Oh, man, we got the sharks here? Two different species of sharks. Looks like different
kinds of sharks, too. What is that? It's a lemon shark. Lemon shark. Beautiful. I mean, just look how they move. I mean, it's almost like
effortlessly glide along. I wish I could swim like that. Engineers wish we
could make boats like that. Yeah. Submarines that could move
as efficiently as a shark? We can't quite do it. Well Rob, this is all amazing. And I think we need to sit back for a second to talk
about the paradigm that all of us hear. We hear it in schools,
we hear it all over. And that's the whole
notion of evolution. What is it really,
from your perspective, what - when people
talk about evolution, what is it? How do you define evolution? The word means change over time. But I believe
in change over time, but I'm not an evolutionist, so how does one
figure this out? Really, evolution is a belief
that enough change over time, over enough time, can lead to the common ancestry
of all species on earth. All right. So that's the part I reject. Of course, species change. I mean look
at these sharks here. We have several different
species of sharks. These things are subjected
to natural forces that the environment
is playing on them and natural selection
is operating on them and mutations happening in them, but they're still sharks. And when we look
at the fossil record, they're still sharks. the sharks have been sharks,
and always are sharks, and they might be able
to grow a slightly longer tail or slightly smaller tail, but there's not going
to be any radical change because what natural selection
cannot do is change something a lot. It can just fine-tune it. So is that what you mean when
you say you believe in change? Yeah, of course things change. We've seen things change. We can watch things change
to a limited degree. What we don't see
is the evolution of a new biochemical pathway, or a brand new thing
that has never seen before. There's no mechanism
in the natural world to do that. All we can do is take
what already exists, tweak it a little bit,
just a little bit. And so what we see when we look
at the fossil record, well yeah, things look
like they were created, they survived for a time, and either go extinct,
or we still have them today. I believe that when God
created the organisms on earth, he put into those organisms
the ability to change, to adapt, to respond dynamically
to the environment. That includes adaptation
to some limited degree. But what we cannot see
in the natural world and what the standard paradigm of evolution will never be
able to explain is how you get a brand-new
something from nothing. Because the tweaking
that we see, the little teeny changes, they don't explain
the complexity of life. But what you're saying is
that the changes that we do see are the changes that are already
in the genetic plan. There are a lot of changes
that are in - sort of like, pre-programmed. Okay. Genetic diversity that God initially put
in to created organisms. And so, over time, as traits are recombining through the normal
process of reproduction, you can get things that look a little different
from each other, from the natural diversity
that God created. But we also have
to factor in mutations. We're in a cursed world. Ever since Adam
rebelled against God, things have been falling apart,
things have been breaking down, and so there are bad mutations
that do occur. When they're not lethal, they can persist
in a population. Okay. But isn't the evolutionary
theory based upon the fact that those mutations are what has taken us
from that small little piece of life to all of this? Absolutely. Evolutionary theory
requires that small, random changes can explain
everything we see. But it can't. And why can't it? Because of the
complexity of life. Okay. Life is so complex that small changes
can't explain it, just like you can't take
a computer operating system and look at it and say
oh yeah this is built up one digit at a time
over any length of time. No, it took an intelligent person to sit
down and put it together. Oh, I can guarantee you,
as one who is in that world, that if anyone in the area
of computer science were to say, if we just randomly change some things in this operating
system it'll get better, I mean no one would
agree with that. No. So, if we're looking
at a computer, and we had a computer
operating system, I - I don't know, what. If you change one out
of every 100 digits in there, one at a time,
it might be survivable, maybe? It's hard to say. It's really hard to put
a number on that, isn't it? Same thing with mutations. There are a small number
of allowable changes. A lot of changes
are simply lethal, you'll never see it
because the organism just dies. We don't have
unlimited changeability. So when we already
have an organism, we can tweak it. We can streamline it. We can help it. It can, you know, it'll reproduce faster
or not faster than the ones that reproduce the fastest, they're the ones that are going to have
more children in the future. That's called natural selection. There's no problem with that. But we're not going to get
the shark to evolve into a bird. We're not gonna get the shark
to evolve into a fish. The number of changes, and the types of changes,
