Kevin Swanson Interviews Dr. Jay Wile on the Generations Broadcast
Kevin: Welcome Dr. Wile to our program.
Jay: It’s great to be here Kevin. Thanks for having me.
Kevin: Let’s talk about the matter in the headlines first. It sounds like the Neanderthals and humans are related according to what the evolutionists are saying now. Doesn’t that sound like what the creationists have been advocating for a while now?
Jay: Oh yes it is. And it’s truly amazing. For a long time, evolutionists have tried to make Neanderthals out as sub-human; in fact, they tried to say that they’re a completely different species. But new data has shown that they are in fact, the exact same species as human beings. . . and that’s what creationists have been saying since the very first Neanderthal skeleton came out.
Kevin: The creationist’s perspective is that humans did not evolve from apes. God created us as a distinct kind or species. We’ve been this way from the start. Nevertheless there are certain changes that take place called microevolution among certain human groups.
Jay: Right. And you can see that with modern humans. If I look at the DNA of folks in Africa, it is slightly different from the folks in Europe, which is slightly different from the folks in Asia, which is slightly different from the folks in the U.S. Yes, human beings do change over time, genetically. The Creator programmed our DNA to be able to adapt to its environment and so forth. Human beings change over time just like every other living thing that God has created that has changed over time. There is a limit to the change, and God hardwired that limit within the DNA. There is a limit in that change and that limit is based on the information God put in the genotype at the beginning. That’s where Darwin and other scientists made their mistake in that they think the genome has no limit to the change it can undergo. [Evolutionists claim] it takes only a few hundred million years for the genome of a finch to become an eagle, when in fact, everything we see in science shows us quite the opposite. We’re actually finding that the change any genotype can sustain is limited.
Kevin: But you do see something different in Neanderthals. You do see something different in their DNA.
Jay: Right, and what’s interesting about this study from a scientific point of view is that they could get DNA from the Neanderthals skeletons at all. In fact, they take just a few bits of skeletons. The bits don’t tell as much as fossils. But we can grind them up, get their DNA, and we can learn a lot from the DNA. They took that genome and compared it to the genome of five modern day human beings from five different regions of the world – two from AFrica, 1 from North Africa, 1 from South Africa, 1 from Papua, New Guinea, 1 from China, and 1 from France. First they looked at the differences in the DNA of the 5 current modern day human beings. And they said, “Okay, here’s where we see differences from different parts of the world. Now let’s look at those spots where we know there are differences and let’s see what the Neanderthals have. What they found was that those Neanderthals had more in common in those regions of difference. They had more in common with the non-Africans than with the Africans. And so, the conclusion was that if Neanderthals have not contributed anything to our current DNA then there should be no similarities to any of the present day humans. That is, the Neanderthal genome should be equal distance from all. But it turns out that they are not. It turns out that they are more similar to non-Africans than to Africans.
Kevin: I.E.: They are closer to Japheth than to the Hamites who apparently moved further south.
Jay: Yeah. Exactly, and that’s the point. It’s clear to me that this a very good study that indicates that there are neanderthal DNA in our DNA. But the I think that the more important thing that it tells us is that it’s very consistent with the Bible accounts, whereas I think this is vindicating creationists on one level. Creationists have always said this. But it’s also now vindicating the Biblical account of everybody having spread out.
Kevin: Now talk about the Neanderthal, what we know about them, and maybe hypothesize a little bit about who they were.
Jay: Well, I think they were definitely human beings. There’s only one way you can interbreed and that’s if you’re of the same species. So they were definitely human beings. I think they were specialized human beings who were adapted to a specific region for a specific lifestyle. Ask yourself why people in Africa have a slightly different DNA from people in the US. It’s because they have different environmental conditions that they have to deal with. OUr environmental conditions and and our life style are two things that affect our DNA. The Africans have their own life style and situation and so they have slightly different DNA. In the Neanderthals DNA their’s is slightly different because they had a different lifestyle and environmental factors they had to adapt to.
Kevin: They had larger trunks, shorter legs, and large cranial capacities.
Jay: I would probably agree with the larger trunks and shorter legs. I don’t know about the cranial capacity. The problem is it’s very very hard to understand things based on fossils. To try and illustrate that, only 6 years ago, BBC produced a thing that said, quote, “Neanderthals are not close family. The Neanderthals are distinctive species, quite different from our own, according to scientists.” Now how did they know this? It was by looking at the fossils. Based on these fossils, based on their measurements of the size of the skull, the length of the legs, and so forth, they concluded that the Neanderthals are a completely different species and never interbred with humans. Now, the DNA is telling us something quite different.
