Destiny of the Human Race by Sal Cordova

Creation, Intelligent Design, and the Nature of the Human Race

Creation Fellowship. Oh, there we go. I'll start over. All right. Good evening and thank you for joining us. Creation Fellowship in Santee has been meeting for 10 years in person and currently online.

We're a group of people who come together to learn more about the six-day creation account that happened some 6 ,000 years ago. You can find Creation Fellowship Santee on the internet at our social media outlets, Facebook, and sometime on Gab.

We have three video platforms, YouTube, Rumble, and BitChute. If you go to www .tinyurl .com forward slash C-F-Santee, S-A-N-T-E-E, you'll find where you can get us on the internet. Or you can email us at creationfellowshipsantee at gmail .com.

And you can email us if you want to get on our mailing list. And with that, tonight we have speaker Sal Cordova. He is a molecular biologist and he is going to do his intro. So, Sal, I'm turning it over to you.

Thank you. Glory and honor to.

Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who created the world not too long ago and who will return soon. Let me share my screen. And it says there, you cannot start screen share while the other.

Participant is sharing. I'm sorry about that. Let me try again. No, go ahead. It was, I was trying.

To get my screen share off. So, let me introduce myself a little bit. To do that, I'm going to reflect on an event that happened April 28, 2005. It was an event that changed the course of my life. That was the publication date of the prestigious scientific journal Nature, the April 28, 2005 edition.

On the cover of that, it said, this journal contains material on evolution. Evolution by natural selection is a theory, not a fact. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered.

And the title of the cover story is, is intelligent design coming to your campus? So, this is almost kind of like a kind of a sarcastic comment. They were alarmed, scientists were alarmed that intelligent design is starting to matriculate into universities, not just the students, but among the faculty.

This is, this covered some incidences where faculty members were rejecting mainstream evolutionary theory. And in that article, it talked about George Mason University, and you'll recognize one of the students.

It's a miracle of God and an answer to prayer. A young earth creationist was in the prestigious scientific journal, Nature, the cover story. Amazingly, only like six months earlier, I said, God, you know, who's going to pay attention to us, what we do here in this university?

No one even knows us. And by a series of miracles, I ended up in this cover story talking about intelligent design. And I detail how I nearly lost my Christian faith. My dad was very, was terminally ill.

And I, I was, I had accepted the Lord at a young age. And then I started to have doubts as I matriculated through science school. And I was like, God, why, you know, why did my dad have to die? And so my faith was shaken.

And I said, the only thing that can kind of keep me going is I understand science. You know, I'm starting to have doubts about everything, including the Bible. And I said, God, you know, I, I have some trust of science.

And Jesus said, in John 1038, if you do not believe in me, believe the works. And little did I know at the time, you know, I was actually following what Jesus said to do, study the works of God. And I began to investigate things very carefully.

And I got restored to faith, I had a chance to share my restoration to faith there in a scientific journal. And I said, God, I think you've called me to do this. I was at the time I was a engineer and scientist in the aerospace and defense industry.

My dad died in 2003, April, April, April 27, as a matter of fact, almost exactly two years before this article came out. For 18 years, I took care of my widowed and disabled mother. I quit my job as an engineer.

And I believe the Lord led me to do that. So I could care for my mother. And I also needed a job while working from home. And I said, How's this going to happen? And enter Dr. John Sanford. Dr. John Sanford is a famous geneticist.

He was an atheist, he became a Christian and then a Christian creationist at age 39. He became a Christian by age 49. He was a young earth creationist. And let me highlight what he accomplished. He gave me a job where I could work from home.

He said, Sal, just research whatever you feel led to. And I had the privilege of being mentored by him and serving him as a researcher. And that's led me to become a molecular biophysics researcher. He I had, after that article in Nature, I had went on to Johns Hopkins to get a master's in applied physics at Johns Hopkins University.

And then John Sanford out of his own pocket paid for my education at the FAS graduate school at the National Institutes of Health, I got a master's equivalent in biology too. And I had the privilege of working with him.

