Original subtitles

this is christopher cernike hosting

episode 8 of season 3

of the current topics in science podcast

this podcast will address breaking

scientific news in light of the origins

debate

and host interviews with scientists this

podcast is available on the following

platforms

itunes stitcher google podcast spotify

and i heart radio

video recordings of the podcast will be

uploaded to youtube

enjoy the podcast

[Applause]

today on the current topics in science

podcast we have the honor of hosting dr

arthur chadwick

dr chadwick received his ba in biology

from la sierra college

and his phd in molecular biology from

the university of miami

he received training in both geology and

paleontology from the university of

california

and the university of oklahoma and he's

worked in the fields of tauponomy and

sedimentary geology

he's been a professor of biology geology

and geophysics

at multiple universities and he was a

research associate

at the geoscience research institute

he's a paleontology specialist who is

the director of the dinosaur research

project

of the dinosaur science museum and was

featured as a tafonomy expert

in the acclaimed is genesis history

documentary

he has done research on a variety of

subjects including

systematic analysis of the geologic

column

in the colorado basin he's a member of

five different professional scientific

societies

and he's earned 11 awards and honors in

his scientific career

he also co-directs a typhonomic study at

one of the largest dinosaur bone beds in

the world

he has conducted geological research the

grand canyon

yellowstone national parks in peru and

on fossil whales

on the global circulation patterns

through time

dr chadwick is the author of numerous

scientific papers

as well as the co-author of a science

textbook he's also the co-founder of the

earth

history research center and currently

serves

as a director of that center he

currently teaches five courses at

southwestern adventist university where

he's been teaching for nearly four

decades dr chadwick is married to his

beloved

joy chadwick who's a ceramics teacher at

that same university

they have two adult children dan and

barbara who are both

active physicians he is grateful to god

for guiding him

and his family now without further ado

good afternoon dr chadwick how was your

day and how are you doing

good afternoon chris it's uh it's been a

great day so far

and i'm really enjoying spending a

little time

away from the office it was my birthday

today so

we had a special party this morning and

another one at lunch so it's been an

exciting day

i hope that you're enjoying your

birthday dr chadwick and it's a pleasure

to have you on current topics in science

now since this is current topics in

science we're going to quickly look at

this week's current topic

cambridge university press has just made

available for purchase

a book by lee lyman called vertebrate

tafonomy

it's a part of the cambridge manuals in

archaeology

the description of this book reads in

recent years

archaeologists and paleontologists have

become increasingly interested

in how and why vertebrate animal remains

become

or do not become fossils vertebrate

tafonomy introduces

interested researchers to the wealth of

analytical techniques

developed by archaeologists and

paleontologists to help them

understand why prehistoric animal

remains

do or do not preserve and why those that

preserve

appear the way they do dr chadwick i'm

wondering

in light of this promotion what do you

think about how

and why vertebrate animal remains become

or do not become

fossils that's a really broad topic and

would take a lot of time to address it

adequately but i can

i can try to approach it

it's clear that when an animal dies

something has to happen very quickly or

its remains will become

dispersed and will not remain as to be

fossilized

it's it's difficult today if you're if

your animal your dog dies

i had a dog that died a few years ago i

buried him out in my backyard

and he was a large dog german shepherd

and a few years later i tried to find

his his gravesite i couldn't even find

the bones

even though i knew where i buried it and

this is typical of what happens to an

organism bacteria in the in the soil and

and fungi and other kinds of degrading

processes take place and so

the remains of an animal are quickly

dispersed

in in africa sometimes one one of the

things that tafonimus study is what

happens to modern animals

there was a herd of wild beasts that

went across the river during flood stage

a few years back

and about ten thousand of them were

killed

and within two years you couldn't find

the remains

of a wildebeest at that particular in

that particular area

even though such a huge amount of

material was deposited

or was at least deposited at the site

so it's normally it's serendipitous if

an

animal remains are preserved

but if you had a catastrophic process

that was bearing a lot of things

you would expect to find a lot of things

preserved as fossils because once

they're buried

and away from the normal biota they tend

to

be preserved and eventually fossilized

