Contested Bones: Examining the Missing Link – Christopher Rupe

[00:00:00] welcome to educate for life i’m your host kevin conover my website is educate4life.org and you

[00:00:06] can pick up all kinds of resources on that website i’ve been teaching 12th grade apologetics for 12 years now and i’ve got a

[00:00:13] ton of information up there that you can use that can help you build a firm foundation for both

[00:00:19] yourself and those you’re seeking to disciple or mentor whether that’s your kids whether it’s a small group no matter what it might be there’s all

[00:00:25] kinds of resources there that will help you get the job done and build a firm foundation in your faith

[00:00:30] we are airing here in uh southern california down in san diego on k praise 12 10 a.m as well as fm 106.1 in north county

[00:00:39] and my guest is also a local uh southern california although

[00:00:45] he’s up in loma linda chris thanks for being on the show today thank you for having me pleasure to be with you

[00:00:50] yeah absolutely i’m super excited to uh talk to you one of the subjects that you are an expert in is something that i’ve

[00:00:58] really been interested in for a long time and um your your co-author i have deep respect

[00:01:04] for dr john sanford um i one of his books uh on genetic entropy is one of my

[00:01:10] all-time favorite apologetic books i just think it’s uh amazing but uh chris real you know we’re talking

[00:01:17] about for those of you listening what we’re talking about today what chris is an expert in and what uh he he authored a book with

[00:01:22] dr john sanford called um contested bones and this is really examining

[00:01:28] that very famous uh icon in which you see the chimp-like ancestor and then the the

[00:01:34] little monkey gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger all the way you get up to uh people and i want to kind of start

[00:01:41] off with the bang uh chris um chris christopher roop by the way you guys for those of you listening you can check him

[00:01:47] out at backtogenesis.org that’s what the 2 back to genesis.org and he’s also got a

[00:01:52] new documentary coming out very soon dismantle evolution.com uh chris i

[00:01:58] wanted to ask you you know one of the things that i thought was really interesting about your book in particular

[00:02:03] was that you don’t cite i mean you do cite potentially creation resources but you’re citing

[00:02:08] actual um you know the the secular scientific literature in order to uh question this claim that

[00:02:16] we evolved from a chimp-like ancestor all the way up through these icons into modern day man uh why did you

[00:02:24] how were you able to do that is what i want to know yeah so that was one of the surprises

[00:02:30] when i went to research uh this topic because if you go to natural history museums

[00:02:36] or if you read books that are uh by the famous discoverers like donald johansson

[00:02:41] and discovered lucy or lee burger who discovered holy for example um or just look at national geographic

[00:02:49] you’ll find that they they have a view of evolution that most people just take for granted

[00:02:54] and maybe just assume that most everyone else would agree with those paleoanthropologists another term as

[00:03:01] human paleontologists but if you actually dig into the scientific literature the peer-reviewed journals

[00:03:07] you’ll see that this every major claim is contested and that’s why we tell the

[00:03:12] book contested bones so for those who say that lucy’s kind australopithecus

[00:03:18] apparently is our ancestor others will say no actually we challenged that view some

[00:03:23] have even said it’s a mixture of australopithecus and homo bones in other words an ape

[00:03:28] human mixture same thing with almost all of the major so-called missing links or

[00:03:33] hominid species so they’re very contested and the public has not heard the full story of these

[00:03:40] hotly contested bones yeah that’s completely unknown i mean for the most part um the general public has for a lot of

[00:03:47] people has this idea that yeah uh you know these are factual it’s very

[00:03:52] scientifically based there’s been lots of observation and tests and yet that’s not the case at all

[00:03:58] that’s correct and you’ll see you know the look on the internet and type in you know some of the famous findings like

[00:04:04] artificial you’ll see all these sensationalized popular press articles then if you just you know hold site for

[00:04:10] just a year or so or maybe not even go into the scientific literature you’ll find other experts in the field

[00:04:15] challenge those those um widely promoted claims and it’s so it’s very interesting to see the full

[00:04:22] controversy um you know just peel those layers back and take a little deeper what

[00:04:28] so give us an example of one of these um that is you know been

[00:04:33] for a long time kind of placed up there by those who are promoting evolutionary ideas

[00:04:39] as a leading missing link what would be a good example of some of the glaring um uh

[00:04:45] deficiencies in the argument that that just don’t line up yeah i think one of the most famous ones

[00:04:51] to mention is the one i did a moment ago and that’s lucy’s time so when when i say the word lucy it’s a

[00:04:57] nickname that refers to a single scallop and her belief be a single skeleton that was found in haydar

[00:05:02] ethiopia in 1974 by donald johnson however there’s many more hundreds of

[00:05:08] other bones that have been attributed to lucy’s kind or lucy’s species and lucy’s species is

[00:05:14] named australopithecus apparently it just means southern ape from afar but if you look at museums

[00:05:21] today now this museum’s all over and textbooks you’ll see lucy is represented as if it’s an upright

[00:05:27] blocking um you know bipedal hominid ancestors what they’ll call it but i’ve heard i i’ve heard chris that

