Evolution: How We Know it Happened & Why it Matters (with Dr. Donald Prothero)

hi skeptics and pseudo skeptics and sometimes kept expand even believers well we're all believers of various things right skeptics is just a it's organization that's a scientific organization we investigate claims of the paranormal and pseudoscience and fringe groups and Colton this is our magazine this quarterly publication of the society when you join today early $25 five dollars off the regular price you can get your latest issue which just came out this last week can pick it up today that way we don't have to mail it to you so that brochure is floating around here if you are not on our regular East skeptic publication weekly electronic publication that's free go to skeptic calm and and sign up for that we just need your email address or just give one of us staffers your email address and we'll sign up for you so you can know what's going on in the upcoming months so today is the last lecture of oh five starting in oh six January twenty-second we have Jared Diamond who is coming back who gave us a full house we'll be in Beckman Auditorium on that day Beckman is the big white round building that holds about a thousand people because that's how many you need when Jared speaks so Jared will be speaking on crisis management by people and Nations which is sort of a combination of Guns Germs and Steel and collapse and his next line of research that he's doing because he's become fairly well known he does a lot of corporate and governmental consulting about good and bad decisions that people and organizations and nations make that cause them to succeed or fail so he's going to do a nice lecture on that then Sunday February 12 which is Darwin's birthday conveniently on a weekend this time so we can have a little celebration for Darwin Lisa Randall the Harvard physicist will be speaking she's gotten a lot of press recently with her new book about oh shoot forget the name of her book parallel universe what Carol L universe is something like that anyway she's a she's a mathematical physicist and cosmologist who has a couple of the most cited papers and all of the physical sciences in the last decade and so this is her first popular book supposedly readable but to the extent that any of these well it's as good as they come it's just hard material so she will translate it for us on February 12 February 26 Dan Dennett will be in town from Tufts University Dan's on a book tour for his next book which I just got a copy of recently I'm reviewing for science is called a breaking the spell the evolutionary origins of religion and I presume by breaking the spell he means to change where that evolution has been going in terms of the power of religion as you know Dan's a bright you know what brights are right it's a terrible name for a non-believer but any rate I'm booked anybody from March or May but then April 9th Tim Flannery who is a Australian environmental scientist has a book out called the weather makers about global warming and everything humans have done to alter essentially we are the weather makers now we're creating the weather anyway so he'll be in a tour in America actually for this book and so we've got them coming through town on April 9 if if you want to go to Las Vegas and who doesn't this brochure which you can pick up over there is a promoting the amazing meeting James Randy's conference at the Stardust Hotel January 26 seven eight nine I'll be speaking Murray gell-mann the amazing Randi of course Penn & Teller Jamie and Swiss Christopher Hitchins Dan Dennett the Mythbusters will be there oh speaking of the Mythbusters that's who's on the cover of our latest issue these guys are the coolest hottest skeptics going out there mainly because they blow stuff up at when they do science and that's what's not to like about that so Randy's really got a terrific lineup it's incredible for three four day three and a half days essentially of all these really cool people just hanging around talking so I do recommend and you can go to a Randy org and sign up there you can pick up that brochure well let's see oh we do the five dollar book table and lots of goodies over here because this December 25th just happens to be the 360 third anniversary of Sir Isaac Newton's birthday and a tradition has historically gathered momentum of exchanging gifts on Newton's birthday so we're recommending science related gifts it's it is Newton's birthday and we have plenty of those here all right so it's truly a December 25th it's also true that it was the old calendar so technically it's not really yet as soon as I started doing this I got letters from all these calendar calculators and science nerds say no that's not right so it's just a shtick okay it's just this isn't hardcore history of science here um well since its we're talking about evolution today okay one minor announcement case you didn't notice we have a different speaker today and a slightly different topic my guy David wheeler who was going to lecture on evolutionary psych couldn't make it he was coming from Illinois coming a long ways anyway his his tour got cancelled so he's not here but since he was a lecture on evolutionary psychology so I figured since half of Americans don't even believe in evolution at all maybe we should cover that subject before we get into the details of where you apply it if you don't even believe in it so not that this audience is going to be in that same demographic but nevertheless it doesn't hurt to know even if you accept evolution believe in evolution is not even I got to quit saying that it's not even the right way to say it you know it's like it's not a belief system it's like I believe in gravity well we either accept it as fact it happened or you don't and half of the whole America don't so those of us who do of course it's good to have the intellectual ammunition for that anyway before I introduced on our speaker the Darwin Awards were just given out as you know the Darwin Awards are given out to people who do really stupid things and remove themselves from the gene pool here are just a few of the ten that were the most interesting seems an Arkansas guy wanted some beer pretty badly he decided that he just throw a cinderblock through a Lindner liquor store window grab some booze and run so he lifted the cinderblock and heaved it over his head at the window the cinderblock bounced back and hit the would-be thief on the head knocking him unconscious the liquor store window was made of Plexiglas as a female shopper exited a New York vegan store a man grabbed her purse and ran the clerk called 911 immediately in the and the woman was able to give them a detailed description of the purse snatcher within minutes the police apprehended him they put him in the car and drove him back to the store the thief was then taken out of the car and told to stand there for a positive ID to a tee replied yes officer that's her that's the lady I stole the purse from a man walked into a Louisiana circle-k put a $20 bill on the counter and asked for change when the clerk opened the cash drawer the man pulled a gun and asked all the cash in the register which the clerk promptly provided the man took the cash from the clerk and fled leaving the $20 bill on the counter the total amount of cash he got from the drawer $15 is doing the new math after shopping for drinks after stopping for drinks it is Christmas Newton was done after stopping for drinks at an illegal bar Azzam Bob Wian bus driver found that the 20 mental patients he was supposed to be transporting had escaped not wanting to admit his incompetence the driver went to a nearby bus stop and offered everyone waiting there a free ride he then delivered the passengers to the mental hospital telling the staff there that the patients were very excitable and prone to bizarre fantasies and finally the number one winner of the Darwin Award for 2005 when a 38 caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a holdup in Long Beach California would-be robber James Elliott did something that can only inspire wonder he peered down the barrel and tried the trigger again he is now a member of the Darwin Club I know idea if these things are true and I think half of them they're just internet stuff but what the heck it's fun all right so evolution how we know it happened and why does it matter well the latest issue of Natural History Magazine in fact is devote the entire issue is devoted to this very subject and and it's not so much here's the debate about intelligent design and evolution it's really about evolution it's a it's a rigorous and deep science and one of the key authors there is Donald Prothero our speaker today we know not a long time he's on the board of skeptic magazine he's been lecturing for us he gave a first his first lecture for us I think in 93 or 94 he also spoke at the Gould Festschrift that we did in tribute to Stephen Jay Gould in 2000 Don is a professor of geology at Occidental College in LA he's a lecturer here in geo biology at Cal Tech here and his master's and PhD degrees from the geological sciences at Columbia University he got a bachelor's in geology at University of California Riverside he likes rocks he's currently the author co-author excuse me editor a co-editor of 21 different books and about 200 scientific papers including five leading geology textbooks and three trade books as well as an edited symposium volume and other technical works in addition to be on the editorial board of skeptic he's on the editorial board of geology magazine as well as paleo biology in the Journal of paleontology he's a fellow of the Geological Society of America the paleontological Society the Linnaean Society of London which is really cool and and he's also received fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation in 1991 he received the Shu Curt award from the paleontological Society which is the award given to the most outstanding paleontologists under the age of 40 stephen jay gould for example won that award he's also been featured I'm sure if you're channel surfing around the various cable channels where you see the dinosaur shows you've seen Don on there he's been on paleo world a number of times walking with a prehistoric beast you see him as a talking head evolutionary biology and geology and the fossil record and so on never on Jerry Springer though that I know of right is right so with that please help me welcome dr. Donald Prather ooh okay kids together now is we going to be able to get the lights down on the screen here so it'll be a little darker okay I'll move around here so I won't stand in your way much for those you're out in the wings you may find this as big as we can get the screen so this is best I knew I tried not to make too much small images or small type I got an email from Michael about five days ago saying our speakers canceled can you put something together so luckily I've done this enough times and I'm familiar with the material enough that I put in a few late nights which the baby's keeping up anyway so it's not a big deal to do that so I threw this together based on stuff I've done over the years and I'm a slide show is now obsolete anyway so it's all PowerPoint these days as most you know as many of you know of course the topic of evolution has always been a hot one in the United States more so than any other country and once again we find ourselves embattled and then to tack and on the cover of Time magazine which is always a sign something's happening and of course it's an interesting sort of a series of historical twists we're talking about here because of course it certainly was controversial in 1859 when Darwin's book came out but by the time Darwin died in 1882 essentially accepted by virtually all educated Westerners in almost all countries including the US although less so here than in other European countries and then there was backlash of course during the 1890s up through 1920s when the fundamentalist movement first arose culminating course in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial which sort of put fundamentalism and creationism in bad light but surprisingly did nothing to change the laws that was actually intended to change it really wasn't until the 1950s in fact 1957 especially when the Year Sputnik went above us which many in this room are old enough to remember that suddenly us realized that had been letting science well languish in its curriculum so long and forced us to suddenly throw out a lot of this garbage that we've been teaching and get our signs up to speed at the same time of course we went through some conservative ways especially in the 1970s 1980s and the creationist movement which had been around since the 1890s sort of rear rows for a while but finally met their last legal Waterloo if you will in 1982 in federal Superior Court essentially it out that everything they do is religion not science and doesn't belong in a science classroom according the Constitution so that should have been the end of the story right there but as you know it was not they kept pushing their cases in places that don't follow federal law too well like local school boards in places like that where they have more power or more influence and then in recent years they have their own new stealth strategy to get themselves back into the curriculum the so-called intelligent design creationism which is why that time cover was out I just heard Michael give a talk on this a few weeks ago and I'm sure you probably talked about it pretty soon when his new book comes out on it so I won't say too much about it here I'll just say a few things intelligent designed by those you know something about it it's basically an old argument recycled these various mostly non paleontologists and rim scientists are start out with religious viewpoints and then they want to say essentially make their viewpoint sound scientific so they're arguing for example nature bear signs of irreducible Exedy that cannot evolve by a quote-unquote random chance requires intelligent designer and they claim their ideas do not require judeo-christian God that they're not some sort of ruse to get religion into the curriculum that they're not promoting religious belief of course they know they have to say that because the course throw them out if they don't but you can find smoking guns very easily if you look just behind the surface of what they say to what they've said in places where they're not realizing when they're being quoted demske for example one of their main spokespersons here and I got this from Michael's book in a conference right out here at Anaheim says intelligent design opens a whole possibility that's