are not something that you can do
one change at a time. So from your perspective
as a marine biologist, and I know that you've studied the whole
area of genetics a lot, the notion of mutations, and the positive aspect of mutations that
evolutionary theory presents, and the power
of natural selection, from your perspective,
they don't get us to here. Is that correct? No, they don't. It's a funny thing, because when Darwin wrote
the Origin of Species, he started with life
already existing. He started with the greatest miracle
in the entire universe was life, and then he tweaks it. But he thought life was simple. When we take complex life
like this, okay, I'll give you that fish. This giant miracle
has already occurred. The fish exists. Now evolve it
into something else. And they won't be able to do it, because the mathematics
isn't with them, the process of mutation
isn't with them, everything we see
actually happening in the natural world is arguing
in the wrong direction. So all of the diversity then that we see is a diversity that God had already programmed
and planned in the genetics that he created in that kind, is that correct? Yes. God created life
with some design parameters, and as long as life
doesn't exceed those parameters, it will continue to live. It doesn't mean
that he put all of the diversity we see today
in the initial creation, because mutations have occurred
that have changed things. I mean, when we look
in the fossil record, there are six-foot-tall
penguins we don't have six-foot-tall penguins anymore. The platypus is
in the fossil record, the ones that are
buried with Dinosaurs. They're twice as big
as modern platypuses. So things can absolutely change. But the types of change
we see are really minor. So we don't get one kind
becoming another kind. No. You know people
have heard the phrase "the missing link," and they usually think
of between man and monkeys. No, there's missing
links between almost every major group of animal, and almost every other
major group of animal, and plant, even bacteria, throughout the entire
fossil record, which indicates very strongly that these are actually
different creations. That is a remarkable picture of what God did
in the very beginning, isn't it? Yes it is. And it's also a wonderful thing
for science to be able to say, because science today
backs up the idea that there was a creator, that life is not millions
of years old, that life did not evolve. and brought about
these amazing creatures that we're seeing
here in the tank. This is a sea urchin. Looks spiny. it's pointy, gotta be careful. Am I gonna get stuck
if I touch it? No, no, he's pointy but - oh my goodness,
they're - they're moving. Yes, they're moving, and in between the spines
are a little tube feet, especially on the bottom. Look at that movement. So he walks with his spines, but he has little
tube feet in here, and that's what he uses
to grab onto things. He could walk right
up this wall, he can hold on
when there's a strong surf, and that thing in the middle, that's called the
Aristotle's lantern. Oh, well, what's that mean? That's what he eats with. It-it has teeth that grind
and grind and grind, and he usually eats
algae off rocks. So that's the mouth, huh? That's his mouth. It's really neat,
amazing little design. There's teeth in there
and the teeth can rasp on rocks. He will eat algae. He just scrapes the algae off. And you can see where these guys
have been underwater, because they leave
a trail of nothing. Well I'll be. Just bare rock. These are very important grazers
in the coral reef ecosystem, and the sea urchins
help the corals live by eating the algae that would cover
and smother the coral. But look, looking carefully,
is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, there are actually
ten radial parts to this animal. huh well it's
a beautiful creature, and it doesn't look anything
like that starfish down there. Oh, the starfish. Actually, the starfish
is his cousin. Are you serious? You can't be serious. Absolutely. The starfish here is
also an echinoderm, but notice he has
fivefold symmetry, instead of ten. Yeah. This starfish does. On the bottom, look,
we see the spines, we see the tube feet, his mouth is
in the center there. So there is
some similarity here, even though externally
it looks a lot different. A lot different. Actually, you want
to see something that looks a lot different which
is a cousin to the starfish and the sea urchin? All right. It almost looks like a rock. Yes, yes, I gotta be careful,
he's squirting on me. This is a sea cucumber. He has spines,
he has two feet, you would never know it
until you studied really hard, that this also is an echinoderm. He's not very happy being
out of the water, so let me put him back in. So these are all related, even though they look
very, very, different. Related in their creation,
not in an evolutionary sense, but our Creator took this phylum
of life, the echinoderms, and created this, and this, and this,
on a similar pattern. So when you say phylum of life
are you talking about a kind as we read in Genesis? I would say these are each three
different created kinds here within the phylum echinoderm, which is part
of the kingdom Animalia. okay, so - So within kingdom Animalia,