[00:05:34] um some people have said that lucy walked upright because of its hip joint because of maybe the way its neck

[00:05:41] was shaped because of a knee bone um that this gave the impression that this was

[00:05:46] something that it was on its way to evolving into a modern-day human yes and i talked about this in dismantle

[00:05:53] uh the upcoming documentary there’s actually a lot of there’s actually three competing views in the palette anthropology community um

[00:06:00] one of the views is is the one that johansen embraces he’s the discoverer of lucy

[00:06:06] so he promotes lucy as upright walking in a manner just like modern humans and he’s known as a terrestrialist and

[00:06:12] so he’ll emphasize the bones that look more human and then you’ll go and you’ll find out that there’s also arboreals

[00:06:18] those are the paleo anthropologists who will emphasize bones that look more ape-like and they’ll say no we don’t think lucy walked quite like

[00:06:25] humans it was more like and they’ll draw comparisons to living apes for example and say it looks more

[00:06:30] ape-like certain features um but then you have a less well-known view and this is the

[00:06:37] third competing view this is the view that says actually we think that um there’s compelling evidence to show that

[00:06:43] it’s the reason why we see eight bones and human bones because it literally is an accidental co-mixture of australopithecus and homo

[00:06:49] bones and so these paleontologists including richard leakey and other famous experts who have done

[00:06:55] this would say that it’s actually not a valid tax it’s not a real species wow in the scientific literature and i

[00:07:02] document this extensively infested bones but the public is not aware of the full controversy

[00:07:07] yeah now is there um is this discussion moving in any particular direction or

[00:07:13] for you know in a lot of ways i feel like people have stopped talking about it in general i mean you

[00:07:18] you and dr sanford wrote uh one of the very few books on this subject that

[00:07:23] um is so thorough like you were saying there hasn’t been another book written on this subject

[00:07:28] in detail um for how many years yeah i think the last book was marvin

[00:07:33] marvin lubin now’s it was published in 2000 or at 1992 i think i believe that’s the

[00:07:40] first edition that was published again later updated in 2004. so that’s that’s why dr samford and i

[00:07:45] really felt led to work on a book like this because it was we needed an update there was a lot of new findings a lot of

[00:07:52] new claims have been made we needed to address them in the secular scientific community are they still searching for

[00:07:59] um missing links is this something that um there’s a lot of uh research money going towards is finding

[00:08:05] uh missing links between uh chimp-like ancestor and modern man absolutely i describe it as a growing

[00:08:11] field um the growing field especially with lee berger his findings in more recent times

[00:08:17] found australopithecus and roman aletti both since i think about 2008 and then

[00:08:23] again in 2013 in 2015 though so in recent years we find we found

[00:08:31] really an explosion of popular press and articles and social media discussions on this topic

[00:08:37] so it is a growing feel so this is a book for anybody who’s a uh

[00:08:43] payment apologist this is a required reading here if you’re out there you guys and you’re listening to this uh

[00:08:48] this is the most thorough book there is on this particular subject it’s the most cutting edge book it’s the most detailed book i can’t um

[00:08:56] i can’t recommend it highly enough it’s an issue in which christians need to be well informed

[00:09:01] especially those of you who have an interest or god has given you a gift in apologetics this is something that’s got to be a

[00:09:07] required reading it’s got to be on your bookshelf and it’s a great resource that you can constantly reference when you’re having

[00:09:12] discussions whether that’s with family members members whether it’s on the internet whether it’s you know you’re writing

[00:09:18] articles for your own website uh use this book because it’s got tons of um

[00:09:24] sources they’re they’re citing their sources all over the place and like he’s saying a lot of them are secular so uh it’s a very very valuable uh so

[00:09:32] yeah you know when i it’s interesting because i’ve been teaching this and i always do a unit on this particular subject i don’t go

[00:09:38] nearly as in-depth as you guys do in the book but um a while back um there was one

[00:09:44] that came up google actually put the the lemur fossil on their google page claiming uh

[00:09:51] yeah ida uh this is a missing link and i actually had students coming to me during that time saying oh my gosh mr

[00:09:57] conover they found a missing link and i was like whoa whoa whoa calm down let’s give it a little time

[00:10:03] uh what’s the scoop on on uh ida yeah so ida you you’ve already basically

[00:10:08] pinned it you know perfectly ida looks like a lemur simply because it is and i think even now actually

[00:10:14] would say well we’re not so sure anymore so you know that was about i believe according to conventional

[00:10:20] dating methods it’s about 50 million years old around there um we focused largely on the ones that

[00:10:25] supposedly evolved since the chimp humans split within the last six million years yeah most famous but yeah ida looks like

[00:10:34] a lemur in every respect simply because it was but yeah oddly you know this is what evolution

[00:10:40] has to evolution as a theory does have to explain the origin of humans from creatures that ultimately go

[00:10:46] back to something like a lemur and before that something even goes back to something like aerodynamic like so yeah

[00:10:54] that’s interesting so um how many of these as you how many different uh hominid fossils

[00:11:00] did you analyze in the book what what were the total amount that you looked at as far as the claims of missing links

