Locks & Keys — Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

Right, ladies and gentlemen, I hope to speak to you tonight about the subject of the logos in biology. Now, there are a lot of you here who are at school or a teaching school and teach biology. And what I want to show you tonight is how much positive evidence there is that the logos is behind it all.

And I'm going to give you some examples which you might be able to use to help your children and maybe help yourself at the same time. Now, there are at the back a number of books on these subjects because I can't go into all the chemistry of this tonight because you'd fall down dead if I did.

But I'll give you the principles and then when you've got a spare moment, you can go and fill in all the details from the little books, book of words at the back there on the chemistry and on the information theory behind the wall that I say tonight.

Interpreting Biology Through Wisdom

So let's just read one word of God for our subject tonight and it's this. Listen to it very carefully. Who knows the interpretation of a thing? Now we're going to talk about a thing but the thing we're going to talk about tonight is biology.

Who knows the interpretation of a thing? And I'm going to try and do some interpretation, the facts which some of you know about already but perhaps haven't thought of the interpretation. Then it says, a man's wisdom in interpretation of things, a man's wisdom makes his face to shine.

I like that one. A man's wisdom, it includes the ladies as well although they sometimes don't like their faces to shine. You know, they put powder on to stop that, don't they? But I think it's a good thing if a man's face shines.

And it says, a man's wisdom makes his face to shine and the hardness of his countenance is changed. That is the hardness of a man or a woman's countenance is changed by knowing the interpretation of things.

So that's what we want to do. Now Solomon did that, didn't he? Talked about everything from the little plants on the wall to the large animals of the sea, he talked about them. And he was the most wise man on earth at the time.

The Cell as a Living System

Now the subject then is Logos, the Logos in biology today. And I want to have a look at the basis of all biology which is the cell. The simple cell, there aren't any things as simple cells but that's what they say.

The cell is a metabolic unit which extracts, don't be afraid and don't take flight before I've finished, which extracts energy from its environment for its own purposes, particularly for replication, particularly for growth and particularly for survival.

So that's the single cell. Now we're all made up of millions of cells but the only way we can function as human beings is if each cell gives up its own life in the interests of the whole body. You see, my nerve cells, the millions of them in the brain, well one or two just there, you know, the millions of them in the brain, if they were to all have their original freedom which they did have at one time as amoeba-like cells, you'd never be able to transmit a thought.

So they give up their own personal freedom in order to make a greater intelligent whole. The cells of the liver give up their original freedom so that they can function as a liver and digest the food and all the rest of it.

My eyes do the same. They've given up their personal free life in order that the whole may see. So that is what the function of a cell is. Now you find the exact picture of that in the church. The church is the body of Christ and consists of people who have dedicated themselves to the whole body which is the church and which is the Christ according to the holy scriptures.

So in that we do collaborate with one another rather than serve ourselves, that makes possible a greater intelligence and effectiveness than would otherwise be possible. That's the meaning of the cell from the church point of view.

I don't want to talk about that tonight but it's one little thing that I just couldn't let go by because it's so important. Now what is a cell? Now listen ever so carefully to this because you'll be rather shocked perhaps.

Cells as Bundles of Keys

A cell is really a bundle of keys, keys, K-E-Y-S. You see in the food that we eat and after all I am physically what I eat, so are you. In the food that we eat there is energy and I need the energy for my own purposes and for the purposes of the cells of the whole body.

Now I put on the board there, I'm not much of a Picasso but I've done my best. There's a little cube there I put on the board and there's a little hole in the front which is a keyhole and I have projected inside the keyhole sort of an author's impression of a lock and you see I've put a lot of profiles on there so that you can see that's a safe, a safe.

And in the safe I've got another little block there labelled A-U. Now for all the elite and intelligentsia of Crawford Chapel, A-U means Aurum or gold. So what you put in safes among other things is gold, isn't it?

Now we have a safe then full of gold and it's nicely locked up to be sure. What are the ways of getting the gold out of the safe? Well now I'll suggest you two ways and we'll choose the method we want to use for later purposes.

You can either take, as I put there in the top corner, in the bottom corner there, you can either take an oxyacetylene blowtorch you know with a cylinder of oxygen and a cylinder of acetylene there and a nice little torch to get two or three thousand degrees centigrade and you can burn the lock out.