I'm going to cover a lot of his work tonight. Dr. Sanford is famous for inventing what is known as the gene gun, you could see the picture of the gene gun there on the left and other pictures of that.

Through this, he improved the crop yields in fed starving billions, yes, billions. The invention is at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. This is someone with stellar credentials. He is a Cornell research professor, which is kind of an elite class of professors at an Ivy League school.

So God raised up someone to help in the creationist cause from secular quarters. He actually came from secular quarters. And that is, that is the picture of the gene gun that is at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

It did make American history. And John said he felt that he owned the patents to this, he was able to retire early. And he said he felt God had appointed him to make this invention so that he had money to be able to finance creationist research.

And he has devoted the remainder of his life proving that there is a creator and attacking evolutionary theory. He joins a number of other elite scientists in the secular world, some names you may not even know, but they're very accomplished.

And they're also young earth creationists. He published in the Journal of Mathematical Biology. In fact, his accomplishment was so stellar, that that article he wrote, and you have a piece of it right there, with Bill Basner, set records in that scientific journal.

And it was a, it was an article critical of evolutionary theory, it set records by a factor of like four. And that was like in 2017. And that led to his co author, the lead author, Bill Basner being invited to biology conferences.

And then Dr. Sanford was able to address the National Institutes of Health. Now that was really incredible that they would, all these scientists, these evolutionary, pro evolutionary guys, they would invite a young earth creationist there.

But he had the credentials, he earned the right to be heard. And he talked about our genome crumbling. And that is the destiny of the human race. Sadly, we need the Lord to return to fix this. So our genome tells us that we are intelligently designed, but also cursed and in need of a savior.

And in 2021, Dr. Sanford and I published in the Handbook of Mathematics, a Springer Nature publication, by the way, it is now on university library shelves, it is critical of evolutionary biology. And I'll tell you how we got away with that.

We only had to quote what evolutionists themselves have said about their own field. Now, the popular science writers will not cover it that way. They want to give a narrative like, you know, this is solid science.

But the evolutionary biologists themselves, in a moment of honesty, have at least enough integrity to say, this is a problem, they'll publish on it, hardly anyone will notice, but it's there. My job was to help dig some of this up.

We were joined by Bill Basner, who you saw earlier, and then Ola Haaster, who's an award winning mathematician, and professor of population genetics in Sweden. This was a stellar crew, and a miracle of God, we got this published, it is now sitting on university shelves.

A little humor here, the book retails, you can buy it from the publisher for $1 ,500. You can get a copy at Walmart for $819. But don't buy it just for me, because I don't get a dime, even if you buy it.

It's the publisher that will get all the money for that we get we get kind of the, you know, the recognition for our contribution. And I'll cover a little bit of what we did in that. Now, as I said, all we had to do is just cover what evolutionary biologists themselves have said about their own field.

And you have to think this is a theory that has destroyed so many people's faith. But this is the state of affairs. Jerry Coyne, evolutionary, well recognized evolutionary biologist, he authored the book why evolution is true.

He said, in science's pecking order, evolutionary biology lurks somewhere near the bottom, far closer to the pseudoscience of phrenology than to physics. And there's a reason that he's saying that there are a lot of problems even by their own admission.

They don't need creationists to come along and point it out. They're starting to come to terms with a failure of their own theory, and it is painful for them. Now, the talk will cover this mathematical equation here, but I'm going to simplify it.

This is just for those who are really, you know, they're going to say, Sal, you're simplifying all this. Well, I am for the sake of the audience that our publication that's now on university shelves deals with this, in all the gory details that you could see that the simplified version I'm going to give today is going to be good enough.

It's pretty close to understand why evolutionary theory is failing, particularly for human evolution. You don't have to go through all the gory math that we had gone through this. This was agonizing, but we had to learn it.

We had to understand it so that we could criticize evolutionary biologists on their own terms, beat them at their own game. And we found problems in their mathematical equations, and we've tried to correct it.