[00:11:05] so we looked at actually i think it was like eight hominids so homonym and phallensis

[00:11:12] that’s everyone’s probably heard of neanderthals um homo erectus it’s another famous one homo fleury sientas that one might not

[00:11:19] be as well known for the average person but the nickname is hobbit um austral

[00:11:24] uh michelle i think of safarensis arty which is the species name is artificus ramidus homo habilis astrological sabiba

[00:11:32] illinois uh the general public doesn’t you know what i find is really interesting is that if you talk

[00:11:37] to a typical college student uh they’ll generally accept evolution um they’ll

[00:11:42] they’ll kind of often times they’ll say well i i just don’t believe adam and eve because i think that’s silly i think it’s myth

[00:11:49] and they’ll when i’ve done surveys about 80 out of 100 will routinely say

[00:11:55] that they believe in the hobbit species as our ancestors instead of adam but if you ask them some questions

[00:12:00] you’ll find out they don’t really know very much at all about these common creatures they just know some of the nicknames

[00:12:06] so as christians we really have an opportunity to to do the do the research the homework and

[00:12:12] what you’ll find is that you can really engage people and have an effective fruitful conversation about this topic because again it is a major

[00:12:18] stumbling block so many people have been led to believe that we are evolved apes and we don’t need

[00:12:24] there’s no evidence for out of need which is also not true so it’s an important topic yeah yeah i’m

[00:12:32] i’m stunned too on the amount of people who are completely uninformed about these

[00:12:37] subjects and yet have just kind of um you know swallowed it whole just said okay yeah i

[00:12:44] guess it’s true you know and that i you know i i talk to my students a lot about this and i say look

[00:12:49] it you know we have the truth on our side but if nobody gets to hear the truth what’s going to happen right people are

[00:12:55] just going to accept whatever they whatever they hear so that’s a big part of what we’re trying to do is get that information out

[00:13:00] there that’s right and the exciting thing about this book is ironically we ended up agreeing with a lot of the

[00:13:05] evolutionists who who uh have these competing views you know they’ll say well actually i think party is nothing more than extinct

[00:13:12] yeah more than a co-mixture of eight bones and human bones and we just say well that was my that was my understanding

[00:13:19] just from looking at the bones the anatomy and then i read it in the scientific literature and i’m just like surprised i’m like wow

[00:13:24] so yeah they’re they’re saying the exact same thing as the creationists but people just don’t know it right yes

[00:13:32] i just disagree with a timeline i don’t agree uh so we have a whole chapter on the dating methods about 40 pages on the

[00:13:38] different radioactive dating methods so oh that’s really that’s fantastic that’s another huge one that always

[00:13:43] comes up is you know how old is the earth and these sort of issues that are so related to this particular issue also but

[00:13:50] um you know so when when they’re digging these up give us um give us some background on how this

[00:13:55] works when somebody’s digging up bones and everything what does that look like and why do they draw the conclusion that okay

[00:14:01] i think this is a missing link why don’t they draw the conclusion that okay this is some sort of uh ancient uh

[00:14:08] monkey or it’s some sort of a some sort of chimp or it’s or it’s a person because you’re you’re clearly

[00:14:14] saying i mean your your biblical view is there are people and there there are animals but there is

[00:14:20] no progression from one to the other so when you when you look at them how do you break that down you go okay

[00:14:26] clearly neanderthal was a person and then clearly this one over here whatever it was ramopithecus or

[00:14:32] whatever it is is a monkey how did you and uh and dr john sanford uh break that down

[00:14:38] yeah so one thing that’s really key to understanding this issue is to try to put yourself in the mind of an

[00:14:44] evolutionary pattern ecologist they think they think fundamentally different than a christian no no surprise there so obviously they

[00:14:51] don’t accept genesis as literal history um they oftentimes just dismiss that outright and they’ll say we definitely

[00:14:57] evolved like you said through a series of transitional forms so when they go into the field and they find a bone bet you have to

[00:15:04] understand that they they think in terms of of the the timeline of evolutionary time of

[00:15:09] about six million years to the present for the human split and so they’re thinking okay according

[00:15:15] to their view they believe that the origin of the first humans the genus homo they believe that was

[00:15:20] around 2.5 million years old some say a little older to point between 2.8 and 2.5 of various

[00:15:27] men who you ask so when you say for our listeners chris when you say genus homo

[00:15:33] you’re talking about modern human or what are you talking about exactly that’s that’s the question i’m trying to

[00:15:38] get at exactly so they’ll say that the earliest members of genus como are

[00:15:44] the earliest primitive humans that are starting to look more and more like us that’s just kind of a vague way of saying i guess

[00:15:50] but here’s the key because they believe that there should not be so from that position they

[00:15:56] believe you should not find any anatomically modern looking bones older than 2.5

[00:16:01] million years old imagine this imagine if they found stone tools

[00:16:09] footprints fossilized in ash for example human looking bones partial human skeletons imagine if they

[00:16:16] have really a growing amount of evidence that shows we can find anatomically modern human looking bones

[00:16:22] pre-dating the origin of the genus hormone if we could find that that would effectively falsify the ape command