Now that's one way of doing it. Lots of people try it. I don't advise it because you ruin your safe and if the police see you doing it their suspicions will be aroused. That's one way of doing it. Now the other way of doing it is of course to find the key.

If you can find the key it's easy. You just insert it and you turn it and the door opens and out falls your gold. So it's dead easy but the thing is to find the key. Now food, all the food we eat is like a safe or many kinds of safe and in the safe, the food we eat, there are calories instead of gold and we need the calories to live on.

Now if you want to get the calories out of food there are two ways of doing it. Just there are two ways of getting into a safe. You can burn it like I do when I try and cook the dinner for my wife you see and it falls on the hot plate and the place is full of the stink of burnt food you see and burnt soup and my wife will come and ask you done it again you see.

So you say you have. It's a very inelegant way of getting the calories out of food. Mind you, you can burn food but it's not considered the way to do it. Now with regard to the cell, the cell needs that gold or those calories in the molecules of food that we eat and the molecules of food that we eat are like little safes and in those safes there's the gold or the calories stored.

Now the cell doesn't go about it in a bullheaded manner. It doesn't burn the food with an open flame. Only the dragons of old you know with the fire coming out of their noses, they apparently did it that way although I'm not quite sure that that's an authentic scientific fact but I doubt very much because the proteins wouldn't stand for the heat would they and for the smoke.

Anyway, the other way of getting it out is to find the key. Now the remarkable thing is that every cell is a bundle of keys. Some of them are master keys and they'll fit all the safes which hold the calories in our food and unlock it without the slightest difficulty.

They just fiddle around the food, sniff around it and they'll have the key ready in one minute and insert it and the calories will fall out just as elegant as you like. Just a wonderful method. Now listen, let me hear those cogwheels whirring up top because otherwise you will not get this bit of chemistry and this is rather hard to get across but it's vital.

Enzymes, DNA, and the Argument from Design

Do you think the elite and the prestigious denizens of Calvary Chapel here in Los Angeles, Costa Mesa and Santa Ana, whatever you call the place here, I've never found out whether it's Santa Ana or Costa Mesa but nevermind, that's beside the point.

What I'm getting at is you the elite and the instructees of our worthy pastor here, have you ever thought what makes a key and a lock function? If you haven't, I'll have you certified but if you have, consider this.

This is vital for all the teachers of biology that are here. If you have, do you think that the properties of the metal of which the key and lock are made, that they provide the profile on the key that makes it fit?

That is, do you think that if you can get the properties of the bronze, nicely classified, that made the key, do you think that they could be related to the profile on the key that makes it work? You see, you know when you copy a key, don't you?

That the profile has to be copied exactly. You put it into the copying apparatus and it follows exactly the key that you want to copy and it puts it onto the new piece of bronze or steel or even plastic today for making the lock.

Now, what I want to get over to you is to be perfectly plain on this point. That the profile of a key is not related to the properties of the metal of which the key is made. It'll hold those properties, it'll hold the profile if it's stiff enough, and to make a key it's got to be stiff enough.

But once you've got it stiff enough, you can take plastic, you can take anything you like, you can take lead or silver as long as it's hard enough, and put the profile on it. But the profile does not originate in the metal or in the plastic, it's put on there from outside.

Now, the body and the cells, even the so-called simple cells have at least, at very least, 2 ,000 lock and key mechanisms in them to open the food in the environment around about them at least a bundle of 2 ,000 keys to fit the locks of the food in nature.

The remarkable thing is the profiles of the keys in nature, they're called enzymes, and they're a subject of my first dissertation I ever wrote. They're called enzymes, and they're absolutely able by their shape, which chemistry alone cannot produce.

That's definite. They alone can open all the kinds of food there is hanging around for us to eat, and they do so. Some of the keys are master keys, and they'll open two or three kinds of safes. Others are very specific and will only open one kind of safe, but safes they will open.

Now, that's the first thing. The second thing to note is this, friends, it's a marvelous thought if you give it a little bit of consideration. How does the cell know in its DNA programming the kind of locks it's going to have to open?

It does know because the, I say know in inverted commas, because on the DNA molecule, there is written up the exact profiles of every key and every master key in that cell, which will feel and scan the food that's put near the cell, and will open it and get out the calories so that they can live, get out the energy so that they can live.