being created the image of benevolent god the java apologetics to clear the ground clear obstacles prevent people coming to the knowledge of christ there's anything i think that his block grows the christ is the free reign of spirit and people accept the scripture jesus christ is that Darwinian naturalistic view well is it more even more obvious smoking gun than that i can't imagine it philip johnson a lawyer berkeley who has no scientific training is one of their main spokespeople you know the objective is to convince people that Darwinism is inherently atheistic of course that's the standard way they do this the shifting the debate versus an evolution in existence of God versus non-existence of God which of course creationist I've done for years from there the people introduced the quote/unquote truth of the Bible and then quote-unquote question of sin and finally quote-unquote introduced to Jesus so it's very blatantly religious it just doesn't say so and when the people are listening but they are in fact clearly religious as this little cartoon from recent editorial things literally the wolves in sheep's clothing their creationism with a sheep's clothing of intelligent design and of course religious right riding that into the public schools and our scientist is saying warn the neighbors the carnivals back in town and of course the only goal is get around what federal courts in the Supreme Court to repeatedly ruled which is you cannot teach any specific religious dogma in public schools especially not in a science class Constitution forbids out of course it crosses a line between separation of church and state so what we end up having is these various interesting of voodoo science being taught of real science as you see the teacher here for those who can't read the back says and now class your new science teacher with the Buddha mask here will explain intelligent design now of course for those you know a little bit about the history of philosophy and history of science no intelligent design is nothing new is just a label a new label on old wine bottle right then around a long time goes back at least as far as the Greeks and the Romans talking about beautifully designed things and of course improving their God's designed those things not the judeo-christian God obviously Cicero is no Christian obviously but of course people like Thomas Aquinas certainly put that kind of argument in there things that was something is very popular with medieval theologians as well for those you know though that the main historical ponent and persons names most associated with this idea is a famous natural theologian what was then the natural scientist of the time by name of William Paley was also course a divinity doctor divinity as well famous book called natural theology which was actually one of Darwin's favorites books when he was a young man and many as they spin fairies as well and his famous analogy here he talked about he walked on a beach he saw a stone you wouldn't make any big fuss about that being something that's intricately designed by a by a supernatural designer but if you find a watch on a beach you would argue that it had some kind of an intelligent designer or this inter contrivance and that would be the watch a divine watchmaker which of course in their minds at that time was the Judea Christian did okay now ironically that argument had already been discredited but it didn't matter okay those you know your philosophy David Hume was one of the most far-seeing philosophies of his time one of the great Scottish enlightenment philosophers in 70-79 dialogues history natural elision when extensive dialogue break Torah this argument shreds and points out of course natural theology doesn't automatically judeo-christian god of course that was the assumption of the British of that time if it's a it's divine and therefore it must be their God okay it could be a God from any other culture it could be a committee of gods or maybe a juvenile God made a few mistakes okay and who does this and a dialogue format so you don't really have them actually saying in his own words he puts in the words of his characters okay now you can if you want to look at nature find plenty of beautiful you know intricately exquisitely designed looking things like this is a shell regulary in' there's a blow-up of the intricate structure these things there's plenty of these in nature that's not a problem this is the you patella the Venus's flower basket sponge with all the intricate little weaving of the glass rods close-up of the compound eye or the interpret the design of a honeycomb this all sounds like it's intricately designed by a creator but of course those last two are really actually functions of putting together clothes packs fears or clothes packs lenders that's how you get exciting or close packing like honeycomb okay but the trade-off of course being hang on here that if you go by that argument intelligent design is the responsible for all these beautiful things you must also then go to get the bad with the good which is nature has lots of things which are not so beautiful not so well-designed okay and these are Stephen Jay Gould favorite examples this is a clam called lampsilis a freshwater clam it actually makes a brood pouch like a very poorly designed fish designed to make real fish bite on that and take the get the larvae into their gills and that's how the clams larvae get one generation the next okay now that's not a very good fish by anybody's standards okay but it's just good enough for an average freshwater fish with relatively poor vision and was following the motion anyway to take a bite okay or this example from we have sound here I didn't know we're going to that this is the angler fish that you see is very nicely camouflage and then has a spying over its nose which Wiggles out there and in the water and that the spine is a frayed edge it looks roughly like a fish lures of a prey item close enough to try to take a bite of that and then it opens his mouth and sucks the prey okay not a great fish lure but just good enough okay and as they screeching tires here of course this was school's favorite example the pandas thumb pan is of course like all carnivorous mammals like your caddy your dog all five of their hand fingers are fused together in a paw okay like any other thing and they have to have what appears to be a sixth finger there's actually an extra wrist bone which is used because pan is the only carnivore that eats plants of course the bamboo and they use that juryrigg wrist bone to strip leaves off of bamboo doesn't work really well like a true thumb it just has work just well enough for them to survive which is the way evolution works in general oops and of course if you want to stand is just explained design you have to deal with issues like the fact that there are lots of evidence of things that it looks sloppily designed if you want to think that way of course they make lots of sense in evolutionary context vestigial organs of course they're clearly scream out evolution and make no sense in this sense of a designer we want to divinely put things together of course whales of course still have this I'll show you this in a moment again hip bones and thigh bones deep inside their bodies even though they no longer have hind legs on the outside snakes to out hip bones and thigh bones deep inside their bodies only no longer have their limbs and course horses still have remnants of their side toes okay all of which make no sense if you're trying to design something the right way the first time and of course humans as much as we like to think of ourselves as the pinnacle of creation are classic examples of poor design if you want to think of us as designed the way we are now of course it makes more sense that we evolved and something was different originally our backs and our feet of course our poor little hominid there with back pain are not meant for bipedalism as many of us in this room can tell you our appendix and tonsils of course of his digital organs no longer have any function but they are prone to infection so they're actually deleterious to a lesser degree and yet we still have them and you can ask yourself if you're intelligent designer why the males have nipples okay just give that thought a little minute all right but the bigger problem of the design argument is one that goes back to almost all of apologetics and Christianity is that there are many examples of cruelty and evilness in nature we define nature by human terms does is imply that the God that created it is crueler II Lord just doesn't care okay it applies not only to well I know examples the ones that make Christian apologetics always have to thrash around a lot of things like innocent children dying horribly and natural disasters killing innocent people but also natural systems and the classic example this is a group whole family of wasps of 3300 different species of them that do this they're known as ik Damona wasps and they have a very interesting way of reproducing they find a prey item and the female stabs it with a positive and paralyzes it lays eggs inside the body of the prey item and then the larvae the eggs hatch the larvae start eating the prey from the inside with the less essential organs first and leave the essential organs to the very end so the prey is essentially eaten alive from the inside and finally they eat the last organs that are still essential which kills the prey item finally and then they hatch out of the apprai ins body okay the Victorians of Darwin's time were horrified by this all right they all believers in God's magnificent benevolence you know anyhow he could never let a sparrow die and that of course more this was documented the more made them have serious problems about their religion okay but this is one of many examples of nature's no not necessarily cool or friendly it's just nature okay now the bigger issue I want to focus this whole talk that's all I'm going to say about ID from now on because that's in Michaels book anyway which is due out I want to focus mostly on the fossil record which is my area of expertise I've been a parent halogen is age four and never grew up so I will focus on the fossil record which I do have expertise on and this is something that I can definitely debate them on anytime both young earth creationists here which is the old-fashioned type of creationist like Gish and Henry Moore's and so on and the IV crowd both have to try to debunk evolution and they have to definitely say something about the fossil record they can't leave it alone obviously so they do as I'll show you throughout this whole lecture they have repeat lots of old and spreaded to the lives of propaganda by the fossil record and the big issue here of course is credibility they say something about the fossil record why are you to believe them or not believe them the issue is credibility how are they doing this well first of all none of these guys either the newer or the old generation creationist has any formal training in paleontology it's not a single one I know of that maybe that one guy in Tennessee who was one of Google students once they're all basically trained in other areas most of which have nothing to do with fossils okay many of them may have a PhD but as those you in this room who have a PhD knows that proves nothing only right and only and only proves that you can do one task which is your thesis and finish it right and the old joke in graduate school as you get narrower and narrower and narrower and low less less about the rest of the world as you get further into your dissertation so you know if you have a PhD in hydraulics it means that um it does not mean anything about your credibility as a physicist or paleontology or anything else but when they throw their PhDs on the cover of their books you know that impresses the unwashed and they think oh well they must know something they have a PhD that's usually my first red flag by the way you see anybody put their their doctor on the cover of their book and that's usually a sign the arguments aside can't stand by themselves okay I never have that on my book even though I'm entitled to it okay now as most you know follow them their research quote-unquote on fossils consists of meeting kitty books maybe a few more advanced trade books and quoting Paley dollars out of context they never actually looked at real fossils themselves certainly never done any research as far as I know not one paleontological papers ever been published by this group okay and that's a criterion for credibility you have to actually publish in peer reviewed journals you can't just write out of kitty books okay so in my terms you can say anyway like but they're no more qualified to write about fossils and they are about anything else auto mechanics you name it right there just blowing it out the status okay so these are two of the more typical Trax's in the old earth version from Duane Gish and this is the more recent sort of deed religion which they use for trying to push their agenda on school boards they're both examples essentially of taking old as now discredited ideas about the fossil record which I'll go through them in detail now and repeating them over and over again even though they've been all discredited multiple times and the course they never listen to criticism so they don't realize this okay here's a quick list I'll just go over some of these and greater detail some in less tail this is the common as things you find them miss interpreting and/or lying about and I will just use the flat-out word lying about because that's what they do and they know they're doing it to the fossil record okay the this confusion doing bushes and ladders which I'll talk about first their misuse of the famous concepts of gradualism versus punctuated equilibrium the idea that fall succession is not in fact support for the fossil record which they they managed to push once in a while or they argue well the fossil record is great it's good enough to show every transitional form so they try to have both sides of the argument here usually this business about the camera explosion which I'll show you in a moment here and then they're flat-out claim that there are no transitional forms well that's only possible if you've never looked at a fossil okay and finally there's never been the missing link it's never found all these are typical the claims they make let's look at them one after another here and I'll spend more time in some of these the first problem is this idea that U is hard for us in evolutionary biology to get used to people actually thinking this way but there are people out there lots of who think this