dr chadwick thank you so much for those

interesting insights about the fossil

record

you know the fossil record is often

brought up when discussing origins

with creationists with evolutionists

with id advocates

all alike claiming that the fossil

record is an

accurate reflection of their viewpoint

dr chadwick in a research paper called

of dinosaurs and men

he wrote about how the riverbed of the

paluxy of central texas

has been a source of extensive

discussions between evolutionists

and creationists i was reading this

paper

and i came upon this interesting

paragraph where you said

at what cost to truth did we ignore data

which were contrary to some pet theory

however interesting or inviting it may

have seemed

the cost was indeed great

creationists might have had the honor of

laying aside this misconception

ten years ago with little philosophical

expense

as a result of their own scientific

research

it has now been torn away by individuals

many of whom

unlike cuban himself have little regard

for the cause of creationism

does not need the footprints in the

paluxy river

for its support dr chadwick

what's the story behind the paluxy river

and how can both

scientists and laymen alike be more

discerning when it comes to scientific

research

the biloxi river story goes way back

into the 1930s and

and 1940s there were scientists out

exploring in this area in central texas

and the peluxi river had long been known

to

be the source of dinosaur tracks which

were amazing in themselves then

somewhere along the line

the idea of human tracks with the

dinosaur tracks

came into the picture and people began

to

start to attribute certain features of

the riverbed as

as human tracks and suggest that

dinosaurs and humans lived at the same

time

well that is a belief system for me i

believe

dinosaurs and humans were on the earth

at the same time but

i don't want to support it with evidence

that's that's not

sound so we came out in the early 1970s

we drove out to texas and we explored

these tracks we made casts of what was

there

and we discovered

that there are elongate tracks that look

somewhat humanoid

and there are three toad tracks that

look very much like dinosaur tracks

and the elongate tracks we discovered

had in the front of them which would be

the direction the animal was moving you

could see on several of the tracks that

there were three

toe marks just barely embedded into the

mud

when the animal was walking so

presumably the animal was not walking

up on its foot like this but it was

walking on its ankle like this

which is called the plantagrade uh

walking and so they were probably the

water level was low if they lived in the

water the water level was low

but for whatever reason these animals

were walking

on their wrists and they left elongate

tracks and they weren't human tracks at

all

so we published that and

we were pretty much

panned by the by the creationist

community because we were

unsettling their argument but we wanted

truth we didn't care about

what the tracks say we didn't need the

tracks to support our

our position because our position came

basically from the bible

and we wanted to know what the tracks

were

what the tracks said and if there were

human tracks there that would be very

interesting

and we should document it in a

scientific fashion and not just spread

rumors about it

so that's what we set out to do in all

our study we found out that there were

a number of tracks that had been carved

in the rocks

they were both human and dinosaur tracks

so presumably these people back during

the depression

would make money any way they they could

and some of them carved dinosaur tracks

and we found out we could tell a carved

track because the

interior structure of the limestone the

internal structure of the limestone was

batted

so you could see lines that would come

up to the track and then stop

and that would be a car track whereas in

a real track which we also looked at in

section

the lines would come and go dip down

underneath the track and come up on the

other side

so um we published that data

and as i said we were panned by the

creationists

and that's that's fine but

we could have we could have been

responsible

for good scholarship instead we were

credited with

claiming that things that weren't human

tracks were human tracks

so that's kind of the blunt end of the

story

and so when we look at that story

are there any lessons that you would say

that we can learn

from that today and how we would go

about doing scientific research now

i think one thing you can learn is that

it has to do with the basis using

science as

evidence to support your theory if

you're using

science to support your views i think

that's probably wrong-headed because the

views are basically philosophical

whether you believe in creation or

evolution it's a philosophical position

it's not demanded by science and

i think it's very important for people

to recognize that

and it's not necessary to have silver

bullets

to destroy other people's arguments

instead you should

build relationships and seek to

become a member of the scientific