And sometimes even their own data give us support without any correction. It's just been wonderful. So, here are the words of an evolutionary biologist. This is what he says about the destiny of the human race.

This is Michael Lynch, distinguished professor of evolutionary biology. He says, it remains difficult to escape the conclusion that numerous physical and psychological attributes are likely to slowly deteriorate in technologically advanced societies.

The incidences of a variety of afflictions, including autism, male infertility, asthma, immune system disorders, diabetes, et cetera, et cetera, already exhibit increases exceeding the expected rate. This observational work may substantially underestimate the mutational vulnerability of the world's most complex organ, the human brain.

Because human function is governed by the expression of thousands of genes, the germline mutation rate to physiological disorders may be unusually high. At least 30 of individuals with autism spectrum disorders appear to acquire such behaviors by de novo mutation.

It has been suggested that there has been a slow decline in intelligence in the United States and the United Kingdom over the past century. This echoes a lot of Christian doctrine, if you're really thinking about it.

God said we are created, but we are also cursed. Cursed, and Jesus said this world is passing away. They're coming to terms with this, not just on the universal level, but even at the biological level.

And they don't have answers because they're assuming evolution. And we get headlines like this in 2017. When I had started kind of looking at the creation evolution controversy, there is stuff now that is coming out in the scientific press that was not available to me 40 years ago when I was a young teenager.

And now these headlines are there. Genomes are decaying. We're getting experimental evidence of this. And so how can this be? We're taught that Darwinian evolution says survival of the fittest, so the best will survive and just keep improving indefinitely.

That's actually not true when we examine things very carefully. So let's look, you know, we have copy errors in our genome. We call those mutations. Most of those copy errors, the overwhelming majority, say 90 to 99 .99%, we don't know the exact figure, would be actually compromising and damaging to the genome.

It usually does not result in complex functional improvement. It may improve reproductive success, such as antibiotic resistance, if it's not involving what they call plasmid transfers, horizontal gene transfer, but it usually is a degrading of the genome that enables it to acquire new capabilities.

And we can cover that in the question and answer. But let's hypothetically suppose we have a population here of healthy individuals represented by green and birth defected individuals represented by yellow.

The theory of natural selection says survival of the fittest, keep the best, toss the rest. So I'm just going to, let's just say 20 is defective, hypothetically, just for the sake of argument. And I'll have the Terminator here destroy the defected mutants, sayonara muchacho.

And it looks like, hey, look, Darwinian evolution works. Keep the best, toss the rest. There is a problem, however, that Darwin and a lot of evolutionary biologists haven't considered, except the few elite who really are thoughtful.

What happens if all the kids have a slight birth defect that the parents didn't have? Well, what can you do then? You can't just eliminate everyone, that entire generation. So you might eliminate the actually worst, the worst of the defective, but they're all defective.

So you keep some of the, you know, you keep the best of the defective. It's still survival of the fittest. The fittest genome has actually passed away in the parent. And that is a scenario Darwin and all these evolutionary biologists in general did not consider.

And I try to explain this to your typical evolutionary biologist. It flies over their head. The people that understand this are the elite class, the mathematicians, the mathematical evolutionists known as population geneticists.

They have sensed this. Dr. Sanford, when he was still an atheist evolutionist, he remembered his professor saying, this is a problem. And they said, well, maybe there's going to be a solution. Well, there's no solution to it.

He became a creationist. He followed through on what you're seeing here illustrated. So basically the species survived, but each generation is dumber and sicker, just as Michael Lynch had pointed out.

And there are more and more of these things coming out. The fundamental problem is if we're getting say 100 slight defects in our genome or say 80 per individual per generation, then evolution is false.

So there's this project, it's a billion dollar project with its follow-ons called ENCODE. And their research was really kind of identifying how the genome worked. And as they studied this, they came out to the conclusion that most, a lot of the genomes, a lot more functional than the evolutionary biologists had claimed.

Evolutionary biologists said most of the genome is junk. And they said, well, our experimental results says it's functional, but that also implies that if you have that much function, it's just all that many more things that can go wrong.