How does it know? Because you know, there's one thing that's absolutely certain, ladies and gentlemen, that you don't make a key and a lock mechanism by random processes. And Darwin says, the whole bag of tricks is made by random processes over millions of years.

Now, did you ever see a locksmith go at making a fine, exact lock and key mechanism by that sort of process? You'd have him certified on the spot if he tried to do it like that. And that's what all our kids are asked to believe at school.

I think it's an absolute scandal to invert their common sense by telling them these things. It's time that we told them the truth, that the one who made the food must have been the one who made the DNA molecule of the cell to give the cell the instructions, what profile it needed to open the food.

Because the two hadn't got any contact with one another until the food comes to be digested. And the cell comes to get some food. And yet the cell knows exactly the thousands of types of keys, they absolutely perfect fits made by what is called optical activity in the cells.

If you want to read that, ladies and gentlemen, you can read it in the natural sciences know nothing revolution. I gave that to my publisher in Switzerland. Oh, eight years ago. And I said, you know, you have as a coat of arms for your firm, which was formed at the time of Gutenberg, who invented printing.

You remember the little story, don't you? He has a coat of arms for Schwaben company, which is my publisher in Switzerland, an anvil and a hammer. And out of the hand, the anvil and the hammer, huge sparks coming in every direction.

So I said, if you publish this book, you will realize in practice what your coat of arms says. Who we said, that's just what we want to do. Well, I said, I don't know whether you've got courage enough to do it, but that's what will happen.

He said, well, if it's good science, we'll take it. I said, be sure careful what you do, because you may get into trouble. Well, I said, you've got a fortnight to consider it. That's two weeks to you people, to consider it.

And he said, you don't mean to say, do you, professor, that we've got to publish the book in two weeks, do you? No, I said, I'm not mad, you know. You can think about it for two weeks and then tell me.

He telephoned in one week and said, we'll take it, it's good science. And that's what I said in the book. It's really, it's in the natural sciences, know nothing of evolution. That the keys given to the cell, the profiles of those keys are fixed up, laid down on the DNA molecule of the cell.

And they know the type of locks there are on food and will open them. Now, there are several types of keys and locks and I don't want to go into them in detail. But one's an ester, for chemistry, you'll know what that means.

Another is a double bond. Another is a carbohydrate, another's a fat. And there are special keys and locks for all these systems. And the cell's got it off pat, can open them immediately and get the calories out.

When you think of a key and a lock mechanism, I would say myself that the simplest and the most sensible way of explaining that is to say that there was a locksmith. The same is, who knew his job? The same is, you see, for a clock, a watchmaker.

For a watch, a watchmaker. I think that's fairly obvious and it brings back to that question we did last week, you know, about design needing a designer. Now, if you try and get around that, as Darwin did, you can't get around it today with the knowledge that we've gained since Darwin died.

And part of the knowledge is how to make the shape right. And the shape is to do with the optical activity for those who've done their chemistry, but I can't explain that tonight. Now, that's the first thing.

And every cell knows how to do it. No cell could live if it didn't make those locks and keys first to get the energy it needs out of the food, which is round about it. Now, keep that firmly in your mind and you can draw a little red line under what I've said, because I'm going to give a second example now.

Language, Information, and the Logos

And at the end, I'm going to tie it all up together and I hope that you'll worship God when you see it, because it's marvelous when you think of how the cell works. There you can see the logos in it. So draw a little red line under what I've said and we come to the second example now.

Now, there's a more remarkable lock and key mechanism in the body, which concerns us as human beings very particularly. It's like this. We're not going to talk now about food molecules having calories in them, but we're going to talk about languages and books having contents in them.

Now, this book here, which was given me in Wheaton 25 years ago when we left Wheaton in Illinois, this book is a safe. And in it, lots and lots of sequences, bits of information, which are coded according to the English language.

Now, when I read that, you know, I was brought up to understand the English language, as you might guess. And there's one thing, if you give this book to a Turk, we lived two years in Turkey, you know, he looks at it and you look ever so wise because the Turks can do that.

You look ever so wise and you say, doesn't mean anything to me. Why not? Because the dear good fellow hasn't got the key to open it. He wasn't taught at school. And the key to open it is of course, the English grammar, the English vocabulary.