[00:16:28] theory because although it’s kind of like here’s an analogy you can obviously co-exist with your grandparents

[00:16:34] but you can’t be born before your grandparents does that make sense oh yeah yeah

[00:16:40] completely you can’t have humans existing before they supposedly evolve but yet we’re finding

[00:16:46] we document this in chapter 11 if the chapter is called coexistence we find clear evidence of human bones

[00:16:54] partial skeletons footprints human artifacts predating the origins

[00:16:59] of the first humans so you’re essentially saying they’re putting the carp before the the horse rather than allowing the evidence to

[00:17:05] inform their their theory they’re allowing their theory to inform their evidence

[00:17:10] yes and here’s the key so when they find these human looking bones they understand they’re experts in

[00:17:16] anatomy so they can acknowledge this this looks human in this respect and they have certain terms to describe

[00:17:21] it primitive or derived putting that aside for now keeping things straight forward even though they’ll

[00:17:27] acknowledge and they’ll say this one is anatomically indistinguishable from

[00:17:32] modern homo sapiens they’ll even say virtually identical to homo sapiens they’ll use that kind of

[00:17:37] tools even though they acknowledge the anatomy is clearly modern human because of the theory just

[00:17:44] like you’re saying they have to say well it just proves that australopiths were bipedals they must have had very

[00:17:50] human-looking bones they must have had very human-looking uh features because that’s that’s how evolution happened it

[00:17:56] happened in a mosaic fashion where certain parts involved before others certain skeletal parts so that’s amazing

[00:18:04] so as a christian we’re trying to say wait a second let’s just look at the anatomy

[00:18:09] let’s just use the real observational science let that guide our you know instead of

[00:18:14] instead of force fitting the data yeah and what you come to is include a conclusion that is very biblical apes

[00:18:20] and humans coexisted as far back as common falses are found and that’s consistent with the genesis

[00:18:26] the bible teaches that god created man and apes on the same day of the creation so the fossil record

[00:18:32] remarkably fits that pattern so um what about and you talk about this

[00:18:38] in the book too i know you talk about the hobbit uh type creatures and some people are saying well that’s clearly not a monkey

[00:18:45] it’s clearly not a person so what is this type of creature that is uh in between are you saying it’s an

[00:18:50] extinct human we even hear certain christians talking about that there were sub-humans that pre-existed

[00:18:56] adam and neve um so how do you respond to this issue when you have a creature that is clearly not

[00:19:02] not human it’s clearly not uh ape uh what what is that in the paradigm that

[00:19:07] that adam and eve are the beginning of history they are historical figures uh how does this this uh type of

[00:19:14] creature fit in yeah so excellent question because you’re right there’s a lot of confusion even within the church

[00:19:20] um i accept genesis as literal history i believe the hebrew language is clear it’s historical narrative

[00:19:25] so that’s the genre of the early chapters in genesis and i do believe that um you don’t have

[00:19:31] any uh you know pre-human species so there’s no such thing as

[00:19:36] there’s only one human species homo sapiens we’re all homo sapiens but from the evolutionary point of view they don’t think like that they believe

[00:19:43] that there is at one point many human species dozens of human species homo sapiens is not just you know that’s that’s just

[00:19:49] one type they also believe there’s someone on the end of the lenses almost fluorescence like you mentioned ammonium silences almost

[00:19:55] denisovans and so forth so they believe in lots of different um human species they don’t even believe

[00:20:01] anatomy at all now those who believe who are christians believe in an old earth they think that there could have been soulless

[00:20:07] dominant creatures that lived before adam i reject that i think we don’t have any we don’t have

[00:20:14] any reason to be believe that i feel it’s very ad hoc or or uh they’re just tacking it on just to try to

[00:20:20] i don’t know what i and it’s a little bit confusing to me because i i think to myself well the evidence is overwhelming from the

[00:20:26] from the uh fossil record that the biblical narrative is historically true

[00:20:32] and so i’m not they’re trying to ram a square peg in a round hole and so

[00:20:38] and so yeah go go on about that that’s interesting yeah so they’re borrowing heavily from the evolutionary perspective in my opinion because

[00:20:45] they’re basically embracing the same taxonomic classifications as they are and i don’t think they’re as

[00:20:50] they don’t seem to be as privy to the controversies so consider homo homo fluorescence or hover that was found

[00:20:56] in the island of flores and this this supposed species if you look at the

[00:21:02] bones it’s very interesting because overall anatomy is clearly human however the homo fluorescence stood about you

[00:21:09] know roughly around four three and a half to four feet i forgot exactly the height and i had a very small cranial class about 420 cc’s

[00:21:17] so it’s an individual that was very small in stature small cranial capacity but nevertheless

[00:21:22] the hip bones the feet the hands all the diagnostic parts of the scalp

[00:21:29] and they’re well preserved are clearly human anatomically now here’s part of the past

[00:21:34] version that you won’t be that you may not be aware of if you look at the scientific literature homo fluorescence

[00:21:40] is hotly debated just like the other ones so for hobbit they’re experts who are on the discovery

