature of science. Really, science comes down to this idea that if it works, we go with it.

It's really pragmatic and it kind of needs to be that way. I mean, you want to know that gravity still works, not because someone said so or because someone believes it's so, but when you're sitting in your economy class seat on a

Boeing 737 about to take off, you want to know that this isn't tested, validated, that laws of physics are working and it's not just because someone said so.

That's just the nature of science. It's how this process of knowing the world operates. That's the background to why the evolutionary community has demanded this of creation scientists, but again,

I'm going to make that a separate point. But again, the second point is it really goes down to just, this is the process of science itself, the scientific method.

Again, there's extensive philosophy behind it, how you come to this conclusion, but this is the way science works all around the world today, except of course when politicians interfere with it, which of course destroys the whole philosophical foundation.

This is the way in which we're supposed to be able to derive conclusions and hopefully ultimately discover a cure for cancer.

That's how we've discovered laws of physics. This is how we're making discoveries about human history. This is simply the way the scientific method is designed to work and the way it's been extremely successful.

And folks, we're going to tell you in a moment how you can get more or listen to more of Dr. Jensen, but before we do, there was something that impressed me.

So this is now, we'll go personal as we wrap up, but when I talked to Dr. Lyle about you, there's one thing he said, because this is a question

I usually will ask of creation scientists who have their PhDs, who have gone through secular universities, because it is a hard thing to be in a secular university and publicly or be outed as a

Christian. And one of the things that Dr. Lyle had said is, because he and I've talked about this with the fact that he wasn't as vocal when he was going through his degree.

You were at Harvard, not exactly, well, there was a time Harvard was a seminary. So it did have a good religious background.

But one of the things he had said is, you are not only at Harvard getting your PhD, but you are a very vocal Christian.

He said it takes a certain kind of person who can not only be in the science realm getting a PhD, but not be hiding away from his

Christianity. He was speaking of that being to your character as someone who knows his stuff so well.

That was his point, was that you know your stuff so well that even though you're a Christian, it makes it hard for people to criticize you.

How difficult was it in a secular university as a believer in an area where you're probably one of the only ones?

I guess a couple things come to mind, and I'm going to twist your question a little bit, because this may also be relevant to the audience.

And I get asked this, how did you survive? Or if it's a student, how do I survive if I'm considering this sort of career?

And I tend to go back to three things. One is a strong church network or support.

When I was in Boston, I still had people who would pray for me in Wisconsin, and I was part of a local church.

There was a strong student body, but a tremendous amount of accountability and transparency. So, you can be a hardcore creationist and go live in sin and wreck your faith that way.

There's still a strong need. You can't abandon any of your Christian life.

You can't compartmentalize your Christian life into apologetics and then sin and these sorts of things. It all goes together.

So, to have that background and to see what I could have had, thinking back to my undergraduate days,

I lived on campus one summer. And to get a glimpse of what I had missed, thankfully, having lived at home so many years, just one of the guys bringing his girlfriend and just the open, aggressive homosexuality.

And there's so many pressures from a moral standpoint that I was grateful to not have to live on campus and to escape all that living at home.

And then when I was in Boston, to be living with believers. There was one year I think I lived on my own, but there was a website

I had found about matching up Christians for housing situations. I had lived with a Christian married couple for a first year, and then

I found another Christian housemate who was a poetry master's student, I think, who was a believer. I lived on my own, and then moved in with several of the guys from the church

I was at, which was also great for accountability and such. So, that's a key element. I guess it's still under point one.

Second point is, you have to be prepared. And I'll explain this two different ways.

One is, I remember reading an article by Marvin Laskin, World Magazine, advice to incoming students from his experience being a journalism professor at the

University of Texas, Austin, I think is where he was. Which, of course, Austin is about as liberal as it gets in Texas, the northeast of the southwest or whatever.

So, his advice was sage. I remember sending it to my sister, who was 16 years younger than me, I think considering going off to college at the time.

And his comment was, expect to read double if you're a Christian. Because every discipline, English, literature, science, doesn't matter, every discipline will be thoroughly imbued with, imbibed with secular thinking.

So, if you want the Christian worldview in whatever discipline you're in, you have to read as much outside of class as in it. Which is tough.

And so, maybe the flip side of that is, consider taking a year off if you're a student. I didn't take a year off, but I had homeschool through eighth grade, worldview conferences.

I was at a Christian high school. I was reading in certification research books, John Morris' book on the younger. I was prepared for, and this is not patting myself on the back as much as I can kind of breathe a sigh of relief, because it could have turned out much worse had

I not had this background, thanks to my parents. I was thoroughly versed in creationist biology, creation science by the time

I got to undergraduate. And so much so that there was hardly anything that surprised me. Again, not a testament to me as much as a testament to those who ensured my preparation so that I could,

I already knew evolution and I could explain it to them before we got to class and judiciously raise my hand or say, here's the answer you want on the test, but know that I disagree with it or these sorts of things.

Whereas if I had not been prepared, oh, wait, he's talking about this and I never heard about this before. And what do I do?

And how does this fit with faith? That would have been traumatic and very stressful. And I don't know how students survive that.