we have the animals. One branch are the echinoderms. Another branch are things
that make up corals, and sea anemones. Another branch would be
things with backbones, you and me and fish. So we're talking
about the branches of the tree of life,
the tree that God created, not in some evolutionary tree. How do we know
these different branches? How do we know them? We've studied them,
we've looked around the world, and all the
different environments, and scientists have collected,
measured, preserved, all these different
forms of life. The most amazing thing
about the oceans is that the oceans have more
different types of life than any other environment. When we were
on our dive yesterday, we saw phylum echinodermata,
we saw sponges, which are another phylum,
we saw fish, we saw algae, we saw an amazing diversity that you cannot see
in any other environment on earth other than a coral reef because there's so much right
on top of each other, all these wonderful, different forms
that God created. Well, who put all
that in those forms? I mean, who studied that in the beginning
to create all of those phylums? One of the great taxonomists in history is a man
named Carl Linnaeus. People call him the father
of modern taxonomy. He gave us our naming system. So we are Homo sapiens. That is the name
ascribed to people. And it's called
the binomial nomenclature. Binomial, two names, and the nomenclature
is the way to name things. It's kind of funny how
the nomas appear twice in that, but they're - binomial nomenclature is
our system of naming species. And Linnaeus came up with that? Linnaeus came up
with our modern way of doing it. And so, when we talk
about echinoderms, that's in a classification
system that he put together but funny thing is,
Linnaeus was a creationist. He believed that God created, and he was going out and
studying the diversity of life that God put on this earth. But it's really interesting
the way things change over time, because the evolutionist
now have claimed that taxonomy is theirs. They have -
they start with bacteria, and they go up to more and more
complex things over time in their evolutionary story, but Linnaeus is the one who organized it
like that for us. He didn't believe
in the evolution thing. And what's even more funny, more amazing, Linnaeus had
a concept of species very similar to mine, see, because he read in the Bible
about God creating different kinds of animals
and plants and things, and that there's
some reproductive barrier between this group
and this group, but the Bible doesn't explain
where the difference is. So he went out
and he explored it, and he said,
wow all these species here, they can interbreed. so his definition of species was much broader
than Darwin's definition 80, 90 years later. Darwin's view of species
were very finely different from one another so you
can have a species of iguana and another species of iguana
and there's slight differences, they call them
different species. Linnaeus wouldn't have
thought that way. He would have given them
two different species names, but he would have thought that
they still could interbreed, because they're
one created kind. So from Linnaeus' perspective when he was talking
about kinds from the Scripture, is that what relates
to the phylum? Actually, yes, but most creation biologists
would put the created kinds at a lower level,
so it's not the species level, because gray wolves
and red wolves, we give them
different species names, but they can interbreed. Domestic dogs can interbreed with them, coyotes
can interbreed with them, Australian dingoes
and African jackals that's one giant interbreeding what? We call them different species, but if they can all interbreed
and have puppies that can grow up and interbreed
with other things, there's no biological
barrier between them. That's probably a created kind. So all the canines, the canidae, would be
one created kind. Just like all the felidae, all the cats in the world,
are one created kind. It surprises people when they go to a zoo
and they see a liger, which is hybrid
between a lion and tiger. So all members of the big cats,
they can all interbreed. Now I suspect big cats
and little cats probably can, but you couldn't actually do
it physically because like, one would eat the other
and you have problems with it, but there's these breaks
between the living things that God created, and if we look
at it biologically, it happens about the level
of the taxonomic rank of family. Now there are some exceptions, but that's about where most
of us would draw the lines between the kinds. Well this is I think important, because a lot of Christians I think have equated the notion
of species with the kind that God made, and so they get confused when we
see these different species that are really
all part of a kind. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, because like,
the old question, how many animals did Noah
have to take on Noah's Ark? Well, people have this concept of species I mean millions
upon millions of animals but that's not what
we're talking about. Maybe you've got a few
thousand pairs of animals. It's actually a surprisingly
small number of kinds that'd have to go onto Noah's
Ark to preserve the lineages. So we only need to take
that high level kind of the dog. Yeah.