community in good standing

by doing good scientific work and just

going out and

shouting from the house stops that you

have a silver bullet

that destroys the evolutionary scenario

that's nonsense because evolution as i

said is a philosophical construct

just like creation is and it's not

something that you can destroy

if you have data that says suggest

somebody else's

data is not correctly interpreted that's

fine publish it

in the scientific literature and

establish whatever position you're

working on

but don't claim to be doing scientific

work

if you don't if you are not willing to

accept

the standards of science dr chadwick

that was really good advice

on how to approach scientific research

and speaking of research you were a

research associate

of the geoscience research institute

which recently had a major article

published in adventist review this

february first

raul esperante a research scientist from

geoscience

wrote an article called why are fossils

important for christians learning a lot

from dead bones

etc he concluded the article by saying

fossils and the rocks in which they are

contained

are an excellent platform for discussing

origins from a biblical perspective

especially in relation to the design and

complexity of ancient life

and the worldwide destruction caused by

noaa's flood many questions regarding

fossils

origins creation and the flood are still

there

for us to investigate dr chadwick what

are some areas of research that you

think

that creationists need to further

investigate in

terms of toponymy and paleontology well

that's a huge question

i was talking to somebody the other day

about

the how i got into this kind of work

it turns out when you're first starting

your career

it's very difficult to think of the

right questions to ask and how to

approach

the answer to those questions by the

time i've reached

near the end of my career i have so many

questions

that i could i could supply anybody that

wanted projects to work on i think dr

brandt and i together

are working on six or seven different

scientific projects all of which have

some bearing on

the relationship of geology and

paleontology to

the model of origins so there is there

are a lot of different

things that you could pursue i mean in

in our dinosaur research

we're trying to understand how these

dinosaurs got to be where they are

we just published a major paper on that

last year

and we have started another paper

just dealing with the taxonomy of these

animals these amazing animals

so there's just a lot of there are a lot

of different directions you could go and

of course

all the data we have we have 30 000 over

30 000 fossils in our collection

those fossils tell lots of stories

including

predation and scavenging and disease

and life processes that you can read out

of the bones

so there are um there are a lot of

papers coming out right now on our

on our work and with a special interest

in

the disease processes and the

in the life processes of these dinosaurs

that's all coming out of the bones

themselves

that's pretty incredible dr chadwick and

i'm sure that your comments are going to

help spur

further creationist research let's

actually take a moment

to talk about your own areas of research

on your is genesis history bio

it states that you're developing a model

for the tafonomy of dinosaur bone beds

dr chadwick i'm wondering may you

describe your tafonomy dinosaur bone bed

model

contrast it with models held by

evolutionists

and show why your model perhaps has

greater explanatory power

just published this model just last year

in that major paper

and the model differs from the standard

model

standard explanation for these kinds of

bone beds that we

that we're finding is that a dinosaur

it's based on the african

model of animal death that

animals were crossing a river when it

was at flood stage and some of them

drowned and got swept

downstream and caught in a bend in the

river and over time they accumulated and

the bones built up and you had a bone

bed

that's the standard model that's used by

most paleontologists to explain these

bone beds

however we discovered that in our bone

bed the

bones are not just randomly distributed

but they are graded

with large bones on the bottom and

smaller bones on the top

which means they couldn't have

accumulated over time they must have

been deposited that way

and thus they must have been deposited

in in deeper water

and so that can involve something very

rapid like a debris flow

or some other process that would

transport them quickly and bury them

quickly rather than

accumulation over a number of years so

that's a major

difference that we propose now of course

not everybody's going to accept that

but we think that's a valid model and is

believable

so that's that's all based on taponomy

we're now dealing with some more

difficult cases where you have some

isolated

dinosaurs we have a couple of

triceratops and a

duckbill dinosaur and a raptor

and a small dinosaur called

thessalosaurus

and these are all in quarries that are

that are

different than the main quarry which is

a bone bed these are these are