So, there are ways to be prepared. In some cases, it could be taking a year off. One of the things we have in Answers in Genesis is online courses, basic worldview preparation, regardless of which discipline you go into.

About six courses right now. You can take them all online. My thought is if you're a high school student, you know, take one between freshman and sophomore year or take two over the summer and then two more over the next summer, two more the next summer and you already have that.

Or just take a year off and read as much literature as you can. There's this pressure, I think, these days that you've got to get out of high school and get through college and get your job and rush, rush, rush as if you'll fall behind.

I feel like I felt that myself. I don't think that's the way the world works. In some cases, even let's say you apply to medical school.

There's so many cookie cutter people applying to med school. If you have something that distinguishes you and one of my colleagues who had spent a year in Saudi Arabia, I think, and he's like,

I think that's how I got in because he had something unique on his resume to say, this is what makes me different from everyone else because they all have good grades, all these strong letters of recommendation.

So, it may actually help you if you're a student to take a year off and do something different. I'm recommending you take time to prepare yourself apologetically and in terms of that's the second big element.

Again, you can read just as much outside of classes in it. I don't know how anyone has that much time for it. That's sage advice.

But again, it's a dramatic amount of reading to do when you're already stressed. If you're taking a full load of credits, how do you complete that?

So, strong church background before and during, number one. Secondly, being prepared.

Again, you can read as much outside classes in it. I think that's tough. So, do the reading before you get to college.

And then, I think I was able to get away with as much as I did because I wasn't in a strongly origins discipline.

So, people who go into paleontology, geology, I mean, Jason was in astrophysics, my impression is you're dealing with age of the earth or evolution.

Let's say you go into zoology as a biologist. You're dealing with evolution day in and day out and I don't know how a professor is going to have the patience for a creationist student who's questioning it day in and day out.

I went into medical science, dealing with present tense questions. Evolution comes up tangentially and almost has no relevance to anything we're doing.

And my professor knew that I was creationist, but I don't think he cared so long as the grant money kept flowing. And my creationist views didn't threaten the grant money because we're not dealing with origins questions day in and day out.

And we got along fine. I mean, there were other professors who, for other bible science issues like ethics and stem cells and these sorts of things, weren't too happy to work with me.

And my professor, I think, was also of a personality. He was just very winsome and nominally Catholic and opposite side of the issue when it comes to stem cells and creation, evolution, these sorts of things.

Happy to get along with me. That made a big difference. But still, had we been working on the fossil record or something where it is the subject matter and we have to butt heads every day, that,

I think, would have been much more difficult for me, for anyone to go through than the path I had chosen.

So, I think that also plays a big role that I probably still don't fully appreciate the smooth path and ways in which the path is much bumpier for people in other disciplines.

It is hard for us to take a stand when it could cost us our degree, our job, things like that.

I think we're coming to the point where Christians are going to have to make that stand in every area of life because it's just everything's going to come against us.

But I think a good way for people to prep, people in high school, you're in college, I would say,

I think you might agree they should get the book Traced. That might be a good thing to train themselves and prepare themselves.

Go to mastersbooks .com, get the book Traced, use the code TRACED22 to save 10%.

That's TRACED22, mastersbooks .com. That coupon code will be only good from June 3rd until July 4th.

So, you have one month. Now, one side question I thought of afterwards is you started off in the beginning of this podcast talking about how you first sat under Ken Ham, his teaching.

Now you're working with him and for him. How much does that value? I mean, how much do you value that, that here's the guy that kind of started you off this way and now you get to work with him every day?

I don't see him very much because AIG is so big and there's so much going on. And maybe I should say,

I had mentioned Ken Ham because he's one of the speakers, but I really benefited from whatever was out there at the time. You know,

John Morris at ICR with his book The Young Earth, and there was the rate project that had happened. And basically, if there was creation books, we'd purchase them and I'd try to devour them.

There was a very broad creation science background of which Ken was a part. I remember because he had spoken and I had the notes, you know, still a dynamic speaker to this day, great to listen to.

And so, I'm probably not as grateful as I should be, just sitting reflecting on where I had come from and what

I had built on. If he hasn't, I don't know if you could tell, we're here at the Truth Matters conference and John MacArthur was speaking as we're doing this interview.

Yes, I know I skipped John MacArthur for this interview, folks. But when you listen to John MacArthur over 50 years as I have, you can hear, you can,

I can actually tell you that like rough years based on his voice, like how strong it was, how fast it was, you know, the age.

But you don't, I can't do that with Ken Ham. I cannot do that. In the many years I've been listening to him, it's like he's got almost the same cadence, the same, you know, it's like,

I don't know what's up with him. Whatever vitamins he's taken, I want to know what they are. We'll see how he does when he turns 80.

Yeah, that is true. So listen, folks, we're going to do, we drop with this dropped today, which will be on June 1st, but you're going to be coming on to Apologetics Live tomorrow from the dropping of this, obviously not from the air of the recording of this, but from when we air this, which will be

June 2nd, you're going to be on the Apologetics Live. So folks, if you don't know our Apologetics Live show or podcast, you can go to ApologeticsLive .com.