And if you learn the English grammar and the English vocabulary, you can very soon unlock this safe and get out all the information which is hidden in it. But you can't take an oxyacetylene torch and get out that information.

There's no way of doing it. You must have the key to do it. There's no easy way around it and no hard way around it. You've got to do it the right way. Now I say the easy way and the hard way. Have you ever thought, ladies and gentlemen, once when I was busy learning Russian, because I had to do Russian when during the war, we had gallant allies there, you know, and they came and looked around our laboratories to see what we were up to.

And they couldn't find anybody to talk to these people. So they thought, well, here's the fellow, teach him Russian. So there I was led off to a nice Russian boy twice a week. And I was sitting down one day learning my Russian grammar.

Oh boys, Russian grammar, it makes me great to think of it. Anyway, while I was doing this, while I was doing this, our microanalyst, who was a Christian, a very nice little man, and he was his flink, he was his fleet of foot and elegant in his language as a microanalyst should be.

He came, touched me on the shoulder and he said, Waldo, you look as though you're in rough sea at that job. So I said, well, I am. I'm not only look like it, but I am. And he said, do you know this? That even the babies in Russian can read that.

They don't have to work at it. You must be dumber than the babies in Russian. So I said, Tim Heron, his name was Heron. I said, that's very nice of you to tell me that. It was a bit tactless, isn't it, under the circumstances.

So he said, it was truth. So I said, truth isn't always tactful, you know. And, but he thought about it. If you confront a baby with a language, the baby can decode it. It takes time. Have you ever watched a mother talking to a baby?

We've had four and they've had to learn a number of languages very, very, very, very early. So let's have a look at how a baby learns a language. A baby hasn't got much vocabulary, but he's got eyes and it has ears and a mouth.

Now, if you put the baby, after it's learned to focus its eyes, you know when they're born, they can't focus their eyes. One eye looks up here and the other eye looks down there and poor little thing's lost.

But after a time, they get their eyes parallel and can look at you. And when that great event comes, the first smile that it gives its mother. Now, that's a great event. The first smile of recognition of the mother.

You've seen that, haven't you? It's really wonderful. A little child looks at its mother and you can see the sheer joy as it smiles. Now, you do this little experiment with the baby. As soon as it can focus its eyes, I'm not going to do a bad experiment.

This is a good one. You prop it up on the bed in pillows so that it's more or less sitting up as straight as it can. And then you put the mother at the foot of the bed and she talks to the babe. You know what mothers say.

I'm not very good at this, but I'll do my best. Here they say honey, don't they? Well, if a woman says honey, it's an American, sure enough. But an English woman will say darling or something like that, or sweetie pie is what they call them in England.

And she'll sit there and say sweetie pie, you see, and darling and all the rest of it. And the babe will look and listen very, very intently. And then it'll form its lips and it'll try to say sweetie pie.

It will, and that's the way it learns. Now listen, this is the experiment. You now put between mother and baby a big Perspex glass transparent sheet screen, you know, a nice transparent one, perfectly transparent.

And the mother is now asked to speak into two microphones. And one loudspeaker from each microphone is on each side of the bed. So you've got two lateral microphones and the speakers and the microphones up with the mother separated by this large screen between the mother and the babe.

Now, they let the two microphones work, speaker on both sides of the bed. The babe will continue trying to imitate its mother and will crow with ecstasy, you know, when it finds it's got the mother's attention.

But now you do something which is very wicked. You turn off one of the microphones so that the baby sees the mother's lips working, but will hear the mother's voice at the side of the bed. Now it's used to seeing where the sound comes from.

And the computer is built up to work on that. It'll see what it hears. And that gives it two directions on which to work on the language. The two directions, much better than one. So it goes at it from two sides.

Now you turn one off, the baby will immediately howl. It can't deal with that, it's too hard. And it'll cry, miserably, because the voice is not coming from where it knows it is coming from, namely from the mouth.

We can't work on that basis. Now, as soon as you turn the loudspeakers back again, so that it hears the voice from where it sees the lips moving, it'll crow with delight again and the seance will go just nicely again.

You see, the computer is set up to take from two directions, from the hearing and from the seeing, to decode any language. Now, how does it do that? Well now, you think of a computer that will decode a language by just looking and hearing.

