What were the Original Animals God Created Really Like? - Dr. Todd Wood

[Music] so todd what got you interested in biology oh i've always been interested in biology i can't remember a time when i wasn't i remember you know three four years old going to the brookfield zoo in chicago and the detroit zoo and being pulled around little red wagon you know my parents and looking at all the animals it was amazing and it's just an amazing thing and i just sort of knew there was always going to be these kinds of creatures in my future somehow todd when we walk around a zoo like this i mean the first thing is just the beauty of all of these creatures but that beauty seems to be found in that diversity there is just so much difference a beautiful difference in all those creatures and yet there's something similar about them as a biologist what do you see when you see all of these creatures yeah when i look at these lions specifically i'm seeing cats myself and you know all the other cats they have here at the zoo they all have this underlying catness to them that's really apparent it's really apparent when they start playing right you're seeing them lick themselves and clean themselves or you see them playing with some sort of ball or something and they look they're just like a cat they look like a cat i mean this is like kittens play around and they do that sort of thing and so for those kinds of things the scientists would put that into a family called felidae and i would understand the felids to be representatives of a single created kind so the continuity the similarity there is so significant that i'd say yeah these guys have all descended from a single pair of critters that was on the ark and that eventually generated all the different sorts of cats that we have today well todd how do we get all of that diversity the other cats but they look different yeah they definitely look different that's a good question where do we get all this diversity so for an evolutionist of course they would argue that it's natural selection and many years of mutations and changes but for creationists i'm looking at this thinking these designs are already built into whatever cat came off the ark with noah and over time then those characteristics have been expressed as the cats have dispersed and spread out over the world just like we see in dogs oh kinds of dogs how does that dogs are a great analogy i mean in only a few hundred years we've taken essentially a wolf-like creature and turned it into all these crazy breeds the chihuahua and the saint bernard and the german shepherd and i think that's kind of what's going on here with the cats there's within that cat that came off the ark those two cats that came off the ark they had all the potential necessary to generate the various forms of cats that we have today it was just a matter of breeding it out and dispersing the dispersing the cats around the world and as they went then then you have the lions and the tigers showing up later on so originally the the cat and the original dog they there was a lot of potential then within them but genetic potential huge genetic potential all programmed inside of these critters just waiting to come out so that over time in the in the breeding that we've done with dogs we're basically just kind of uh separating some of those genes out yeah yeah so so there's that all that potential that's in the dog kind in the dog genome whatever it is that gets expressed as we sort of tease out different parts of various genetic traits and combinations you get dalmatians and whatever that's the same sort of thing that's happening here with the lions so rather than just a a random accident it appears as if all of these different species are coming from a really elaborate design oh absolutely and it's not just a design like god you know designed and created the lion it's god created something that could make a lion so it's more like you know a multi-tool or a swiss army knife where you've got all these pieces that you can just pop out whenever you need them but it's all just one thing that's exactly what i think god created cats to be like you have these traits that can come out when they're needed uh we can see some of these variations come out even today so you take a lion here you cross it with a tiger you'll get a liger but that thing will be much bigger than either of its parents so those are traits that come out and the beautiful thing is even amidst all this variety and variation and generating diversity you can still end up with this cat right so you end up with a liger that's a real cat it works you know it's not like these are broken things or degenerated things they're the real deal the amount of design that we're talking about here is just way more than just god making one critter fit for one place it's making a critter that can make other critters that are fit for places that we've maybe maybe not even encountered before and it's just an amazing design it's so much bigger than what we used to think of as design okay so we have cats and dogs as kinds what are some other examples oh there's lots there's the sea lions that we looked at this morning we've got grizzly and polar bear they're members of the bear kind duck swans and geese the members of the duck kind and now the dogs are really interesting so in russia they did this experiment where they tried to breed foxes to be more tame right they ended up with these foxes that looked like little dogs the ears started to droop and they started to bark which is really weird and so just by breeding for a single trait you can end up making all sorts of other weird changes in the the appearance of these dogs which i think is another great example of how you know the traits that we think of as defining a species or really they're all embedded into different members of a single created kind so those foxes actually were still carrying that dog kind within them oh yeah that's that's the amazing thing how does this happen that's a good question how does it happen we we don't really know one of the things that we can tell is when we're looking at the various genomes of dogs we see that their chromosomes are all scrambled around and changed up quite a bit it's really amazing and so then you might think well maybe that has something to do with how they change and how they differentiate but then the camel and llama which are all members of a camel kind their genomes are almost exactly the same so even when you think oh that must be this the genomes get scrambled nope there are other kinds which are really different and they don't have scrambled genomes at all so it's really it's a baffling mystery how how these various traits end up coming out of an organism it's just really weird well todd that's kind of fascinating now to think about what god was doing when he was bringing two of every kind what do you think was going on there oh yeah he doesn't have to bring every little variety onto the ark so you've automatically got room to spare basically when you actually do the calculations and okay so we don't know exactly how many creative kinds there were on the ark but maybe a couple thousands and they're small most animals are quite small so you have room to spare literally room to spare on the ark with for all the provisions and and noah and his family and all of that diversity that we have today is built into those two of every kind so they get off the arc they start spreading out encountering new environments so you get and the rabbit kind you know some rabbits move up into the arctic and of course then you get your arctic hares with their beautiful white fur other rabbits are going out west uh in the u.s where you have grasslands in the plains and they're getting really long legs so they can run really fast because there's not a lot of places to hide they're also getting coloration that matches their environment it's an amazing amazing thing that's all sort of built into that whatever that rabbit was that got off the yard so that also then uh gives kind of a neat uh picture of when god