way and this is this idea that nature is this great ladder of creation this goes back to Priya to Aristotelian thought and what's very much prevalent and pre-darwinian philosophy and was essentially blown out of the water by Darwin but of course it still persists Society that we're just part of the great chain of being going from lower things to hiring and of course super naps and things like our angels and archangels and Seraphim and cherubim and all the rest we sing about the stem here are all higher on the ladder than us okay and this is of course a nice little medieval notion it has nothing to do with nature okay it's not a ladder it's a bush and Google said this many many times evolution is about branching about multiple lineages appearing and disappearing and coexisting there is no such thing as this latter of the great chain of being that was thought about and pre-darwinian things but nevertheless you'll see of creation is saying is very strange things like if humans of all age how come apes are still around and you scratch heads and what hell do you mean by that until you realize that's what they're thinking they're thinking that apes had to give up their place on the world of humans and are for humans to evolve the Apes cannot coexist in humans and so that's that's such a bizarre way of thinking that it's hard to even conceive of it but that is still something you'll hear people say and this is not a very old cartoon here the two characters and Johnny Hart specie who was a very conservative religious guy by the way said if man evolved Apes how come they're still Apes around and the other guy says some of them were given choices okay so evolution is not this very simplistic notion like here's the old-fashioned century-old now diagram of evolution horse is a straight lineage through time well that was appropriate a century ago when there weren't many fossils but of course we now have a huge diversity of horse fossils and they are very complex lis branching in there are many different bushes here and by the way the end of lecture I brought out a bunch of specimens or I've got a bunch of horses and ancestors of horses here on the table if anyone wants to see what these look like the castes are mostly there's a couple of real specimen here to their cat show you how big these things are and what they look like oh yeah sound effects there all right and you'll see this iconography all the time which of course is also invalid and long ago discredited it's marched through the human evolution or marched hominids again this is an unfortunate early way of drawing human evolution a single line rather than a bush or a branch and then you give various take offs on this icon here so here's a creationist here there is a 6,000 years old and he's standing in the middle between what Homer rectus and Neanderthal and here's another version going down to the computer age there at the end of the line of evolution I've had another one which I didn't find a copy of the scanrate come up culminates and Sylvester Stallone dressed as Rambo this this icon is so familiar that if you've ever seen Stephen Jay Gould wonderful life the book he published about 15 years ago he's like 25 examples this in the front of the book but of course it's completely incorrect right human evolution is it just as bushy as any other species on earth or any other family on earth this is the evolution the hominids our family and there's about 25 26 recognized Mohammedan species out there besides ourselves in six or seven gender and now I'll show more about this in a moment and so that's all you know the problem there they start with the wrong iconography you get the wrong conception and of course there's chimps and there's gorillas they run parallel to this all along they're still around obviously okay our second widespread misconception is a typical case for something that was a normal debate within scientific circles is taking a plea out of context by creationist and this of course the big debate that originated in 1972 when Stephen Jay Gould when he was a young man fresh out of grad school and Niles Eldredge who was one of my graduate advisors at Columbia pointed out that the fossil record doesn't show what people in Darwin included it said it should show this gradual insensibly graded series and these are frequency histograms of a different organism through time and you see time goes along the axis there does not many examples that in the fossil record we don't see that and there was a good reason for that and Gould and I'll just point this out actually it should have been pointed out 20 years earlier but it was cool and LG finally did this and that is in the 1950s biology went through a big change where they realize that species are produced by small isolated populations on the periphery of the main range of the population not in the main population and that's called the allopatric speciation model it had pretty much been accepted by biologists ever since the 1950s and if you think about the predictions that that means a populations like that are small they will produce a species and then maybe migrate back the main area and you will only get new species appearing suddenly as a result especially in the geologic record you will not see that transition unless you're extremely lucky okay and so most species will appear relatively suddenly in the fossil record and then they appear to have long periods of stability or stasis that follow that and all this was something that first was a shock to Paley who unfortunately had not paid attention with biologies have been saying for 20 years but then within about 10 years it's been realized that virtually all fossil record looks like this there's some exceptions but generally speaking most fossils show punctuated equilibria if they show anything at all okay now when they made that argument of course they argued the transition be speed to be rare but not absent right they wouldn't have you know completely absent but of course you can pick up any of those creationist books I just showed you and they will find a quotation out of Elgin Google accorded out of context to indicate that there are no transitions which of course neither time and no time did Alger google ever say that or mean to say that of course that's the typical Croatians tactic quote things out of context don't do your own research obviously and what a lot of times when we talk about transitions forms we're not talking about the every single specimen leads to a new species that's a hard thing to get under any circumstances or even look at a series of species that are static through time they form transitional series too and so they you don't have to have the actual specimen that's ancestral something else to see a transition okay so this is a very widespread misconception you'll see these in their literature all the time okay point number three the creatures cannot abide your the idea that the rock record shows a change in life through time obviously if it's all dropped there by Noah's Flood it can't show that so they have to have some kind of explanation for and they do it two ways which are self contradictory one way is it straight denial claim that the fossil record doesn't show evolution they claim that evolutionists have rigged it right then we arrange the fossils in the order that we want by the strata and that's essentially as a circular argument they were saying oh the fossils show change through time but we did it that way all along of course and therefore that's our proof of evolution we'll know and I'll show you in a moment why that's wrong or the exact opposite argument we can concede that the fossil record shows change through time and then they have this ridiculous little little argument claiming that smarter animals climb to higher ground during the great flood okay well let's look at both of those arguments the first one here is a geologic time scale that predates Darwin by at least 30 years okay ignores history okay because a timescale that we now have goes back to 50 years before Darwin okay it was worked out by creationist geologists in 1802 eighteen five okay evolution was never in the equation it's an empirical distribution of fossils through time you don't need to have evolution or any other causal mechanism to explain it it's the basis for all of the dating of rocks and around the world and it's done without evolution ever driving in the first place because evolution wasn't around when it was created okay and it's been verified by thousands of geologists and clean some who are creationist geologists and come to admit that in fact it does look this way it's an empirical distribution you can find it in the Rock area do you want to look for it yourself and of course without it we would never find any oil or gas that's the main tool that we use to tell how old the rocks are in order to drill for oil okay so it can dig and get rid of fallen succession but then they have to get rid of oil and gas too or or the other argument course which comes in there flood geology models this idea that somehow smarter animals outran Noah's Flood and climb to higher beds and that's why you have mammals at the top and dinosaurs below and the lowly invertebrates at the bottom well of course that's crap too all right this is the old hydraulic sorting that came from Henry Morris from a I'm an engineer but not a very good scientist it only makes sense if you want to try to explain a cartoon okay this is a typical cartoon of the geologic time scale from a kiddy book right and that's an abstraction right that's something they use to make a general point it doesn't look like any real spot on earth right and yet you're trying to make a flood model explains a cartoon rather than a real place on earth a real rocks okay and then bears as is a no resemblance to real rock I reckon on which this is based I mean one look at real rocks go to places like for example the Grand Canyon Zion and Bryce and yes you'll get a sequence here where you can patch together the lower part of sequence in the Grand Canyon the middle part of Zion and the upper part of Bryce but even that's not that complete in most cases it's much less complete than this and of course in no way does this resemble something is produced by a single Noah's Flood okay a more typical example where I did my dissertation work in the big battle and South Dakota one of the most richly fossiliferous places in the world here is distribution to some of the more important animals to these beds and sure enough well here some is large and smart and long-legged animals that are way at the bottom and here's Turtles above them okay now if you can argue how a turtle outran the flood and a large not I'll give you a lot of credit okay so basically of course it's all crap this is just an attempt to push their biblical models on something they don't understand and so this conversion of creationism is that's full of holes all right another argument you'll hear them make this is very strange one moment they're trying to discredit the fossil record next minute they're telling you say it's so good it shows us something else so you can't have it the consistency out of them at all crazies will hear them argue there are millions of fossil museum cabinets which is true the fossil record should be very complete and should show every transitional form between species okay well not necessarily actually despite 200 years of collecting I'll show you in a moment why the fossil record is not that complete for many things that's are very poor you know there's a lot more out there than we realize okay and of course that's because fossilization is an extremely improbable event right you have to have the organism die it has to avoid being too scavenged be buried at appropriate time and not just decay away completely and then after a long periods of burial it has to be exposed to the surface again at just the right time so in the last 200 years a paleontologist walked by and saw it okay otherwise it's lost the loss to history okay and this little cartoon says it quite nicely if you imagine let's say your antelope out in the African Serengeti it dies well of course most often is torn apart by scavengers so very little is left but if there's anything left is trampled by other animals and then it's buried and then all sorts of stuff happens the soil to break up the bones and then groundwater works on it so there's all this stuff going on to a thing that potentially we have a fossil so at the end and then when it's probably exposed again and eroded it's again it's got to happen when a paleontologist happens to be there see it or it doesn't get collected okay so you think about it it's a miracle no pun intended that any bone or shell ever becomes a fossil it's a very improbable event if you think about it a priori like this okay let's get some quantitative handle on that we can talk about we're have about a quarter million known fossil species that's all animals and plants together okay yet at this very moment there's at least five million species on earth today and some people say as great as 20 million depends on how you do the estimate and then if you add a modern time slice and back it up for every all the times is back to 600 million years come over to gigantic numbers of how many millions of species must have lived over the last 600 million years okay so no matter how I do that calculation the very best you can get is less than 1% of all the species that ever lived or how represented the fossil record okay and that's nothing like creationist we gave you to think now of course not every group is equally bad things that would well develop skeletons like mollusks and corals are much more likely to fossilize then are let's say insects or worms which have a crappy fossil record of course so when we do something with a fossil record we do it deliberately with groups that have good preservation but still maybe only 10 or 20% of all species have ever lived in the best records are fossilized so that creationist argument that we should expect to see everything is crap all right now I hope you don't mean calling a spade a spade here I think the audience understands this is one that's a constantly in fact I was with Michael on radio at KPCC about a year and a half ago an idee guy was on on the channel and he brought this out and I thought this guy doesn't know what he's talking about it why would he bring this out but this is something they keep bringing up some because it sounds good to an audience that doesn't know any better okay back in Darwin's time we were talking 150 years ago then it was it was a great mystery why trial of mites and sponges and bracket paws and all