Kevin: But you could still find someone out there with a -2 standard deviation length of legs to torso ratio, or somebody somewhere in the world with a certain head size that may be comparable to a Neanderthal.
Jay: Neanderthal anatomy fits within the normal range of humans. It fits within what we see today as the normal range of humans. And it is important that you see how difficult a thing it is to determine much with paleontology. When we look at a fossil, we’re looking at a sample size of one! We don’t get the variation.
Kevin: You don’t get the standard deviation. There’s no standard deviation in a sample size of one.
Jay: Exactly, and I think that’s lost on those people. And statistically, even a wealth of fossil information gives us almost nothing.
Kevin: If you were out there trying to collect evidence for evolution, and you were a rational scientist, that is you want some rational evidence for evolution that produced a man from an ape – you would hope to find a little more than what we’ve come up with so far. The Neanderthal turns out to be a man. The Nebraska man turns out to be a pig’s tooth. You need far, far more than what we’ve got – if you were trying to be rational about this business of the science of origins.
Jay: Yeah, because the point is this. If any kind of a creature like an ape evolved into another creature like a human being, then in the end, there’s got to be a transitional forms along the way. And I don’t expect, because the fossil record is so random, a complete series of forms telling me exactly what happened. But I would expect some representative ones that are mostly ape but have a little bit of human, and then something with a little more human and a little less ape. I’d like a few transitional forms. What we see in the fossil record, is something like the Australopithecus that basically looks like an ape. They are so close to ape, that whatever we use to try to justify calling them transitional forms is incredibly minor. And then we see normal humans. We just don’t find anything in between.
Kevin: In other words, we’ve got .1 percent variation on the one side and another .5 percent variation on the other side. But it would sure be nice to see the 99.4% variation between the ape and the man, and we’re not finding a lot of that.
Jay: You see that with all fossils. For example, the one that’s been the showcase of evolution for years, Archaeopterix, which is supposed to be a transition between reptile and bird, and it turns out the thing is 99% bird. And the only “reptilian” features are very minor. And yet, this is supposed to be the showcase fossil!
Kevin: And then they get incredibly excited about almost no evidence. But why is that? Obviously, their presuppositions must be working pretty strong in their worldview construct.
Jay: Absolutely. The fact is that there are lots of different ways that you can show evolution. It’s not just by fossils. You can show it genetically, but you don’t see that either. The genes have really been messing with our understanding of fossils.
Kevin: Ok. What are we learning in the genetic code?
Jay: From an evolutionary point of view, we would expect to find what they call “a nested hierarchy of life.” If we go backwards in time, and retrace the evolutionary steps, we should find smaller and smaller organisms, that gave rise to larger and larger set of organisms, producing some sort of tree-like structure to life. Now if you look at the fossil record through a presupposition-weighted, evolutionary perspective, you sort of make out something like that in the fossil record. But, when we look at the DNA, that’s not what we see at all. We don’t see any kind of tree-like pattern emerging from the DNA. As a matter of fact, there have been a lot of evolutionary biologists who say, “You know, we’ve really got to get rid of this tree like pattern, because it really doesn’t work.”
Kevin: I’ve heard somebody call it the “bush of life.”
Jay: Yeah, but you know, even that, is not really working, because even a bush has underlying structures and limbs and branches. W. Doolittle, an evolutionary biologist, wrote an excellent review article of what we know from both DNA and proteins, and he says this. “Molecular Phyiologists (who figure out evolutionary patterns) will have failed to find the true tree. It’s not because their methods are inaccurate or because they chose the wrong tree. It’s because the history of life can not be properly represented as a tree.”
Kevin: So the tree of life becomes “an explosion in the mattress factory of life.” You’re just not getting connections.
Jay; That’s exactly what it is. And that’s what DNA is telling us. What DNA we can look at; the modern DNA in trying to trace evolution images from this modern DNA is not working at all.
Kevin: Well you’ve got an article on this online. I was reading it. There’s this pax 6 gene that shows up in the eyes. And apparently, if I read this right, it appears that it presents more of a de-volving condition, where animals with eyes give birth to animals without eyes.