And therefore we, it looks like we have possibly 80 to a hundred slight birth defects per generation. It may be generally imperceptible, but just like tires being worn out as you drive them, you know, they slowly, the wear and tear starts to accumulate and then suddenly your tires are no good.

And it looks that's like, that's the case for our genome. So an evolutionary biologist was not happy with the data. Again, this is a purely secular argument. This evolutionary biologist named Dan Grauer said, if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong.

And he was livid. He said, evolution, he said, ENCODE has to be wrong because evolution is right. And he got it backward. ENCODE is right. Evolution is wrong. And the genome is deteriorating. So let's see the effect of losing 80, having 80 birth defects or mutations, what we'd call deleterious, but that's not, I prefer function compromising mutations, copy errors.

As the children are reproduced by the parents, there are copy errors that the children will get that the parents didn't have and starts to accumulate. So let's just start, assume that we have a nice, clean, perfect genome.

And the parent is represented there by where it has zero, which means it has no defective birth defects, whatever that's the parent and the parent. And there's some simplifications here that we don't need to get into.

The parent has children. One child has 60 birth defects, the other 70, the other 80, the other 90, the other 100. And I say, these are slight, you may not notice it in the kid. It's like you drive a car, you may not notice that the tread is actually worn a little bit.

So these are slight enough that it would escape ordinary notice unless you're sequencing their genome. So let's do survival of the fittest, keep the rest, toss the rest. And okay, so the parent dies, that was the best genome in the whole family.

So we're left with all the kids and the worst kids, let's say are eliminated by natural selection, survival of the fittest. Well, the fittest actually has defects that the parent didn't have. And let's just repeat the process.

So this child goes on to be a parent himself, and he's just going to have, the next generation will have his, will inherit his defects. And then the next generation will also add to it. So even if we have survival of the fittest, the fittest actually didn't survive because the fittest was the parent.

It's the survival of the fittest among the siblings. And even if that holds true, the genome deteriorates. This again is, if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong. They themselves, the evolutionists have set the terms for what will falsify their theory and they are failing at it miserably.

So let's fast forward to a million generations. It's going to be a disaster. This means to me, looking at this, something specially created the human race not too long ago, and we could not have survived this level of deterioration.

By the way, historically, how did the word junk DNA come up? They said one way to solve this is to, you know, if most of the human genome isn't functional, that means there are less things that can go wrong and problem solved.

You know, if we get up to one mutation, one defect per individual, per generation, then the human genome is going to decline. We're at about 80. And so that's where junk DNA came about. Now, again, for anyone who's really anal about this, I'll explain a little bit of what this equation means.

It means that kind of like what you saw with the average, like say the average mutation rate is like 80 or 100, you get some that are not quite 80, there'll be somewhat less. And we call that the Poisson distribution, and that's highlighted in red.

And so the evolution will say, well, if you have enough kids, you know, there'll be at least one kid that is free of these birth defects. You know, maybe mom and dad have to make a lot of kids, but maybe one of them is free of defects.

And that's what this equation is trying to highlight. So how many would it take at the rate? And this is by an evolutionary biologist himself. If 80 of the genome is functional as trumpeted by ENCODE Project Consortium, then 45 to 82 deleterious mutations arise per generation.

For the human population to maintain its current population size under these conditions, each of us should have on average 3 times 10 to the 19th to 5 times 10 to the 35th kids. This is clearly bonkers.

I mean, this is how many kids a woman would have to have to have one kid that is free of birth defects. That's a calculation he did. That's not what creationists had to do. We've done that independently.

I've done it myself. Dr. Sanford at the NIH coded Dan Growers. You know, Dan Grower's saying, oh, it has to be 10 to the 11th, 10 to the 35th. And that's bonkers. And the funny thing is, even if we use Dan Grower's numbers, he's saying every female needs to make 44 ,000 offspring.