these other things that show up in the Cambrian appeared at that time to show up all at once and it was called the Cameron explosion not long after that and you'll hear creationists claim this Cameron explosion is inexplicable by natural explanations and it requires that it become one of the creation events mentioned the Bible course not consistent all with the Bible but that's another point all right but of course that shows that they don't do any homework we've learned a lot more about the Camry in the last 40 years that's nothing which of course enters their literature and he actually enters the literature in very prominent ways I mean cover of Time magazine you can't miss something like that evolutions Big Bang which of course was nice it was evolutionary but it has the misleading things as you see in the caption on the title here talks about almost overnight well 20 million years is not overnight by many people's standards even geologists don't consider 20 million years overnight but that's what Time magazine dumps and does too now in fact this is what the fossil record really does look like contrary creationists will make the claim this is my friend bill shops pictures over UCLA we have abundant fossils prior to the Cameron but until the 1940s nobody saw them because they didn't look the right way you have to look with a microscope they're all sign of bacteria they're all little microscopic single-celled things you have to have very good microscopes to see these things okay and for 3 from 3.5 billion years ago we have the sign of bacteria used to be called blue-green algae they have living relatives our true virtue indistinguishable from these fossils okay and then from 3.5 billion to almost point 5 billion in other words 3 billion years of life's history there was nothing more complex on this planet than single-celled algae and bacteria ok 90% of life's history we were the planet of the scum now is this is if you see a structure it's big enough see with naked eyes these mountain light structures made a sign of bacterial mats hellström a delights that's the biggest thing you find in the fossil record until about 700 million years ago okay so of an alien landed in this planet any time in this last 4 billion years and wanted to take a sample life odds are this is all there was to see it's a very very late phenomenon all these advanced plants and animals that are multicellular we're just the last gasp the last ten percent of Earth history now in that last ten percent of course things happen pretty fast relatively speaking geologically speaking so the first stage after a single-cell organisms are the so called Ediacaran fauna these things are known for about 700 million years ago the late Precambrian a multicellular but all soft body we only have impressions we don't have skeletons and these things are the debate as to what they really are they're related to say modern corals and sponges or whatever whatever they are their mother animals are multicellular and they're large enough to see with the naked eye affect some of these things are foot and half long but no skeletons yet okay so that's the first thing you start with single cells you get multi cells with no skeletons and then the very beginning of the camera before trial about two rows you see the class of what's called the tamati and little Shelly fauna these are all about a couple millimeters long now some things look like malas some things look like other groups are recognized some don't look at anything we've seen before and so when star sees skeletonized fossils they're tiny alright skeletonization is a big step and they make very tiny amounts of mineral when they first start make the skeletons okay and it was not until the third stage of the camera out of banning in their the trial of whites and some of these larger multicellular skeletonize animals appear and that's when you get the Cameron explosion so they're actually multiple steps which are very logical and here's the so-called Cameron explosion diversity increasing to the right there that window is about 20 million years long so it's not an instantaneous event contrary to what the creations may have told you and of course some you've heard this course steam jiggles book wonderful life was on this topic in the middle Cameron we have an extraordinary window on life in that period of time where you have soft preservation these things that normally don't fossilize we see all these bizarre animals like Hallucigenia there and opa binya which remind us again how we can complete our fossil record is the soft body preservation is a rare event only occurs in a handful of places we know in the entire fossil record and tons of stuff we know must must have existed but we'll never see as a fossil ok now this is the meat of what I want to talk about here and I'll spend most of my time on this topic this is where they obviously have to do something because they can't leave this one alone or they'll not take any we're not being believed they have to argue flat-out denial it's it's like denying the Holocaust they have to deny the transitional form right and they don't have any first-hand experience with any fossils so this is all done strictly by blind faith ok and so there are various ways they go about doing this the elgin google of course said of course the transition is what we're rare but they do occur and of course i'll show you some of those in addition there are many examples where you have you know fossil species that are stable and of course have already undergone their evolution to represent what they are now but if you stack them the sequences they are in the rock record they still represent transitions one stage another that hasn't been ruled out ok well i'd instead is we'll see and I'll talk about this examples of multiple times here the creation is pretty much deny what's out there they have to print some kind of outright lie or just quote out of context in order to deny existence of fossils that are real well documented by anybody who spent the time actually looking at real fossils rather than reading Kitty books now this goal is at every level you can name okay when I was in the graduate student I spent a fair amount of time working in micro paleontology deep-sea cores because the amazing try patience is a group called the planktonic foraminifera this is a group called the radial area here and you go up to the core centimeter by centimeter and you can see these micro fossils change centimeter by centimeter they're really dramatic I mean think there was a big spongy ball silicon initially then four arms and three arms and two arms then it gets narrower and narrower and then it starts becoming this big sort of spongy Catholic that's a complete multiple rearrangement of the body form for that time of evolution and to me that's dramatic although creationist courts don't care about any things that's small all right well this simple sort of bulbous for I'm going here to something's very sharp lakeil step by step okay so micro fossils are full of that okay if you look at the inverted posture where you have tons better preservation many many more fossils we do in vertebrates are many classic cases this is a famous using snail from the Gulf Coast after Lita which changes dramatically to the sequence this is evolution of a variety of trilobite sand the Cambrian and whales and this is the evolution of horseshoe crabs from a group called the glass pits you can see the steps along the way okay all this is well-documented creationist never talk about these things of course or if you like sand dollars and sea urchins while sea urchins and the Cretaceous chalks of Britain have this dramatic transformation of my Craster where the mouth and in a shift position as you go up to the sequence or here we go they're the earliest sand dollars arise from a fairly biscuit shape sea urchin but by the early Eocene we have these flat sand dollars we can see these intermediate steps of flatter and flatter sea urchins until you get to sand dollars okay all this is money many more examples I can provide these ones I happen to have convenient pictures of or the a monoids of course the most common of all fossils in the Mesozoic in late Paleozoic they have many very bizarre things go on their evolution according calling up and then uncoiling again coiling in spirals coiling in knots according in hairpin bends they do weird things they're very very flexible in the evolution is very well document because they fossilized well okay but those are all examples of changes within a major lineage or within a species a couple cases what about transition between the major pile of invertebrates and all they people have always argued well that's you know will concede these micro evolutionary changes in your ammonites but what about how do you get from that arthropod to an analogous like that so this is a little more difficult because we're talking about groups that go back to the and most of them are not skeletonized before then they were probably soft bodied so you don't get too many fossils of that transition although we know the relationships quite well because it's shown both by their anatomy and now of course by their molecular phylogeny but there are some ok this was a famous discovery 1952 a little little cap shaped shell found in the Peru Chile Trench of the coast of Peru in deep water it's called neo polina well that's because the original fossil was found the first time it's called pi lino and so they actually knew the fossil before they knew the living fossil and this is a Mallis no question about it's got a mantle it's got all the other things afoot and everything but it also has segmentation the only Mouse that's segmented ok still got segmented gills and segmented muscles which says very cloud and clear that of course malice arose and that's now verified by molecular phylogeny from a common ancestor with segmented worms and likewise this is often pointed to although this dispute about this one the available worms the honor Kafra perimeters is a common name for this thing although they don't live around here they live in the tropics there there look a lot of alike a segment of worm but they also have bending beginnings of jointed appendages with hard cuticle like an arthropod and so they have often been pointed to as sort of a link between those two phyla and they are actually known fossil record especially back in the burgess shale well as you might guess creationists and their followers don't know one fossil shell from another couldn't care less anyway right so if you show them invertebrates optic wazoo we won't press them they're not really interested okay so you got to focus on our group the vertebrates right that's what they care about some degree and of course that too is well documented this is a diagram that's almost a century old now it's a well-documented sequence actually we have some of these transitional forms living today that are sort of halfway on the way to being vertebrates and they show all the various steps the vertebrates acquired as they became vertebrates including acquisition of pharynx the notochord which is the cartilaginous try the procedure vertebral column the segmentation tale all those things that define what a vertebrate is we have various steps along the way and for example this step right here the so called tunicates or sea squirts you look at the adults and you said how the hell is that related to us a little sac bag like thing which is made of jelly and there's the adult but the juvenile is very much like this sort of ancestral formula had a tail as a notochord but when the juvenile stops swimming and attaches it goes an amazing way to morph assists and turns into that little sack like a dolt okay it's a classic example of using larval forms to get from one stage to another and then here's another step further up here amphioxus or Branco stoma the lancelet is the group that is very fish like in lots of ways but doesn't have jaws it doesn't have a true head yet okay and still very common in fresh waters all around the world and of course it is known from bosses like pacaya there in the burger sales so we have good examples of this and then of course creations don't even pay attention that old stuff this is recent stuff that they would never pay attention to although it's in science it's hard to miss it okay published in science just a few years ago the Chinese now have from the lower Cambrian the first examples of soft body preservation of true vertebrates so if verbs now go all the way back to the beginning of the Cambrian like every other phylum on earth they're part of the Cameron explosion they just soft body so it takes extraordinary preservation to get them okay so now we have fossils as well as our living representative to show how vertebrates arose okay we'll jump all the way out of the fishes and right up until in phibian here I'm gonna keep this short so I don't want to spend too much time on every possible thing transitional forms to get to amphibians well this is also one that's been documented for close to a century now the most famous of these was a fossil the set of fossils known as HTS Steger from the late devonian primarily Greenland and Spitsbergen and these specimens were studied by Swedes especially Eric yar vaq and published finally after decades of work and these are animals which are interesting transitions because still have fish-like tail fins and still fish like gill slits they still have the lateral line system which is the water sensing system that organisms used to pick up electrical currents in the water there are fish like in lots of ways but they have well-developed hind limbs and four limbs okay and so that is about as ideal intermediate as you could ask for given renature the fossil record and we can trace that entire sequence by looking at some of the last lobe-finned fish which have these fairly advanced limbs here with these big bony struts they match up with the color scheme is not visible to back they match up bone for bone with the same elements we have in our hand or in the case of the hind hind flippers in our feet and of ultimately all these elements which are rigidly part of in our co-opted and used part of the vertebrate limb and this is true not just their fins and limbs also true the details of their skull bones through the details of the vertebral column any place you wish to look you can see this transition now this has gotten more interesting lately Jenny Clark and her colleagues in Britain have found more specimens it's always good idea to get out there and get more stuff when it gets interesting and their discoveries this animal here at Kent the steak I hear is