[00:21:46] team who disagree there was a new species and some of these people who had dissenting abuse

[00:21:51] that actually i think is just a homo sapien just a small body human and so is there any other to that well

[00:21:58] even today there is still a pygmy population living on the island not too far from where they found almost

[00:22:03] fluorescence so i do think that is the best interpretation and that is also

[00:22:08] compatible with the biblical view yeah so how come we don’t hear more more

[00:22:13] from these uh dissenting scientists why don’t we hear from these people are they afraid to come out and talk about

[00:22:18] their dissent or is it just not published is it just not getting out there what how come it took so much digging for you

[00:22:24] and dr sanford to be able to find this information yeah in the case good question in the case of hobbit there is

[00:22:31] it wasn’t a popular press they did do a good job in that case i think there was a back and forth that happened

[00:22:36] and they did do an excellent job of promoting that but that’s not the case generally typically

[00:22:41] um you don’t know about different views of lucy for example you don’t know about different views um even neanderthals so yeah

[00:22:49] it really just required a lot of research in the in the peer-reviewed scientific literature we focus almost exclusively

[00:22:55] on evolutionary journals we just really want we really want to understand the claims that were made

[00:23:01] and you took like four years to do that at least at least four years yeah and it was you know it was

[00:23:08] something i accepted over at night all the time that’s great it was all an all-consuming project but

[00:23:15] it was yeah very exciting it produced an incredible uh result so thank you for all your hard work for

[00:23:20] those of you just tuning in my guest is christopher roop and he is the author with dr john

[00:23:26] sanford uh cornell university professor um of contested bones

[00:23:32] and if you want to check out more about him back to genesis.org back to genesis with the number two dot

[00:23:38] org dismantle evolution.com is the upcoming documentary and tell us about that uh chris

[00:23:44] what is dismantle evolution what’s the uh you know what was the um premise of this why did you decide to

[00:23:50] move forward in this direction thanks for asking so i’m really excited about the documentary because

[00:23:56] um i’m really trying to reach an audience that is

[00:24:03] um generally the hostile skeptics if you will those who say they need they just need

[00:24:08] the hard evidence and so it really really came out same way as dustin bones where i focused on

[00:24:14] the primary scientific literature and really trying to go out of our way even though i don’t think it’s fair

[00:24:19] we’re trying to go out of our way not to use creationist sources as much as possible and we just made a case for uh the

[00:24:26] biblical perspective by using so let me just break up like this there’s four different scenes in

[00:24:32] dismantling the first one is just basically on the nature of science

[00:24:37] and the major conclusion we come to you’ll have to find out when you watch the supporting evidence is that it’s not

[00:24:44] really an issue of science versus faith a lot of people think that’s the creation evolution debate is all about it’s

[00:24:49] science they think i think science i think evolution diversity is religion or faith in reality even ernst meyer a world

[00:24:57] famous evolutionary biologist he passed away in 2005 from harvard he acknowledges that evolutionary biology

[00:25:02] is not like a hard science like physics and chemistry it’s actually a historical narrative

[00:25:08] it’s a history he that’s exactly the language he uses because you’re not you’re not you can’t you can’t pull

[00:25:14] these dead creatures back into a lab and you know watch that whole process

[00:25:20] it’s something that you have to look at it and you have to interpret it stuff that’s happened in the past i mean it’s just like digging up

[00:25:25] dick digging up old uh you know roman weapons or roman coins and then analyzing what happened uh through uh

[00:25:32] your your digging efforts right that’s right so it’s very different than say finding a cure for a disease

[00:25:38] um you know repeatable experimentation you can falsify it and it’s directly observable testing where

[00:25:43] people are present but we’re dealing with things about origins those events happened in the past we weren’t there

[00:25:49] so we don’t have direct access to the past we do have fossils which exist in the present we do have dna patterns and

[00:25:54] so forth so the question is which view of history the evolutionary view of history or the

[00:26:00] biblical view of history best explains the evidence in other words is the evidence internally consistent

[00:26:06] within the evolutionary view of history or biblical view history that’s called the internal critique that’s ways to evaluate

[00:26:12] the creation evolution controversy and what we show is that the major fields of science including biology paleontology like we

[00:26:20] just discussed and modern genetics are remarkably consistent with the major events recorded in the

[00:26:26] biblical view of in genesis and so and anyway i don’t go too far right now but sure

[00:26:32] sure we don’t give it away right but um that’s that’s fantastic and so how

[00:26:38] is this um is this is dismantle evolution is there a big focus on hominid uh

[00:26:44] fossils and and the whole chimp to to modern man or is this tackling a new subject of um

[00:26:50] study yeah so as i mentioned scene one is just on laying the groundwork leveling the playing field look it’s really an issue

[00:26:57] of one view of history versus the other and then we go into the evidence the first area we focus on is biology

[00:27:03] so we look at the very popular icons of evolution the popular examples and textbooks of

[00:27:09] so-called microevolution i think it’s a misnomer but the small observable changes that you can see today

[00:27:15] which does spawn around with good science now evolutionists will try to extrapolate those small changes called