Poor mom. So again, if ENCODE is right, then evolution is wrong. Evolution is therefore wrong. ENCODE is right. Experimentally, it's showing up. This is the reason ENCODE came to be. We're trying to solve things like cancer, heritable diseases, and how, you know, how to treat it.

And we're finding, you know, we have to figure out that, you know, how all this works. And we're finding a lot more functionality in the genome than evolutionary biologists are willing to admit. And Dan Grower's reaction to this, he started calling the ENCODE scientist Ignoramus' Crooks, the scientific equivalent of Saddam Hussein.

He accused the director of the NIH back then, Francis Collins, of being a creationist. This has led to faculty, even at the same university, being at odds with each other, like these two. On the left is the evolutionist, on the right is the one who doesn't care.

He's part of the ENCODE consortium. And then we get headlines like this. This is by Alexei Kondrashov. He was a colleague of my professor at the NIH. And if you see the thing underlined in red, it says, why have we not died 100 times over?

Now, this is not a creationist saying that. This is an evolutionist saying, you know, if you take everything we know, we should be dead. We shouldn't be alive. We shouldn't be evolving. And he had that rhetorical question.

He came up with a solution that he thought would work. It has been since experimentally refuted. The problem remains, why have we not died 100 times over? He also wrote the book Crumbling Genome. And I just want to reflect again, you know, Jesus said the world is passing away.

Time is running out on us, and the world is cursed. We're intelligently designed, but also cursed. We look at the patterns of biology. It agrees with Christian doctrine. There are others, also secular evolutionists, like Brian Sykes at Oxford.

He says the male population is just going to be gone, a future without men. I mean, these dire things are coming out. There are other scientists I could quote saying, you know, we should be going extinct, and we can't explain while we're around.

Well, if we're willing to accept that we arrived on Earth, appeared on Earth relatively recently, according to a literal reading of Luke chapter 3, then the problem is solved. So, this is typical evolutionary literature.

I mean, look at all these people. These are major evolutionists. One of them there on the lower left hand corner, who actually began all this, Hermann Muller, won the Nobel Prize for his study of heritable diseases, what they call mutations, particularly the effect of radiation in causing birth defects.

And then on the lower right hand corner, if he did become a creationist, John Sanford would be considered an excellent secular geneticist and, you know, quite qualified to comment on this. So, when I debate evolutionists, they try to say, oh, that's a creationist theory.

I'm like, no, no, it is not. You're trying to pin that only on John Sanford. But look at all these secular scientists. And I got some funny looks when I confront an evolutionary biologist about that. You know, I'd say, okay, can you name one researcher of this caliber that says the human genome is improving?

And of course, I just hear basically silence. And that's, again, the question, are there any respected scientists who think the human genome is improving naturally? Because if it's not, that means something else had to create the genome.

And we also have experimental evidence to this effect on all biological organisms. Michael B. He published in a secular mainstream peer-reviewed publication and said most of these mutations are function-compromising.

That's very bad for Darwinian evolution for the reasons that I've highlighted. It also shows that you cannot accumulate complexity. You cannot evolve by natural selection naturally as Darwin envisioned.

Intelligent design is therefore the best explanation in the opinion of many of us. But at the very least, without mentioning intelligent design, B. He just points out the experimental facts we see damage.

That's why if you take radiation and just expose a population to it, you're not going to expect that it's going to gain new capabilities. You'll be worried they're going to contract all sorts of, not just cancers, but all sorts of birth defects.

It's not good. You accelerate mutation. It's usually bad. That's confirmed by experiment. And now that we add population genetics to this, there's no way that this is, at least for humans, there's no way it's going to evolve, you know, from something simpler to where we are.

We are dying. It indicates that we were miraculously created. We ought to be on our knees praying for God's mercy and waiting on the return of the Lord to give us healing. Our only hope is in Him. And so Michael B. He published the book Darwin Devolves.

He covers that. So I'm at about 26 minutes, I think. And I'll cover just briefly why maybe mutations are generally bad. It's not been covered well. And I presented this at the Creation Research Society in July at Liberty University among my peers.