a fiesta again on the bottom they both have these big tail fins they both have similar limbs and similar skulls but the more we cast the steak is a better preserved animal we have more of it than we have a victory of Stiga and it's clear that when we look at it closely now it turns out these guys for example at eight or nine fingers okay not five like a standard for vertebrates later on and the evidence from the ear Regent from the pelvic girdle and so on says these things were not walking a land that their limbs were walking underwater which is actually what salamanders spend most of their time doing if you watch them they don't spend much time walking land their limbs are primarily for creeping along the bottom and that's typical of afib Ian's there is a Rhett construction of a canvas sticker there so it turns out you know just because you have Lynn doesn't mean you jumped on land right away I mean limbs are useful for walking on water first okay and now of course there are many many more of these things now so here are all these various things a canthus Degas right here there's Ichthyostega but we have all these other things we have writings in Elgin Airport on up too high no port on the transition from fish to amphibians is documented by dozens different groups now none of which course creations lever talked about now you asked that what still seems pretty remarkable these things crawling out of water until you realize that's a trick that's been done many times okay these are both examples in the modern group of bony fish which are not even closer related to amphibians okay they're the major group of fish we have today and in several instances bony fish have found it convenient to crawl out of water too and they never have the advantages of lobe fence okay the mudskipper is probably the most famous example the fish that spends a lot of his time out of the water okay and as those you know the south east knows a walking catfish is now a great plague because it can get from one pond to another very fast and manages to spread despite all the efforts to eradicate it the whole series of from about tide pool fishes sculpins that walk on land all the time living out of what air for long periods of time so it's actually a very easy thing to do it's been done multiple times by different groups okay I won't say much about the transition to reptiles but we have some extraordinary specimens moving this one was just described two years ago nicknamed Lizzy by the British press Wes Liliana and Helana must 340 million years ago we now multiple examples of origin reptiles and I'll say just a few things about reptiles we now have a fossil snake and can't see it too well in the back there but its hind limbs are still there they're small but they still have hind limbs not to send a surprise we knew snakes were originally four-legged creatures because their hip bones are still there even in living snakes and we know they're related to the monitor lizard family the variety including things like goannas the Komodo dragons because they're all the details learn atomy fit that crocodilians also we have good examples of how they originated the earliest croc dealing protists occurs here shown here on the left very small sort of lizard like thing okay and doesn't look anything like a crocodile today but we have transitions to all these various body forms and once monster extinct crocodiles of all different shapes sizes and naturally of course on I debated going dish about this 20 years ago this year on this topic creationist love to put dinosaurs in their stuff they know that's the only animal that your audience actually has heard of okay in fact the only extinct animal that any other audience even knows about of course when you a most their audience here's extinct animal I think it's a dinosaur that's all they know okay so they put donors in the publications because they know the audience expects it okay and I had to English and when I was facing the Purdue University put this on the screen a older version of this showing Triceratops and bald and claiming there were no transitional forms well sorry Dwayne you couldn't ask for an example in animals more transitional forms and Triceratops okay we go all the way back to hips will off it on and protag wanted on which are classic bipedal ornithopod dinosaurs its attack asaurus which is the first ceratopsian with the distinctive beak at the beginning of a frill Protoceratops which has a well-developed frill Vanille horns and from there a huge radiation of the various frills and horns that make up the ceratopsians i mean that isn't if that's not transitional forms i don't know what is of course he will deny it and then he would put brought us ours which is an invalid name of course but he has no better on the screen is ah no transitional forms will against again wrong okay many many bipedal primitive sauropods which walked on two legs not in four followed by oh this huge radiation of all these huge giants that you're also familiar with okay but the real crux the matter and this is one they always have to deal with is the classic transition from dinosaurs which we now know are the ancestors of birds to birds and of course it dodo goes back to Archaeopteryx this specimen is in Berlin I've seen the original and there is a cast of do you want to see how big it really looks like that's a cast of it okay there are seven known specimens of Archaeopteryx so it's not a common fossil that is remarkably good that we have it it was found only two years after Darwin's book appear in the course as soon as was discovered it was the hail as the so called missing link pain birds reptiles and people immediately had to deal with it of course creationists have to find somebody discredited if you read their books they will say oh it's just a bird well they can't do anything otherwise obvious got feathers and their way of looking at the world it's got feathers it's a bird okay that's all they can think of so they have to deny that it has a reptilian tail this is this long bony structure right here which no living bird has okay they have to deny that it has teeth which you can see on any well preserved specimen they all have it okay no a living bird obviously today has teeth and the skeleton of course all the rest of it's very dinosaurian okay everything except the feathers in the wishbone the only makes it a bird as feathers which actually is dinosaurian by the way and a wishbone that's a really only truly bird-like feature this thing has and turns out now as there's still a couple of dissenters left out there but virtually all paleontologists agreed dinosaurs gave rise to birds especially things like philosoraptor Deinonychus they're the closest relatives they have a whole series of distinctive characteristics this is just a short list right there if you put Archaeopteryx up next to one of the primitive dinosaurs that is closely related to the skeletal features match up almost identically just some modifications of the hand and that's about it other than that this is the same thing and here's a modern bird by comparison which looks not very much like our cottage at all and in fact one of the seven known specimen Archaeopteryx when it was first described was described as a little dinosaur constant áthis all those you remember Jurassic Park - the copies of the little guys running around that picked on the guy and ate him alive those are May from the same beds which Archaeopteryx comes from and this thing was misidentified as the dinosaur and then recognized as a bird when they looked again and found the feathers although again that doesn't mean a lot anymore now I won't give you a whole list of characters you're just one obvious one the risk bones of birds and dinosaurs and just certain groups of dinosaurs the dromaeosaurus like Velociraptor have a distinctive sort of Halfmoon shaped wrist bone called the semi lunate carpel and in the Velociraptor for example their wrist can only move in this plane because of this Halfmoon shaped bone which is useful if you strike out your prey with their hands well so it turns out of course that that motion is very useful in the flight stroke of a wing all right gives the wings very useful type of thing - and that's one of many characters you find in the dinosaurs legend reg bird then as those you pay attention the news now the last decade now many many specimens primarily from the lower cretaceous landing beds and china have come out with extraordinarily soft tissue preservation including feathers fur you name it a body con body outlines stomach contents extraordinary you know set of specimens have been found among which are a number of things which are way too large ever been flying and everybody concedes our dinosaurs traditional sense of the word and they all have feathers and if you place them on a biogenetic tree it means that virtually all predatory dinosaurs including t-rex probably had feathers okay so it turns out feathers don't mean anything because dinosaurs had them for thermoregulation long before flight was ever an issue okay so when you define a bird no longer use feathers because that means you've got to put a lot of dinosaurs in the basket - and Archaeopteryx is by no means the only specimen right or the only species there 7 specimens of it turns out there's a whole slew of these Late Jurassic and early cretaceous Mesozoic birds which are all nice transitions so even if they could discredit Archaeopteryx well you've still got 25 other birds deal with ok I'll just show you a couple of them here they just this is an area explosive research in the last 15 years all these new species being described I hardly can keep up with it there's so much new stuff this is sine or as described by my friend and office mate early co-author Paul Suri know something you've heard about scientists is nice half way transistor it has a grasping foot like more advanced birds and it has fused up pie just isle this is what happens to the Parsons nose when you have your chicken or turkey at Christmas Christmas or Thanksgiving but it still has teeth and it still has a primitive shoulder oh okay and then down here Confuciusornis obviously both the things named after china Confuciusornis loss of teeth but it still has a big wing claws okay what you see right there so you can actually the line up about 25 of these in a row and show you all these steps in the way Archaeopteryx is just one of many now all right but the best transition of all if you want to make a transition between one major group of animals another is your origin of mammals okay from these primitive things called synapses which used to be called mammal-like reptiles that's misleading because they never were reptiles at any time okay synapse ins the big fin back Dimetrodon which is always in the dinosaur kits the kids buy is not a dinosaur it's a synapse that this is the cast the skull to show you how large these things are and their fins are like five feet tall that's a very primitive synapse at the one on the top there's related to those and they go through a long series of specimens that show Pressley more more mammal-like characteristics okay in fact it's a huge radiation of dozens and dozens of general and about 25 families before you get the things we call mammals okay most of which are known from places like the Permian of South Africa and Russia but also here in the Permian of Texas and Oklahoma and then up in the Triassic you start getting things approached mammals okay and so it's a gigantic radiation things I have here on the table some of these stages here like some of this herbivores guy but I sign it on in a cast of some of the more advanced guys and this bear shape guy signing nathas just to show you the again these are cast but the originals of course are the same size the same shape and this is amazing sequence no matter how you cut it okay you can look at the skull there's Dimetrodon this guy right here on the left going to mammals on the right lots of things happen in this transition and moser happens in different steps some things that advanced in one area and not yet vance another it's classic mosaic evolution where they don't do it all at once so for example they start on a symbol peg like reptilian teeth but then they start differentiating to big canines and incisors and molars and premolars and that's all mammals have that now they start out with a simple little hole right behind the eye and then it gets larger and larger till they have this huge opening behind the eye which serves where the jaw muscles come through allows the jaw muscles to expand and and have a billet II to not only bite harder but to we're Joss I decide and do things that no reptile can do okay but the most amazing straight sequence happens in the lower jaw and the reptiles lower jaw this one right here for example most of the bones in the jar these elements other than the dentary bone the one that bears the teeth and then through the evolution synapses all those non denturri bones gets smaller and smaller those are the colored ones and eventually are crowded in the very back of the jaw and eventually most of them are lost well some of the earliest mammals still have a couple these reptilian bones and their jaw still okay and most them are lost but not all them because two sets of bones the one of the bone that's right here in the lower jaw called the articular and the quadrate bone in the skull those are the original reptilian jaw hinge for the jaw connects to the skull and as these bones become tinier and tinier that hinge no longer works so well and eventually this denry bone actually reaches up and touches the squamosa bone of the skull and get a brand new hinge with a different set of bones and that's the bone that hinges your jaw right now the dentary scamozzi so we think okay what happens these bones were part of the old reptilian hinge and they get lost like all the others no where do they go they go into the ear because reptiles and snakes and religions all do this they here with their lower jaws most of them do not have an external ear drum okay and a snake charmer for example when it's you know we're swaying back and forth with it spike playing while the snake can't hear the pipe that's for tourists right the snake is following the motion the body of the snake charmer because it can't hear when its jaw is not on the ground okay it doesn't go by hearing much anyway it's not an animal uses hearing its hunting so the bones you're hearing with right now when you hear my voice are originally part of your embryonic jaw the quadrate in articular and they're in there when you are an embryo to start with and they shift from your jaw to your middle ear