told the animals and human beings to fill the earth it's it's not just phil it's really it's exploding isn't it you are it's not just you know becoming more of you you know go make more of what you are it's a matter of actually filling all the little habitats and niches and environments that we have on the planet and it makes sense then when we go out and scientists continue to be surprised when we find you know bacteria living you know miles underground or you know we find these weird environments where you'd think hot springs at yellowstone you'd think there's no way any critter could live in there and yet they do so filling the earth yeah we filled the earth pretty effectively but we're talking about kinds uh that were on the ark yeah people sometimes equate that with species can you help us get those species has a really weird history and and trying to understand exactly where the species idea came from when you look into the history of it you realize it's really coming out of people studying reproduction people used to think that if you left a piece of meat out to rot it would turn into flies right and so this guy named francesco reddy he started doing experiments and realized no no it's because flies lay eggs on the meat and then the baby flies come from the same kind of fly that laid the eggs on the meat and so he called those things species and that led to the idea well you know if species always produce more of the same species then you go back far enough you come to creation right it wasn't until later in the 18th century that people began to realize it's not really clear what these species are and it's pretty clear that sometimes they can be really variable and sometimes they can even change and so people began to think there must be another category here that's not the species that god was the original creator of because species can really change in pretty dramatic ways todd i think a lot of people think that uh the animals that came off the ark were all the animals that we see they came off the ark and then they just they stayed that way but you're telling us that's not the case oh yeah the ark the ark pictures and the cartoons with all the lions and the tigers and the and the and the zebras and the horses that is really unrealistic really unrealistic plus noah looks like us i mean he's a white guy that's very unrealistic too uh yeah the the ark you might not have even recognized it but the cool thing about it is you would have recognized things you would have said hey that looks like a horse hey that looks like a cat hey that looks like a dog even though you might not have known exactly what kind of cat or dog or horse it was but you could have at least recognized yeah i know what that is i can see that that is a member of that creative kind that's the amazing part so if we have uh the horse kind or the dog kind coming off the ark how can we get so many so rapidly is that possible that's that's a good question and when you look at the history of dog breeds and you can see only in a few hundred years we can generate all this diversity i'm not really that worried about generating the diversity that we see in created kinds i think it's possible it's just a matter of keep hammering away at it and trying to understand exactly what's going on there because we're just at the beginning now of understanding genomes i mean when i was in when i started grad school we kind of had a idea of how genomes and genes worked i mean basically the year after i started grad school was the first genome sequence published it was a bacterium so i was there as the genome revolution was happening it was pretty amazing to watch right up close and we're just beginning to understand it we're barely beginning to understand it by the time i got out of grad school we discovered an entirely new class of small rna genes that we didn't even know existed that turned out to be really important for epigenetics and control of gene expression so you know people want to know well how do you generate all this diversity so fast and i think how do you generate diversity at all how do you even make features of an organism we're barely able to answer those kinds of questions right now and so how do you make it different well i don't think it's going to be that hard so all you're talking about is there's some environmental things and other factors we don't really know exactly how but it's possible for all that diversity to happen rather quickly absolutely it's totally possible to have it happen really fast now you mentioned the term epigenetics what is that epigenetic so yeah so you have your genes which are the things that make physical parts of your cells epigenetics is the stuff that controls how the genes make the physical parts of your cells because you don't want all your genes on all at once that'll give you cancer that's bad so you've got to have some sort of control some sort of way of making sure that the right things get made at the right time that's what epigenetics is all about so it's kind of like a super controlling factor over all of this potential we were talking and it controls as much maybe even more of inheritance from one organism to another when they have babies as the actual genes themselves there's already a cell there that we call the zygote once the egg has been fertilized that has a bunch of epigenetic stuff already in it that's going to guide and direct how the genes are expressed to build a new organism it seems like this whole genetic thing is like we're just touching the surface of something amazingly deep and powerful underneath is that that's exactly right we are we're on the brink and i love the idea of more christians becoming involved in this kind of research and learning more about the genome because to be on the cutting edge of understanding where all these traits and features are coming from that's going to be you know next generation creationism right there it's a level of complexity that's just much bigger than just the simplistic ideas that we have we think we're the ones that are breeding all these things you know and making all these different dogs no no we're expressing things that have been built into that system from the start yeah how far can we go with that todd that is an excellent question and to really understand that we got to go look that at the cat that isn't really a cat the meerkat is right around the corner here yeah that's not a cat let's go check him out i have to hate to lead you guys so the cats that aren't cats the most popular part of the zoo right so they don't even look like cats they look more like little weasels or something and i've made a work effort over the years doing a lot of research trying to understand the similarity of these things to cats and i can show quantitatively using all sorts of fancy mathematics that these things are very distinct from cats and i would interpret that as something i call discontinuity there's a there's a difference between cats on the one hand and meerkats on the other hand um so they are not the members of the same created kind they're not really related at all they're separate creations that god made in their own separate sort of kind so are you saying that we couldn't take a meer cat and breed it with a real cat and get something in between no you could not make them cat meerkat hybrid no they're definitely is that that discontinuity you're talking about that is the discontinuity that i'm talking about they are separate created kinds you're not going to cross them you're not going to you know breed meerkats to look more like lions it's not going to happen they're different does that happen across all kinds in absolutely kinds are separate kinds are distinct they're cute and they're adorable [Music] you

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Keywords: is genesis history, todd wood, creation science, creationism, young earth creationism, created kind, baraminology, baramin, biology

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Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 14 2021