So you get, why do we get these things? Genomes decay despite sustained fitness gains. Fitness means reproductive ability. So like antibiotic resistance. So this is an example where bacteria are just developing a lot of capability to reproduce under a stressful environment where they kind of starved it.

But they said, you know, the genome's decaying. It's like, well, you know, sometimes if you want to fly an airplane higher, you just kind of dump out all the equipment, make it light. It's pretty fragile, but you can get it to fly higher.

Doesn't mean you've necessarily improved it. You're actually getting rid of stuff. And this is what we're finding. A lot of times, sometimes all that is doing is just getting rid of stuff. It's, you know, a last ditch, last resort effort.

So, you know, for the sake of argument, let's accept universal common ancestry. Just for the sake of argument, you all know I'm a young earth creationist. But for the sake of argument, universal common ancestry.

Does that mean, even if all the individuals and organisms evolve from a single, like say, microbe, does that mean all the proteins evolve? Now, a little joke here. That would also mean like this squirrel eating on the strawberry, he's eating a piece of his cousin because they're all related.

Anyway, you can't extend that to the proteins. So the proteins are the things that are affected by changes in your DNA. So the DNA is a blueprint for the proteins. It gives us the spelling of the DNA, gives when it's translated, gives the spelling of the proteins and the spelling of the proteins, very critical to its function.

It creates all these geometric shapes and geometry is priority. You could see that they're all different shapes. And therefore even evolutionary biologists will say all of these proteins had independent origins.

Now they won't invoke miraculous special creation, but they're really close now. Unlike, you know, they just say, well, I don't know. I'm like, well, you know, this is going to be problematic if these proteins are complex.

So I don't even get any argument over this creationist looking orchard, what we call the orchard model in creationism. There is one evolutionary biologist there. We had a frank discussion. I said, what do you think of my ideas?

He said, I think you're right. In so many words, there's this, I was in a debate with 55 ,000 people watching. There is this secular Satanist named Arun Ra and I showed that protein orchard to him. And he was like, he didn't know what to do with it.

He wrote his buddies, came back to me later. And he thought he had me. And he said, there is no flipping common ancestor for all proteins. I used the family-friendly version of his quote to me. He wrote me this email and I said, I was thinking, dude, that's exactly what I said.

And he was acting like I didn't know. And I'm just like, I'm the one who put it on the table. You know, that's kind of a, I think it's kind of a sketchy rhetorical move, but he, even he who has been fighting creationist tooth and nail had to admit there's no common ancestor for all major protein families.

And why is this? And by the way, there are papers on this. It's kind of a simple reason. Geometry is priority. So we can kind of imagine how a car could evolve from like that first Carl car by Carl Benz, the Mercedes Benz fame.

And, you know, the, the architecture to today of the cars have, you know, it looks very, you know, it resembles the ancestor. It's like, okay, I could see how this can evolve by gradual steps. But the problem is in the parts, you cannot take a part and say, it's, you know, the ancestor of like, say a radiator, a battery, a spark plug, a piston, a tire, a gas tank.

Can you think of a, you know, a device that you can evolve in slow, gradual steps? And it's like, no, that's not going to happen. Okay. So maybe for an entire car, yes. But when you look at the parts, no common ancestor comes out of nowhere.

And why would that be? Well, let me just, okay. This looks I call this, you see, this is this is this is a potassium ion channel, if it resembles a nut, a man made nut. And so I say that's God made. And it looks kind of like the thing that's man made net cool.

This has to be geometrically precise that hole in the center, just like in the man made case has to be very precise in the God made case, the geometry is priority, it cannot tolerate it has to be that or it's dead.

And geometry has a priority. People have heard the word irreducible complexity, all or nothing. If you don't have all the parts. This is from another presentation. So I'm sorry, I'm having to blast through this.

This is a protein that I have studied and work with a another young earth creationist who is a professor of biochemistry. He's an adjunct professor at Vanderbilt School of Medicine and also a associate professor at Fried Hardeman and formerly Lipscomb University, Joe DeWeese.