and the quadrate bone becomes the incus or the so called anvil of your hammer anvil and stirrup and the the articular bone of the lower jaw becomes the malleus of the hammer that you're hearing with me right now okay so that's what's in the mammal jaw it's part of your old jaw old ears your ears probably rolled jaw sandwich and as you couldn't ask for a nicer transition this one here because not only is the ear transition happening this thing is literally known as dog arsenate such double jaw joint because here if you can see it here there's a close-up of this pins region the skull here here is the articular bone touching the quadrate the last of the reptilian hinge and then the dentary bone touching the squamosa so it has both sets of hinges operating on each side of its skull simultaneously so it's right on the cusp between becoming a mammal hinged and a reptile hinged jaw okay and this is one particular fossil that shows this and then of course eventually the other hinge is lost and it's only dead risk imposed you go to the advanced synapse things like the cynodonts which is a big group of how the whole series things these two guys here on the end are both cynodonts the fairly advanced mammal like things and some are small some are huge but they're all Chris credibly more mammal-like and it's been a debate now for close to 70 years where do you draw the line what do you decide if one of these things is a mammal or not I mean it's so arbitrary because these things are so close to what most people consider mammals at the end of this evolution now my specialty offers not dinosaurs or hick theistic or anything I am a fossil mammal specialist to have been for many years and so I'll focus on that for the rest of this talk here fossil mammals have an immensely better fossil record than say dinosaurs or anything else because they preserve more often and they're you know especially the hard teeth are very fossil izybelle and we have an incredible Foss work especially the beginning of the age of mammals right after dinosaurs died out of all the radiation of the modern groups of orders of mammals and families and mammals and between 70 and 50 million years ago virtually all those groups are known to originate we have fossil record of that so we have the fossil record now this incredible explosion of everything from-from insectivores to rabbits to rodents to hyraxes to elephants and manatees to primates and bats whales carnivores you know there's the twenty or thirty some groups that are a live day and many more extinct groups all of which appear during this narrow window right after dinosaurs left the planet for the birds of course and by fifty million years ago all of them were in place and most of these guys you can now trace their fossil record back to common ancestors in addition to that we have a new method called cladistic analysis which has been used in the last thirty years now to really tease apart this relationship and way never possible before and then finally that's part of my research actually and finally we have now molecular evidence for most living species certainly that ties us all together in another way so we have three lines of evidence that tells us how are these things related when did they originate I'll just show you some example I can't do all the mammals in the lecture like this but for example we have the radiation of the carnivorous mammals the cat lineage with the hyenas and civets and mongooses on one side the dog and bear lineage including raccoons and weasels and so on and we have amazing fossils this is a gnarly artist which is from shark-tooth Hill bone bed up here just north of us near Bakersfield it's a classic transitional form between a bear and a sea lion so the halfway between being aquatic and being fully marine the skull is still bare like in primitive lots of ways but it does have flippers or just within one lineage here the evolution of fossil cats and their relatives is amazing well-documented and by the way Sabretooth here's the one that were Angela Brade up here like six times okay being a saber-tooth is not unique they do it over and over and over again now in robe I spend most of my time on is the hoof mammals which are easily fossilized because usually large body things the audio doctor was the even-toed hoofed mammals prison actuals odd-toed ones the whales by the way I'll show you in a moment or hoof mammals ones I spent the most time on are the Parisa dactyls my first book ever was published on these and pris tack today include just horses rhinos and tapers but they have many extinct fossil groups as well and they show many many transitions this is my particular especially my latest book just came out earlier this year on the evolution North American rhinos rhino has evolved tremendous diversity of body forms most of which did not have horns okay horns are a late acquisition in Rhino history and they have lots of different body shapes and sizes and some are small running things some are big hippo like things and the most impressive ones at all with these gigantic and drinketh ears some of you may have seen on walking with prehistoric beasts that's where I was quoted these big 20-foot tall beasts that grazed on the tops of trees okay no horn by the way it's still right okay and if you trace back the earliest rhinos and the relatives and the earliest tapir in the relative and the earliest horse in the relatives to really easy 55 million years ago to the naked eye these skulls are virtually identical I have enough experience I can tell you at a glance which ones which but you can see if you're not an expert they're very similar here's a modern tapir by comparison to a fossil tapir and here's their upper teeth and Crown View and again I you know these I've used these things enough that I can tell them apart but I remember as an undergraduate the first time I experienced with her a cure theorem and Hamal axe the earliest horse it was tapir right and I had all these unsorted teeth and the Bighorn Basin of Wyoming in my class project I had to sort and I was having a terrible time telling which one was a horse which one's a tapir they're so close I mean it's just a little bit more development of crests between kus is the main way you tell it's going to come a taper and not a horse and I already talked about horse evolution I won't say more about that it's overdone anyways he was he's too often now elephants have an amazing fossil record big things like that League grid big fauces behind so elephants mastan's and mammoths can be traced all way back to an animal called Mira theorem and actually now they have a thing called Pasco theorem which is more primitiveness look more like a tapir than any elephant although beginning to have tusks and trunks but if you saw that 50 million years ago you would not call an elephant okay and by the way their closest relatives live today of the elephants and their relatives are the sirenians manatees and dugongs of sea cows there's a manatee right there and just a couple of years ago my friend Daryl domina Nets him they're grinning on the Left got to describe an amazing specimen called Pisa Sion port Li from the easy to Jamaica this thing has got a class of manatees do Kong's type skull and even the same kind of teeth that load from the back it's got these big heavy thick ribs that they use for ballast it's got feet hands and feet not flippers right a modern manatee has no high limbs at all flippers on the front okay it's a walking manatee alright and of course the creationist hate this now this is about is that good or transitions you get asked now to stagger the mind here the most amazing transition of all is the ordinary whales and of course whales are great interest a lot of people for lots of reasons or to great groups of the live right now for years it was very controversial as to where they came from in the mammal family tree and the 60s people notice there's similarities to a big group of extinct hoofed mammals carnivorous hoofed mammals if you can get around that concept called 'messin it's okay and people said well these have skulls identical the earliest whales I knew at the time and then as soon as someone said well they're all so close to relay to even-toed hoofed mammals the creationist put diagrams like this together from bossy to blowhole right because creationists don't matter much biology so when they sink even-toed hoofed mammal think of cows well they're on the wrong end of the mammals it turns out hippopotamus is actually a better animal if you want to put something there okay so this is their car to know how whales of all but a caste artiodactyls the largest group to hoof mammals live today it's not just cows or camels pigs hippos deer peccaries parlons antelopes sheep tremendous diversity of things okay and the meze knickers are probably actually the distant relative of both these groups this is the large the mezack is thing bigger than a Kodiak bear which is large predator alive today a huge predatory animal these things were already large as whales of all now this is where creations that are deep ship because anytime this gets put up on this screen against them they don't have an answer I read their literature closely they hem and haw but they don't have any way of dealing with this the transition from meza nickens or if you prefer hippos through all these various things to things that everybody would agree the whales are markedly well documented all this is known now and only the last 15 years once these fossils discovered the 80s and 90s and now recently discovered starting with the earliest discovery which is pakicetus this thing here which was apparently partially aquatic but still had fully functional whale-like sculpt to Ambulance see this this is the most amazing of all these treasures of fossils unknown from nearly complete skeleton there it is right there the name means the walking swimming whale and it's actually more you know sort of more like an otter as it's a locomotion with up-and-down motion of spine but it's also about the size of a crocodile and this thing was fully developed for feet but probably had webbed feet a long tail you know it has a whale like skull already and then up to Dowe and his teasin where the feet are started to be reduced the skull is very larger and much more whale like still it's beginning to move the nostrils and the tip of the nose up to the top where the blowhole goes okay and then to row to see this which is the more well like the nostrils are up on the top of the skull now like a whale its limbs are reduced but it still has front and hind limbs Rota see this is right there okay and then the whale have been known for over a century and a half now the so called bacillus Ord whales or Zhuge Lorant whales these things are up to fifty feet long okay but they're fully aquatic and yet they did have this little tiny high limbs 50 foot long whale with a Highland size your arm okay which probably had no function was probably vestigial okay all that of course is corroborated we look at modern whale skeleton a here's a photograph one there's the hip bones deep inside the body have no function whatsoever they're just sitting there they're leftovers in the days and whales walked okay and so then from that ratio of all these primitive whales we have the radiation the modern baleen whales and the toothed whales whales and dolphins that you're familiar with their teeth okay you couldn't ask for better transition of course the creationist again again don't have any way to answer this but in fact they don't give a damn right reality creation don't care about any other organisms except Homo sapiens right they only have to care about them when they have to debate one of these paleontologists get in their way but the only organism that really matters to them it's almost a pians right and they would do they would concede all the rest with any argument they could if they could get around the pack that they cannot live with the idea that humans are members the animal kingdom that our closer or later the great apes especially chimpanzees and that's where they spend most of energy this is place where they definitely draw the line they will not allow us to be related to animal kingdom they will not allow us to be as in desmond says here the h reflection okay and this goes back even older than evolution of course this is where the idea of missing link was most frequently applied it's as we said a part of this pre-darwinian great chain of being notion which has no place in modern biology but frequently gets pulled out of the woodwork is used used by people who think and as 2200 old terms if you want to think about missing links you could point to intermediate fossils galore like I just did for the last half hour and any one of them could be called a missing link but some of you know dealt with creationist in my head this happened to me too you put one of these on the screen when you debate them and they say oh well no how do you get between that fossil in this fossil you know on how do you get from that falls to the other side right I put ambulocetus on the screen well over how do you get from animal Cetus to a terrestrial animal to well I have all those gaps too but they don't usually live with that they asked you for more you know if you come up one they demand more right that's pretty slick way to play the game as you can see for example at the hominid fossil record we'll just one exceptional fossil it should be sufficient to do the proof right and in fact in 1920 Raymond dart described the famous tongue baby Estrela physics opportunist the first true if you want to think of in these terms missing link ever described it was not a member of our genus and he had it was clearly not an ape okay it was something intermediate so that alone should have been enough at that point of course for most people it was but gracious no but of course creations demand more and more intermediate fossils they always try to in their literature say well strata pick is just an eight well it's bipedal it has small brow ridges it has a flat face no wait like that has ever been existence okay and if you insist on adding more to the story you have to get all those links in there well how many fossil records damn better than it was in 1920 this is just a small part of one museum collection this is after the discovery of Lucia for olive is a zephyr in sis and they put a lot of specimens on table show you just one museum's collection of hominids okay and now there are multiple ice in the world where they have thousands of hominid specimens not as good as a rhino collections I work with but still hominids are much better known than they were even