individual skeletons more or less

juxtaposed so you still have the bones

fairly close to their original positions

and so we're having to explain that

right now that's the paper we're working

on at the moment

dr chadwick it was really fascinating

hearing you contrast

your ideas about fossils with the ideas

held by

evolutionists evolutionary scientists

like those at the university of berkeley

state that the fossil record provides

snapshots of the past that when

assembled

illustrate a panorama of evolutionary

change

over the past 4 billion years

the picture may be smudged but fossil

evidence

clearly shows that life is old and has

changed over time

now it sounds like the university of

california berkeley is making the case

that the fossil record is recording

evolutionary change

and speaking of recording when my family

went to the tampa aquarium

my brother casey who's a photographer he

took a picture of a jellyfish

which looks exactly the same as its

fossilized ancestors

dr chadwick can you explain what living

fossils are

and what their implications are for the

evolutionary theory

there are a number of taxa that have

existed all the way through the fossil

record from from cambrian to recent

they're not a super abundant number but

there are a number of taxes for example

a brachiopod called lingula which is a

phosphate

containing it has a phosphate containing

shell phosphatic brachypod

it doesn't have a hinge and we find that

in the cambrian we also find it in the

modern environment so

this is a case of a very long-lived

taxon well the taxonomists have come

along

since this was recognized and

have tried to give it a different name

so it doesn't look like it's been there

the whole time they do these kinds of

things to

try to maintain the appearance of a

fossil record of some sort but

there are there are enough taxes the

most recent one are bacteria that have

been

excavated from deep down in the earth

and

they are supposed to be from rocks that

are that are hundreds of millions of

years old and yet

they they seem to be unchanged from

modern taxes so

that again is a bit of a problem that's

just come up in the last

couple of weeks but there are

there are taxes that are called lazarus

taxa that

appear early in the fossil record and

then they disappear and then they appear

late in the fossil record

like they were resurrected but the most

common thing you see in the fossil

record the theme of the fossil record

is no change things

come into the record they remain in the

record for a while

and then they disappear from the record

just as they came in

in fact there's a a well-known

paleontologist

that i don't know if i mentioned his

name but

anyway he's in southern california and

he works with mammal fossils

and he did his dissertation i believe at

yale if i'm not mistaken

and he studied 160 lineages

of fossil mammals in the southwest

throughout the

cenozoic so he was tracing these mammals

from their first appearance in the

fossil record

until they disappeared from the fossil

record looking for change

of course his goal was to find that

change because he

was a thoroughgoing evolutionist in fact

he's

he is in a class of people we call

anti-creationists

he hates creationists they are on his in

his radar

and so he doesn't want to look like a

creationist but

nonetheless of these 160 lineages of

fossil mammals that he traced through

the cenozoic

he says 159 showed no change whatsoever

from the time they first appeared in the

fossil record until they disappeared

the third the one that changed

had slightly smaller it was oreodon

had slightly smaller members when they

disappeared than when it first appeared

so that

the fossil record tended to diminish

with

with position position industry

but so so he talks about the fact that

evolution predicts that changes took

place during some

catastrophic climatic event but when we

look at the fossil record where

are supposed to be catastrophic climatic

events and we look at the mammal fossil

record

we don't see any change which is which

is a striking

indication that this scenario does not

represent what we see in the fossil

record

so he he goes back to stephen gould's

model that the fossil record is mostly

stasis

which means there's no change with

occasional punctuations

which is where all the change takes

place the reason

google came up with that model is

because that's what you see in the

fossil record

as as as the scientists

found out when you looked at these

fossil mammals

they don't change and they just

disappear

so you have stasis stay in the chains

staying the same and then disappearance

and

so that's just they call that an

evolutionary model but it really it's

a model of creation it's a model of

no change or very little change

dr chadwick thank you so much for that

clear answer

about living fossils and different

changes in the fossil record

or the record of no change as you said

i'd like to ask you now about one of the

most popular fossils

the trilobite in an article you have

published under the american scientific

affiliation called

the trilobite enigma of complexity