You try and build a computer to decode Russian into English by that method and see where you get. Noam Chomsky filled the university, the MIT, with super-duper hyper-computers to do that. Uncle Sam wanted a machine in which you could feed in the secret Russian documents they'd stolen from somebody or another, you see, in Russian, they wanted to feed those into the machine and the English edition should come out the other end.

Lovely idea. But after he'd spent millions on this, he sent in his resignation and said, this can't be done, it's a waste of taxpayers' money, it's too complex. The programming to do that, to see and hear and decode, open the closed safe with all the information in it, in the language, is too complex.

Now, he was asked to explain why he couldn't do it. So he did. He said, look here, the only explanation of language, to find this in a scientific textbook, it's called Language and Mind by Noam Chomsky, to find the explanation given in that book gives you as a Christian an absolute jolt.

He said, how does a baby do it? The baby must have something to bite on, to latch on to, to do it. How does he do it? Well, he said, there's all the evidence that we can find in analysing the various languages that are extant on the earth today.

There's all the evidence that once upon a time, all language was one on earth. We had a complex, complete language and every man spoke the same language. Now, he said that the Tower of Babel, and to find that written in a scientific textbook, there's no, no, no Wellhausen critique, a critique of the Bible in that.

He said that the Tower of Babel, that one language was scrambled. Now, you all know what scramble means, don't you? Which is simply mixed up like a scrambler does on the radio so that you can't hear the language and you have to de-scramble it to get it back again.

He said it was scrambled, but in the scrambling process for all the languages that have been produced, the common factor for all languages remained hidden in those scrambled languages. So there is common to all languages, a factor which they call P, which they haven't yet identified, but they know it to be there, otherwise a baby wouldn't be able to decode any language you care to present it with, couldn't do it.

From a theoretical point of view, from the computer point of view, it must have something to latch on to, a common factor. Well, if you get this common factor, then the baby cottons onto that and will gradually uncode the language through that common factor.

Now you think that every baby is genetically programmed to build a computer that will just hear and see a spoken language and in two or three years, it'll speak that language that is learned that way.

Now you try and do that, that's what we're trying to do with computers. And it's an insuperable problem today. Now you think of the other thing, that that programming of the baby's computer to build the software and hardware of a computer like that was present on one sperm the size of a pinpoint and one egg the size of a pinhead.

And all the information was there, besides the information to build the baby's eyes, to build the baby's ears, to build the baby's heart, to build the baby's lungs, to build the baby's legs, to build his kidneys, to build everything that he is, and also to build the genetic cells for the future generations as long as the human race exists.

All computerized and miniaturized on one sperm and one egg. Now you think of the intelligence required to do that. If you tell me the programming of that sort was made by random processes from natural law, well, there would be common ways of saying what I do with you, but the real way to do it, the real way to do it would have you certified immediately and put out of danger to the public, you see, you're going to do that.

I mean, it's simply incredible where we've got to with all the information we have. So that's as far as I want to go on that point. The important thing is that the baby's computer is able to do that. Now, if you wait 10 or 15 years until puberty, okay, you present then the young man or the young woman with the decoding of a language, and you ask him to learn German, or you ask him to learn Russian when he's got four children of his own, you know, and the poor fellow can't do it because he's given for a few years a plastic computer which is capable of scanning out any language to extract the meaning from it.

That is, he's given a key which will be inserted into it, it is capable of being inserted into any language and opening it, that is giving the code for it. But after he's got, say, 15, 20 years old, the crust grows over the key and it doesn't fit.

He works and works and works at it, but he always speaks with an accent, you know, you can't get around it. The thing is this, we're always given just time enough to do what needs to be done. And the child needs to learn by the time it's 14 or 15, perfectly, the language that it needs for its life.

Language Learning and the Timing of Education

And after that, the plasticity of the computer sets and it can't take in any more new profiles for keys or languages, unless it's learned two or three when it's young. I found this, I didn't stop learning languages, my wife, until we were, until we got four children.

And so we weren't then exactly what you might say teenagers. But because we'd learned one or two languages early, you see, we had to learn French, we lived in French Switzerland, and we had to know German because we went then to German Switzerland.

And we've been all ways round where they speak all sorts of outlandish languages like English. And we've had to learn all these things. Now, the trouble with the education system here is not only that they're teaching you wrong things about biology, the trouble is they're teaching them too late.