It is a show where you can come in and ask any questions. If you heard some things today that sparked you and said, you know,

I want to understand a little bit more, then come into ApologeticsLive .com. It is a show where we can, we're going to go through a lot of this same material, but where you can come in and ask any question.

And maybe if something, you need more clarity, you have maybe a challenge. Maybe you want to understand something better.

It'll be a good show for you to come in, but join us there for Apologetics Live. Before we end up,

I just want to give you a chance to say anything else that you want to share with the audience. I'd say we've probably just scratched the surface as much as it's hard to believe, but there's so much that this research touches.

Again, it's not a testament to me. It's really the hero of the story is that 45 on your time scale and the ramifications of understanding human history are so manifold.

We've talked about the age of the earth relevance. We've talked about the larger apologetic relevance, which is huge again,

I think, in light of the history that precedes us. We've talked about, sort of sketched the, touched the surface on prehistory, so -called prehistory questions, pre -Columbian

Americas. There's all sorts of surprises that have come out there. Maybe one of the biggest things that's relevant to people that we haven't touched on as much is you can find at the base of this

DNA -based tree, almost a mirror image of Genesis 10. So, practically then, any person, any male who takes a

Y -chromosome test, if they get the result, and I've put the tools in the book for this purpose,

I can tell you, or the book can tell you exactly which son of Noah you came from. So, there's this huge personal ancestry side of the equation.

If you're a lady listening, you find a male relative, and we've done this. We have my father -in -law from my wife's side. We've had my mother -in -law's brother.

We've had my mother's brother. There's all sorts of ways you can start to fill in your family tree and figure out which many sons of Noah, perhaps, you came from.

And I should also mention, this book is really just the beginning of a research project that will likely, I say beginning, we've done 10 years, but in terms of this specific question of human history, this is the beginning of something that'll likely take me the rest of my life, in which we now try to uncover the hidden history of every single people group on earth.

So, if anyone wants to participate in future research, or if there are missionaries who are working with neglected peoples, you want to connect them to the sons of Noah, there may already be published data for them.

Any question that someone might have, we've got a portal we've set up. It's answersingenesis .org. That's the homepage.

So you put in the homepage, and then you go slash go, G -O, slash traced, T -R -A -C -E -D, the name of the book.

So answersingenesis .org, slash go, slash traced. That's also the place where you find supplemental data.

If you're a nerd or you're a critic, you want to find out some of the background information. But if you scroll down on that page, you can enter your name, email, comment, that goes directly to my inbox.

We've already had about 400 people write in from around the globe. I've been surprised at the response to this book.

I've spoken to about 400 Arabs, who all, of course, want to know that they go back to Ishmael or not. So I have in the book here, I talk about, we have the genealogical line of Abraham, Isaac, I think, and Jacob.

I mean, there is, not having talked to the Arabs, maybe it's Ishmael, but I still think it's probably the Jewish lineage. You can find the echo of that in the family tree.

There's just so much that comes out of this. And it rewrites race and ethnicity. What the book shows is that the so -called races have changed multiple times in human history.

This, to me, advances the ball even further than what we've discussed in creation circles. So there's just so much explosive, so many surprises that come out of this research.

If you want to participate again, answersingenesis .org, slash go, slash traced. You have a genetic result. What does it mean?

Which son of Noah did it come from? Probably about half the emails have been along those lines. I can probably look it up for you, 10 seconds, and give you the answer.

And again, going forward, there's a lot more research that's happening. There's a Native American history project I've got going now.

So there are Native Americans who respond, about six of them. So there's so many irons in the fire now as a result of this research.

It's really exciting. And again, if for nothing else, it has these massive apologetic ramifications. So the book should be back in stock,

I think. The second printing, because of COVID, there's these delays. I'm told maybe mid -June, you can still pre -order it. They told me pre -ordering starts at Master's Books on June 3rd.

Okay. My apologies. Yes. So Master Books, you can go there. Answers in Genesis, you can pre -order now. Amazon, you can do pre -orders now.

Second printing will be in June. And they've already made the third printing. It should be here in August. So the book will keep coming.

And as well, we're going to have some more videos. We've done about five or six videos already, giving people sort of a preview of the content on the

Answers in Genesis YouTube channel. I've got probably another four videos on the chapters we didn't cover, another five on the backstory to let people know this is the culmination of a lot of research, and then some specific ones dealing with the critics that should be quite entertaining.

So, and it hits some of the points we've already discussed in this podcast. So I'll have that link, folks, in the show notes, answersingenesis .org

slash go slash traced, along with the link for Master's Books and the coupon code

TRACED22 to get your 10 % off. Dr. Nathaniel Jensen, thank you very much. I know this was worked out,

I think, better than I had hoped, because we were originally supposed to record. You ended up sick. And we're now here in person, which

I don't get to do very often. So I appreciate the time. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to come and join me in this office that we found to be able to record.

Thanks for taking the time away from listening to John MacArthur to record this. So I appreciate your interest and the opportunity to talk about it.

I think I have listened to probably about 2 ,000 of his messages. So I may have heard a one or two from him, maybe.

And with that, folks, that's a wrap. This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry. For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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