[00:27:21] microevolution and they’ll say given enough time the small changes will add up to big changes

[00:27:26] the problem with this thinking is that there’s a big difference between microevolution and macroevolution

[00:27:31] the key difference is this micro-evolution does not involve any new genes there’s no new sets of genetic

[00:27:37] instructions being produced through these processes however to change say apes and demand

[00:27:43] large-scale changes macro evolution you need lots of new functional dna sequences new

[00:27:49] genes to code for innovative structures and functions so part scene 2 is all about

[00:27:54] can random mutations and natural selection genetic drift those are the evolutionary those the

[00:27:59] revolutionary mechanism of change can that result in macroevolution give enough time

[00:28:05] in other words can you extrapolate the small changes into big changes and that’s very

[00:28:11] interesting because what we’re finding is i want to give it all away but basically all of the observable changes that we’re

[00:28:17] seeing in the present are not involving any novel sets of genetic constructions or new genes

[00:28:23] that’s very interesting uh and now when is this uh documentary coming out so the documentary comes out on october

[00:28:30] 9th to 11th we’re we’re having a free week one weekend premiere

[00:28:36] and so if you go to dismantle evolution.com you’ll see a link right in the banner that says you know click this

[00:28:42] link and you’ll be able to watch it anytime you’re on weekends for free after that it’ll be available on dvd or

[00:28:48] blu-ray and real quick and i should say there’s also two more scenes see really quick scene three is on

[00:28:54] highly anthropologies that’s that has a lot of findings from potential bones in it and then

[00:29:00] scene four is on adam and eve and i think this is probably what i’m most excited about because very few people are aware of the

[00:29:06] incredible genetic evidence that has shown we came from just two people in the recent past and after that there

[00:29:14] was an event where we dispersed from the middle east to form the various ethno-linguistic

[00:29:20] groups which is very consistent with um the tower of babel dispersion recorded in genesis chapter 10 11.

[00:29:26] wow i love that i’m really excited to see that because that is a area that i’m particularly interested too

[00:29:32] i love the um and i’ve even heard it in the scientific literature outside of creationism that um you know

[00:29:38] you you hear people say oh was there a an original adam and eve you had you hear people talking about africa

[00:29:44] and uh and these sorts of things and that we all came from there and it actually sounds like there’s a lot of um uh you know secular

[00:29:52] data from science um from scientists actually saying yes this is right we came from a very you know uh

[00:29:59] potentially one single woman is that is that what you’re talking about that’s right kevin it’s amazing once again we don’t have to rely on

[00:30:05] creationists for our skeptics we can go out of our way and say well what is what does genetics show us

[00:30:11] there’s a thousand genomes project they’re now expanding that so they’ve sequenced thousands of human genomes

[00:30:16] and they’re small chromosomes like the the y chromosome um or the mitochondria chronosome those

[00:30:22] are maternally inherited or paternally inherited and so evolutionary journalists have known this for now in a

[00:30:27] few decades that all humans living today all living humans trace their energy back to a

[00:30:33] single father and single mother of the whole human race wow and but this was never predicted uh

[00:30:39] basically evolutionary scenario so they’ve had to continually revise their own theory to better fit the data what’s coming out

[00:30:45] what’s emerging from the evolution perspective is a view that looks more and more biblical

[00:30:51] yeah yeah that’s incredible it’s that whole thing where the you had a bunch of scientists who get to the top of the mountain and they hiked to the top of

[00:30:57] the mountain and there at the top are a bunch of theologians going hey we’re glad you finally made it

[00:31:04] um i mean it’s absolutely incredible i love that i mean when i was in college at ucsd i in my

[00:31:09] classes that constantly i heard references to things that were in the uh the scientific data and i

[00:31:15] thought to myself well this is just what the bible says and i just i loved it but so i think

[00:31:20] that’s a an incredible approach that you guys are taking uh to do that so that’s fantastic um so

[00:31:27] uh i had another question back to the whole hominids and the missing links um you know neanderthal man

[00:31:34] interesting um i thought for a long time that he would that neanderthal man was not considered modern human um

[00:31:41] and then not till relatively recently they said you know what we think neanderthal man is actually human is

[00:31:47] that true yeah so there’s been a lot of changes since since the first neanderthal bones were

[00:31:54] found even before they uh even before darwin’s book in 1859 i think they found some of the first bones

[00:32:00] of that it later became uh harmony and valencia’s and so in recent in recent times there’s

[00:32:08] been a drastic change because they’ve always played them downplayed them as being brutes if you will

[00:32:14] um and it goes back into the 1800s with with marceline boulder who was a french

[00:32:19] anatomist and he actually reconstructed some of the early skeletons he actually arranged the foot of neanderthal he put

[00:32:27] you put you know what hollick says apes have a holics or a grasping big toe

[00:32:32] oh yeah yeah yeah have a big toe in line with the other floor too so that’s yeah very comfortable i’ve always i’ve always

[00:32:38] wished i had one of those yeah i can i i’d love to be able to do

[00:32:45] what they can do at the zoo yeah so what he did is he basically um

[00:32:52] fraudulently it’s definitely a fraud this has been acknowledged by evolutionaries by evolutionary pilot experts now and he