thirty years ago now that doesn't mean that they won't try to somehow distort the hominid fossil record and get around these things so this is a famous little plaid pamphlet from Jack Chick publications called Big Daddies so you may have seen before sort of classic and creationist bizarreness and in the middle of it it has our famous march of hominids through time which of course is the wrong icon to begin with and then in every one of these cases here they're trying to discredit emid evolution by somehow saying well this particular thing does not bear up to scrutiny well yes and no okay for example a plus a Peking Man well specimens are all lost yeah that's true the original collections the so-called Peking Man Homo erectus from the yokujin caverns in China were lost during the second world war when the Japanese invaded but they had casts of all those specimens and many museums and there are many more specimens now in existence that's a semi lie right saying oh they don't exist anymore well no the fossils are both represented by casts and by new material okay well pill town man was a forgery but that's you know that happens in science those things are a problem New Guinea man's only something creationist talk about no habits apologist claims that's anything but human likewise poor man young man and the abbot old man will they say oh well it's you know based on diseased individual the earliest complete skeleton if it was a diseased individual but we have many non disease individuals now it's definitely not us okay and so on and so forth that's the typical their way of approaching things prior to spreaded three or four cases ignore ninety percent of the data the so called Nebraska man case did you show up there this is an honest scientific mistake Henry feel for Osborn leave it over zealous he got this single isolated tooth from the Pliocene beds of western Nebraska and he said aw looks like a hominid to me you know we got humans in the western Nebraska which is something he wanted to believe in all of his colleagues said no no no don't get so carried away there's something wrong here turns out it's not only not a hominid tooth it's a tooth of a peccary javelina something you've seen these in zoos around here they're very common in the Central and South America and that's not that surprising right pigs and peccaries have very similar teeth to us because they're omnivores like us and their tight teeth designed eat about same kind of diet okay now the creation is of course then jump on this say oh well they didn't correct it scientists corrected this but of course scientists do get a carried away so this is the famous reconstruction that was done before they realized what it was okay and then of course in the previous image there they say all was found to be a twos of a pig no pigs and peccaries are different families okay they don't know the difference but course they're not much of a biologist to begin with alright so what is the hominid fossil really look like here's the hominid fossil record as was a couple years ago there's a couple of new things I didn't put on here we have false is going all the way to six or seven million years ago and up through today and what's striking about it I didn't show their relationship here I'm just showing their time ranges it's extremely bushier branchy no matter how you connect these things and it's sometimes in geologic past this has been as many as five or six different things that are called hominid members of our family coexisting in south and east africa the same time found in the same beds okay so we're right now we're back the only time in hominid history were the only one of us you know just 30,000 years ago when animals around there were two different members of family alive okay and then to show you this fossil record is extremely dense we'll just quickly throw some images of some of these guys this is the new discovery a couple years ago say hi Ultra bus chat instance from Chad 767 million years old already bipedal about the time that hominis branch from other apes we're already bipedal and then this is the famous called Lucy ester Olive is this afarensis I'm a hard time reading here but it's this one down here the most complete skeleton that goes back that far this is the famous black skull which is a very primitive member of paranthas parentheses locus and then the most famous thing that Louis Leakey made his reputation on this is of course so-called Nutcracker man dear boy that Mary Leakey called it that made their reputations and careers Zinj Antipas of its original name it's now called Australopithecus Boise I most hyper robust of all the anthropoids and this is what made Richard Leakey's career this is famous came in re er 1470 this famous specimens originally called Homo habilis it's now homo rudolfensis it's the first member of our genus didn t know and it goes back almost two million years ago okay and then this is a Richard Leakey now Walker's discovery this is the famous narek kotomi boy a young individual teenage individual nearly complete skeleton found a Westar Cana about twenty years ago and that was no Rosie no it's the fossil record I could show hundreds of these things but I won't go on and on the point is being we have incredible material now for healing the evolution 90% which the creationists never talk about all right and even if there are not a single hominid fossil it wouldn't matter we still know we're closer related to chimps and gorillas because that's in our DNA in fact 98% of your DNA is the same as a chimps okay like lesson a little 1% actually makes all the difference between you and a chimpanzee and it mostly is what are called a regulatory gene that shut on and off all the rest the genes you have and make you into what you are okay that alone should be sufficient but of course it's not and so we heard Jared Diamond mentioned he will I guess be hearing here pretty soon but one of his earlier books a very interesting book when you're still doing mostly biology not so much anthropology was the third chimpanzee the title refers the fact if you took a bunch of DNA samples different organisms gave them to an alien to teen a sequence right very smart alien right they would say that humans DNA is so similarly the other two species chimpanzee they were just a third species of chimpanzee right in terms of a DNA there isn't any real difference we're more similar to the other two species of chimpanzee than most any groups of three species you can name anywhere on earth okay that's how similar we are okay well I bored you a lot of science here let's get to the politics all right why do we give a damn why is it matter right is this just some sort of you know innocent little thing where a bunch of fundamentalists can influence a few schools in the south southern part of the US and the rest of us can ignore them no it has national implications it has global implications and there are a whole bunch of reasons why we have to actually take an active role as much as we can and fighting creationism and preventing them from infecting our schools and there's a lot of reasons to say this first of all it's a denial of reality just like denying the Holocaust okay evolution not only happened it's happening all the time we have evolution going on in lots of cases I'll just show you a few in a second here I'll show you in a moment why deny evolution you'd actually be deadly you can make lore test mistakes if you can't live with evolution but more importantly evolution is a central unifying theme of biology and without a biology makes no sense whatsoever okay and most of the people who debate evolution and the creationist side are not biologically trained because that's the hardest thing to live with okay and more importantly it's a wedge it's an attempt to start by attacking evolution as sort of the most prominent thing they don't like about science and their their worldview doesn't jive with it but of course eventually geology astronomy anthropology a whole series of other things that don't match the Genesis literal interpretation are their targets and finally the last of the most practical economic terms if you want to be more dollars and cents about this science literacy in America is among the worst in the civilized world or at least certainly in the westernized world and creationism is a good part of the reason for that okay let's go over all those points evolution didn't just have in the past happening right now animals involve whether we like it or not they're going to keep evolving okay you can deny it but it doesn't change the fact in existence like you can deny gravity but it doesn't change a passion exist and these are some in this Natural History article that Michael just mentioned here these are some modern examples things that have been observed of evolving human timescales variety of different things here you can go look it up if you like it won't spend a lot of time but this is the famous old textbook case of the peppered moth system betcha Larry which went through a very dramatic case of natural selection the natural peppered moth looks like this and then when it's trees in Britain in the industrial world got very sooty during the peak of the Industrial Revolution they became conspicuous so the natural selection picked off all the pepper guys and the sooty guys are the only ones that persisted and now that they've cleaned up the air and Britain the the pepper guys are back and these melanic forms are rare okay but there's smells evolution and stickleback fishes is evolution in the birds of a Hawaii there's evolution of variety things going on all the time but the real master for rapid evolution and our timescale of course is in your body right now okay microorganisms bacteria and viruses are the most rapidly evolving of all organisms the reason of course we have a brand new strain of flu every year is because they change their protein coat on the outside and they are unrecognizable to your immune system at least initially and that's how they infect and they do this virtually every year right they evolve so fast that you get a new flu strain and you see several new flu strains every year and of course other vector viruses like HIV aids okay that still has been been mastered by immune system it attacks it instead okay and it evolved only fairly recently as far as we can tell all right so not only you know denying that this thing is occurring is not only just you know plain old denying reality it hampers research and put people's lives at risk if you had creationist doing molecular biology we were in deep but it's even worse than that okay some of you've heard about Loma Linda University out there in Riverside County run by the seventh-day Adventists who are by the way creationists okay you might have heard those who are old enough to remember this case is now twenty years ago the famous surgery where they placed a baboon heart and a human baby called baby Fay and of course poor so poor soul she died a couple of days later because her immune system rejected the baboon heart now that should not have been a surprise I'm Bailey this Bay is used to the baboons are surprising and this is the quotation from the article given their relatively distant evolutionary relationship to humans meta primates we're going to put a primate heart in human it's not a human heart you'd use a chimp not a baboon right they're closer right the reason came to light when The Times of London published an interview between Bailey and Australian radio crew the reports have been reporters have been forbidden ask direct questions about the operations they queried Bailey about the issue I'd chosen baboon and view of baboons evolution and distance from humans Bailey replied er I find that difficult to answer see I don't believe in evolution I certainly wouldn't want him cutting me it's shocking the Bailey ignored basic biological concepts formulating a life-threatening hearing star basically baby Fae died in vain because this guy didn't believe in evolution okay now that's very practical but in a very broad term it's practical to think about biology biology is synthesized the central element that ties all the biology together genetics and biology systematics biogeography behavior all that is evolutionary we would heard in evolution psychologists say that now psychology is added to that synthesis of this so studying biology that evolution is nonsense and the great geneticist the adductors of danske put it nothing in biology makes sense except the light of evolution that's been true now for close to 200 years but it doesn't just biology right they may know a secret if you read their literature close they say this in black and white that the evolution is just their obvious target it's the weakest most vulnerable part of American science because that's the part the most public misunderstands and has doubts about well they have every intention replacing real geology with so-called flood geology and then if they did that of course there would no longer be any real search for glass oil because you couldn't use fledged geology to find it and obviously Genesis 1 would replace astronomy of course they can't live with the Big Bang imagine that and of course Adam and Eve would replace paleoanthropology you just think of the list of things that they would do so here is a cartoon version of this we could have this equal handed approach here teach both theories which is the way they try to get into our fair-minded legal system here chemistry versus alchemy phrenology versus neurology magic versus physics or astrology versus astronomy I mean a lot of public doesn't know the difference between these fields still but that's another issue okay and that brings us to our last point scientific illiteracy this result of decades of creations attacks on science and generally ignorance of science and our culture in general is already clear you can look at any recent ranking of science scores of students of any grade fourth grade up through high school in fact adults as well and we're always near the bottom of the 20 or so countries and westernized countries that they rank usually Japan and China near the top Netherlands Iceland Canada Sweden Switzerland Germany always in the top 10 where usually the bottom or the third from the bottom okay and this is just down the line to consistent every time they test us very high percentage of error can still think very bizarre things as overrun this society knows pseudoscience is our main focus here think that the Sun revolves around the earth think that humans live with Dinosaurs can't tell science from pseudoscience that's still know no matter what number you think there's 40 50 