He's on one of David Reed's videos on topoisomerase. And this is kind of a depiction of Richardson ribbon representation of the topoisomerase. So let me there's Joe right there. He and I published in the creationist journal.

And he published in the prestigious scientific journal nature. So he's also not only great creationist scientist, but also a great secular scientist. This is the number one science journal. I had the privilege of publishing with him in secular journals as well.

And let me just show a topoisomerase does. And you can see why.

Mutations have to be generally harmful. Let's consider what happens as DNA unwinds during replication. As DNA unwinds, it acts like this rope when we pull apart its two strands. As you pull the strands apart, twisting tension builds up in the rest of the coiled portion.

It is actually adding one twist to the remaining rope for each twist pulled out of it. At some point, you can't separate the strands anymore. The remaining rope is too tightly twisted. If you relax your tension on the rope, it will twist around itself in a super coil.

It is releasing tension. If you want to keep pulling the rope apart, you have to release the tension periodically. And one way to do this is to cut the rope and splice it back together. This problem has been best characterized in small circular DNAs.

There are two methods of dealing with this problem in DNA. One cuts only one strand of the DNA double helix, and the other cuts both strands. Let's look at the first. Topoisomerase I enzymes cut a single strand of the double helix, pass the other strand through the cut, and reseal the break, relaxing the overwhelmed molecule, which now has one fewer twist.

Topoisomerase II enzymes do the same thing but with both strands of the double helix. Topoisomerase II cuts both strands of a double-stranded DNA and passes another double strand through the break and then reseals the break.

So if a molecule of DNA is supercoiled, topoisomerase II can remove the supercoiling two twists at a time to yield a relaxed circle. Now the importance of this enzyme,.

It's a target of chemotherapy. If the genome is not untangled, the cell eventually dies. And so this is why it's a very well-studied enzyme. So chemotherapy, we try to just kill all the cancer cells.

Sadly, we kill a lot of the healthy cells because we're trying to figure out how to get better targeted. But basically if this enzyme doesn't do its job, we're dead. The cell's dead and therefore we're dead.

And so the question is, wow, this is really precise. Look at all the parts that have to work. This enzyme resembles a pair of scissors and it's not an accident. You have the geometry kind of like a pair of scissors.

If the topoisomerase were to cut and it didn't have the ability to untangle and reconnect, it fails. It's all or nothing. All parts have to be there. And if it is able to untangle but it doesn't cut, well, that fails too.

So the one, if it cuts and doesn't do the other things, it's going to shred the genomes. All that has to be there all at once. And there has to be, just like these pair of scissors, there has to be a precise geometric connection for the parts to work right.

Geometry is priority. And there are like 60 connections to implement the topoisomerase. And just like, let me show you some further pictures here of that. So you have a nut and a bolt. Even something as simple as this that we take for granted, if they are not shaped just right, they're not going to be able to work together.

It can't be too much or too little. So therefore changes in the geometry, if you change the spelling in the DNA, changes the shape of the protein, and it results in functional compromise. There's no way to really improve certain systems that are already optimized.

Very hard to build something from scratch because you can't build it incrementally, like the topoisomerase. It really has to be all functional. Otherwise, the system could be totally gone. And in worst cases, it's dead.

And there are some things that are very technical here that actually natural selection works against the creation of complexity. And I'm working on some of that. And that is pretty much it. If I may share one last thing from Dr. Sanford, and I thank you all for your time.

This is at the end of his book. He wrote at the end of his book, when I was young, I accepted the fact that I was going to die, and that all of the people I loved were going to die. I accepted it. But it robbed me of joy, to say the least.

I was taught that there was still one hope that the world was getting better. Science was advancing, culture was advancing, even mankind was getting better. Through our efforts, we could make the world a better place.

Through evolution, we could evolve into something better. Through progress, we might eventually defeat death itself. Perhaps we might someday even reverse the generation of the universe. My personal hope was that I might in some small way contribute to such progress.