[00:32:58] rearranged the large toe to be to be positioned outwardly more so it looks more like you you created a

[00:33:04] bent lead bent hit posture um long story short they had to downplay some of the obvious human anatomies to

[00:33:11] make it appear more less human but today because we’ve sequenced neanderthal dna we’ve actually

[00:33:16] retrieved dna from their bones and they’ve been sequenced we now know just like the anatomy shows the anatomy is human the

[00:33:24] the the genome is also fully human and in fact a lot of people today most people today

[00:33:29] have bits and pieces of nerve all dna which proves we interpret them and based

[00:33:34] on the biological species concept most the most widely accepted species concept if you can intermarry if you can produce

[00:33:41] fertile offspring you are the same species okay so they’re just they’re the same species they’re just

[00:33:46] ancient there’s nothing different about them really um and ancient

[00:33:52] so from our from our perspective um you know when when an evolutionist says ancient they’re talking uh you know millions of

[00:33:59] years ago or hundreds of thousands of years ago what is our perspective as a biblical creationist uh

[00:34:05] who believes in the literal history of adam and eve and so forth um how did neanderthal fit in there yeah

[00:34:11] so from an evolutionary perspective they would say neanderthals are about forty thousand years old thirty thousand years old all the way to maybe about four

[00:34:18] hundred thousand years old some say even older um and again the hominins in general they would say about

[00:34:23] six million years going back to the going back to the the last common ancestor believed to be a hypothetical chimp-like ancestor

[00:34:30] so that’s their timeline for human origins but obviously it goes back further than that um i’ll

[00:34:36] go back to the first living organisms the first supposed bacterium that would be about

[00:34:42] four point three point eight billion years so that’s the evolutionary timeline yeah he’s even

[00:34:48] older another big bang would be 13.7 billion years old so the traditional biblical perspective is where we have a fundamentally

[00:34:54] different view of that it has to do with how do you explain the fossil record

[00:35:00] so the fossil record was formed over millions of years which slowing gradual processes i’m not sorry not slow gravity process

[00:35:06] through through um you know slow gradual processes over time then you would have

[00:35:12] a fossil record being basically millions and billions of years old but if you believe in a global flood as

[00:35:18] the bible um teaches then you’d have basically sudden burial of organisms

[00:35:24] rapidly deposited rock layers you would form you would form the phanerozoic or much of the visible rock

[00:35:31] black record in a very short period of time yeah so biblically i do believe that the evidence from geology from

[00:35:38] geology from geology perspective especially i believe there’s overwhelming evidence for a global flood

[00:35:44] so the genetic variation within um humans today because if neanderthal man is is like a modern

[00:35:50] human really but um you know they say that a more protruding brow

[00:35:55] they have different things about uh you know the forehead or the cc uh brain capacity these sorts of things

[00:36:02] um are what from a biblical perspective are we saying that uh that variation happens very quickly

[00:36:08] because i’ll hear some people who are arguing for evolution say you couldn’t have that kind of variation over that short amount of time

[00:36:14] um is there a response to that yeah i think you can actually kind of have that happen quickly

[00:36:21] especially if you have any scenario where you have genetic isolation or reproductive isolation

[00:36:26] and that’s the scenario of the tower of babel where you have different people groups leaving a single population a single

[00:36:32] intermarrying population in the middle eastern area area um middle east area sorry

[00:36:37] and from there as you separate and disperse you form smaller reproductively isolated groups and in smaller

[00:36:44] tribes you will have genetic fixation which means you’ll have rare alleles brand mutations

[00:36:49] you can easily fix them in a small population just through random genetic drift or even selection so that’s if you google

[00:36:56] founder effects you’ll understand what i’m talking about so this is this is just straightforward genetic principles

[00:37:02] and and even if you have small isolated populations like neon falls you would expect inbreeding this is

[00:37:09] probably one of the most interesting findings of our of our book because we predicted before we found five independent studies

[00:37:16] confirming it we predicted that neanderthals were suffering from inbreeding now most people are under are aware that

[00:37:23] you shouldn’t marry close relations yeah yeah that’s increased people come out

[00:37:28] you’ll have and in fact we find clear evidence in the fossil record are bone-deforming abnormalities caused by mutations that

[00:37:35] become fixed in populations and so evolutionary genetics as i mentioned have sequenced the neanderthal

[00:37:42] genome and they describe the neanderthal genome as having a heavy genetic load

[00:37:48] which means in other words a heavy mutation alone they were highly mutant they were they were suffering from the effects of

[00:37:54] inbreeding we have several other papers confirming this so there’s really straightforward evidence that

[00:38:00] some of these strange strange skeletal features are caused by developmental um abnormalities caused

[00:38:07] by inbreeding and then that’s really interesting it’s exciting small isolated populations yes and

[00:38:15] and because what happens is they get isolated um they’re only um reproducing within

[00:38:20] that small niche and then the mutations that that appear get stuck and keep reproducing in in that small niche and

[00:38:28] then you just get more and more health problems yup so evolutionary geneticists and evolutionary patterns kind of