You find American boys and girls on the mission field, devoted people, and they start to learn the language when they're about 28 or 30. And you know, it's far too late. They could have done it when they were six, eight years old.

But now that the profile has got set and is no longer plastic, it can't feel its way into the language as a baby can. The thing is this, it's too late and too little. That's the trouble. Now, if you go to Russia, I'm not, I haven't any shares in Russia or in Marxism, as you may guess.

But if you go to Russia, you'll find one of the astounding things there is that if you go into the schools, the children will often address you in Shakespeare English, and perfectly. Their teachers speak English with them.

And they do it by the same method as mother to child. Then they learn the grammar afterwards. That's the way to do it, that we're built like that. The information on the sperm that made us and on the egg that made us made us like that.

And then you get not half the trouble that you normally would have. Now, perhaps you'd allow me, ladies and gentlemen, to say a little bit of our own experience because we've made, we've moved house 26 times since we've been married.

And we've taken, had four children on the way, as it were. And it takes a little bit of doing that because of the schooling. Now, what we did, we took very great care that we spoke when the children were going to English speaking schools, we would not understand English in the home.

Now, it takes a great deal of character, particularly on the part of the mother, to stick to that. And when the child tries to revert, you see, to the language he's using in school, not to give way and to insist.

Now, the result was that our children had no difficulty when we went back to Europe, when they were all about in their teens, you see, young teens, they had no difficulties at all because they already spoke three languages.

So they could concentrate on the sciences. And they all got to university by the time they were 16 or 17, because they didn't have to sit down and sweat at a late age to get the languages which are mandatory, you see, to get into a European university because they'd already got them.

So they could concentrate on doing the science, which was a bit harder. So think of these things, they're very important for practical wisdom in life. Now, let's just, one other thing. When we lived in Wheaton in Illinois, these are little practical things that we've come across in the course of our life.

There was a nice young woman there, a German lady, and she'd married a GI when he was in Germany. And they have one little daughter, about three, four years old. So I addressed her when I came in in German, you see, as I normally would do.

And the little girl came up, nice little bright little girl. So I addressed her in German. You know, she looked at me as if I'd hit her over the head with a golf club or something like that because she was absolutely shocked.

Well, now, I said to the mother, that's remarkable, doesn't she speak any German? And she wept. She said, oh, she said, I'm so worried about my little child. I think she must be dumb. Now, I said, just take a look at her eyes.

Her eyes are all right, she's not dumb. She said, well, look, I take her every day for an hour to the kitchen table. And I give her a lesson in German. I said, madam, madam, you're one of the good old German type.

You love hard work, don't you? Even though it's not necessary. She looked at me as if I'd hurt her, you see. So I said, madam, if you just talk to your child in German, she'll be all right. Never occurred to her.

Then she got out her textbooks and was burdening this kid with all the grammar, you know, daddy and das and all the rest of it that they burden kids with. They learn it far easier if you just talk to them, you know.

So she was working too hard. Now, I'm not suggesting here in Calvary Chapel that you work too hard. I wouldn't say that at all. But just go the natural way, you'll be all right. So I don't know what she did.

I didn't see her after that because we left shortly afterwards. But we're made such that we can learn very easy and we can unravel any system of language or code by this method that I've told you. Now, let's just have a little bit, look at this a little bit further and see where we get to.

Wolf Children and the Window for Learning

You know what a wolf child is, don't you? Human children that are brought up with animals are called wolf children. If they haven't any contact with human beings, they don't speak. They'll just make the noises that the animals make.

Now, there was in California many, many years ago in the days when the West was wild, there was a group of Indians living in one of the Californian forests which had some young children and the Indians were rather, had a tendency to steal.

So there was a tendency on the part of the Western settlers to shoot them at sight. Well, horrible way of going on, but that's how it was done. Now, from one little village of these Indians, there was one day a group of the warriors went out to collect some eggs, you see, from the white settlers and to collect some fowl because they had good fowl and good eggs and they were caught and they were all killed.

Now, the people left at home were the old people, just two or three old people, to look after the children, look after the little camp. Now, when the others didn't come back, after two or three days, the old people left one or two of the older children and the very young children in the camp and they went out to search for those.

They did not come back and they didn't come back either. The children were left in the camp and as a result, they're pretty hardy, you know, these kids. As a result, there was only one boy which survived.