a case for intelligent design you wrote

in the absence of evidence for the

evolution of complex

biochemical and integrated organ systems

in the trilobite

and for any increase in its information

content reliance on darwinian evolution

remains a matter of secular faith

we propose another theory of origins

that involves an intelligent designer

special creation dr chadwick why do you

see the trilobite

and other fossilized creatures as being

intelligently designed

well as you as you mentioned i have

training in both molecular biology and

also in paleontology and geology which

gives me

a unique position to

tackle questions like this it's it's

very clear if you look inside the cell

and that's what my

degree was in the cell molecular biology

if you look inside the cell you see a

marvelous system of roads of

transportation vehicles and and

connecting systems and

nervous systems all inside the single

cell

digestive systems reproductive systems

all of these things are going on inside

that little tiny cell

but when darwin first proposed his

theory of evolution the cell was just a

bag of fluid

if he had seen the amazing things that

we have discovered since then

and i credit the scientific community

with having

garnered this understanding which is so

astonishing

uh there's no way he could have proposed

the theory of evolution

how can you make a factory how can you

make a motor

and all these kinds of integrated

systems that

we find inside the cell and that's just

the beginning of complexity that's at

the lowest level every system that you

have in there needs a system higher up

to regulate it

that higher up system needs another

system to regulate it

and so you have all these regulatory

systems

to control the development of the

integrated systems that you actually see

in the cell

nobody has come up with an explanation

about how that could have happened

uh in in a abiotic

non-non-science with no scientists there

system with no scientist and and no life

how you could ever get the first cell to

form

is a terrible mystery for those that

believe it happened

it's it's it doesn't broach solution it

just

it just gets worse the more you look

into it

we're finding more complexities much

faster

than those paleo bio-geochemistry

finding

explanations for the things they need to

make it happen by accident

dr chadwick i really enjoyed your answer

on how these

amazing creatures and how the amazing

complexity in the cell it reveals

this incredible intelligence however

not all scientists would agree with you

for instance richard dawkins believes

that the fossil record is evidence for

evolution

and he believes that ghost lineages

have satisfactorily explained fossil

patterns in the evolutionary model

dawkins says any cladogram

can be placed in a temporal framework

that agrees with the stratigraphic

record if sufficient

ghost lineages are invoked dr chadwick

what are ghost lineages and is there any

evidence for this evolutionary

explanation

well i'm not quite sure how he's using

ghostline agent i assume that means

that it's there but you can't see it

it's like

the term that that trilobite

paleontologists use for the organization

they call it

cryptogenesis it's a wonderful word

crypto means hidden genesis means origin

well

if all of your origins and all your

changes

are hidden or are secret you really

don't have a story

to tell and richard dawkins doesn't have

a story to tell either

and it's just amazing that

he can think just because i can wave my

arms around a little bit

i have an explanation i want to see an

explanation

for a single protein a single functional

protein

in a world which is not populated by

scientists

if you can explain that then i'll begin

to listen to some of the other things

that you

you have to say until you can show me a

single protein

with 20 amino acids all in the l form

that is put together in the proper

sequence to make it do something

you're just arm weighting and that's

just one protein

and nobody's even come close to that

nobody can there is no

scenario that would do that without a

scientist

any experiment on origin of life that's

being done now is done

in a laboratory or at least by a

scientist so there's always intervention

and usually

they use chemicals that they got in pure

form from some chemical company

and many of these chemicals have come

from living organisms so they're not

even

they can't even get away from that and

their experiments just

take us nowhere i wish they would learn

that and go do something more productive

with their lives

so very smart people dr chadwick

that was really incredible you know i

appreciated how

you pointed out that you actually have

to have

good scientific evidence for a theory

you know you cannot simply act as though

that invoking

you know sort of seems like rescuing

devices or imaginary entities

can actually save the theory yeah i i

agree

i don't i don't think you can save the

theory by waving your arms

and i i'm speaking about some of the

outspoken people that i don't

i don't mind confronting on this issue

but many scientists

are just neutral on this whole issue