Jay: (chuckles) Sort of like that. The pac-6 gene was identified initially because it controlled part of the embryological development of the eye. So as fish or a human or a mouse is developing in the womb, the pac-6 gene controls certain parts of the development of the eye. So it was always assumed that the pac-6 gene is associated with vision. But if we actually look at pac-6 gene in a human being and the pac-6 gene in a rat they are a 100% identical. If you look across a lot of different creatures with different eyes, you see higher than 95% similarity in the pac-6 gene. The evolutionists say that that means that the pac-6 gene is highly conserved. What that means is that it can’t change much and eyes still function. This was a really popular view for a long time, until, of course, we found the pac-6 gene in animals that don’t have eyes. And this pac-6 gene is 90% similar to the pac-6 gene in animals that do have eyes. So what evolutionists are forced to believe now is that there is this gene that’s sort of laying around. We have no idea what it is. When the evolution of the eye occured, that gene was magically recruited to control the complex development of an eye. That gene that was in eyeless creatures had some function but we really don’t know what it was. But for now, it’s main role is the development of eyes.
Kevin: Meaning, we’re losing connections here.
Jay: Oh yeah, because in the end, if genes are so similar, that means they form similar functions. And how can you have a gene that’s in an animal without eyes that supposedly only controls eye development and that same, almost identical gene shows up in an animal with eyes? Obviously this is all part of a very complex developmental process that’s been designed by somebody, who is a lot smarter than we are. He’s been able to encode this information in a way we can’t quite understand.
Kevin: What about the DNA similarities in dolphins and bats? I noticed in your article that you had some reference to how dolphins and bats share some similarity and yet they are vastly different animals and have no connection as far as the fossil record is concerned.
Jay: This produces one of the biggest difficulties to evolution. The problem is called evolutionary convergence. The idea is this. We think that humans and apes had a common ancestor years ago because we have a lot of similarities, and similarities imply common ancestry. That’s the general rule in evolution. The problem is that there are creatures that have incredible similarities that no evolutionist wants to believe has a common ancestor in recent history. An example of that is dolphins and bats. In any evolutionary scenario, the common ancestor for these animals existed a long time ago. Yet, they use almost identical means of finding their prey and navigating. They use echo location. They send out sounds; they receive sounds. Evolutionists hypothesized that this function evolved by pure accident, twice! Dolphins evolved the ability to echo locate, and then bats evolved the ability to echo locate. They thought that they would eventually show that these two echo locating systems came about from two disparate evolutionary paths when they finally studied the genetics associated with those systems – assuming they would find different genetic systems. However, when we looked at the genes associated with echo location, we found that they are nearly identical! This is a difficult problem for evolution. They want to say that, “We know evolution occurred because creatures have all these similarities.” But if creatures have these similarities and evolutionists want to reject the recent common ancestor because the animals don’t fit into their model. How do they know when the similarity is the result of evolution, and when the similarity is the result of coincidence?
Kevin: I’ve got another explanation. We may not get explanations for the similarities from recent common ancestors Jay, but what if there is a connection to an Intelligent Person? I’m just throwing this out. An Intelligent Person says, “Hey! I’ve got a really neat form of sonar – and I’m going to put it in a bat, and a dolphin too!” What if there is this intelligent Creator?
Jay: That’s the way we operate in other realms of science. For example, in anthropology, if I see a stone tool that’s fashioned in a certain way in some cave in Europe, and similarly on some island a few thousand miles away, I would conclude that, “The same kind of people made those tools.”
Kevin: An intelligent person made a tool, and then they went over here and made another tool.
Jay: Yes and that’s common scientific thinking in many scientific fields, but they don’t want you to do that in biology.
Kevin: As we learn more about DNA, as we expand our knowledge about biology and astronomy, it just continues to confirm a basic creationist perspective doesn’t it Jay?
Jay: I think both are true. It wasn’t that long ago that evolutionists were saying that 90% of the human genome was useless junk, leftover vestigial remains of evolution. Creationists always said, “Oh no. God wouldn’t go to the process of creating a genome that was 90% junk.” There can be a little junk in there because mutations destroy things over time. But in the end, the vast majority of the genome should be functional. And indeed, that’s what modern genetics is showing us. Modern genetics shows that there are specific functions for large sections of the human genome that were originally named by evolutionists to be complete junk. The more we understand about nature, the more clearly we understand that it has been designed and created.
Kevin; The heavens declare the glory of God and so does the DNA.
Jay: Absolutely.
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