[00:38:34] anthropologists um that’s no surprise to them anymore that yes

[00:38:39] and so that that’s really interesting because that is consistent with a biblical perspective it doesn’t take millions of years to

[00:38:44] form these these features it can happen very quickly in small isolated populations

[00:38:50] and what’s interesting is this is uh that’s the kind of thing that happens with like dalmatians too

[00:38:56] um they they kept breeding them and breeding and they have these severe health problems um and we we can see that in in

[00:39:02] modern day uh breeding methods with animals and so forth um so so along those same lines um

[00:39:09] is this also why so you said you said this is why we’re seeing we see in the fossil record some of these

[00:39:15] strange bone abnormalities um i heard i’ve heard that um neanderthal actually

[00:39:21] some of them they found um were stooped over because of these bone abnormalities and and this is why they were giving

[00:39:28] credit to them as some sort of missing link because they were saying hey they don’t stand upright and this is what’s happened why

[00:39:33] is that true they’re they’re they have found a neanderthal skeleton early on with evidence of arthritis

[00:39:40] but um even even given that that that’s i don’t think that’s

[00:39:46] characteristic of all of the neanderthal specimens they have there are some that are suffering from arthritis mars and blue went beyond that and made

[00:39:53] it even more dramatic and tried to emphasize more able so yes but you’re right uh pathologies numerous pathologies are

[00:40:01] common in the dominant fossil record especially among the hormone types and that’s like i said that’s not a

[00:40:06] secret now to evolutionary prophecy yeah do you think do you think that we’re actually making ground

[00:40:14] in that regard um we’re making ground with um is the scientific community coming to

[00:40:20] the conclusion that hey you know there are serious problems here we’re seeing a uh

[00:40:25] we need to pick up some alternate theories we need to reconsider you know what we’re saying or is or is

[00:40:31] there just continue to push forward with the evolutionary paradigm just despite the evidence that is

[00:40:36] uh contradicting it that’s a good question so the way i would characterize the the

[00:40:42] field today evolutionary field is that they have been acknowledging for some time now that the

[00:40:49] more i haven’t found a journal of this title do more fossils mean less clarity and so

[00:40:56] and he acknowledges in the prestigious national academy of sciences the author acknowledges that the more bones we find

[00:41:02] the more we have great difficulty explaining what’s going on in the hobbit fossil record nevertheless they still acknowledge that

[00:41:09] there is a pattern and leslie isla and others have acknowledged that there’s basically two distinct types there’s the homotype and

[00:41:16] the australopithecus type now astrological type is more age-like and the homotype is more human-like

[00:41:22] and so even though they can’t make sense out of it the reason why they can’t make sense out of it because they’re trying to find a series of transitional forms that go

[00:41:28] from australopithecus to homo and they they really can’t connect that yeah they call it a messy bush

[00:41:34] literally they don’t call it a simple tree it’s a messy tangled bush that’s their words not mine

[00:41:39] and they say among these tangled branches we can’t figure out we can’t see a traceable lineage from homo to

[00:41:44] australopithecus and so they and this has been acknowledged by um bernard wood

[00:41:50] the leading evolutionary palestine numerous experts now acknowledge we can’t make sense out

[00:41:55] of it yeah as a christian the exciting thing is we can make sense out of it

[00:42:01] from their own words we do see two basic types there’s lots of variations in the homotype lots of variation in the

[00:42:06] australopithecus type nevertheless they are clearly different types there’s the eight type and human

[00:42:12] type they coexisted that’s very biblical yeah that’s fantastic well i love it um you know we’re just

[00:42:19] about out of time here chris and uh i just want to thank you very much for coming on the air and talking

[00:42:24] about this i think what you guys have done is incredible and uh i think it’s going to be very impactful down the road here

[00:42:30] as we continue to spread the word and make people aware of of the truth and ultimately it leads them back to the

[00:42:35] word of god so and uh hopefully their salvation excellent thank you for having me i

[00:42:40] really appreciate your time up there in the book they can go to contestability.org um and it’s manifoldevolution.com stay

[00:42:48] tuned for the upcoming documentary it’s free if you want to watch it awesome october

[00:42:53] 9th through 11th you guys if you’re listening um this will this will show will be up on youtube it’ll be up on our website

[00:43:00] it’ll be airing on k praise down here in san diego and uh back to genesis.org is christopher roope’s website that’s

[00:43:06] backtogenesis.org with a two dismantle evolution.com is the documentary coming up

[00:43:12] and uh again i can’t recommend it more um we need to be able to be in a in a very um uh

[00:43:18] hostile culture at times it’s really important to be able to articulate why we believe what we believe and that

[00:43:23] creation is true so please check that out my website is educate4life.org you can check that out also tons of

[00:43:29] resources on there for you you and your family and your friends and uh god bless you i hope you have a

[00:43:34] fantastic weekend try to stay cool if you’re in southern california that might be a little difficult but otherwise

[00:43:39] stay cool and we’ll look forward to being with you next time take care god

[00:43:45] [Music]

[00:43:52] bless

[00:44:06] you