they don't care they just want to learn

what's there

and the more they learn the less it

looks like an accident

wow speaking of that design in a film

called is genesis history you said what

we find in the fossil record

and contra to darwin's hopes this is the

rule

is that a form exists in the fossil

record basically stays unchanged

and it disappears from the fossil record

without having been changed

that's got to mean something besides

evolution

because we don't ever see changes from

this form

into this form in the rocks themselves

so it's coming from somewhere else it's

a paradigm that's being imposed on the

data

rather than the data providing the

paradigm

dr chadwick why is it important to

consider your paradigm when practicing

science

that's a really good question because so

few scientists do they aren't even aware

of the extent to which their science is

driven by paradigms

and i mean a lot of times

what a paradigm does is it fills in all

the gaps

and it doesn't mean we have answers it

just means that we can skip over that

part

and so the scientists are over here

working on some

some minor aspect of let's say cell

biology they're working trying to

resolve what's going on they don't

realize that the revelations they're

making

are are inimical to evolutionary theory

and very often you'll find papers

perfectly good papers written

describing scientific research and then

at the end they tack on the obligatory

statement about

well either in molecular biology it's

usually about curing cancer

but in other areas it's about how this

impacts evolution

and that's that's nonsense that's not

that's not

the paradigm that's just that's just a

whitewash job

and if they really thought about what

they were saying they'd realize that

they have gotten into deep water

and they're way over their hands and

again these are very intelligent people

i i would never

seek to undermine the idea that these

scientists are intelligent

they're very intelligent and yet they

are bound by paradigms

that ask them to relinquish their

freedom to think and i think

creationists

have a much better perspective

creationists who are trained as

scientists

who are doing science have a much better

perspective on the world around them

because

they're free to think through all the

possibilities

i don't have any restrictions on where i

can go with my data

and i think many scientists do

dr chadwick thank you so much for that

very telling answer

and we've now arrived at our final

question

the north american division of the

seventh-day adventist christian church

has an article called kindness or

set them straight how do we deal with

persons who don't believe

genesis is right about creation and the

flood

this article tells a story of how a

group of scientists from loma linda

university

geoscience research institute and

southwestern

adventist university spent about a

decade in research on a fossil wales

in the coastal plain of peru this group

of scientists says

they ended up finding a peruvian

paleontologist

who was searching for more than fossils

several amazing discoveries happened and

this paleontologist admired the

committed faith of this team of

seventh-day adventist christian

scientists dr chadwick seventh-day

adventist christians

feel the special calling to preach the

creation message with the everlasting

gospel

dr chadwick how can a person give their

hearts to christ

and accept the faith of jesus the first

thing you have to realize

is that winning an argument is not going

to win a person

and typically what happens is when

people lose arguments they tend to turn

away from

the person that's that's that they're

talking to

so i think that that should be thrown

away the desire to win an argument

should be thrown out the window

we ought to be talking to people about

jesus and when they see

the beauty of his character and what he

has done for them what he is willing to

do

that he is lord of all they'll recognize

more likely that this is a global

this is a universal issue it has to do

with the whole universe

and if there is no creator there's no

reason to hope

that there's a better life so

ultimately it's the holy spirit that

brings conviction it's not humans

it's not arguments and so our job is to

be a spokesperson for jesus

and not to try to destroy people's

arguments

i think as long as we're doing that god

can use us

to promote him on the earth dr chadwick

thank you very much for your time it was

an absolute joy

and to our listeners thank you very much

for taking the time to learn with us on

current topics in science

where scientific discoveries are

examined in light of the origins issue

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it's available on itunes stitcher google

podcast spotify and i heart radio

you can find dr chadwick's biographical

information

and scientific achievements a link to

the geoscience research institute

a link to the entire is genesis history

film which is available for free to

watch

and links to the bio the articles and

the videos of dr

chadwick on the is genesis history

website

thanks again for listening and remember

the truth saves