percent of the countries believes these bizarre ideas and this is despite all of our spending on education and reality actually a lot of spending is misplaced if you target read the recent articles and the research that is done on this they say that in particular this new effort by the Bush administration the No Child Left Behind thing what is actually done to education is forced people to teach to the test and the test that they take or in math and English and things like that rarely are they tested on science which means science gets left out when time is of essence whatever is on the test it keeps their test scores higher that's taught first so what does this say for the future of our country and the population sign to be illiterate or believes in suicides which despondently the same thing at a technological time one of the few advantages we used to have over the rest of the world when don't have advantages and cheap labor obviously don't are advantages and many other things now we farm all of our work over to India one of the few things we use to be the best in the world at with science at technology but it doesn't look very good for us if we're following that far behind most the rest of the world and will another generation okay so I know this won't be Roger on the back I'll read this out to you this is there's a priceless little cartoon this is the leave you child behind act hey parents are you concerned that your child will grow up to be an intellectual elite then urge your school district to adopt the leave your child behind curriculum there's no fancy book-learning except a literal reading of the good book and then hear the teacher says NASA research proves the son really stood still in the sky and then the Cal captures as your actual lesson being taught in 300 school districts obviously fundamentalist Centerville in school districts right the Sun Stood Still highfalutin critical thinking is discouraged as students are told everything they know and the teacher says European settlers in America liberated the Indians and one of the students says but I heard you heard wrong and then the next frame here we're also retooling the traditional screening system so this student has an A oh no I got an arrogant this one has an F plus I got a freedom plus in the end all of our graduates receive special Doug Ruiz okay congratulations young lady aren't you glad you decide against a career in science duh and finally here as I say all say dog together and roll your child a day because free dumb is on the march okay so final final take-home point here we have choices we can make we let fanatical religious minorities dictate public policy and drag our science education literacy back to the Middle Ages and there see no evil hear no evil speak no evil with their Bibles covering their various parts or we can come to terms the world which darn led us now almost 150 years ago in Darwin's words as a grandeur in this view of life with its several powers having been originally breeding the Creator into a few forms or into one and that whilst this plan has gone on cycling towards the fixed laws of gravity there's no simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved thank well I'm willing to take questions for as long as I can physically stand although I think baby kept me awake last night so I didn't get a lot of sleep but I'll do my best here we had a question right there go ahead your vaunted chart didn't show any evolution in the chimps and apes they must have changed their delay yeah their fossil record is relatively poor and it's because we think they mostly evolved in the tropical regions especially tropical rainforests which have almost no fossil record so we have a handful of really decent specimens of fossil Apes to proceed the chimps in the gorillas and there's not a lot of fossils for them that's one of those things we don't have so you can't say much about him other than we know they were there 6 million years ago and they're still here it's hard to me to see in these lights here there's a hand go ahead oh the ones from Borneo is that when you think of um they're probably distinct species I'm not enough an anthropologist to have my own first-hand opinions on that but I read the literature they do seem to be a dwarf species smaller than any human hominid or human is live today and you could make an argument that they were a dwarf on an island that's a very common phenomenon the big problem there is not so much with their scientific interpretation because that's relative straightforward it's who owns the bones and who has the right to click collecting and that got to be really sticky but yes I would say that's reasonable think that there are unusual dwarf species that lived on that Island and dwarf there and never lived anywhere else that's within reason ok we had some hands over there go ahead oh yes question was always you didn't hear it whether cro-magnon searched at least Homo sapiens at that time right and Neanderthals interbred they do overlap in time by quite a bit okay there's a famous skull in assuming a famous cave in northern Israel which has a series deposits it's called school which smelled like weird skull and they actually have interbedded where they have Neanderthals and then they have Homo sapiens and then the Anne Turtles again so that proves definitely the Homo sapiens and Neanderthals lived in the same places beyond that is speculation right I mean we know in the Anatol is generally speaking were mostly northern Central Europe and the more modern homo sapiens is rigid earlier mostly from Middle East South and there's not many places where they lived coexisting it's not likely they interbred if there is difference we know they are but again there's no scientific evidence money or another beyond that we know they were coexisting for thousands of years though okay I can't see you guys in the far back corner is just one hand at a time I'll let you Michel could answer that it's virtually all us movement mostly from the Discovery Institute up there in the Seattle it's larger the Bass Pro that one group he asked the question was there all the IDS intelligent design creation in the US yes it's a base of the US movement I don't think it has much of a following elsewhere yet now there's another hand up there in the bright lights like expectancy purely a function of condition or is there some evolutionary link to that second a wide in certain countries that are fundamentalist religious involved and give us um okay compound questions let me do it one time this time the first question is what was it about life expectancy okay the problem you have with dealing with human evolution the last few hundred thousand years or so is that you have both biology convolution which is fairly slow right it's very difficult to move species from one place to another and culture evolution which is very very fast okay which is large and what humans have done I mean many of us in this room would not be alive today we didn't have our glasses and our various other aids that make us able to survive right that's all cultural that's nothing biological going on there biologically speaking were not very fit and so in that regard it's hard to know because it's some people would argue that humans have not evolved biologically much at all in the last say thirty forty thousand years that we pretty much have reached a stable plateau and we're compensating for our biological problems by cultural evolution and so whether there's in any real biological evolution of humans since then is a good question it was a lot of debate among anthropologist on that now what your second question was right right that's an interesting Twitter twist yes the early days of Islam when it spread from the Middle East and of course all the way across the Mediterranean was also a period of time where they were intellectually way ahead of the Europeans of their time right they spread mathematics and algebra which they invented and a lot of other things and they preserve written documents that the Europeans are routinely destroying and so it's interesting although the Muslim fundamentalist culture is different from American Christian fundamentalist culture in lots of ways among which Muslim fundamentalists at least until recently were much more certainly ones of those centuries value scholarship in a way that certainly may be the fundamentalists of Iran in Iraq don't now I don't know enough about all the details of their history to tell you more than that but yes I mean I'm not saying fundamentalism per se is the reason but they're they're certainly a lot more narrow-minded people among fundamentalists in about any other group you can name that's probably a valid generalization okay as a hand right there next to you sort of joining school teacher what do we yeah that's always a good question I mean all of us have only so much time in our lives and you know the the biggest issue is there are certain places and times where a little bit of effort makes a lot of difference okay like when a certain school boarding if you especially if you're the resident of the area where the school board is doing something that's when it's worth your time to get out there and show up at their late-night meetings and make a big fuss and there are networks you can look online the National Center of Science education has a big network keeps track of all the creations doing so you know it's it's easy to keep track of it if you're interested in doing it that's where you have the biggest influence that and especially if you're a member of electorate that elects school boards in states like Kansas or Pennsylvania okay then the Brio put the issue there is that that's where you may also make the biggest difference is making sure that school boards like the one currently in power in Kansas which was voted out once and then voted back in again now you know doing another job embarrassing the state of Kansas twice that's where you can make the biggest difference if you have more time your hands of course there's a lot more you can do and look at the NCSE website and there's just tons of stuff going on if it's something you if you have the interest in time tool it there's no limit to what you can join in and take part it okay question down there in front of you well you know that's like having your cake and eat it too right I mean most the time creationist don't want to exceed any kind of evolution at all and then you push them on something like some of those examples I had in the screen there and they say oh well as it's micro evolution we only well you know we'll concede that because they're there within the created kinds of the Barrowman of the Bible okay which is the mistranslation the Hebrew I learned up Hebrew to know that and so then they then you have to pin them down because there's a little oiled macro-evolution something that's impossible well most of the examples I just showed you there were Mac revolutionary no transition from reptiles of dinosaurs to birds it's about macros you get and those the ones they really spend their efforts trying to deny because that they cannot live with okay now there was someone there who got mister go ahead well you hope they have voted out the next time around is what you know yeah no I mean if there's a real interesting book called the Republican war on science it's out just what's the author I came from the author's name like just came out just just shocking what the Republican Congress and this administration have done to our science research yeah there's some instances that - I mean pork barrel goes both ways the bigger issue is that when it becomes an issue in us you know an election that's when you have the most influence you know that's when they are actually on the spot and hopefully you know enough of influence can sway them but beyond that once they're in office there's not a lot you can do except protest and you know III look at this I mean I personally had a big stake in this I've debated Gish I've written stuff you know I try not to get too involved in because largely it just takes too much time and I don't have that time to spare but if you stand back and look at in the broad view a lot of this has to do with the way in which political trends and you know social trends in this country go the creation has come out of the woodwork when we go through conservative times the 1920s through the 1970s Reagan years until now okay they tend to disappear we go through progressive times they were rich invisible during the FDR years they were virtually visible until the late part of the kennedy johnson administration when the country becomes progressive they don't have an audience when the country is conservative they think for a while have an audience but then you know when the country starts thinking about more important things they realize that creationists are wasting their time and you know that's why I don't think you know you can't eradicate it you can't do anything to legislate it it's very hard to fight them now I'll accept as sort of a holding action and then just hope the wins a political change will come and help and make them go back in the woodwork it's yes go ahead we have about 200 species and dogs and new ones are created right well that's artificial selection right that applies almost all domesticated animals and a bunch of others that were never Decimus cave and just learn to live with us and all of the selection was one of Darwin's classic cases of showing how much a species could change if you put heavy selection on them in case humans by domestication creation is generally speaking don't care about that because when you push them on that they say oh again that's my crow you know that's within a created kind as a dog kind or the cat kind and that's allowed by their broad interpretation of Genesis the so called Barrowman or kinds in the Bible and that was one place where they will generally back off if you push them but of course you look hard at it you know for example what we've done to go dogs domesticate them they were alive in that form in nature they'd all be distinct species they're up technically that way because they all interbreed although chihuahuas and Great Danes would have a hard time making it work but most dogs can interbreed and they're pretty ingenious as you know so you

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 121,874

Rating: 4.832408 out of 5

Keywords: evolution, Darwin, Intelligent Design, creationism, biology, geology, palaeontology, stratigraphy, science, Donald Prothero, evolutionary biology, evolutionary theory

Id: efpjE_wg_1M

Length: 106min 55sec (6415 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2009